Word: thomson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...educators who operate the private and state-funded Thomson Education Center set a wide range of high-minded goals for the students who participate in the program, ranging from the development of scientific skills to cultural awareness. Fundamentally, the two-and-a half-year-old program attempts to help students from a divisive, conflict-oriented school environment learn to function as a tight-knit group and have confidence in themselves and in each other. And that is a goal that most observers believe the Thomson's Island students are achieving. As Jerome Winegar, federal court-appointed headmaster of South Boston...
...contrasts with the mainland school are marked. At Southie High, the students are quick to report, athletic activity begins and ends with football. Yet out on Thomson's Island, every morning the group devotes an hour to "initiative games" that take place in the open air. These specially designed athletic activities--with names like "The Regain" and "The High Wire Tension Traverse"--are designed to help the group learn to solve problems together, to aid in building a cohesive sense of trust among the students...
...recent Thursday morning, for instance, Thomson teacher Greg Watson asked his group of 15 students to try to complete "the suspended log obstacle test." Within 20 minutes the group would have to get every member up and over a log suspended nine feet above the ground between two trees--with the proviso that once a student was over the obstacle, he could not help the rest of his classmates. Working as a team the group succeeded with minutes to spare...
...some days, the students will directly investigate the unique environment of the 160-acre island, a setting that includes salt marshes, forests, meadows, coves, orchards, beaches and clay cliffs. After some initial classroom instruction from the Thomson teachers, the group will go out to study the environment together, in projects ranging from soil surveys and vegetation transects, to wildlife observation...
...work project designed to add to the resources of the Thomson center provides another focus for the students' group work. The current group of 30 is terracing a site, selected by both students and instructors, in an attempt to prevent soil erosion. The hillside site they chose is extremely steep, and the students must rely heavily on each other to work safely and effectively. The black and white students, who tote humus and wood girders together, who anchor one another as they climb up the hillside, certainly provide a sharp contrast with the students who walk the halls of Southie...