Clearwater Student Sound Bites

--by Susan Milton, Clearwater parent and member of website committee.

An all new Clearwater website is currently in the works. To help out with this project, I volunteered to gather quotes by members of the Clearwater community that could appear on the new website. One thing I did was to ask students for quotes when I saw them at school. I asked if they would be willing to say something they liked about Clearwater, or something that people interested in Clearwater should know about, or just anything at all that they thought would be a good quote for the website. Many students said they would need more time to think about it. But for right now, I thought readers of the blog might enjoy seeing my unedited list of off-the-top-of-their-heads quotes by Clearwater students about their school. So here it is:

I like Clearwater because there's pizza there sometimes. - Imogen, age 5

I like Clearwater because of what Imogen said, and because the teachers never boss you around. - Jaime, age 8


You can make up languages. Nikos and I made up a language. - Vera, age 8

I really like Clearwater. It's the best school I've ever been to. It's really good. - Blessing, age 6

Attending the Clearwater School has enhanced my soul chakra beyond my natural bodysphere by about 12 octahedrons - Simon, age 14

I kinda like the Clearwater School - Thad, age 12


Creek Village! - Chiara, age 8

Creek Village is a really fun game. - Stevie, age 11


Clearwater is a good school because you make your own choices. - Stevie, age 11


I like the outside part of Clearwater. - Tommy, age 11

The creek is awesome! - Tarka, age 9

Clearwater has more computers than any other school. - Tommy, age 11


As far as the computer room goes, it's great that you can play so many multiplayer games. For example, the school has it's own Minecraft server, and Team Fortress. - Tarka, age 9

I like doing art in the art room - Delaney, age 16

I like the computer room. - Imogen, age 5


A great school where you can roam free. - Jesse, age 8

End of post.

Big Day in the Kitchen

I was so excited to hire Robert and Braden for the day to help me cook a bunch of food. I wanted to test as many new recipes as I could in one day, and I planned and shopped for a couple of days ahead of time.

I can't tell you how much fun it was to have them in the kitchen for the day. I wish we'd remembered to take a few photos, but we were awfully busy. We did manage to sit down and eat at one point (carrot and ginger soup with coconut cream garnish), and they went and goofed off for a little while with Cass. Not for long, though. We stopped off at Central Market on the way to my house and went a little crazy in the Asian aisle, in front of the Wall of Soy. We serendipitously discovered that if you eat straight adobo sauce, which is crazy hot, and then eat nori, which is seaweed, the nori makes the heat go away like magic.

They really love cooking, and they know a lot about food. They were tireless, fun and enthusiastic. The time they have spent in the new Clearwater kitchen with Mat has made them so confident. When we were tasting things, they were unabashedly opinionated, which was great. They have this crazy idea about opening a restaurant at the school with the menu being made with ingredients bought at the gas station.

By the end of the day, we had made fifteen things, then we fed ten people. I know the two aspiring chefs are going to be feeding many more. As for me, I could barely get out of my chair to make the pancakes for dessert, and they were all full of energy.

You can read more about the day, and a couple of the recipes we worked on and perfected, at thedailygrindchopandfry.com. The Udon Noodle Soup was the biggest hit of the evening. The rest of the recipes will be posted in the coming week or so.

(And please consider this a ringing endorsement of Braden and Robert as employees. I wish I could hire them every day, and they are saving up for a trip to Europe this spring.)

End of post!

The Clearwater Mafia Forum

Mafia is a party game that many people at school play. There are many different variations, including some played online.

I have created a mafia forum for people to play mafia on, and as I am on vacation, I am having trouble recruiting. If you want to play a online mafia game, you can go here and sign up.
I am running a short introductory mafia to make sure people are acclimated to forum mafia. The requirements are not too much. Basically, you would need to post once or twice a day (or more) and state your opinion and vote and such.This post ends here.


End of post.

Minecraft

Gabriel here!

What am I writing about today? Minecraft!

If you don’t already know, Minecraft is a Sandbox game created by Markus Persson.

In Single-player Creative Mode, you roam around the randomly generated map, and build structures, or dig down and find some caves, or go on a mad destruction rampage and destroy all of the blocks that make up the world. You can do pretty much anything. Right now, you cannot save any maps, unless you have purchased the game for about fifteen dollars.

In Single-player Survival Mode, you have a limited number of blocks and a limited number of hit points. You also have a limited amount of breath underwater. You have to mine all of your materials by destroying blocks. It also takes a short time to mine. (As opposed to Creative Mode where you can destroy blocks instantly.) There are also angry creatures called “mobs” running around. Currently the types of mob are:

Zombies: Basic enemies that run up and try to kill you.

Skeletons: Slightly more advanced enemies that shoot arrows at you and explode into arrows when you kill them.

Pigs: Run around, do nothing and drop health-restoring mushrooms when you kill them.

Sheep: Stay in one area and graze, drop cloth when you kill them.

Creepers: Enemies that have an attack like zombies but explode when you kill them.

In Multi-player Creative Mode, you start or join a server, and play with up to 31 other people from all over the world. You can make collaborative works of art, or just show off your art.

On Tuesday, the 3^rd of November Joey started up our very own minecraft server, TCWS Flat Grass Server. We used that for a while, dealing with griefers, and watching awesome pixel artists do their stuff (pictures below).

Then we saved that map, renamed the server to TCWS City Server, and used a map editing tool to create roads all across the map. We are currently running that map, and we are having fewer problems with griefers. We have created a few anti-grief precautions there, such as not being able to dig without an admin’s consent, creating more admins, and learning to type “/ban playername” more quickly.

Currently there are six admins from the school, and one from the internet. It is a huge phenomenon at school. The server runs 24/7, but unless an admin is on, nobody can get on.

I have collected a series of screenshots for your viewing pleasure. Also, feel free to stop by and explore our city. Just create a new account, go to the server list, and click TCWS Natural Server (or create an account and follow the link above). Introduce yourselves and ask to be let out of the prison cell you will appear in.

The Admin Tower on the old server, which housed the spawn prison and the griefer watchtower. Made by Joey with a map editor called OMEN.


A waterfall on the old server, made by Joey.



A companion cube from Portal, made by an interwebber named Flox on the old server, which, if you look at pictures of it in Portal, is remarkably similar.

The subway on the new server, made by Joey and an interwebber named Coolpilot.


The admin-only pool on the new server, made by me!



A dog statue, made by Leo

Gabriel Intro

Hello to all the folks in the blogosphere!

My name is Gabriel, and for the purposes of this portion of the blogosphere I will be called CapitalG.

In case you haven’t noticed, I will be posting here now.

I’m also a member of the Computer Committee, an admin on the school’s Minecraft server (details in the next post.), and a participant in the writing of the Warrior Cats play. I’m also making Warcraft III maps in my spare time (which I don’t have a lot of.).

Things I like: computers, drama, the word “blogosphere” (blogosphere! Isn’t it fun?), long hair, books, nature, loooong walks (I am planning to walk/run a marathon next year), and Clearwater.

Next post coming soon!

--Gabriel

End of post!

More Clearwater Art

Drawing is something many students do everyday at Clearwater. A parent's birthday or some public occasion often inspires younger students to create and present a piece of art to parents and sometimes staff members. Some students are dedicated and disciplined artists whose daily routine includes drawing many and varied images. Others put pen or pencil to paper to draw maps of the school or imaginary worlds, which become props or references in creative games. Young girls are often fond of drawing princesses or fairies with lovely clothes and flowers.

Niya, an 11-year-old student, draws frequently at home, but recently has been drawing more often at school. Recently, I was delighted to notice a couple of wonderful, fantastic creatures she whipped out. There is something about the personality and weight of the creatures that captured my imagination. Niya graciously signed and dated the pieces and permitted me to publish them on this blog. Thank you, Niya!



You'll notice that the drawings are on ancient, lined dot-matrix paper, donated to the school for scratch paper. One of the things I find fascinating and inspiring about all the drawing that goes on at Clearwater is that most of it is done for the student's satisfaction, out of a need to express something graphically. Clearwater students don't draw because it's art time, and they usually don't start drawing with the intent to produce something to display. They draw because they feel impelled to, which is often. People such as Niya draw for the love of it, while also consciously working to improve their skills. I often wonder how natural and common drawing would be for most of us if we had all had the time and space to draw for our own pleasure and need.


(End of post)

Joey's Background

This picture of the school is a wallpaper made by Joey using Inkscape and Gimp. It can be found in 4 sizes, below.

800x600
1024x768
1280x960
1280x1024

Reading, Gaming and Getting Serious

When my son entered a Sudbury school, he was not yet a reader and this worried many of the people that we knew. He spent his days building forts, talking and playing with friends, and boasting to his friends in “regular” school that he did not have to wear shoes or learn anything at all. He was seven.

God only knows why this was OK with me; I clearly remember the intense desire to ‘crack the code’ of letters and words, and it was obvious to me almost from the beginning of my son’s life that this was not something we shared. Letters and words are, in a way, too two-dimensional for him, too precise. Once things are out of his head and articulated, they are too final. Even now the written word is not a part of his creative process; he simply remembers everything. But I knew that he would learn to read, and that he did not need to be enticed, badgered or embarrassed in order to learn. So I watched him pass a few years without really caring about reading, and then one week I watched him read the last Harry Potter book on his own. He was ten.

This is not a reassuring scenario for many parents. It’s practically an advertisement for not sending your child to a Sudbury school. How could I just stand by and allow my child to remain illiterate for so long? I could have hired a tutor, or worked with him at home, or sent him to a traditional school where he would have been sure to learn to read at grade level. But the reality was more nuanced than it seemed. He was doing a lot of casual reading every day, reading signs and cereal boxes, following along with Captain Underpants, and going over the Pokémon books on his own, for example. He kept much of this to himself, knowing there was a great deal of power, most of it emotional, that other people conferred on his ability to read. He did not let on that he could read at an ‘everyday’ level. He was like a magician, pulling a reading rabbit out of a hat. It was a game, a trick.

Now he is engaged in another form of illusion, another hot-button issue that worries many adults who are involved in his life or who are looking for examples of how Sudbury kids waste their time and do not do anything serious, anything worthy. He is a gamer. I see him playing games every day, all of the time. He loves games, really loves them. He prepares for a day at school by going through his complicated collection of Magic cards, assembling decks that he hopes to ride to victory. He plays with anyone who is willing, and he is not exclusive in the games he will play. He’ll play almost anything. He goes through phases, where one particular game will rise to prominence over all others. One week it is Magic or poker, one month it is World of Warcraft. He’ll spend a few days beating a video game, and for variety he’ll play Apples to Apples or some other board game that is currently hot. He’ll exhaust a game and go back to it later and find more joy in it. He is twelve.

The trust I had in him when he was seven is still there. What he is doing is not a waste of his time; he is developing social and strategic skills, and many more strengths I don’t recognize. Part of me feels that it is unfair to try to parse his gaming to extract some reassuring list of accomplishments. He does not play to further a long-range plan, he does it purely for the joy of it. I mention skills because I know that parents worry about them and want to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel. But for him there is nothing dark about what he loves, no light beckoning to him. He knows how he wants to turn this love of his into a vocation, and he has been actively getting to know video game designers and getting advice on what to study, where to do it, and what he needs to know before he gets to college. He meets these developers at a big gaming store where they get together and play Magic. He plays with them (and has begun beating them).

I have had moments of anxiety about all of this, most of them caused by conversations with people I know who are critical of our decision to raise a Sudbury student. But the faith I have in him is always there to reassure me. I am very glad that I have not spent the last six years wondering when he is going to ‘get serious’.

Karen Hyams

What gamers were doing today!

I went into the computer room on Monday and decided to ask all the people what they were doing. These are the things people were doing.

Mat R. and James (17) were playing a battling game called Robot Arena.
Joey (16), Gabriel (10) and Cass (13) were all making maps for a game called Warcraft 3.
Caitlin (8) was playing a cute penguin game!
Leo (11) was playing a strange fruit game called Locoroca which I was informed was based off of a PSP game.
Maddy (9), and Meghan (10) were playing a game called World of Warcraft or WOW while Gabe(9) watched. (I do believe that WOW was based off of Warcraft).
Vera (6) was playing a cute little dress up game, while right next to her Kevin(7) played a shooting game.

That's a day in the computer room!
-Chloe J.

Photo by Claire

Painting Wall

Photo by Claire

Introduction to Chloe!

Hi all! This is Chloe J. , I am a former student at Clearwater. I attended for four years and I am doing an internship at the school. I am eleven years old and am the daughter of one of the schools lovely staff. I have two little sisters, one who used to attend Clearwater and she is four, and the other is around a couple months old. I will be helping with the blog so you will probably see more things being posted by me.

PS. Happy election everybody!

Things to do with tires

Make a barricade or something (photo by Chloe)


Sit in one during School Meeting


?????

Take our picture!

¡Hola Maria!

Our newest student has a lot of adjustments to make, but making friends can cross language and cultural barriers.



Spanish/English classes can happen anytime, anywhere!

Pizza Photos