Word: richmond
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rest of the field includes Army, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Navy, Pennsylvania, Providence, Richmond and Yale...
Microsociety is the dream child of George Richmond, a painter, teacher, author and acclaimed educator who was raised in the tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side. His first job, at a Brooklyn elementary school in 1967, was a rookie teacher's nightmare. Richmond's fifth-graders skipped class, scorned homework and slept through lectures, their apathy and cynicism surpassed only by their appetite for petty classroom warfare. In the end, the young idealist from Yale threw up his hands at a system in which teachers who pretended to teach and students who pretended to learn did very little...
Grades were a basic dilemma. Nowhere else, Richmond realized, were people expected to work without compensation. An A-plus could not be saved, or invested, or traded for something of value. That was how a teacher with a deep belief in the value of learning for its own sake began paying his students -- in fake money -- for completed assignments, good marks and perfect attendance. Students then used their "cash" to play a new game, a sort of life-size, walking version of Monopoly in which they bought, sold and mortgaged various "properties" around the classroom...
...postal system, a comic book, a loan agency. Disputes eventually led to the creation of laws, police, courts and a constitutional convention (democracy triumphed over a police state by a single vote). As they began to discover the relevance of reading and arithmetic through managing their miniature society, Richmond's students also discovered in themselves an enthusiasm for education -- and a hunger for more...
...Richmond wrote a book about his experience and eventually helped launch the first school based entirely on his Microsociety model. After much sniffing and sneering from the local newspaper, which dismissed the idea as "futuristic," "dubious" and "a gimmick," City Magnet School opened in 1981 in a empty library in Lowell, Massachusetts. By 1987 the school's students were testing two years above the national norm in both reading and math. Then in 1990, 13 eighth-graders passed first-year college-level exams, again in reading and math. School attendance hovers around 96%, and during the past six years only...