Don’t let school get in the way of your education.
Any alumni of Island School surely knows this quote by Mark Twain, as it is one of Maxey’s favorite and attests to the value of the unique experiences one has in Eleuthera. Island School believes that education should not be restricted to the classroom, something that is tested each day from morning exercise at 6:30am to late-night research presentations before bed. At The Island School you live and breath your education, and although Maxey will get the occasional student who argues that their Eleutheros paper is interfering with the educational value of getting food at the Marina Store, it generally works out well. This quote has inspired us to explore beyond the boundaries of our own classrooms this spring and create a senior project where we will hopefully help to keep the knowledge we learned and experienced on Eleuthera alive back at home.
This spring, we (Sarah Allison, S’12, Devin Caccavaro, F’11, and Kate Maroni, F’11), three seniors from Noble & Greenough will be working with the Island School Boston office as interns to help ease students’ transition back home and to promote The Island School program. We will be working from Nobles two days a week for 2 hours, and from the Boston office once a week for 4 hours. Our project began at the end of March and continues until the end of May. The Island School left a lasting impact on each one of us, and we therefore feel obligated to stay involved and to help the school grow.
For our first project, we will be working on creating a Transition Manual for returning Island School students. We have all experienced how difficult it can be to integrate back into our home communities, and to resume our daily routines while still maintaining the Island School values. Our transition manual will incorporate both our own tips for transitioning, as well as the advice of other recent alumni. For our big project, we will be visiting local schools in Boston to present the Island School program to them in hopes of allowing more students the opportunity to benefit from such a transformative semester. Lastly, we will be making phone calls to other institutions and organizations with study abroad programs in order to gain perspective on how to strengthen our own alumni network.
Please follow our blog to view all of our progress, and we encourage all email comments and questions about our project!
Our blog link: islandschoolblog.wordpress.com