Core Curriculum

Review of "A Room For Learning" in Vermont Life, Winter 2010

Many Vermonters relish their state because it offers an alternative to the rest of America. But there are those who find mainstream Vermont still too confining — and that is the teacher, and those are the kids, that form the heart of "A Room for Learning," an engaging memoir by Tal Birdsey, an idealistic teacher who launched a "one room" schoolhouse in a faded old building in Ripton in 2001.

Exasperated by both the contemporary school system and its all-too-conventional critics, Birdsey takes a reach-for-the-stars approach that will help students find "the illuminated core" of their potential. Such a vision suggests a man with his head in the clouds, but Birdsey is firmly earthbound dealing with the weight of 12 students and a new school all on his shoulders. His eyes are also wide open to the "real" Vermont — if real is a code word for just scraping by — and his descriptions of one impoverished boy in particular are heart-rending.

Birdsey's students are as outside the system as he is: Battered in the harsh pecking order of the normal schoolyard — too smart, too shy, too different somehow — their parents are desperate enough to enlist with a maverick middle school that only exists, at the start, in Birdsey's imagination.

His book recounts the eventful first year of what came to be called the North Branch School, tracing in a serious, soul-searching way the journey that teacher and students take together. Their lessons range from emotionally charged conversations to simple, life-affirming pleasures like a hike in the Vermont woods. It is a free-flowing, essentially utopian style of learning, impossible for the mainstream system to deliver, but just right, it appears, for those who need it.

• A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont
• By Tal Birdsey, 296 pages, hardcover, $24.99, St. Martin's Press, New York

— Bill Anderson