We Had Built a School and We Were Our Own Teachers

When I was a college sophomore, I had four roommates. We'd all been randomly assigned to the same dormitory floor as freshmen and liked each other enough to give it a go in a large two-bedroom house just off campus.

Many of our other friends from the dorms had joined fraternities, but none of us saw ourselves as the frat boy type. Our house was located to the west of the majority of the frat houses, so we mockingly called ourselves Frat West. Our joke caught on. One evening, while I was there alone, an entire sorority stopped by to serenade me: just me alone hanging out a window with 30 young women singing to me. 

My roommates and I made an agreement to start the year: we would create a schedule that required one of us to be responsible for a dinner for all five of us each evening, Monday-Thursday. That left us with a schedule that meant we each got an occasional week off kitchen duty. Our other rule was that you were allowed one "cheat meal" per quarter. A cheat meal was anything that we collectively agreed was not "real cooking" (like frozen pizza), but even then it had to be balanced according to government guidelines (e.g., dairy, meat, vegetable, fruit, grains). None of us were seasoned cooks, although my mother had taught me a few of her recipes, which gave me the reputation as the "gourmet" of the bunch.

Our friends predicted the schedule would fall apart within weeks. Even my own mother later told me that she doubted we'd be able to stick with it. And I don't blame them. Here we were, five young men, responsible for preparing our own food for the first time in our lives. No one expected young men to manage a household. Certainly studying and social life would come first. 

That doubt unified us. By the end of the school year, we could tell the story of each of our collective meals together. 

There was the night that Mike made "rhino burgers": burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. 

Kevin tried his hand at Chicago style pizza. It's still the standard by which I judge deep dish.

Dan disliked salad dressing, so one night I served him an unaltered head of iceberg lettuce in his salad bowl, which he gamely consumed in its entirety.

Brian got us to agree that he could be replaced one evening by guest chef Father Patrick from the Catholic House. Father P complained about our dull knives. 

Friends often asked to join us as a sixth or seventh, which we typically accommodated.

Between defying doubt and our friendly competitiveness, we stuck with the program from September through June. And even when one of us failed, we praised or panned accordingly, but we always ate the food. 

Looking back, I can see that the year was the product of accidental genius. We placed constraints on ourselves through agreement -- dinner for five, balanced, Monday through Thursday, only one cheat per quarter -- but within those constraints we'd given ourselves enormous freedom. And we had the most useful, and brutally honest, feedback mechanism imaginable: people who knew us well actually eating the entire meal. 

I didn't see it at the time, but I now recognize that we had created a functioning anarchistic community, in the original sense of the word. Or in less controversial language, we created a pretty sophisticated cooperative labor system.

Those balanced dinners became more than mere healthy eating. They were community meetings. They were events in the shared history of five people. Remember the turkey-extra-crappy? The meals became landmarks.

Nobody taught a course called Cooking 101. Together, we constructed an environment with real responsibility, meaningful constraints, repeated opportunities, natural consequences, and a community that depended on us. We all learned because learning was a necessary part of living together. In fact, I know that I learned at least as much from this experiment in community as I did in any of my classes.

This is where I first really learned to cook, but it was much more than that. We had a communal need. Rather than each of us solving it individually, we created a cooperative system into which everyone contributed, and from which everyone benefited. Responsibility rotated. 

This isn't far off the kind of cooperative preschool community in which I spent my teaching career. It's where I got first-hand experience with rules designed not to enforce obedience, but as agreements that allowed our community to function. We didn't do any of it to avoid punishment or earn praise, but rather because the other four guys were counting on us. The original goal might have been to eat decently and save money, but the real outcome was learning about one another, developing traditions and stories, and creating community.

Every Sunday at midnight we would do our grocery shopping. We chose that exact time because we agreed that none of us would have other plans. There was a big, no-frills grocery store called Waremart, known for its low prices. We each contributed $20.

We took a single cart through that virtually empty store and together shopped for the ingredients we needed for our meals, but also what we individually wanted to have around for breakfasts, lunches, and weekends, not to mention household necessities like toilet paper. We were in a constant state of negotiation as we jockeyed to stay within our collective $100 budget. One thing we all agreed upon was that we each got our own loaf of sliced bread, white or wheat, for the week. Another was that the common budget could not be spent on dessert . . . Unless it was ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, which would be made, and consumed on an evening when we were all at home.

I'll never forget the cashier, a middle-aged woman, checking us out after our first group shopping expedition. When the final bill came due, we were within pennies of $100. She said, "You boys made good choices." 

The best part is that even at the time, we all approached it as a kind of lark, a challenge, an adventure in which failure was always a possibility. Even our midnight shopping felt like a night on the town with friends. 

In other words, we were playing.

It was just a bunch of young men experimenting with life, creating it together to suit ourselves and one another. It's kind of stunning to think about how much learning was embedded in our play: budgeting, meal planning, nutrition, compromise, division of labor, accountability, generosity, cooking, economics, shopping, conflict. We needed no other curriculum because we had something to accomplish together. That's what we play-based educators call project-based learning.

In Frat West we had built a school and we were our own teachers.

But most importantly, I think, is that we were learning that autonomy isn't the opposite of community. Indeed, we were learning that a healthy community is what makes autonomy possible.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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