Frog Hollow, but for teens!

First up, I wanted to let you all know that registration at Frog Hollow is open for next year, and as of today, there are still spaces in all classes, including (drum roll) the brand new Teen Core Class!

The teen class, which the kids want to call Toad Hill to riff on Frog Hollow, is like my main Core Class only, well, for teens. (Twelve to sixteen-year-olds, actually.) A full day once a week, but with bigger writing adventures and bigger adventures too. That’s right, we’re taking field trips. Writing big risky things: poems and essays and maybe some sprawling fiction. Practicing being in community with each other and being part of the larger community in healthy, fun ways. Being exuberant and intense, goofy and sometimes dark, because we are, most of us, twelve-to-sixteen year olds, and all of us are human.

Exploring Pigeon Point

I am really excited about next year in so many ways: the Core Class has strong returning classes and returning teachers, and we’re building on a great year, a blossoming kind of year. And the Teen Core Class is the manifestation of a longtime dream of mine of starting a middle school.

I’ve had an idea for a middle school in my mind forever. It was always my alternate life plan, if I somehow wasn’t doing Frog Hollow, because, say, I’d moved to some cool little college town, like I was always toying with in my twenties and thirties, while I meanwhile dug a deep burrow in my hometown big city.

The school would have multidisciplinary inquiries along big social studies and natural history themes, approached through creative arts. There would be lots of time spent on social/emotional learning and conflict resolution. We would make a culture that both accepted everyone as themselves and asked them to treat each other well. And there would be a service learning/internship aspect of the program, with students plugging in to their community in tangible, useful ways as an antidote to the apathy that comes from teens new ability to see the scope of problems without feeling agency to do anything about them.

I was telling my assistant teacher Caleb about this vision during our spring snow storm, as the class rolled giant snowballs on the astroturf of the soccer field (the only place where the snow wasn’t mud). He pointed out the obvious: I didn’t need to start a school, because I already ran one. Whoa! Mind blown!

I could make this dream come true now, the Frog Hollow version: One day a week. Mixed age class. Language arts, especially creative writing, at the core of a curriculum that pulled in the world, from social studies to ecology to music and art. Active outdoor social time and class circles, weekly social connection in a strong culture of kindness and mutual respect. Adventures into nearby green spaces to move and find salmon, creeks, and even owls. The rest of the city’s treasures just a bus ride away.

Over the last couple of months, this vision has solidified into a class. Registration just opened this week, and there’s a nucleus of super excited, lovely teens forming. So send me your awesome1 young writers. We’re making dreams come true over here.