Sometimes, The End Is A Parking Lot
Whenever we design our curriculum and our coursework, we always begin with the end in mind. Here at Stone, we work hard to clarify the design principles of our courses -- why a student should take them, what our students will be able to do after taking our courses, what measurable and definable skills they will acquire, what “Big Questions” they will be able to answer, why the work matters.
Sometimes, the end can be a little abstract.
Other times, the end is a parking lot.
Every two years, Stone seniors and juniors have the opportunity to enroll in “Introduction To The Beat Generation”, an Advanced English course focused on early 20th Century American literature, music, art, and popular culture. The course is built around a Big Question -- “What Is Exploration?” -- and is designed to give our students the opportunity to acquire college-level reading, research, and writing skills as they formulate a significant academic response to the question. Over three Mods, ‘Beats’ students read everything from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Kerouac and Biraka to Derrida and Wallace; they research the visual arts and the performing arts and even land art; they write (and they write, and they write).
And then: they explore.
On the final day of class each year, Beats students pile into a van and explore America -- each trip unique, each trip created by the students themselves. This past year, they began by “taking a left” out of our parking lot and heading south -- for Virginia, and Alabama, and Mississipi. They drove across Oklahoma and across Texas, they dodged tumbleweeds in the Southwest, they watched the sun set over the Salton Sea, they sprinted into the freezing cold Pacific Ocean and they spent an afternoon shopping at City Lights in San Francisco. Then they headed north -- through Reno, across Route 50 (that’s “the loneliest Road in America”), up toward the Canadian Border, across Montana and North Dakota and Minnesota, before ducking below the Great Lakes and heading back to Lancaster.
That’s 7500 miles of exploration in 13 days.
And all with no electronics allowed in the van.
Like we said: everything we do, we backwards engineer with the end in mind. Sometimes the end is an experience, or an assignment, or a project, or hard evidence of an acquired academic skill.
And sometimes, the end is a parking lot.
See also: We Did #Big, Colleges, Universities and Programs Admitting Stone Students, 2021-22 Curriculum Guide, Meet the Pioneers
