Booklist Review of "A Room for Learning"

A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont.

 Birdsey, Tal (Author)

 Oct 2009. 288 p. St. Martin's, hardcover, $24.99. (9780312547301). 373.110092.

 Birdsey had been a stay-at-home dad for three years when he was approached to start an independent school in the small town of Ripton, Vermont. His 10 years of experience teaching seventh and eighth grade at an independent school in Atlanta gave him the kind of background his neighbors were looking for to extend the homeyness and free-spiritedness of the grade school into adolescence. Birdsey recounts the journey from that idea to the creation of a one-room school with 12 students from seventh through ninth grades. With an eclectic mix of personalities and skills, Birdsey’s students helped to guide the school year, pondering the music of Coltrane and the poetry of Yeats and Bukowski, the meaning of personal ethics and the mystery of science, and the typical adolescent angst of any school. In this absorbing and often-humorous account, Birdsey chronicles the growth of his students as well as his own personal development as together they searched for the real meaning of education and its power to transform the individual.