SEPTEMBER 29, 2026. 48:37
EPISODE 2: WHAT IS THIS PLACE?
What was so different about The Met?
Andrew arrives at The Met believing in the school's philosophy. His students arrive carrying years of disappointment, anger, and uncertainty. Episode two follows their first year together as they test one another, challenge boundaries, and slowly begin to build something neither side expected.
Along the way, listeners get their first real look inside The Met and the educational approach at its core.
OCTOBER 13, 2026.
EPISODE 3:
ONE STUDENT AT A TIME
Coming Soon
The Advisory: Class of 2006 - Episode 2 - What Is This Place?
ALBERTO: I’m Alberto Maldonado. Class of 2006 at the Met. I was one of the 15 students in Andrew’s advisory. And, I have a funny story for you. This is true.
So many times, we asked Andrew “How come you don’t have any kids?” Like I remember one time someone said “You and your wife Leigh, you seem like such a great couple…How come you don’t have any kids?”
And finally, one day, someone asked the question again and Andrew looked at us and said “You know why I don’t have any kids? Because I have fifteen bundles of birth control.”
That’s what he called us. His “fifteen bundles of birth control.” I’ll never forget it.
I loved the Met. It shaped a lot of my life today - my job as the facilities operations manager for a hospital. My love for taekwondo. I can trace all that and a lot more to the Met.
But at the start, The Met was weird. We were in this weird school building, with a weird advisor who drove a weird car.
For me and the other students, it wasn’t like anything we were used to. We had so much freedom. So much say in our own education. And initially? Wow. Things were crazy. That’s why Andrew gave us that nickname - the bundles of birth control. It’s also probably one of the reasons he went from a full head of hair, to that clean look he’s got now.
Looking back, 20 years after graduating, I can see how important all that weird stuff was. It’s the reason the Met changed so many of our lives. But at the time, I remember asking myself one question. I think all of us were asking it. “What is this place?”
In this episode, we’ll try to answer that question, by taking you inside the Met.
From Big Picture Learning, This is The Advisory: Class of 2006. Here’s our advisor, Andrew Frishman
Scene 1 - Take A Tour
ANDREW: To get to the Met, from downtown you’ll probably end up driving down Broad Street. Right through Providence’s South Side. It’s a working class neighborhood. Mostly immigrants. Lots of people live here. It’s always busy.
You’ll also drive by Providence’s two biggest public high schools, Classical and Central. You can’t miss them. They’re huge. They’re like a lot of high schools - brick and concrete. There’s a football field and some parking lots. They take up a whole city block.
Eventually, you’ll turn left onto Public Street. You’ll see a stretch of “triple deckers,” as we say in New England. Three-story, multi-family wood-frame homes.
And then, you’re at The Met. Right in the middle of the neighborhood.
Just like Alberto, lots of people come here and ask “What is this place?” The answer is a little complicated. So, we’ll start with a short tour.
Daniela: I like being here. It's a good energy compared to other high schools.
Daniela Muralles is currently in 11th grade at The Met.
She and I will show you around.
Daniela: We have sort of a large amount of land and I thought, wow, this is really beautiful.
There’s a big field out front. Lots of trees. A walking track. And then there are the buildings.
Daniela: When you first come to the Met, you see these beautiful brick buildings. They catch your attention.
There are about 600 students on this campus, instead of one big school building, the students are spread out in four smaller ones.
Daniela: There's the Unity building, the Justice building, the Liberty building, and the Equality building.
Each building runs like its own small school. With its own principal, staff and about 150 students.
There’s also a fitness center, a health center, an entrepreneurship center, and a commercial kitchen.
Daniela: It’s sort of active a lot like a college campus.
And, it’s an open campus. Open to the whole community.
People from the neighborhood often come here to walk around the track or sit at a picnic table.
Daniela’s taken us inside the Unity Building. The same building my advisory was in.
Cole: Good morning, Met Unity, good morning. And a happy Monday to us all.
School’s just getting started. It’s time for Pick-Me-Up.
Daniela: Pick-Me-Up. It has it in the name, it's supposed to pick you up.
Cole: All right, we're gonna give our full respect, and attention again, to our awesome guests, OLEEP, in the house. Give it up for them, give it up, give up for them.
Pick-Me-Up happens several mornings a week in a big common area. It’s a time for the whole building - students and staff - to come together in one space. People share announcements and opportunities.
Daniela: It's just something to sort of get you motivated and get through your day.
Students might talk about a project they are working on. Or there may be an invited guest. Today, a couple of students from a near-by college have come by.
Speaker: OLEEP is a partnership between the MET and Brown University. We work together to develop leadership skills, environmental science knowledge, and environmental justice awareness.
The program’s a chance for Met students to leave and learn outside the building.
Speaker: Thank you guys. Yeah! Woo!
And it’s not the only opportunity. Students are encouraged to do all sorts of things off campus. Take classes at local colleges, volunteer, and especially go to their internships.
Student: I really recommend that you guys take every opportunity that's given to you.
Visitors aren’t the only ones who ask “What is this place?” Freshman ask that question all the time as they get used to The Met. It takes a while. Today at Pick-Me-Up, older students are helping the younger ones make sense of things.
Carlos: Um, I'll say ask for help, like all the advisors here, everyone here just wants to help you.
Leila: I think the biggest thing here is just to be you. Just be yourself and just be you. So Yeah, that's it
Peter: Big round of applause for our seniors. Big round applause. Thank you, thank you for your attention this morning.
Daniela: So we just finished Pick-Me-Up, and now we're on our way to advisory.
As the students head to their advisory, you might notice that the Met sounds different than other schools. There are no bells to signal the end of a class. No banging lockers. No shuffling down hallways to get to the next class.
In fact, there are no hallways.
Instead, each floor has a big common space in the middle, where students work and socialize. And surrounding the common spaces are the advisory rooms.
Daniela: We don't have that traditional sense of switching classes or signing up for new classes. Instead you stay in your advisory throughout the next four years here at the Met.
Around the school, the advisories are starting their days, and there’s any number of things they could be working on. In this advisory over here, seniors are talking about college applications. In that one, students are writing in their journals. And just over there, they’re reading and researching.
Beccy: So quick announcements. I wanted to mention an opportunity that I emailed to you guys. It's from the Papitto Foundation. They have this transform Rhode Island Scholarship that they offer.
Daniela is in Beccy Siddons’ advisory. And she takes a seat at an oval-shaped table in the center of the room - it’s big enough for everyone to sit around.
Beccy: So it is a way that you can actually get some scholarship money and potentially make a difference in our state,
Beccy also tells her students about an internship opportunity at a design company. And another one with a local woodworking studio.
After Beccy’s announcements, the students settle in and get to work.
Beccy: Let's look at your learning plan together and see if we can update that together.
Beccy’s advisory is a bit of an experiment. This year, half the students are juniors and half are freshmen.
Right now, Beccy is sitting with a freshman. Helping with her learning plan.
Beccy: It's the document that kind of is an overview of each student's work at the Met. It'll have your specific things you're working on…
Remember when I told you about how I visited Vimar and her mother at their house to talk about her learning plan? Those conversations about learning plans never end. A student and their advisor will meet again and again. Set new learning goals… measure progress. Set new learning goals…. measure progress.
Always asking questions. Are they being adequately challenged? Or are they struggling? What’s getting in their way?
Beccy: And then the other thing we're trying to update for now is just adding your specific books that you're reading in this trimester. So this is the first book that you are reading, right? Yeah.
This student has been doing research on mental health and policing. Spurred by an incident with one of her family members. Eventually, she’ll write up what she finds into a research paper and share what she’s learned in a letter to a local police department.
Daniela: So you have your research folder.
Meanwhile, Daniela is giving advice to a freshman who’s having trouble organizing her research.
Daniela: What's, and then inside the research folder, I make a new folder. That's the name of your research paper. So what are you writing about?
Speaker: So I'm writing about the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The student’s research project, on the Dominican Republic and Haiti, - I really think it’s worth stressing this - it’s not an assigned topic. She chose it. Based on her own interests and learning goals.
And she won’t have to take a test or a final exam on it. Instead, a few times a year, students share their work publicly with other students, their advisor, their family, and their mentor from their internship site.
Daniela: And you're going to open a new doc and you are going to copy and paste all that information into that new doc.
Speaker: Wait, I don't get it.
Daniela: Okay.
Scene 2 - First steps
I want to take you back to my time as an advisor, so let’s leave Daniela in her advisory for now.
It was in this same building, The Unity Building, where I had my advisory back in 2002. Me and 15 students trying to figure it all out. And we had a long list of things to get started on.
The best person to show you that list is definitely Natasha. All the students were required to keep a daily planner. Hers was impeccable. Because I’m a bit of a pack rat (ask my wife), I still have a copy of Natasha’s planner from those first few weeks and I asked her to read what she had on her “to-do list”.
Natasha: Write three multiple-choice questions about yourself, read over learning goals, finish reading…character, description, reading group, homework. Get library card, phone script…
Every student had their own version of this list.
One of the items on my list was this: help the advisory gel as a group. I needed to bring us all together.
The Met is designed around the idea that relationships are key to a successful education. Research backs that up. Students with solid relationships thrive in school and afterward.
Or, maybe I should put it this way., The advisory is intended to be a place for a kind-of “relentless intimacy.” We’re all going to get to know each other deeply. Learn together. and lean on each other. Heavily.
None of us had ever even come close to connecting like this in a school. But, we tried. Sort of.
Samenta: Oh I did not like it. I did not like it. I was like why? Like why can’t I be with a cooler crew? [laughs]
Natasha: She said that she thought I was just gonna be like one of these stuck up girls.
Alberto: I mean we, we had such an eclectic group.
Noam: So I think I spent most of the time just sort of not participating.
There was a tension in the room that you could feel. Kind of like the moment right before a thunderstorm hits. Everyone was keeping to themselves. They were looking around the room skeptically. It felt like if anyone got too close to each other? They'd get zapped. Sparks would fly, and not in a good way.
Justine: I didn't know where I was gonna belong. And I really struggled, I think, making connections at first because I was so afraid. I was afraid to show people of who, who I actually really was because I wanted, I just wanted people to like me.
Advisors have a handful of methods to bring the group together. For instance, Monday morning check-ins. It’s as simple as gathering everyone around the big oval table and asking, “What’s up? What did you do this weekend?” Everyone’s encouraged to share… the good and the bad.
Justine: It was weird sitting in an advisory and having these like weird conversations, like what did you do and what did you do over the weekend? And I would say to myself, What the f*** does that matter? Like why the f*** do you want to know what I did? You know? And I was fresh and I probably said that like none of your f***ing business, you know, like. (Laughter)
Yeah, so, that first year, some days… most days – check-ins didn’t go smoothly. Maybe getting out of the classroom would work.
Starting right away, advisories take trips together. And so we did that… A lot!
In some of the first few days of school, my advisory took the ferry out to Block Island. It’s a popular tourist destination. And, we went camping by the beach. Kids pitched tents and cooked spaghetti, and made s’mores under the stars.
Andrew: Had you done those kinds of things with your classes before?
Natasha: No. Everything that we did at the Met was like my first time doing– like camping? I still haven’t gone camping. I only went with the Met.
Later on, we went to a ropes course, theatre performances, and movies at the local independent cinema. Another time we drove together up to Boston to visit a museum at MIT.
Students started to get a bit more comfortable with each other. Even I started to feel more relaxed.
Vimar: We created that bond with each other, with the field trips that we would do.
But the trips were no magic wand. It felt like one step forward, one step back.
Noam: I think my impression of the Met as an institution was, these are a bunch of idiot corn balls and I hate forced fun. Stop making me do these activities.
I look back on this time now and think about how stressed I was.
And it wasn’t just the stress of acclimating to a new job. It was more than that. I had serious doubts. Could I pull off this whole “relentless intimacy” thing? Would it work?
But there’s more to the story. My doubts grew when I found myself unprepared for other parts of my job.
In the more conventional schools I taught in, there were a lot of rules. Like, a literal student handbook of rules. It says all the things kids can and can’t do.
“Call your teacher Mr. or Mrs.”
“No hats in school.”
“No walking in the hallway without a pass.”
These rules are handed down by the school.
At the Met on the other hand - and this is kind of hard to explain - the culture and in a way, the “rules,” are something that’s demonstrated. They’re not enforced by hall monitors, or teachers sending kids to the office. It’s in the air. I swear you can feel it.
Everyone in the building treats everyone else with respect. The advisors, the students, the principal, the person working the front desk.
But this approach is pretty foreign to the new students. It’s unexpected at best, and uncomfortable at worst.
I’ll admit. I felt a little bit like I was freefalling without all the rules. It’s an approach that takes a lot of trust.
And it’s not just that. Students are also trusted to decide what is acceptable behavior within their advisory. We decide it together. As a group.
I can give you an example.
We discussed how we could make the advisory a safe space for everyone. Especially, because some of the students didn’t always feel welcome at previous schools. Vimar definitely experienced that growing up.
Vimar: Yeah, they just made fun of my hair. My hair was not done all the time. My hair was curly and sometimes it wasn't done and, you know, they were really saying things that were racist, prejudiced.
Each student wrote up some expectations, we put them on a big poster on the wall, and everyone signed it. Kind of like a constitution for our advisory.
For example, we agreed under certain conditions, cursing would be allowed. But homophobic slurs were not. Like someone saying “Oh, that’s so gay.” Not allowed.
Yeah, well… The students found a way around that. One student might say “Oh, that’s so...” And another kid would pick up and finish the sentence “Gay is how I feel today!”
This pushing of boundaries… it wouldn’t stop. Samenta remembers.
Samenta: I was testing the waters a lot. A very lot.
Anthony: I remember one time you caught me stealing the blank CDs. And then you come in. “Anthony, what are you doing?” Oh, no, I was just, “You stealing my blank CDs?” I mean, no no, no. I was going to tell you anyway. [laughs]
Anthony, what a joker! I can say that now. But not back then.
Not only was he taking CDs, one time he got caught driving the security golf cart around campus. Then, there were the times he’d take my car keys. Yes, “times.” Plural. More than once.
Anthony: We go outside and we will move your car to like the other side. And I say, and we'll put the keys back and we wouldn't say nothing. And then you, and then you come out and you, where's my car? And we did it a couple of times. I think you caught us one time. Yeah, you did. You did caught us one time, right?
Look, pranks like these, students not getting along, offensive comments, it was a challenge, sure, but stuff like this happens at lots of schools. Some of it is just teenagers being teenagers. But we were spending all day together, and there was so much of it.
Scene 3 - The Guardrails Came Off
In the midst of all the hoopla, some things were very subtly starting to shift. To show you, I want to spend a moment with one student. To dig into their story a little.
Part of the Met’s approach is to make the walls of the school porous. It’s not like “School is in here. The outside world is over there.” At the Met “school” is happening everywhere.
The trips we took are a perfect example. So are internships. Students leave the building to learn in the community then come back to share and reflect on what they’ve learned. People are coming and going so much, it might be better to install revolving doors.
As an advisor, I’d leave the building, too. I’d drop in to visit students and their mentors at their internships.
And, from time to time, I’d meet students and their families where they lived. Not just over the summer to talk about learning plans. But during the school year, too. To talk about how school was going. And get a fuller sense of homelife. It’s part of the deep relationship building that’s essential to the Met’s culture.
And I want to give you a glimpse into what that felt like. What it felt like for me, and what it felt like for my students.
Alberto: I now know that everyone was going through something.
This is Alberto Maldonado. My former student who works in healthcare, and loves taekwondo..
Alberto: It's the love of the art. I think it's a very beautiful martial art.
Alberto had an interest in martial arts going way back, but until he got to the Met, it never really stuck. But when he joined the Met's taekwondo club, he took to it. It grounded him, gave him a place to put his energy. He still watches old videos of his performances from back then.
Alberto: We did a presentation for the mayor at the time… So I look back on it and I was like, Wow, I was terrible. (laughs)
While we were reflecting on that time, I pulled out a photo from Alberto's freshman year.
Andrew: So I'm wondering if you could just take a look at this who is that?
Alberto: Look at the acne. [laughs] Who is this guy? This guy was someone who was going through a lot.
Alberto’s father was an alcoholic, and he had died when Alberto was four. So his mom was a single parent. She had diabetes, and later, Alberto would learn she had schizophrenia, too. But when he was young, all he knew was: life at home was chaos.
Alberto: My mother couldn't keep a job. You know, when she did have decent work, she would spend money on very frivolous things.
That meant that money was tight. Really tight. One time when I visited, the electricity was turned off.
Alberto: I'm a huge advocate for school lunch to be free because for me a lot of times that was my only meal. (pause) Um. (Pause.) I didn't think that was gonna hit me.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Alberto: [takes a deep breath] I’m good.
By 6th grade things were especially bad with his mom. Then an uncle Alberto was close to died.
Alberto: I guess my reaction was, I'm not going to school. And because my mother was always working, she didn't really pick up on it.
Every day, Alberto’s mom would leave for work. When she came home at the end of the day and asked, “how was school?” Alberto would say “great!” And that was that.
And I should say, Alberto didn’t miss just a few days here and there. In middle school, Alberto missed what he describes as “record time.”
He didn’t go to school for six months.
Alberto: I think she came home early one day and she found me in the house and she was like, What are you doing? You need to go back to school and she sent me to school and then they were like, Who's this kid?
Alberto re-enrolled. He made his way through middle school. And navigated life at home as best he could.
As he started high school, he took a job bussing tables to help his mom pay their expenses.
Alberto: I remember giving her money more than enough to cover the bills, and it was never enough. It was always like, hey, I spent it, can you give me the rent money? Hey, can you just give me 300 bucks because I need to pay the light bill?
Before the Met, I taught in schools where I cared about my students, but they moved in and out of my classroom every hour. And, that was it. I didn’t really see the big picture.
Now, at the Met, I was starting to get to know each of my students more fully - or, at least, trying to.
Some students would reveal what was happening at home in their journals. Those home visits were incredibly valuable too. And I remember that Alberto started to open up to me during our one on one check-ins. He was starting to trust me.
Things that had felt abstract to me before… poverty, racism, instability, the ways that systems fail families…suddenly had names and faces.
And so when Alberto started acting differently at school, I understood why.
Alberto: As a young kid, if you can't find an outlet, you're gonna take it out on the people that are around you.
Alberto’s mood would fluctuate: some days he was engaged, paying attention. Other days he was withdrawn, depressed.
Instead of staying focused on his work, he’d sometimes download video games on the school computers. He'd also refuse to go on our advisory’s trips. He’d stay inside, and keep to himself. All that weight he was carrying outside of school, it was right there. In school with Alberto.
But the good news is, he kept coming to school.
Remember, Alberto was just one of 15 students who, as he put it, were taking things out on the people around them. Some days, I felt like things were crashing into the guardrails.
Like one time, it was around MLK day in January. And I put on an episode of “Eyes on the Prize.” It’s a documentary about the civil rights movement in the US. I had remembered watching it with my parents, and I hoped it would start a conversation in the advisory about racism and efforts to end inequality.
We were watching scenes from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama where marchers demanding the right to vote were being beaten by police. And another scene with protesters being attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
And a couple of students of color in the advisory turn to a couple of the white kids and say, “Yo, those cops. Those KKK. They look like you!”
Noam was one of the kids they were looking at. So, Noam lets a few f-bombs fly and says “What are you talking about?”
The kids noticed this upset Noam so they pushed harder. And Noam snapped back. They went back and forth, back and forth. Screaming at each other.
And finally Noam says “You don’t understand. The KKK hates me, too.” And the kids were like “What are you talking about?” And Noam says “I’m Jewish. The KKK is anti-Jewish. They’re also anti-Catholic. And most of you are Catholic.”
Eventually the students ran out of steam, and the school day ended. Everyone went home.
Here I was thinking “Oh. This documentary will help us understand our history. And it’ll help bring us together. ” But, instead, it was a screaming match.
In the middle of all this, I thought back to Andy, the Met student who I saw at that event the year before. The one who told his advisor his interest was hanging out with his friends and the advisor somehow turned that into a love for anthropology. I wanted to be doing that.
I wasn’t. I felt like I was spending too much of my time breaking up arguments. There were so many that Natasha would walk out of the advisory and into the common area just so she could get her work done.
Natasha: I would utilize the space out there just to like let me get myself away because there's too much back and forth going on, too much arguing, and it could be over like the smallest, like simplest- Thinking of it as an adult, it was the dumbest reason to even be arguing over small things. But when you're a kid, it's big.
The other day I found an old self-evaluation that I wrote at the end of that school year. Here’s a snippet:
“Too often students are combative, disruptive, defiant and argumentative. I am not entirely sure what I have done that has allowed this type of behavior to go on so long, but it is definitely the single most frustrating aspect of my job.”
And of course, other advisors with freshmen were grappling with similar behaviors. I’d turn to them for advice. It helped – but man!
Nancy: Yeah, his kids might have been extra mean. [laughs]
This is Nancy Diaz. Today she’s the co-director of The Met, but back then, she was the principal of our building. The Unity Building.
Nancy: I mean, kids come from eight years of bad schools where they've been mistreated, not loved, and disrespected. And so they come with that, right? They don't trust you... Like this model can't be real, it can't be true. So they were fighting it.... And Andrew was all full-fledged going to love them, and they probably were like, "no!"
There were some mornings I’d wake up thinking about the day ahead and feel ill. I had trouble keeping breakfast down on the way to school. I remember calling my wife in the middle of the day to calm me down. It got so bad, I was shaking so much, I’d have to leave the school, and walk around the block.
Again and again I went to Nancy, the principal. And, when I told her how hard things were, again and again, she’d tell me it would get easier. “Just wait until sophomore year,” she said.
Nancy: So, I was always trying to get Andrew, like, “no, don't pay attention.” You know, “they don't really mean it. You're gonna be okay.”
But, one day, apparently I’d gone to her too many times.
Nancy: I think the work was hard and he tried his best. But you also don't want someone to be suffering or feel like that, right?
I remember she turned to me and said, “You know, Andrew. If this is really making you miserable, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to stay.”
Scene 4 - The Roots of The Met
There's a question people ask after “What is this place?” They say, “How did The Met even happen?”
It’s a really good question, especially when you think about what was going on at that time in public education.
Ever since the 1980s there was a sense, not just in Rhode Island, but all over the country, that education needed fixing. A pretty damning report about America’s schools, published in 1983 kicked off the conversation, and it stuck around.
Throughout the 80s, and 90s, education reform got attention from the media and politicians. Both Republicans and Democrats wanted to do something about it.
But there was a belief that education couldn’t improve until it could be measured. Here’s president Bill Clinton in 1997:
Bill Clinton: The most important thing of all, is that we know whether we are learning what we need to know. And that requires something America has put off doing for too long, the embracing of a genuine commitment to national standards of learning for our young people.
Clinton passed reform during his presidency that brought some standardization into America’s schools. And the movement for standardized education would gain speed after that. It really came to a head at the start of the 2000s, with the signing of a bi-partsian bill: the No Child Left Behind Act.
Jim Lehrer: President Bush signed the education reform bill into law today. It requires students in grade 3-8 to be tested each year in reading and math. The results will determine how federal aid is spent.
George W. Bush: And so the new role of the federal government is to set high standards, provide resources, hold people accountable and liberate school districts to meet the standards! *applause*
So that was one direction, the mainstream direction, that education was going in the 90s and early 2000s. More standardization. More testing.
At the same time, the State of Rhode Island, was looking to address issues in its education system. In particular, they wanted to make sure schools were preparing students to join the workforce. One way to do that was with a vocational school - a school that teaches students specific skills they can use on the job.
Rhode Island was eager to solve the problem by building a brand new school. A publicly run, state-wide vocational school. So in 1994, the state went to the voters, and asked them to approve a 29 million dollar bond to acquire land, and build this new school, from scratch.
The vote was close. But the voters said yes. And a new school was funded.
Behind the scenes, there were two people working to make this new school a reality. Their names were Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor.
Elliot: And we said, ah, finally, we got something that we could get our arms around.
That’s Elliot. He and Dennis had moved to Providence recently, and together, they had become a bit of a name in the education world. A reputation for being radical, one that they earned in the 1980s, when they were working in a small town in rural New Hampshire. The town’s main school, a combined middle and high school, was a pretty traditional school, and it was under performing. Graduation rates were low, and only about 10% of its students went to college.
But in the 1980s Dennis was hired to be the school’s new principal, and Elliot was his close collaborator. They started making changes. They implemented an advisory system. They got parents more involved. They started having the kids learn out in the community. Sound familiar?
Over the course of ten years, they turned the school around. Graduation rates, and college acceptances skyrocketed. Dennis was a finalist for a national principal of the year award in 1993.
After that, Dennis and Elliot moved to Rhode Island to work at Brown University. And when they heard about this new school in Providence they thought “Oh. Wow. This isn’t just a chance to reform a school, it’s a chance to start one from scratch.”
Elliot: And we said, basically to ourselves, if we didn't know what school was like, what could it be like?
So they eagerly drew up their dream school and proposed it. With a few unique conditions. Quite a few.
Elliot: If… it would be a set of small schools and we gave the parameters that the student would have a learning plan, families would be engaged in learning plan meetings, students would be out of school two days a week, there would be strong, very strong advisory system.
At the center of it all was one idea: relationships. Everything they proposed was intended to build relationships. Even the architecture.
On the site in South Providence they proposed four small buildings with a hundred fifty students in each.
Elliot: Because if you look at certain anthropological data, when you get beyond that size, you start losing contact and relationships and not everybody knows everybody.
In many ways, the school they were proposing emulated the experience that students receive at America’s elite private schools: close attention from teachers, the ability to follow your interests, and networks of relationships: Students graduate as part of a tight-knit community, with connections to people in the fields they want to pursue.
But unlike a private school, they wanted to build a school fully embedded in the community.
Elliot: The student became the curriculum, and the entire community became the school.
As you might imagine, people were skeptical. Dennis and Elliot’s ideas resembled nothing else in Rhode Island – or most anywhere, really. Keep in mind, most education policy was moving in the exact opposite direction - towards standardization. And because the Met wasn’t a private school, or a charter school even, it meant they had to get approval from just about everyone. Everyone:
Elliot: Not just by the Commissioner of Education, but by the State Board of Regents and the entire legislative body in the state of Rhode Island and the governor.
Dennis and Elliot convinced a lot of people to come on board. Politicians, educators, business leaders, and the local community.
Elliot: This was not a flimflam operation. This was very serious school.
The state accepted their plan. The Met opened in 1996 with freshmen advisories and about 50 students.
They were confident about what they were doing, but I think, Elliot and Dennis might have been crossing their fingers.
Elliot: You really have to give a lot trust and a lot grace. And add a lot more uncertainty but that was the exciting part, living in that uncertainty makes you good.
I understand what Elliot is saying about uncertainty. It’s what I signed up for. But the uncertainty I was feeling was not exciting. I felt like I was improvising everyday. Inexperienced. Not in control. Almost like I was riding an elephant - I wasn’t sure if I was steering this thing, or if I was just along for the ride.
And then when Nancy, the principal, said, ‘If things were so hard, I could leave,’ I was shocked. Leave? What does she mean “leave?!”
My competitive streak kicked in. It’s not that I feel like I have to win. But I AM going to show up. Especially for a school with this approach to education. And especially for the kids in my advisory.
Rather than leave, I leaned in. Learned to trust the students more. Learned to trust the Met more.
Besides, my colleagues kept telling me what seemed like a mantra at The Met: “things would get better sophomore year.”
Scene 5 - Surfacing Interests
I decided that rather than focus all my energy on trying to manage the chaos, I’d ask students questions. Lots of questions, to find out what their interests are. And not just “what do you want to be when you grow up?” That, in my mind, is the wrong question. Justine thought so, too.
Justine: I was how old, fourteen, fifteen? Who the f*** knew what I wanted to be? You know what I mean ?
But one thing they teach you, as a new advisor is that there are so many right questions to ask:
Like, what makes you angry about the world? What do you wish was different? How could it be better?
Who in your family does something that you think is really interesting?
What’s something that you’re clueless about? You have no idea how it works!
Sometimes, and this will really put us back in 2002… Sometimes, I’d throw 15 copies of that day's newspaper onto the table and say “hey, if you had to read this newspaper, what sections are you turning to? What stories catch your eye?”
I’d ask them these questions in the classroom, but I’d also try to break things up a little. I’d take students on walks around the track, or over to the corner store to get a snack. And we’d chat. Heart to heart.
Noam: I think you were just taking a bunch of West Wing-ish, Aaron Sorkin-ish walks with students then.
Noam remembers one of these walks.
Noam: And you were super interested in what I was interested in, and I actually was a kid. I hated school, but I was curious about a lot things, and I spent a lot my own time. Being curious about all sorts of things and learning about all sorts of things, and you had a lot of questions about that.
Andrew: I remember it was like, Oh this is a kid who's listening to current events and NPR every day. This is a kid who's doing guitar lessons. This is a kid who was going out and shooting photography. This is a kid who, there were just a ton of things that you wondered about. And I couldn't figure out the disconnect of why are you so angry about school?
Noam: But super excited to be doing stuff that didn’t seem like school outside of school. Like I would take a camera and walk around a junkyard photographing whatever textures I was in, like sneaking into the RISD darkroom to steal their paper and develop the photos.
Andrew: Just as a hypothetical example, I'm sure the statute of limitations is expired on that one. *laughs*
We hadn’t gelled as a group yet. There were still arguments and pushback. But as we began to talk about their interests and explore possible internships, my students perked up. Someone was taking an interest in them.
Natasha: So I was really interested in fashion design. I was also interested in like hair styling, just a bunch of different things
Joseph: I think I really knew my interests and back then it was still like like martial arts and philosophy and I really wanted to get into that.
Alberto: I wanted to study technology and I wanted to s you know, work with computers,
Anthony: Learning how to cut hair.... I just like it. Like that was my thing.
After a student identified an interest, our next step was this: set up informational interviews. Reach out to people who work in that field. It’s a chance to ask questions. See if it’s a fit. But Natasha told me it’s not easy.
Natasha: I don't want to do this. I don't want to interview people. I don't want to have to talk to them. But then after, it's like, I'm so glad I talked to them, like I learned a lot from that interview.
Noam figured interviewing people about their work would be child’s play. I asked him to read a reflection he wrote at the time:
Noam: Before calling an internship site to set something up, freshmen are required to script a phone conversation detailing exactly what they are intending on saying. I found this to be a useless exercise and so I neglected to do it figuring that all I had to do was call and ask. As I quickly learned, this was not true.
Scene 6 - Leaving to Learn: Internships
So, students are exploring their interests, conducting research, doing informational interviews. Next step? Internships. Students have to find an internship.
Maybe it will be with the person they interviewed. But, maybe it will be something completely different. I was there to help, but in the end, it’s on them to figure out. Which is exactly what Daniela did.
Ambi of Statehouse tour
Daniela: So you guys can follow me.
Daniela is the junior who led us around the Met. Her internship is at Rhode Island State House. The capitol building. And she’s leading a tour.
Daniela: Okay, so we just walked up all the stairs and you can see that the entire state house is made of this beautiful marble.
Giving tours is part of her internship with the Secretary of State of Rhode Island. And this tour is actually for a group of high school students.
Daniela: These four pillars are what's keeping up the entire State House. It is one of the largest self-sustaining domes in the entire world. So the other largest, the Taj Mahal, St. Peter's Basilica, the Minnesota State House, and it's us.
Over the course of 4 years at The Met, students usually intern at about a half dozen places. They spend about 10 hours a week off campus.
Daniela: I told my teacher I was interested in doing things in government. I was interested in law. Politics is something I'm really big on. I'm very open about talking about situations in our current state of the government. And at that time, government was very new to me, but I knew that it was something I wanted to be a part of.
Daniela: OK, this is the Gina Ramondo painting. Obviously, our previous governor. Only female governor. She’s really cool if you don’t know about her…
Daniela: I wasn't comfortable talking to people.
Daniela: Obviously, being in a political setting, I would have to attend press conferences. I had to attend different meetings. I couldn't just hide in a corner with the lieutenant governor. So I had to branch out, I had to shake hands, I learned how to give a firm handshake and introduce myself. Hi, I'm Daniela Muralles, I am an intern at the lieutenant's governor's office. So I sort of, I'd learned that skill.
Daniela: If you look down the hallway she’s actually with some of the oldest governors we’ve had…
Daniela: I decided to start taking up tours at the State House. And that's when I got introduced to the whole history part of Rhode Island. I got to learn more about its founding, how the government truly works.
Daniela: Fades In So the state house is a public building. This is your house. You pay for taxes. Every time you buy like a piece of candy, a chips, a pastelito in the corner store….
Daniela, has been interning in the state government in different roles for 3 years. She’s interned for the Lieutenant Governor and the Secretary of State. Lately, she’s been doing such a good job, the statehouse hired her to give even more tours. It’s part time work, on weekends and over the summer.
Daniela: I fell in love with it. And I love giving tours.
Daniela: That's the end. So you guys can take your picture. Although I'm pretty sure after the session or before, they're actually gonna take a picture of you guys.
The fact that students have a stake in what they’re doing. That’s what makes internships so powerful. They’re building relationships with experts in the field. Building skills. They’re making something real happen.
And in my advisory, I could feel things really start to turn once students found their first internships.
Justine: My first internship was a kindergarten teacher.
One student interned at a zen meditation center. Others interned at a bakery and a barbershop. Vimar, interned with a nonprofit called the Nonviolence Institute.
Vimar: And we would go downtown and help prevent some of these fights. And that was so exciting for me because we were able to notice when some of these things were about to happen and we were able to defuse situations.
And Noam? Who thought informational interviews were child’s play? He interned with a photographer who asked really thought-provoking questions. Like one day, when they were looking at a photograph, he asked Noam about the color tones.
Noam: That's a great and interesting question that feels nothing like school. And then we'd have a conversation about color theory. And to me, I was just like, I really felt like I was getting away with murder. I was this is incredible. This is like the least schoolish thing ever. And I don't think I had an appreciation for how much I was learning.
For Natasha, her first internship was a chance to figure out what she didn’t like.
Natasha: I had an internship at a daycare, and I'm just like, yeah, working with kids isn't really for me. So I didn't, so I was like, I need to figure something else out because this isn't who I want to be.
Natasha successfully completed that internship and started looking for another.
But not all internships end so smoothly. Like Samenta’s internship as a teacher’s aide at an elementary school.
Andrew: I remember getting that phone call. Mm-hmm. The phone call was Hello, is this Andrew? Yes, are you Samenta's advisor? Yes, I am. You need to come pick her up, now.
A staff member had discovered Samenta sitting in the teacher’s lounge using MySpace on a computer. They fired her.
Samenta: I hated that I got fired. Like I hated it. It was the worst feeling for me. 'Cause to know that I did something poorly and then I just didn't do it again, ever again.
When I was a science teacher at other schools, I was the content expert in the room. Afterall, I had a bachelors in biology from Wesleyan and a masters degree in teaching biology from Brown.
But here at the Met, there was no way I could be the expert in all the different subjects my students were interested in. Hair dressing… Computer science…Car mechanics…Non-violence… How was I supposed to be an expert in all of those subjects?
On top of that, I also needed to be a kind-of job coach. Mentoring students through finding internships and, in some cases, losing internships.
And so even though there were days here and there when I felt like I was getting a handle on the elephant, other days, the elephant was definitely in charge.
I remember one day in particular. It was in mid January of freshman year. 2003.
Natasha from video: My name is Natasha Luigui. I’m in the ninth grade. This is my second quarter exhibition.
It was the day of Natasha’s exhibition. A presentation where students share what they’ve learned over the past few months.
Natasha from video: My first quarter narrative talks about the good things and the bad things that went on last quarter.
As good a student as Natasha was, it was clear she was wrestling with problems outside of school. She was absent more and more as the year went on. I knew some of what she was struggling with from her journals. But, now she was about to share what had been happening, publicly. Other students and staff from the Met were seated around the room. Natasha started to read an essay she had written…
Natasha from video: Every day I think about the same thing. Why do people kill other people? What can they get from that besides getting revenge… The world is really going crazy. Everyone killing each other for no reason whatsoever.(fades under)
Watching Natasha stand in front of the room and talk about the violence in her neighborhood. It was gut-wrenching.
I thought I knew what my students were living with. And, it’s true - visiting them at home gave me more insight. But, I was realizing that I didn’t get it. I hadn’t yet fully grasped how poverty and violence affected some of them. How all consuming it could be.
And as Natasha’s advisor I didn’t want to lose her.
Natasha: It was really scary just knowing that someone close to home, someone that I was close to and that I knew could be taken away so quickly.... So during that time I didn't really know like how to feel. So my main reaction was just shutting down.
But it turns out it was her experience that would bring us together.
You’ve been listening to The Advisory: Class of 2006 from Big Picture Learning. Join us next time for Episode 3, “One Student at a Time”.
If you enjoy this series, please help us spread the word by telling your friends about it and by leaving us a review wherever you subscribe. To see archival photos, to learn more about The Met, Big Picture and our advisory, visit our website: classof2006.org.
I'm Andrew Frishman. Thanks for listening.
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