So, the planning year is officially over, and tomorrow morning at 8:30, the SLA teachers report, along with all the rest of the School District of Philadelphia teachers, to their school.

Unlike the vast majority of those teachers, SLA teachers will walk into a building tomorrow teaming with construction workers desperately finishing tiling the floors, getting the phones and internet working, putting knobs on doors (and installing doors in some cases) and generally getting the building ready for opening day. They swear the building will be ready. I have started to question if their definition of ready and my definition of ready are the same.

It’s not the atmosphere that I’d prefer to have them walking into, but it’s also not exactly unheard of in the world of small school reform. I think it will be strangest for this group not to have internet access, after having spent seven months online together planning. In fact, I’ve been on our moodle site all night, reading, writing and planning with teachers.

But lest anyone suggest that SLA teachers are great online, but shy away from other work, we were in the building on Friday and Saturday, unloading box after box of furniture. We must have moved several hundred huge boxes of desks and chairs and tables. Some of the stories of the last week, while not necessarily appropriate for the blog, will be told as part of the lore of the start of this school for years.

Someone asked me how I was so calm, considering how much needs to be done in the next two days to be ready for opening. And on one level, I’m not calm. After a year of planning and sweating every detail that I could have an affect on, it does drive me crazy that the physical plant is where it is tonight. But on another level, I’m not worried, because I’ve seen the first unit plans the teachers have created. I know how much work they’ve put in. I’ve read the moodle posts of the kids who are excited about and invested in the vision of SLA. And I know what we did in August, in a big room with no walls, at The Franklin Institute. And I know, as so many of the edu-bloggers say, that it is, in the end, about the relationships. No SLA teacher came to teach here because the classrooms were big and new (they are), no SLA student came to SLA just because they are getting a laptop. There’s a shared vision at work, there are relationships being built. And those things are more powerful than a shiny new building.

That being said, I’ll still be sweating over every last piece of tile, doorknob and phone system between now and Thursday morning at 8:15 am.

One of the things that I think really is unique is SLA’s Integrated Biochemisty (Biology/Chemistry) course. We’ve found three or four other schools across the country where this experiment is happening, and we’ve talked to some others who are thinking along these lines.

So I wanted to post the big picture unit arc for the first year of the course. This was written by our two founding Biochemistry teachers, Gamal Sherif and Matt VanKouwenberg. As you can see, it’s a very different sort of look at both biology and chemisty, structured to combine concepts of both biology and chemistry to speak to larger understandings about our natural world. One of the things I’m really excited to watch is how Gamal and Matt use these larger conceptual frameworks as the way to teach the traditional concepts of biology and chemistry. One of things I really think they have done with this course is find a way to make the scientific world make a great deal of sense. As I hope their document shows, we can teach biology and chemistry in a way that makes it about much more than a sequence of discrete facts and skills, but rather gives kids a powerful lens with which they can look at the world.

As always, thoughts, ideas and comments are always welcome.

[So we have some school-wide discussion forums on our Moodle server at SLA, and the conversations are flying fast and furious these days. One of the threads was about where everyone went to middle school, and it morphed into some students talking about how they have to justify their choice to attend SLA over one of the older, more prestigious public schools in Philadelphia, Central High School.

One of the joys of the small schools movement, and of creating more choices for students within the public school system is that we can start to move beyond a purely hierarchical ranking of schools where X is always better than Y, and instead start to offer students and families more choices so that kids have multiple options and can choose the school where the style of learning and the community that exists makes the most sense for them. Central, for example, is an amazing school with nearly 170 years of tradition, but that doesn’t mean that just because a student gets into it, it’s the right school for them. I think, now, with SLA and other small schools, the students of Philadelphia can make more informed choices about going to the school that gives them the best chance to realize the best version of themself four years from when they entire high school. With that… here’s what I wrote in that Moodle discussion:]

Tell all those folks that you’re going to the school that you want to go to.

We have a bunch of students who chose us over Central (and a bunch of kids going to Central who chose them over us.) I think Central is a great option for some kids, I think we’re a great option for some kids (o.k. — I’m biased, of course, I think we’re an AMAZING option, but hey… like I said, I’m biased.) And I think that if the worst thing in the world is that someone has to make a choice between Central and SLA, well, then they have a pretty good life.

I do think that some folks might not understand why a student wouldn’t go to Central, with all of its history and prestige, but I do think that we offer something different that you all are already a part of. I agree that the kind of teaching that we’ll do here at SLA, as Bryanna said, might end up looking very different than it does at Central, and I think that having things like — for example — this moodle forum where teachers and students and administrators have conversations like this makes us very different. But I think that it would be hard for someone who isn’t willing to look past the name and history of Central to understand why we’re all so excited about SLA.

And that’s one of the things that makes you all unique. Every student coming to SLA this year had to make a positive choice to come here, whether it was coming here over Central or a charter school or Germantown or somewhere else, you have to make the decision that the way we talked about education and schools made sense to you. I — and I think I speak for all the teachers here — am always humbled and honored by the energy with which you all have taken to that choice, and I (and we) feel a tremendous amount of responsibility to honor that choice by working with you all to make SLA something special and unique and powerful for the students of Philadelphia — for this first class and every class that follows you all.

So definitely keep talking about where you all are coming from — where we come from has a powerful effect on who we are and who we will become — but as much as we all are coming from 49 different schools, we’re coming together to form one amazing school, and that is the most exciting part of it all.