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http://www.nsnva.pvt.k12.va.us/

The New School of Northern Virginia

This is a wonderful school! Read below how the Head, John Potter, describes it, because 
that tells you everything you need to know. You might also read more of John's tender,
poetic, insightful words as they appear in the pages of these (Earth Circles) website as well 
as the ones I've added below about his experiences growing up in an English village.

John Potter,

Headmaster

AND, from Challenging the Giant, volume IV, John wrote:

Mary:  I am sending you this thing I wrote.  Feel free to do with it as you
wish.  It is just one of my many musings on our profession and my life.
Pax,  
John

EDUCATION

 

Whatever enters our hearts

or our brains

through our eyes and ears and sense of touch and smell

from the day we are born ...

from the day we were conceived.......

from whatever that day was.....when we began

That is our education.

Of course it keeps on going .......as long as we let it?

We couldn't stop it starting. Whether it was the primal thadump thadump

which let us know somehow

that we were alive in those small translucent days

Or the first wild and desperate breath we took

of the air we now breathe so matter of factly.

 

So at the age of four in the little village in which I lived

I ran away to school

hating my parents

not forgetting to drop by my parents best friends house

to tell them.......

my parents hated them....

and then on to school.

I knew what the building looked like

from the road

but once inside it was huge and strange and empty.

I pressed my face against a class window

full of children like me, but a bit older............................

.............and Pauline spotted me

I always liked her for that.

I was invited in and joined a makeshift band

marching around the classroom.

So this was school.

I couldn't wait.

 

Imagine an examination

that every child in the nation takes

at eleven.

Pass it and you're made

fail it and you're sunk.

At eleven I had moved

from the village

to a farm on the fringe of desolate moorlands

A school with sand toilets outside and open

with single coal stoves at the front of the class

almost a one room schoolhouse for children

from families of little means

- subsistence farmers to gypsies.

 

Mr. Matthews was a teacher who yearned for

children who wanted to learn

and he seized on Derek and me.

He thought us rebellious and smart

and dug through the dark and frozen turf

his own formal education had laid on his mind

to come up with something which might engage us.

He read to us from Les Miserables

so that Javert haunted me for years.

He tried without success

to teach us Latin.

But he sparked our minds

so that when the examination came at eleven

and I had to write an essay for it which had to begin with.............

....."There was a shattering of glass and.................. "

my pen gave my hand whiplash and they had to stop me writing

two hours later.

 

Six weeks later I was playing with Derek

and the school head sauntered over to us

in the company of Mr. Matthews

and told me to go to Miss Crocker's room, pick up the cane

and go wait by his desk.

I'd done something

I didn't know what

I was very scared

because he'd hit me before

and he hit very hard.

Miss Crocker smiled as she gave me the stick

and I went and waited by his desk.

He came in with a thin smile

behing the fat and distorting lenses of his little glasses,

took the cane

told me

to bend over and grab my ankles

which I did.

As he raised the cane to strike

he told me that I had passed the examination - I was made.

I ran to Derek

I found him in tears

Mr. Matthews had told him he was sunk and cried too.

I could not speak

and felt ashamed that I passed.

 

Whatever enters our hearts

or our brains

through our eyes and ears and sense of touch and smell

from the day we are born ...

from the day we were conceived.......

from whatever that day was.....when we began

That is our education.

 

So much had poured into my mind through my senses

that I felt old.

My education had been too much

I felt too much

If, in 1953 they had books on tape and Walkmen

I would have found a cave

and listened to Les Miserables until I died.

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