A Conspiracy to Learn: the Incredible Unit Plan It is an extraordinarily big pleasure for me to be here at Gill with you today.

Every teacher has a story. Their idea for teaching starts somewhere, and it catches fire, begins to drive them into loving learning and loving sharing it. Into loving their fellow travelers. Their colleagues. Certainly their students. Fire is the right word. Because the heat of discovering what we need to do in our world, in our lives, is incredibly exciting. Some people, lucky enough to hit on the right career, call it - "getting a calling." Some people fall into their life's work by chance, and discover once into it, that this is what they need to do. So in this room today, for every teacher in the room, past and present, there is a story waiting to be told or shared about why they became a teacher. And how it went when they did. But I am here today, privileged to be so, so let me tell you my story and how and what - even now - it has to do with Gill St Bernard's and its amazing students. I have been incredibly lucky. My life has been an impossible and unpredictable zig zag, in the beginning because I was following my husband's career path, but at the heart of it - whether I have been a young mother of three landing with my husband in a New York suburb, writing children's books in my attic or buried in

the jungle of publishing in New York City - at the heart of my life has been teaching. Sometimes - on a good day - I suspect its a calling. I started my life as a teacher ironically as a journalist in Kentucky. My first job was as a reporter at The Louisville Courier Journal. I was green as grass. The editors thought I was sweet and young and probably amusing and sent me off on stories no one else wanted, with a camera that was far too big for me, stories like my first one hiking sixty miles to Abraham Lincoln's birthplace with a group of Girl Scouts. Ok, I got to interview a few famous people that came into town like Arnold Toynbee, the famous historian, and Sputnik was set into orbit when I was at the Courier, and I got to interview people on the street about whether they thought we'd get to the moon someday. But at the Courier: it was a little guy with a plaid jacket, hair sticking out every which way, who often came down the halls to see the feature editor, who intrigued me. His name was Jesse Stuart, a Thomas Edison-like guy in size and shape, who

got famous writing a book called Taps for Private Tussy about a Kentucky hillbilly who went to war, and came back to the Kentucky hills. But who also, I soon discovered, wrote a book Called The Thread that Runs So True. But I am getting ahead of myself. One of my stories for the Courier, as a reporter, was in a classroom, fifth grade probably, and just walking in that classroom blew my mind. I forget what the story I was supposed to report was, but the moment I won't forget:

the smells of pencil and paper and books, the kids, their incredible ideas and spontaneous humor, their enthusiasm. I knew suddenly, journalism or not, I had to go back to the classroom. The sixties were an odd time as many of you know. Folk singers were taking roost everywhere. People were protesting the Vietnam war - and everything else - in the streets, in parks, in the offices of college presidents. A whole bunch were having their Woodstocks, expressing themselves in more ways than we could ever imagine -either we were there or the photographs of it are still in our minds. Protests almost became the fifth estate, over integration, women's rights, certainly over the war. It was true of education, as well. Educators are always looking for new forms, and they were looking again during the sixties and early seventies. For the first time, you heard words like "open classroom", and people were writing books like Summerhill about an English school that gave its students almost complete freedom and the privilege of using their world as their classroom, creating their own schedules and programs. I took my first education course at Wayne State University in Detroit shortly after Ron got out of the army - which was why I had been in Kentucky in the first place by the way - and got a good dose of some of those new educational ideas, but it

was the book of that country boy, assigned by some professor whose name I have long forgotten - that suddenly woke me up to how I wanted to teach, new forms or not. That book, The Thread that Runs So True, by Jesse Stuart, the same hayseed writer that had wandered the halls of The Courier Journal: Thrown into a one room school house in the hills of Kentucky at the age of 17 to teach country kids from six to 26 - in one room, kids used to working hard on farms and running barefoot and fancy free when they couldn't. Sure-fire, bull headed, Tom-Sawyer creative, strong, independent kids. Barely out of school himself, Stuart had never taught. But they needed a teacher and he was there, bright and handy. Well, his first days, were not easy by any reckoning. Those kids didn't want to be in that school. No way. He needed to learn how to teach..and quickin order to survive. But how! Well, it was something of a miracle, I suppose. Hard days for him were passing by with no answers until one day, watching and hearing those same wild kids out in the schoolyard playing a game, he heard them exuberantly chanting, "The needle's eye that does supply The thread that runs so True I stump my toe and down I go

All for the want of you. " It was their exuberance that set him to paying attention. To listening and watching. Suddenly, he found himself asking if the chant had something to say to him, as a teacher Maybe something important. Then, he began to see it clear. "The needle's eye that does supply": The needle was the teacher supplying the idea or thought or plan. "The thread that runs so true": was the kids. Kids would run true all right, even when they were learning, if the teacher got it right. And the very game - it was coming clearer and clearer - was part of the secret to this. Play itself was part of the secret, too. Could kids also work by play?. Learn by play? The idea of Play in teaching, even at the beginning was too simplistic for Stuart, too easy, but it gave him permission to think outside of the teaching box. Look at how free they were outside in their own world. Exuberant! Okay then, for starters, he'd go to their worlds to meet them at least halfway; and he'd go with a spirit of gamemanship. Of play.. No sitting in tight little rows, in tight little seats then. He'd go into their acres of corn to measure, to the truckbed of dirt to figure the amount of dirt a truckbed could hold , to the daffofils in the field to read Wordsworth and to write; he'd go wherever he needed to teach his lessons; he needed to engage these kids. And he

did. Before he knew it, even during the time inside the one-room schoolhouse, at the stiff backed desks, the kids were more engaged, full of good humor and discovered intelligence and spirit. They simply trusted the whole situation. Including him. Any teacher - many of the best in this room today, past and present - knows there are ideas and facts and history and literature that need to be learned and memorized and stored. Numbers and equations and formulas, too. There are limitations to play; there are even limitations to using a student's environment. But the principles of play and gamemanship - competition, sharing, teammanship - that engage mental and physical acuity, quick reaction, curiosity, a respect for serendipity and originality - and the by products of play that create environment, where that enthusiasm, good humor, passion for succeeding, adjustment for losing - could live. You know how coincidences are. Ron got out of the army and we ended up in White Plains, N.Y. near New York City, where even though I was writing children's books, I had grown more and more intrigued with teaching. I went back to Manhattanville College in Purchase N.Y. - still the sixties - at a time when people there - Robert Fine I recall - were saying some of the same things as Jesse Stuart. Look at your world. Use it to teach your lessons. Don't lecture all the time, and use inductive reasoning, where the kids themselves can pluck at facts, and

conclude from them what they themselves have discovered. I remember a lesson on "ethnocentricity" where Fine sketched out six or seven countries on the board somewhat mysteriously, each time scrawling the name of the country and its culture beneath it, admitting that each savored its own culture one-mindedly above others, then, drawing a circle around each one, proclaiming, each time: "ethnocentricity." Hey, I was beginning to digest Jesse Stuart, I understood what he was doing. He was making us as students think; letting us derive what our own tactile, visual evidence showed us. Letting us conclude. At the time, Manhattanville's Sister Ruth Dowd had opened the Harlem Prep School in storefront space, using the world of Harlem, the streets, the parks, the objects, the practical needs of her students, to teach the gifted kids there who, trapped by their own economic prisons, were getting lost in traditional classrooms. People just looking in new places and new ways to teach and to learn. Somehow respecting not only the facts of learning but the texture of learning. Anyone who has ever read Mary Bateson's book, Composing A Life, knows that she believes women of my generation improvised their lives. The men went where they needed to go to have their careers - Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, New York; the women followed. . Make no mistake, though, those women were working on themselves, too. Working to become who THEY were., no matter where they ended up. Improvising. Maybe listening to or for their calling.

I had just finished my masters degree in education at Manhattanville when, once again we moved, this time to Basking Ridge, N.J. Once again, I needed to improvise. What exactly would I do here in this new place, where I didn't know anyone, not even the streets of this semi-rural village? The one thing I carried with me from White Plains were ideas, not only about literature- and all that involves but about what education was or could be - when I saw a small article in the Bernardsville News about a school in Gladstone, N.J., the Gill-St Bernards School, that was going to create a whole new kind of program in its Upper School. It was called the Unit Plan. And it intended to use its own gifted teachers, but look to the community, as well, to see if there were some experts out there, too, that could teach. Its philosophy? The world is our classroom. Bingo. Talk about coincidence. Let's get one thing straight. Teaching is not easy. Any teacher in this room - and the best are in this room today, make no mistake - knows that teaching is not easy. Having published a children's book or two, and looking something like an outside expert, I got the job of teaching some English courses and creative writing at Gill from headmaster Jack Wright. But now thrown into the classroom, with eight to fifteen teen strangers who were, - well, skeptical, suspicious, slightly mischievous - and definitely wondering who on earth I was. (And, remember, I was short even then.)

But before I walk into Founders in this little story, a building which everyone here knows well, let's talk about the Upper School Gill kid of the early 70s. Because how can you talk about teaching without talking about the kid. Maybe because of the imaginative curriculum, the school was attracting the brightest, most wonderfully off-beat kid right from the start. This kid had probably been going his or her own way - or trying to in some traditional setting - since the time he or she was five. Maybe younger. The kid had a lot confidence. A lot of sass, maybe even a little swagger when he or she needed it. But this kid, this Gill kid, was used to dreaming at the edges. Used to looking not just at the "thing" but the aura of the "thing." Not just at the idea but the idea of the idea. Sometimes these kids actually photographed the "aura." (Anyone remember Marc Vilain?) Sometimes they argued the idea of the idea, exploding into debate with their fellows in seminars, long the mainstay of education at Gill English and history courses, or with their teachers in the teacher's office before school even began - just to disagree(Brad Blackford and Steve Susman come to mine.) And artists, a lot of the Gill kids were artists, fine artists, who preferred to describe their world with a pencil or a brush or torn paper rather than words. And musicians, who carried their song or their guitars with them.(Does Chris Burt still carry his guitar?) A lot of them were - and I know this sounds impossible - everything. Engaged in art and words and athletics and everything the world had to offer. They had

multiple talents. They were into tasting life. Celebrating it. There was a spirit in them, which I cannot fully explain. Even now. And even today, I meet a kid or a young adult - and I recognize him or her by the spark in their eye, by their sheer "difference", their individuality, their confidence and intelligence. Their artistry. By their willingness to go "the road less traveled, " a way overused poem by Frost, but even so just right for the Gill kid. "Hey, Ron, That kid we just met? Is that a Gill kid, or what?" If I say it, he knows just what I mean. And the teachers? Ironically, not every teacher, grown, was in their bones a Gill kid. Not all of us were as gutsy as our students. As courageous. Not all of us thought out of the box as regularly as the kids themselves, but we were to the last teacher - and I am going to guess this is so even today - game. So a lot of us came close. Gill attracted Roger Cavanaugh who regularly taught Eygptian history at a time when who was even thinking about Egypt, he believing in energy that we could not see, but which a pyramid in his own apartment could capture. Sue Ely, a horsewoman, an athlete, a poet and lover and brilliant practitioner of words, Wellesley graduate whose mind was an encyclopedia of literature, and whose brilliance shone in everything she said and taught. You can imagine a trip to Greece for a Greek Literature course with someone like Sue Ely. Rosemary Hartten, originally from Oklahoma, whose broad smile and hearty laugh and sheer

intelligence, charmed everyone around her as she tackled her favorite subjects like European history and Native American Studies, The Literature of the World's Women. Or Peter Schmidt who was a Quaker in his heart, who grew up during the Vietnam War, and whose pacifist values brought him to the streets in protest, and brought him into the Gill world where he knew his colleagues shared his passion for learning and living courageously and in peace. Mike Chimes, Pauline Lurie, Jerry Cirillo, Jerry Cetrulo, Phil Kaufman, John Burt, John Menke and so many more. Forgive me not remembering and speaking the name and story of every one. Not only did we believe that the world was our classroom, which truly was the school's mantra, but each of us created and sought our own world, each classroom as different from each other as the school's classrooms were from traditional classrooms. And here is what was truly unique for me: we - all of us, as different as we were -- had time - to create those classrooms and to teach in the amazingly individual ways and places that came to represent the Unit Plan. And let's pause on that. In my mind, this is probably the biggest distinction in the Unit Plan among educational forms even now: "time." Time for something as selfevidently important as a beginning, middle and end to an assignment or a program or project. Time for immersion in a subject. Time for research. Time to go somewhere to re-enforce an idea whatever its shape.

"The needle's eye that does supply The thread that runs so true";

The needle's eye is served well by the elements of play and texture and the world as classroom, giving multilayered dimensions to the teacher's teaching; but it is particularly well served, simply, by having enough time. A course like British and American Literature was seven weeks long, from 8:30 to 2:30 each day. Time. Not interrupted by a bell, not squeezed in between disparate subjects, not eliminated for an assembly. Usually. .Time for the Thread that Runs so True. For teaching kids in a way that invited them in. Those of you who are hearing this for the first time, are you worried that core courses were not taught. Are you worried how kids in those days could pass the New York regents test if they had to or their SATs with high enough grades? We were well aware. We taught those core courses, believing fully in the lifechanging material that was in them! After all this was a private preparatory school whose students needed to get into colleges and universities, fine ones; we brought our backpack of ideas, our individuality, our imagination, our gamemanship to the design of core courses.

But we brought the same to the courses we designed individually. I have been working with novelists for the last twenty years in publishing. I can tell you that a novelist who chooses the novel she or he writes, driven by their own passions, has the best chance of writing a break-out novel with an original Voice. Likewise a teacher who is allowed to create a course that comes from what she or he knows and believes and feels driven to share, will teach an outstanding, maybe unforgettable course. Is that not true even now? And so our passions drove each of us in our own way to invent different and imaginative learning in core courses, as well as to invent our own particular courses, driven by what we loved. No question there was a one-mindedness that created both. And did I say that we, this faculty, this band of believers, learned as well as taught. Well, it is true: the expansive environment, the depth of devotion and study, the textured curricula, the dedication made possible by time, made learning possible for us, too. At every turn. How did all of this work in the classroom? (Some of you in this room know well.) For me to tell you, I need to go back to a principle of play: Teammanship. (Some of you here today will remember this.) The Unit Plan created teams of each class. Living together in a round of seats for seven weeks, the kids became, as it were, teams or families, or for some reason the term " merry bands" comes to mind.

Make no mistake, the kids certainly didn't always agree - do families? They squabbled - do families? But in class after class, they hung together in good times and not, through hard lessons and revelations - that only the word "together" can describe. Almost always with wit and immense good humor. (They made me laugh!) It happened over and over, this coming together, but I remember well the so-called Adjusted English class where, so close were they to each other, that the kids decided everyone in class was Fred. So we would hurry across campus to lunch or chapel or the gymnasium, with voices calling out: Hi Fred. Hey, Fred. Yes, even me, not Mrs. Gauch, but when collecting my mail: G'morning, Fred. What a team! What an environment for living and learning. In their brand of independence and love of freedom, many of our students actually and stubbornly fought reading. Some also fought writing papers of any kind writing and reading always primary goals of school and certainly of Gill in those days, as it is now. But here, once again, is where time came in. (And I realize I can not speak for math and science, only the humanities, English in particular.) Because we had the time to immerse ourselves in whatever we were reading - we had amazing choice. Over a week or so, we could tackle Catcher in the Rye or

or Slaughter House Five, Franny and Zoey, Farewell to Arms, Wuthering Heights. Without interruption. The book could absolutely occupy our daytime minds and world. In our seminars, we could talk about the book in wonderful particularities: discover character and characterization, hear Voices, unearth metaphors, make connections. The seminar was an intimate stage really, an intellectual playground, at times battleground, for ideas. Since there were only fifteen people in most classrooms, that meant something round, something egalitarian - no lecture with the teacher parading in front of fifteen students regaling them with his or her backpack of facts. Though a fine lecture is a beautiful thing - the seminar allowed us to create an opportunity for learning that was not only interactive but whole: intriguing (What did you like about this chapter in Red Pony?), personal (Give me a name or moment and defend why in your eyes it was outstanding), specific (How did the weather reflect Jody's emotional mood when he was drawn to the barn) and intellectually exciting - (How did the death of the pony change Jody's life perspective, or did it?) It was almost like a game. Frequently, one of the students would lead the seminar. No one ever refused that I remember. I recall Laura Sydell, yes NPRs Laura Sydell, Julie Reby, leading many seminars: they just got better and better at it. It was also a game ( fun and demanding) to play teacher.

In one of my first British American Lit classes I was blessed with the most hearty individualists you could imagine, a "merry band" of them, each with totally different things on their minds. They probably were not all that thrilled to even be there - friendly seminar circle or not, particularly on those warm, fall days, when the smell of fall leaves drifted in the opened windows. I knew I needed to select a book they could love, absolutely love, so I picked one that I loved, arguably the best place to start: Killer Angels, the Pulitzer Prize winner by Kenneth Schaara, historical fiction about the three day Battle of Gettysburg. 374 pages! Because we had time! We would read it in patches over two weeks - living each battle through the expressive and powerful words of Schaara. The fifteen kids would learn literary techniques: points of view: Chamberlain's, Pickett's, Longstreet's, Lee's. They would learn about research for such a book. They would learn about the narrative movement in a great story and what and how a turning point is created. They would particularly learn about developing character. . They would begin to love to read. That was my plan. Wasn't I the needle? I figured I needed to get them into that 1860s world. To be able to touch the story, to be touched by the story. I always figured that when more than one sense was involved, they'd remember. I figured that if the decisions were theirs, they'd

remember. If they could be brought to the battlefield by the words of Schaara, they'd remember. Choose a dimensional project then. Seminars in the morning, projects in the afternoons. I remember those afternoons, the bustle of the classroom, everybody working on something with whole hearts. Though each student had his or her own, I don't remember every project . I do remember that I felt their passion when a giant Gettysburg map was created and spread out on a table that occupied the center of the room. I remember the battle grounds coming alive each day, under Schaara's words and their hands. The battle of Cemetery Ridge, The Peach Field, Little Round Top. But it was also matching activities to talents. Huston Ripley was one of those everything people - a serious baseball player (that was the love of his life walking into that classroom) and an artist with considerable talents. What could he do that reading the book would bring to life. He sculpted a life-sized head of General Longstreet. I saw Longstreet for the first time when I saw that splendid sculpture.. Time. It sent our teacher imaginations ranging, and to such a degree, giving us the space we needed to teach a lesson that we could hope would not be forgotten. Sometimes in memory I mix classes up: I don't always put the right people in the right class or together. But I know The Thread that Runs So True ran through

another Adjusted English class I taught. People in that class - tenth graders, I believe - were not at all sure they ever wanted to read a whole book - there was just too much else to be doing. You can imagine, I was, unabashedly, after trying to win these kids to reading. So, again, from what I loved, I chose a new young adult book by Robert Cormier, called The Chocolate War! I loved it. Why wouldn't they? Sometimes at Gill, students would so love a book or a poem that their response was almost ecstatic. It might burst right out of the classroom. And that's what happened to The Chocolate War: the ideas burst right out of the classroom. A poignant book about Jerry whose mother had died, his father become withdrawn, and he was in a new school facing a wicked administrator called Brother Leon and his teen-age henchmen: Archie and the Vigils. Why? Because he refuses to sell chocolates for their annual chocolate sale Jerry puts up a sign in his locker to remind him that he had enough courage to resist all of them. The sign: Do I Dare to Disturb the Universe? And the war began. The ecstatic scene in this book never leaves me. Jerry is set to fight Janza, a Vigil, climactically in front of the whole school. Commands as to which punch to throw are being called out by a neutral referee, when the vigil Janza throws a low, unfair punch and Jerry, unthinking, unleashes a barage of low, unfair punches himself, pummeling Janza, bloody, to the ground.

"Triumphantly he watched Janza floundering on weak, wobbly knees. Jerry turned toward the crowd, seeing - what? Applause? They were booing. Booing him. Shaking his head, trying to reassemble himself, squinting, he saw Archie in the crowd, a grinning, exultant Archie. A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it. He had allowed Brother Leon and Archie to do this to him." Unbeknownst to me, the kids in the classroom, fired up, took a poster board, scrawled on it "Do I Dare Disturb the Universe", and taped it up on a board next to the lunchroom fireplace. The school began to answer it! Scrawl comments across the board. "You have to disturb the Universe in order for any kind of progress, don't you." " Not this cat: you know where that will lead you." "Coward!" "Anything worthwhile takes a fight." And so on. I wish I could remember all the retorts, but I can tell you that suddenly the school had been engaged, the ideas going way beyond the class room into their own world. I can tell you, too, that kids who never gave books a moment, gave that book time, and I am going to guess, went on giving books time. Weren't we teachers involved with a noble process? Weren't we on a journey to build people? Isn't Gill - and every good school - still on that journey?

I came to Gill as a writer and teacher of creative writing. What a glorious class to have an entire day to spend on. And three weeks, generally. Perhaps m ore than in any class, I had a basic idea, that life too often went by kids. They didn't see enough. Clearly enough. Particularly the kid who wanted to write. In those creative writing classes, I took the school's mantra most seriously. If the world was our classroom, we would go into the world to see, to touch, to hear, to feel - in the particular - and to write. We ranged near, wandering through the once-plowed fields by the school, looking for disparate images: butterflies and rusting Campbell soup cans; trout in the river and garbage thrown by the side. Images perfect for writing hai ku. We went to the gym to experience choosing and being chosen into teams - what could be more emotionally charged for some or not - and to play basketball-what could be more physically chargedor not? All to write poetry. It was that night's assignment where John Athowe, athlete poet wrote: Fingers, A hummingbird's wings, nervous wands leaving scattered

trails of flailing arms.

Coiled springs of gold can spin webs in needle's eye.

Shafts of sunlight warm and caress the flesh from within. there is no numbness in the relaxed fingertips of these spindles.

Basketball.

We ranged far, too. To Cape May to walk the boardwalk and, as Faulkner did in New Orleans, to listen to and gather different voices to introduce Voice as a concept. We wrote the poetry of antiques at the creaky Victorian bed and breakfast where we stayed, including the Widow's Peak that looked out over a stormy sea. We wrote 42nd Street in Manhattan, looking again for disparate images: splashy billboards, tawdry marquis, the shabby habitants of the street, often ending up in green and flowering Bryant Park where the park broke into national groups and national pastimes. Or walked down Fifth Avenue, discovering the three story stacks of books in what was then Scribners, the jewel glass figures of Steuben Glass, the secret top floor - by invitation only - at Gucci where students somehow discovered Picasso drawings decked the walls. We stopped and wrote the Picasso drawings. Exuberance. Definitely part of the learning game. I talked the head of the department into letting me teach Drama as Literature as my special course. It was simple, why: I loved it. I felt as if the course had something to do with life. And I was right. We came face to face in those courses, not only with beautiful language, and powerful sentiment, passion-driven words, characters

that became archetypal in their classic stature, but face to face with ideas. Like those of Shakespeare and Moliere, of Ibsen and Strindberg. Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, his dramatic and powerful treatise against War. Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House and Captain Shotover's monologue about old age come to mind. Ionesco's Rhinoceros is the play I don't think any of the course's students will forget. Certainly not I. The drama, set in Paris: Parisians simply walking the street or sitting at cafes, when one day a rhinoceros storms down the street, and then on the next day another, and another, until pairs, groups and finally herds of them are stampeding down the streets of Paris, and now the evidence that it is human beings that are turning into rhinoceroses - animals: horned, leathery, bereft of individuality or brain, and stampeding, mindless as a crowd, arriving at a last act where the audience sees even the protagonist growing a leathery hide, hooves, a horn. How to give the students a multidimensional experience for this powerful idea, how to drive them to understand in their skin, at their heart, the violence and compulsion of mind control. The needle's eye that does supply but what, in this case, to supply? And how? A preface to the play led me to the famous Nazi propaganda film Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, that showed the thousands and thousands and thousands of Germans marching robotically into a government square in the l930s as one, their legs, arms, tilt of their hats, chins, mouths, identical, and shouting Heil HiItler as

one impassioned voice to an Adolph Hitler, standing smugly in a box above them all. Rhinoceroses. With that film still ringing in their ears, the kids - switching roles every so often so everyone could read - stepped into Ionesco's words, robotically becoming rhinoceroses. I still hear the pounding of their feet in the Conover classroom their hooves vibrating more and more fiercely as s the acts went on, driven by Ionesco's powerful words, driven into becoming rhinoceroses: the fierce animal image of mind control and loss. Whether the course is writing or reading or studying history or philosophy or geology or chemistry, the question consumes the teacher: how can I bring a book or poem or formula meaningfully to the student? Bring it to the well of who he or she is! And who's surprised that when a teacher - in any kind of teaching plan - is lucky enough to get it right - the students are exuberant. So is the teacher! Am I right, every teacher remembers those moments when he or she gets it right. I remember the rhinoceroses, writing Picasso, the Do I Disturb the Universe poster, the serendipitous moment when Chris Burt started to strum his guitar behind a class reading of Leaves of Grass - I don't want to forget that- and so much more We teachers in the Unit Plan were just a little bit luckier than most, because we had enough time.

Maybe people were right to call the Unit Plan an experiment. Okay, it was an experiment, but an experiment that tested the waters of learning supported by our senses, our intellect, our love of learning, and the lessons of the game. An experiment that essentially tested whether - if teachers had enough time- would it give them greater opportunities to teach in a way that ideas and facts and lessons of the book - and of humanity- would not be forgotten. I don't believe there is only one way to teach, nor one way to learn. Jack Wright and Barclay Palmer after him hired people whose philosophies matched theirs: we believed that the world was our classroom and, with this new kind of time on our side, dreamed big. The brilliant and creative Sue Ely, took her kids to Greece and Ireland- a rare thing in the early 80s, bringing to bear her poetic sensitivities and demand for articulate response. Peter Schmidt took his kids on inward journeys, taking kids into dimensions that don't fall easily into traditional courses: Spirituality in America, Race, Class and Gender, as well as courses in US History and modern China. Jerry Cetrulo, influenced by mythologist Joseph Campbell, regularly backpacked with his kids in the tangled woods around Gill, to understand the hero's journey, his goal not only to discover the hero in myth and mythic literature but the hero in themselves. And so it went. When I have heard the No Child Left Behind criteria, I shudder. I have not read the whole booklet, but what I have heard - the emphasis on teaching to the test, on

teaching a curricula that teachers not teaching have probably constructed, I have thought I must live on another planet. What is education all about? Is it only learning the technical skills to survive in an increasingly technical world - and I know how crucially important that is? Is it only learning the shape of an expositional piece of writing - and I know how crucially important that is. The formula for a Quantum equation? It might well be crucial to some! Learning great words, great ideas, numbers of consequence, formulas --like everyone in this room, I know that more than ever the human being needs - and wants - to have these tools in his or her belt - basic cultural and technical information, honed skills - when they go out into the world. And try to survive it. But surely there is more. As a teacher, isn't the real education accompanying the student to a greater humanity as well? To ideals constructed from experience and the wisdom - fiction and nonfiction - of those good books. To decision making that comes from those ideals, decision-making that will enable a human being to navigate and be resilient in an increasingly complex world? George Saunders, author of The Tenth of December, wrote in a NY Times article recently, defending why, though famous, he still taught: "Even for those thousands of young people who don't get published," he wrote, "the process is still a noble one. The process of trying to say something, of working through craft issues and world view issues

and all of this is character building and God forbid everything we do should have career results." God forbid that everything we do should be aimed at getting test results. Let our information and skills and book learning - and loving them - be the tools in our belt for going forth, demand them, but let our humanity be our goal. I say that, even now. When I left Gill, I took the lessons of Gill as well as my students on my back. I took the belief in texture and looking at the small into choosing which novels and picture books I would publish. Make no mistake, publishing is a private journey and does not have many of the collective joys of a Gill classroom. But it allowed me to take what I believed into the world of publishing and choose books like Owl Moon, which Ian Schoenherr's father John Schoenherr illustrated and which won a Caldecott Medal, and many beautiful books by Ian Schoenherr himself, who was always on the same page as I was. It allowed me to choose manuscripts that cherished concrete and textured words, and that believed in the beauty and power of language. Having read all those novels at Gill, luxuriated in time, I came to publishing with a clear sense of narrative line and the power of a great character, and was smart enough to publish books like Mockingbird by Kathryn Erksine which regarded the totally original human being as loveable and powerful in her

own way, a book that won The National Book Award. Kathy Erksine would have made a great Gill kids. I am so glad that many of you could be here today, many I have taught and many I wish that I had been able to teach. When I hear where people are: in Colorado, in California, in Seattle, in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts: NPR news reporters, lawyers, therapists, professors, artists of every kind - of national advertisements, well-known picture books, book jackets, graphic presentations - gallery artists featured for their engraving like mastery , jazz singers who also compose, creators of music productions, founders of holistic spas. I wish I could see them all and hear their stories. I have a strong hunch - or at least I hope with all my heart - that all of them, all of you - came into your college lives, believing that learning was a good thing, that ideas were cherishable, that authors and artists like Sophocles, Homer, Moliere, Shakespeare, Blake, Poe, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Ionesco. all of them. could go on your journeys with you. There was room. I hoped there would always be room. It was a good idea, the Gill Unit Plan. It came from a good place. At a good time. It believed in the beginning, middle and end. It believed in the texture of the day. It believed in the capability and possibility of each human being, and in his or her

individuality. It attracted teachers with ideas and courage and immense love for their subjects and their students, and enabled teachers to go to wherever they needed to go to meet an idea half way in order to give kids transcendent moments of learning. It gave them time. Shades of Jesse Stuart. There is only one place where I can end this talk. When I first came to Gill, it was the 70s, years that had their own stories. Years that had followed the 60s with all of its flower power and songs of freedom. But this was a school. At Graduation during the 70s and early 80s, the undergraduate Gill kids climbed up on the rooftop of Founders. (It was after all another time) But the graduates, often barefoot, many in different kinds of white dress, flowing or slim, with fresh flowers pinned in their hair - yes boys and girls -came down the chapel walk. They were ready, I know, to break out, to throw programs into the air in celebration of the next step. But for that moment, walking down the walk, there was a wonderful quiet. It was such a remarkably individual walk. The teachers - bless them all, bless us all - were filled with such pride in each of those kids. Everything about the moment, said, watch out world, these are kids with promise.

I have spent a lot of time today on the Gill of yesterday, but I know the individuality of Gill remains today - I have seen it today in the classrooms and

hallways of Hockenbury - the love of learning, the creativity of teachers, the relationship between teachers and students, the willingness to see each person for what or who she is. Today, the last class of the year is a Unit class in length and, I'm told, idea. Great! Would it be fair to say, that the "now" of Gill is served today by original and wonderfully imaginative teachers and staff, with - now and then a nod back to its "big experiment", its rich, somewhat amazing, and even courageous past? I love you all, and I love this school. Thank you for this opportunity to tell you how much.

The Thread that so True Runs takes time. It takes heart. A passion for the learning game. We were after the kids getting to know the game of learning, and playing it humanly.

Maybe it will always be playing The Thread that Runs So True. I conspire to play it. And it attracted teachers with ideas and courage and immense love for their students.

Extra stuff: The world: going to Cape May staying at an amazing Vicgtorian Bed and Breakfas, The Mainstay, filled with antiques - in every corner, where on the first hour Hali Harvin sped down the bannister and into the doorway antigues stopping within an inch. where, like Faulkner, we listened in on conversations, croweded into the Widow's Peak atn ight,

Where we read: Artist as a Young Man, and argued - after lunch took up Joyce's argument about whether art shuld be kinetic or static, something that moved the viewer, or paralyzed them with the thought or the beauty. Voices were raised. I remember one, Tim Ripley, who is here today. Look for the bones of this speech. That we had time and space, an ideology that enabled us and gave us permission to reach, to teach to the moment and the world. And gave permission to the kids to live in this place, to become, a merry band, in

pursuit not only of information, not only of skillsand techniques, but in pursuit of their own humanity and of a greater good that was informed by the ideas and shapes of masters, and of their own ideas. If I met an individualist, something that was outrageously original, and opinionated and funny and wise, I would say to Ron: Heis like a Gill kid. I know you kow what I mean.

Did I mention that Marsia turned out to be a reader, and a songwriter, a lover of words and rhythms. What is the goal at Gill. Not just to force information into them like grain into a goose, information that if not integrated into their lives, may be digested, but not fully integrated. force seldom works. That our classes were places of peace. Classes who wanted to come. Who were enthusiastic about coming, anxious to learn: what next. Internally. I believe the students knew that in our classrooms they were safe; they could speak; they could disagree; they could invent; they could break - like tapping an Ipad screen into some sidebar of their own thinking or imagination? it in that way.

Threat was not part of the game. We were creating families of people. Each class a family. The We was key. Somehow everyone knew we wer on a jhourney together.

It is some kind of a pure idea. It goes beyond clssrooms, and facilities, various kinds and forms of education. It goes, ti seems to me, to the heart of education. Eduction should engage the spirit. Maybe it has to fit the particular teacher. But isn't itspirit to spirit that good education happens. As you sit there loving what you eventually loved, didn't it have something to do with engaging your spirit, and somehow making you part of what was going on. Not an observor. Not a Greek chorus, though some chorus chroisters were probably much engaged a dramatic action. But good education asks the student to go on stage. the teacher's mandate is to find the way to invite the student to that place.

then the education can happen.

My friend Barbara Berger, the artist, had an entire exhibit of art boxes, each one, giving the viewer different kinds of permission. Isn't that what the teacher all about: about giving the student permission to discover himself. Herself? Their talents. Their ideas. The needle's eye that does supply The thread that Runs so True. should be fun

Any system for teaching goes beyond the system to the teachers themselves and the students themselves.

Multiply ideas time classes. Able to choose our own books, teachers could go to the heart of what they believed and treasured. I could go to Killer's Angel, to Portraitof the Artist as a Young Man, Leaves of Grass. Btu I could also go offbeat, for Oxbow Incideent, a major Western, one of the first, where the philosophical question is where does guilt lie: with omission or commission. The man or woman who are in a position to speak about a crime, or the one who know something, could contribute in a way that might help socidety, and does not speak.

It is interesting, isn't it, how the stories that we love the most, that have emotional heft, often reflect a character's character. Isn't that what the Unit Plan was all about, isn't that what Gill is about today? Gill St. Bernard's School: Education the Renaissance Manor Woman: The classroom, your world and your mind. Games for the mentally and emotionally agile. Is this not the goal of every education system even today?

I have often said that a novel, driven by the passion of the author, is a more authentic novel. Courses that were driven by the tacher's personal dedication, were empowered. The power came from the inside!

So I come here today humbly with a story, knowing it is only my story in the face of many such stories, about a time in the ilfe of the school, a matching. Kids looking for new ways to look at the world, teches looking for new ways to look at the world. A world who was looking for new ways to look at itself. . That it was a matching: kids looking for new ways to look at the world, teachers looking for new ways to look at the world. A world who was looking for new ways to look at itself.

(Interestingly enough, the great Gill teacher Sue Ely was probably in Kentucky at the same time that I was, just out of college, volunteering as a midwife's assistant, in the back hills of that great state.)