{"id":6317,"date":"2022-08-12T17:25:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-12T21:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=6317"},"modified":"2022-08-12T17:25:50","modified_gmt":"2022-08-12T21:25:50","slug":"in-over-our-heads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=6317","title":{"rendered":"In Over Our Heads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>1st Place, In-Depth Feature<\/strong><br>2021-22, Division 4, News Writing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>By Noah Bernstein<\/strong><br>The Communicator<br>Ann Arbor Community HS<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1971, Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) tried some-thing new. Under the leadership of Dr. Bruce McPherson, the district\u2019s newly-minted superintendent, a team of teachers at Pioneer High School dreamed up a radical idea. The group, which called itself \u201cTeachers for Change,\u201d proposed the establishment of Ann Arbor\u2019s first alternative high school: Pioneer II, later renamed Earthworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On Oct. 11, 1971 \u2014 only seven weeks after the school\u2019s initial conception \u2014 Earthworks opened its doors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The students, 108 strong, selected gray and clear as the school\u2019s colors. The building, formerly Fritz Elementary School, consisted of three main rooms. Inside, narrow lockers were covered in artwork and scribbled handwriting, a sofa sat against the wall and tires hung from the rafters, serving as repurposed chairs. The school\u2019s bathroom was coed and covered in graffiti \u2014 including a gargoyle next to the urinal sneering \u201cHe\u2019s back.\u201d The two adults in the building, Tom Dodd and Allan Schreiber, designed a curriculum that included \u201cCreative Assholism,\u201d \u201cImagination Marathon\u201d and the innovative Community Resource (CR) program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Only a year later, in 1972, Community High School (CHS) followed in Earthworks\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That September, roughly 300 students ventured to the old Jones Elementary School on Division Street in Kerrytown \u2014 a historic district in Ann Arbor. Given its name and proximity to downtown and the University of Michigan\u2019s campus, the school was uniquely positioned to pursue McPherson\u2019s \u201cschool without borders\u201d philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the nursery, school-aged parents dropped off their children, who were cared for throughout the day. In the classroom, Preston Slosson, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, taught history. In the parking lot, Greg Clark, a junior at CHS, taught a CR on motorcycle maintenance. In the fire escapes, students listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, smoked weed and played Euchre. And, although it was originally left undetermined, the school\u2019s mascot eventually became the rainbow zebra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Throughout the 1970s, these two schools ran parallel to one another \u2014 with Earthworks taking the more radical route \u2014 until their paths eventually converged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A Safe Haven<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1974, David Mosher \u2014 a self-described hippie who had sharp features and wore his hair down to his shoulders \u2014 moved from New York to Michigan. His parents had recently divorced, his mother needed to make money and his grandfather taught at the University of Michigan, so Ann Arbor was naturally a safe haven for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In New York, Mosher had attended the semi-alternative Briarcliff High School (BHS) for his freshman and sophomore years. There, he would go to class once, \u201ccharm the teacher and then not show up [again].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After Mosher\u2019s grandmother learned that he was coming to Ann Arbor, she quickly suggested CHS. Shortly thereafter, he enrolled and became a member of the high school\u2019s very first, full graduating class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI joke about this, but [at BHS] I smoked a lot of pot and played basketball,\u201d Mosher said. \u201cWhen I got to Community, I pretty much got credit for doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On a more serious note, however, Mosher believes that he was lucky to attend CHS. In fact, he credits the school with giving him the support and the freedom he needed to graduate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cCommunity, for all its goofiness and unrealized focus, saved my life,\u201d Mosher said. \u201cFor a certain kind of person, it was a watershed moment, a boon to whatever [we] were trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mosher\u2019s watershed moment manifested in music. He played in the jazz band with Bart Polot, sang in the vocal studio with Betsy King, took a CR on fingerstyle guitar and acted. All four experiences taught him skills that he still uses as a roots musician today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI\u2019m not a jazz guy,\u201d Mosher said. \u201cI read like shit. But I can play mandolin, fiddle, guitar, banjo, bass, whatever \u2026 It was the kind of thing that Community did really well. [The school] helped you find what you liked and said, \u2018Here\u2019s some options. Go do it.\u2019\u201d<br>However, learning the guitar, smoking weed and playing basketball weren\u2019t the only things Mosher did at CHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also took a course called \u201cHuman Relations,\u201d taught by Tom Johns. According to Mosher, the class was essentially a therapy session, supplemented with weekend camping trips. Notably, Johns had no formal psychology training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI watched other people go through some major shit, for sure,\u201d Mosher said. \u201cI eventually found it to be a little unwieldy. Now, from this perspective, it wasn\u2019t as professionally run as it could have been. They wanted to do the right thing. I just think that sometimes they might have been in over their head \u2026 We were all a little bit in over our heads.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For Mosher, one camping trip to a park in Jackson, Mich. was more memorable than the others. To him, the weekend felt especially out of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI remember [a classmate] sobbing, and thinking, \u2018This didn\u2019t need to happen this way.\u2019 They took her apart and didn\u2019t put her back together. It just seemed to me like we were playing with fire, with people\u2019s feelings, both unrealized and realized.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Today, camping trips are only reserved for forum overnights, a fundamental part of one\u2019s experience at CHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After graduation, Mosher left Ann Arbor and didn\u2019t come back until 1986. In fact, just last summer, Mosher married his high school sweetheart, Lisa Davis. They met during his first year at CHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI never fit in with the mainstream, and I don\u2019t wear that as a badge of honor,\u201d Mosher said. \u201cI know that because Community was not normal, I wasn\u2019t normal, and we got along well. I\u2019m just not a four-classes-in-the-morning, three-in-the-afternoon, turn-in-your-paper kind of student. [Community] was my little hippie heyday. It was the way life should be, a buffet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The End of the Beginning<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the spring of 1975, one semester after Mosher be came a student at CHS, Mike Mouradian graduated from from Eastern Michigan University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That fall, with degrees in Biology, Chemistry and Counseling, a \u201crevolutionary\u201d and \u201coutside-the-box\u201d approach to education and uncertainty about his future, Mouradian found his way to Ann Arbor. More specifically, he found his way to CHS as a student-teacher and to Earthworks as a substitute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c[I was] young, and I wanted to change the world \u2026 I was looking to do things outside the normal, traditional route,\u201d Mouradian said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Despite Mouradian\u2019s optimistic worldview \u2014 and a coworker saying that he\u2019d \u201cbe okay\u201d at Earthworks because of his background in social work \u2014 his first day at the school was understandably eye-opening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThere [were] couches and bean bags and stuff everywhere,\u201d Mouradian said. \u201cThere [were] kids all over the place just laying around, playing checkers. And there was this little guy who immediately grabbed me and said, \u2018Hey, I\u2019ll show you around.\u2019 As he was [doing so], I wondered, \u2018What am I supposed to do?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Expecting to work alongside other teachers, Mouradian was even more surprised to learn that he was the only adult in the building that day; the school\u2019s two full-time teachers, Tom Dodd and Allan Schreiber, weren\u2019t there. Nevertheless, Mouradian slowly em-braced Earthworks\u2019s unique, camplike culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cStudents came in and learned whatever [they] wanted to do,\u201d Mouradian said. \u201cTom and Allan just over-saw the mayhem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Although the mayhem was supervised \u2014 and sometimes supported \u2014 by Dodd and Schreiber, the students were also key contributors to Earthworks\u2019s creative chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cPioneer was very happy to clean the jails out and send students to Earthworks and Community because they were so overcrowded,\u201d Mouradian said. \u201cNobody in the district really wanted Community and Earth-works, but they realized they could dump 300 troublemakers somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, this approach of simply sending rebellious students to CHS and Earthworks was not sustainable forever. Like many of its fellow alternative schools from across the nation, Earthworks\u2019s enrollment sank in the latter half of the 1970s. According to Schreiber, by the fall of 1977, its enrollment had declined to roughly 60 students, four of whom had been patients at the University of Michigan\u2019s Children\u2019s Psychiatric Hospital since that summer.<br>Finally, in 1978, there were no options left. The remaining 50 students and two teachers merged with their sister school, CHS. According to Mouradian, doing so might just have saved CHS from suffering a similar fate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cTom [Dodd] was a great ideas guy, but not a great implementer,\u201d Mouradian said. \u201cA lot of people who went to Earthworks were going there just because they didn\u2019t really want to be in school in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To absorb the immediate influx of students, CHS re-structured an integral part of its identity: Forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Originally, the class was an unorthodox homeroom. Forums would meet for two hours a day, every day of the week, and forum leaders would teach the subjects that they were most familiar with. In turn, students would use their elective hours to study the topics overlooked in the forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Upon merging with Earthworks, two forums of opposite expertise joined together to create a \u201ccomponent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt was a way to combine the two schools without them losing their identity right away,\u201d Mouradian said. \u201cBut after a couple of years, it didn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In Mouradian\u2019s case, his forum, with a focus on science, joined forces with Elaine Headly\u2019s forum, who focused on art. Together, they became the Da Vinci Component. On the other side of the school, Earth-works became the New Educational Opportunities (NEO) component. 11 years later, in 1989, Mouradian and Headly got married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A Neverending Show<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the spring of 1975 \u2014 both Mosher and Mouradian\u2019s first year at CHS \u2014 \u201cThe Midnight Sun\u201d published its third yearbook. Inside is a fictional movie script that describes a typical CHS school day. Its message still resonates today: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cCamera makes full frontal picture \u2014 shooting out of window, looking over at farmers\u2019 market. Soundtrack is heard: Anyone for Euchres? \u2026 Rundown school. Rundown school board. Traditional dislike of authority. Heard over school PA system: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">NW-11. In-Depth Feature<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The entry should be a single story. Judges will not consider sidebars, infographics or other elements packaged with the story. The story must stand on its own. Entries should concern subjects of a substantive and contemporary nature and go beyond the surface facts, give the reader detailed background information with interpretation based upon the facts and background information and often (but not necessarily) an analysis as to its meaning. It is an elaboration of the WHY. Multiple sources are necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Judging Criteria<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Lead captures attention, arouses curiosity<\/li><li>Topic relevant to interests and\/or welfare of school or students<\/li><li>Extensive, intensive and thorough investigation<\/li><li>Effectively combines basics of good news and feature writing<\/li><li>Effectively organized with smooth transitions; carefully outlined<\/li><li>Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly<\/li><li>Proper diction\/grammar<\/li><li>Balanced and fair presentation<\/li><li>Story relies on information from primary sources gathered\/interviewed directly by the journalist(s); general Internet sources and secondary media reports are used sparingly<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1st Place, In-Depth Feature2021-22, Division 4, News Writing By Noah BernsteinThe CommunicatorAnn Arbor Community HS In 1971, Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) tried some-thing new. Under the leadership of Dr. Bruce McPherson, the district\u2019s newly-minted superintendent, a team of teachers at Pioneer High School dreamed up a radical idea. The group, which called itself \u201cTeachers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":6320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,4],"tags":[182,23],"class_list":["post-6317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-indepthfeature","category-nw","tag-2021-22","tag-division4","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/in-depth_Page_1-1-scaled.jpg?resize=600%2C400&ssl=1","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/in-depth_Page_1-1-scaled.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1","author_info":{"display_name":"Morgan Womack","author_link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?author=12"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/in-depth_Page_1-1-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1674&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6K0n6-1DT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}