Memories and Memoirs
Members of The Group School (TGS) community continue to write about their experiences during their years at TGS. This collection within the website contains excerpts from memoirs, poems, and other forms of expression that TGS community members are using to reflect on those times.
G is for GROUP
by Steve Seidel
In this personal essay from A is for All We’ll Never Know: An Educator’s Alphabet Book, Steve Seidel recounts why, as a teacher in high schools and higher education, he always goes into a new class with a commitment to the creation of a group with a shared sense of identity and purpose.
Excerpt From ‘For The Love of God: My Life Spread Thin’
by Marion Gillon
Marion Gillon writes about his five years as a teacher/advisor at TGS in the context of his remarkable life journey from growing up in rural Alabama to joining civil rights sit-ins as a student at Tougaloo College to his friendship with luminaries such as Maya Angelou. He credits TGS as “the perfect teacher preparation program and starting point for my forty-five-year career as an educator” and ties the outsized impact of his TGS years to the “continuous flow of interesting people coming and going through the school.”
Excerpt From ‘Bathing In The Milky Way’
by Barbara Gates
Barbara Gates recalls her cross-country trip to learn how to start a “free school” --ending up back in Cambridge, MA where she joined a group of young people and youth workers dreaming of a democratic school for working class teens. She describes inventing courses like Beginnings and Endings where she and co-teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn combined a study of creation myths with scientific theories such as the Big Bang and credits Kabat-Zinn for starting her on a lifelong commitment to meditation.