MEWsings: '70s Open Classrooms--With a Closed-Off Mind

In 1973, after coming back from Scottsdale, Ariz., we moved in temporarily with my aunt and grandparents in Ozone Park, dragging Chicklet the Chihuahua with us.

My parents found a house in Syosset, and they'd drive us back and forth to school until we officially moved in.  Mom and I would sit in the Station House Diner, now Dunkin' Donuts/Baskin-Robbins, next to the train station to wait for Village School to open. I would eat toasted English muffins with jelly.  Mom would have a cigarette and coffee and we'd walk up Convent Road together.

In third grade, my skills were behind the other children, having come from Westbury schools that had employed a new concept sweeping the country called "Open Classrooms." Basically, in its extreme, Open Classrooms was Little House on the Prairie schoolhouse-style education with kids of different ages and academic levels in one setting without "walls" holding them back.  Teachers were facilitators in this experimental learning.  In Westbury, it was still sectioned into grades, but we were very much on our own.

To me, it was a "lets-throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks" curriculum.  Riddled with what I would later learn to channel as creative energy, I had trouble focusing on schoolwork.  Sitting still wasn't the issue; there were things happening in and outside of me far more interesting than what any teacher was saying.  I would wistfully stare out the window, bored out of my mind, and swear I could hear the grass growing and see shapes in a breeze blowing by. I had a vivid imagination and could occupy myself fantasizing for hours. As a child with this soupy, curious mind, it was hard to think out of the box when you don't have a clue what the box is in the first place.  This free-for-all teaching method was confusing, distracting and didn't work.

Over the years, my parents never sought any diagnosis of ADD, not understanding it and lovingly choosing not to label me. As an adult I never pursued it either.  Personally, I think people use ADD as a clichéd excuse. For those of us who have such tendencies, it is very real and difficult to live with.  You're often messy and have a strange taste in food (just smear mustard on anything and call it dinner), and have temper tantrums, bouts of insomnia and depression.   I'd absentmindedly leave three or four half-drunk glasses of water all over the house like Mel Gibson in Signs warding off the aliens.  Homework was painful, math torture.

Rock 'n' roll songs revved in my head in constant rotation that blotted out the sun. Nothing else could get through until I learned to overcompensate behaviors and my mind matured into an intense passionate focus with a preternatural memory.  I managed to buckle down and be the first in my immediate family to earn a BA in English from Hofstra, but certainly not the smartest.

In the 1974-75 school year, now 9 entering fourth grade in Village School, Open Classrooms came to Syosset, much to my parents' dismay.  The two fourth grade classes were combined. Mr. Haniwalt (whose rumored claim to fame was as a distant relative of The Brady Bunch's Florence Henderson), along with Mr. Parks, oversaw 40 (or more) students in one open area, the wall in between classrooms knocked down. We were scared of tall, dark-haired Mr. Haniwalt, who had a quick temper yet could rattle off the entire attendance list, last names only, in one long breath.  Mr. Parks was shorter, kinder and looked like Paul Anka.  We congregated in mini chat groups to learn meters, liters and grams, the Metric System that America was supposedly converting to soon.

I don't remember having any desks of our own, but we sat in a circle of primary-colored plastic chairs like you'd find in a hospital cafeteria. We giggled facing each other in group therapy mode. Lined against the walls were rows of yellow plastic cubby bins, and we were supposed to take out our dittos and workbooks, read assignments and do work ourselves.  Then go over to another station, check our work against the master ditto, grading ourselves. Ummm…we cheated. Or maybe I should have. My grades weren't that good.

All the children worked at our own pace, so by the end of the school year, I still hadn't made it through the first 30-page math workbook and my friend Steven, deemed brilliant, blew through all 10 books and was bored. It was highly independent training that I later would love, but at 9, I didn't give a hoot about conscientiously striving. Basically, second and fourth grades were a blur for me.

Fifth grade was structured, with desks and a formal curriculum back in place.   After lunch, Mrs. Whitehill, whom I adored, read My Brother Sam is Dead aloud to us as we sat, legs crisscrossed on the carpet, watching tears well up in her eyes when Sam died. Life was much better when I found Judy Blume books and figured out how to process all that stuff in my head by writing it on paper. No one ever mentioned Open Classrooms again.

Does anyone remember Open Classrooms of Syosset?