Issue #42: Back to Real World School: Parental Perspective

Real World School, parents feedback on the first 6-12 months

Prologue

In the hierarchy of local needs, one thing that stands head and shoulders above other topics is one of Schooling, mostly for those with school-aged children, but the impact is felt by everyone in the area. Suffice to say that without a local international school, Alegria/EcoVilla/ESM and the MV as a whole will not thrive. Families can get used to the heat, can deal with humidity, with bugs, with dramas, mechanics and all sorts of challenges that we have here, but if our kids don’t have a place to go to everyday which prepares them for the world at large, families will move elsewhere. This is not unique to Machuca Valley, people everywhere move to live near the “right” school.

This is an ongoing story, one that we started a year ago in only our second issue - Issue #2: Back to School Part 1 (and Part 2) and we had an update in July when Journey and Real World School(RWS) merged(Issue #25). Now 1 year after RWS opened its doors and 6 months after the merger, its time for an update.

Intro

School’s mission and goals are vital, but they can only be fully understood and evaluated through the feedback of its community—students, teachers, and parents. Every family experiences the school environment differently, and each parent brings a unique set of values, expectations, and concerns.

To gain a better understanding of how the school is performing, not just in one isolated area, but across all aspects of student experience—academics, social development, emotional well-being, physical development, I asked 13 different parents two simple questions: What do you like about the school? and What do you wish could be improved? Armed with 8,000+ words of parental feedback, I fed it to ChatGPT along with the past 41 issues of this newsletter and asked it to write another one, based on that feedback. It did. Not the most horrible version, but one that lacked a voice, a sense of humor, a soul. I threw it out, for better or worse, I still have a job. Alright, on to today’s issue.

Friday, Dec 13, 2024 - Last Day of School

We came to pick-up the kids as we usually do to witness quite a scene. Kids were walking out of the classroom crying - not your tears of joy “I can’t believe its finally over!” kind of cries, but bawling with deep sorrow, the kind of crying I witnessed on my kids when our hamster died. Boys, girls, soft kids, tough kids, younger kids, older kids, all were crying, going to their parents to hug them and get some emotional support. Turns out it was announced that Will, the math teacher, will be leaving the school and will not be coming back in the new year for personal reasons.

This little scene tells quite a bit about the school and what I heard from many parents and what’s possibly the most important criteria for any school - kids actually like it there. Most kids enjoy coming to school every day, they love the jungle environment, the windowless classrooms without walls, running barefoot around the campus. The teachers connect to them on deep level, everyone in the school is dedicated to the children and treats them with utmost respect. This is no small feat and is one everyone should be proud of.

Of course at the same time, as we often talk about in this newsletter, it is still very much “transitory” as we’ve witnessed Will’s departure. My kids have been coming to this school for 3+ years now, the only thing that has been constant is them. All the kids have changed, all the teachers have changed, the name and leadership has changed. This is the nature of the Machuca Valley, it is still very much in the “establishing” phase and its felt in school and in communal life. The good news is Devonte is coming back, a math teacher who was teaching in RWS from Jan until July of 2024 and to whom we already said good-bye last summer with almost as much tears and the kids are excited to welcome him back - hopefully for longer this time.

Parental Feedback

Of course, like any parent group, ours is especially opinionated because many people came here away from “the traditional” educational systems, looking for an alternative school, the challenge though is the definition of what that looks like varies quite a bit.

Most parents agree that the kids could learn more Spanish. We’re living in a Spanish-speaking country, yet we continue to create English-speaking bubbles with school being yet another example. Most kids are English speakers as are most teachers and so English becomes the default school language and while there is a Spanish class, it seems that progress there is slow. I’m reminded a bit of my own experience learning English back in Russia when I was 12, when I knew we were going to immigrate to US and so I took English classes in school, but without an environment in which to practice what I learned, I made almost no progress. Of course, once I found myself in America, surrounded by English speakers, it only took me a year or so to become fluent - immersion is critical! We could all use a bit more Spanish in our lives if we are to thrive here and we all wish for School to be doing more there.

The schools most of us went to were organized by age with each grade corresponding to a specific age. Usually there is some sort of a test every student had to pass in order to move from one grade to the next and if you don’t pass the test, you “stay behind” until you do. This system resulted in teachers teaching to the tests and all kind of negative outcomes which we don’t want to repeat here, but one thing it ensured is that at every grade level, academically the kids were mostly at the same level and knew the same material making the teacher’s job much easier since the teacher knew that when they’re going to teach multiplication, everyone in the class already knows addition and subtraction. In our current school every child is at a different level, mostly due to drastically different backgrounds, but also because the schools here (including Casa Sula and Journey) didn’t have a method to bring everyone to the same level. Moreover we generally agree that most kids are behind academically when compared to their peers in schools back home. Leaving aside the “being behind” factor, the mixed levels age-based grades make it very difficult to teach. You’re either optimizing for the lowest common denominator, leaving many kids bored, or you’re juggling 20 students trying to provide individual attention to each one, personalziing the projects to each student’s level - an impossible task. In this situation, one solution is to organize the grades not by age, but by student’s levels. This is something the school is already looking at. The grades topic becomes very relevant if you ever want to switch out of the school and go to another school either in Costa Rica or abroad. Most schools these days will ask which grade your child has completed and may even test them before admitting.

The physical environment plays a crucial role in child’s development, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf education, all place a strong emphasis on creating intentional, thoughtfully designed spaces that support children's learning and development. If you ever tried to cook something in a messy kitchen or one where the kitchen tools are not organized in a way that feels natural or haven’t been kept in a good condition, you know how frustrating that could be and usually it translates into the resulting dish. School is no different and requires constant effort from both Teachers and Children to keep the school environment organized, clean and conducive to the learning activities. While most parents love the Jungly feeling of the school, many have commented on the need to place more focus on both the organizational aspect as well as on the cleanliness of the environments, both inside and outside. This goes well beyond being clean and organized, there is a cultural aspect that is needed where children learn to appreciate and respect the spaces they are in, holding each space as well as materials sacred.

No school discussion is complete without a mention of Social and Emotional component. This one is the most challenging to assess and even more challenging to implement. In fact, I would argue that we haven’t really figured out the social emotional component ourselves as adults, a quick glance at some communal group chats provide enough evidence. Here there is mixed feedback with one parent citing an emotional problem that was quickly addressed by the school while other parents saying that there is bullying, unresolved conflicts and other unwanted behaviors. The good news is this is something the school is very focused on, after all if we’re not going to be the strongest school academically, can we at least be the strongest school socially & emotionally? It has been a great joy to see both of our girls develop close bonds with a number of other girls in school and I hope those relationships continue to flourish.

I remember my first visit to the school campus, at the time it was Casa Sula. I was walking around, seeing kids do their thing, then unconsciously taking out my phone to check something, I was approached by one of the teachers and gently asked to put the phone away. Casa Sula had a strict no screen policy for anyone who was on campus, kids, teachers or parents. In fact there was just one small room with a few computers for older kids to do their research, otherwise the school was screen free. While offended at the time, I learned to appreciate that policy and its impact on children and teachers - their attention was always on something tangible, something that existed in their real-world environment and on each other and there was no modeling of looking at the phone from anyone. Today we find the school in a very different state relative to screen usage, partly intentional where students are encouraged to use iPads to do research and some school tasks, but partly its unintentional as the “no screens” policy is dropped and devices start to pop-up everywhere around school with kids often doing things on devices that they probably shouldn’t do or if I was being generous that they could do equally well without use of technology. This has been a big topic of numerous conversations led by Oren and Na’ama and starting with this semester a device usage policy will be put in place and we’ll talk about its effectiveness in the summer update. Suffice to say that in the age of ChatGPT doing your schoolwork(and sometimes teacher’s work), we’re in for a big challenge on what the right balance between usage of these tools vs. developing some of those skills ourselves and an even more fundamental question of what should the school be teaching if every piece of knowledge is now even more in your fingertips?

The last point of feedback and perhaps the most important one is that of “school philosophy”. A philosophy or perhaps “core tenants” serves as a set of guiding principals around which all other activities inside the school are organized. Moreover those principals are often opinionated and result in a particular way of handling various situations, consistently and clearly. As an example, Casa Sula had an easy to understand principal - “We are child-centric, we let children decide everything and we only set safety boundaries within which they can decide what to do”. Based on this principal a lot of what happened in the school was organized. This particular principal led to some very desired outcomes such as children developing a strong sense of self, figuring out what they like and don’t like and feeling of safety when they needed to defend their particular stance. It also resulted in perhaps less then desirable outcomes such as limited academic progress beyond certain age. The point here is not to argue for or against this particular principal, but to show that as an example and when its stated and communicated clearly, it informs everyone, from teachers to children to parents as to what the school is about, creating a specific container and allowing everyone to act accordingly within it, or to seek alternatives if they disagree with it. When this is not something that is clearly stated and communicated, everyone starts to develop their own ideas of what the school represents, whether its based on Waldorf or Steiner or Montessori or some other philosophy, thus creating a gap between expectations and reality. Moreover, lack of that philosophy creates a bit of chaotic environment and school starts to resemble a “collection of activities”, all of which seem to make sense in their own merit, but they lack cohesion as they are not organized around a core philosophy.

It is understandable that such philosophy can emerge over time. In fact very often a start-up, simply starts with some product idea and as the company grows and matures, it becomes more clear as to what the company is about and its principals can then be articulated. It is my hope and the wish of many other parents that this happens soon for RWS.

Lastly, its worth mentioning that there is plenty of positive developments being done already and the school does a great job communicating all those, whether its MEP Certification or the infrastructure improvements, it felt redundant reporting on them here. If you’re one of those readers who is interested in the school, but your kids are not yet attending it and therefore you’re not getting all those updates, please know that this issue represents only a partial viewpoint and is not meant to be as a holistic “state of the school” article.

As I mentioned in the beginning, a lot of this update is based on parental feedback and as a parent I know I have a very specific point of view with a somewhat limited perspective, not being in school every day and only understanding what is happening by talking to my kids and an occasional school visit. The real constituents of the school are actually our children and its my intention to do the next update in about 6 months, taking into account direct feedback from them.