This is the 12th year of Junetime at HBW
Before we all finished classes for the year, I had a minute to ask Liz Waters about the origins of Junetime. When you have down time in your own Junetime activities, check out her responses to my questions below! A few responses have been edited for clarity.
Question: How long has Junetime been around?
The first Junetime was in 2013—hard to believe it has been 12 years already!
Question: Where did you come up with the idea for Junetime?
It started back in 2012, when a group of teachers started meeting to talk about education—to read books and articles by progressive educators and to talk together about our own beliefs and practices as educators, and what kinds of changes we might want to bring to our “alternative” school. We called ourselves “N.E.R.D.S”: “Nattering nabobs Enjoying educational Readings and Discussions. Seriously!”
As part of our studies and conversations, a group of us took a field trip to the New School of Northern Virginia, a 6-12 private school in Fairfax that shared many of HB’s values and practices. Inspired by what we saw in classrooms and in conversations with teachers there, it occurred to us that we might be able to implement some really creative teaching and learning at the end of the school year, after SOLs. The idea was born in a parking lot in Fairfax!
Question: Did you come up with the idea for full and half days?
Yes, one of the very first things we had to figure out was how to structure the time. We came up with several possibilities, and surveyed staff to find out what they thought was best. At first we weren’t sure that we would get all teachers to agree to participate—some wanted to teach their regular classes up until the last day of the year—and so we thought we might have only some teachers and students participating. We also thought we might have Junetime for a full week. Here are the scheduling possibilities we first considered (I am copying this from a document dated March 8, 2013) and asked teachers to vote on:
Question: Did you make the topics for all the Junetimes or did the teachers come up with their own ideas?
Teachers have always come up with their own ideas! In the very first Junetime Proposal, I said this:
The sky’s the limit as to what could be offered, and could be based on our extracurricular passions as much as our academic ones:
Architecture with Legos
Beekeeping
Car maintenance
Chess for beginners
Digital animation
Drawing with charcoal
How to DJ
Identifying local trees and plants
Intro to Photo Shop
Learn to play drums!
Stage makeup
Tap dance
The power of zero
Unsolved math problems
Yoga
But teachers all came up with their own ideas.
Question: Now that Junetime has been around for a while, do you still like the idea of it or is it too much scheduling?
I think it’s great! The scheduling, and all the organization, has gotten so much easier over the years. We used to have students choose their top seven Junetimes, and then I scheduled students by hand, based on all kinds of information like grade (we wanted a mix), number of students interested, friend groups (we didn’t want anyone to be isolated or without a friend, but we also didn’t want friend groups to be completely together… one of the goals was to have students (and teachers) who didn’t usually work together to get to know each other. We also experimented with having students sign up in person in the cafeteria, letting a few in at a time, chosen randomly, and that ended up being really stressful. Now that we have Sign-Up Genius and a wide variety of options, many of which go off campus (that tends to be really popular, and it’s so much easier now that we can walk to the metro), it’s much easier!
Also, two more pieces of Junetime trivia: the first year, we graded students on their Junetime participation! And for a couple of years, we had Junetime exhibitions at the very end of the year, where students would show off what they had created or learned.