The R.A.F.T. & S.U.C.K.ing the Marrow

Today, Ms. Costello and I plied our collective 71 freshmen with De Rango's pizza (9 party pies!) and cans of soda (I know, not the healthiest) for lunch. We gathered in something resembling a circle on the lawn outside the Upper School, basking in the humid 90 degrees (if we don't relish it now, we won't have anything to look back on enviously when it's 25 below in a few months).

I regaled them with Mark Twain's story of the 12'x16' raft that the white, 13-year-old runaway Huckleberry Finn and the older African runaway slave Jim find themselves on as they agree to escape together to the North. I announced that they were all, now, on a "raft" together for the next four years--or at least the next year. Their classes--there are four between Ms. Costello and me--were smaller "rafts." Soon, in each class, they will form smaller "rafts." Groups of students from different families and backgrounds, some from different middle schools. Students with different abilities and challenges, different needs and goals. I challenged them to do what Huck and Jim do when they find themselves--similar in some ways (both criminals, for instance) but different in more (age, background, color, beliefs, etc.): help each other grow into their best selves.

[Read about the concept of the R.A.F.T.--and what it stands for!]

Ms. Costello told them about Henry David Thoreau's social experiment in which he isolated himself from the busyness of the world--striving, he thought, toward an ambigous goal with little purpose--and urged them to "live deliberately," with purpose and direction, with eyes wide open to the possibilities around them. Having grown up near Walden Pond where Thoreau lived for two years in a 10'x15' house that he built himself, Ms. Costello was the perfect person to tell this story. She quoted Thoreau's well-known desire to "suck the marrow out of life," which gives us--and the freshmen--another metaphor by which to live our/their scholarly life in English 9. Suck the marrow out of everything that you do this year. Not only in our classes, but in all of your classes, in all of your extracurriculars, in your own life. Live deliberately, like you mean it, like you want it.

I chimed in, as I am wont to do, and welcomed them to "the suck." We told them, in so many words, that we were reclaiming the negative connotations of the word and giving them a transformed version, one which, I told them, I hope to use when I call their parents and write students' comments mid-term: "_______ sucks!"

[Read about the concept of "S.U.C.K.ing the marrow"--and what it stands for!]

Here are some photos from our day: