Some teachers expect students to sit quietly. Tal Birdsey encourages them to stand up and scream.

"I want you to scream about the things that matter," he tells middle-schoolers. "You know, love, jealousy, self-doubt, joy, equality, betrayal, belief, desire, death, hope, good and evil, and everything in between."

Madness? The head teacher at Ripton's North Branch School swears it's sound method. Gathering seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders around one table, he'll point to "My Name Is Asher Lev," a novel about an Orthodox Jewish boy yearning to be an artist.

"Anyone can draw," a sculptor tells the title character. "Art is when it is connected to the scream inside you."

That's why Birdsey pushes students to seize pencil and paper and write — not fantasy or fiction, but their own truth. He does it himself in his new memoir, "A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont." With a cover picturing a tidy coat rack, the title may suggest an orderly how-to for parents and teachers. But flip inside and you'll find a messy chronicle of one man's struggle to engage youth in learning, love and life.



'Poetic, idiotic'

Birdsey, 44, was a stay-at-home father of two preschoolers in 2001 when he was approached by several like-minded parents to start North Branch as a private, independent alternative to public middle school.

"Most people are afraid of kids this age because they're all over the place," the Middlebury College graduate says in an interview. "This is the in-between time, the intermediate zone between family and the bigger world. They can be profound and poetic, idiotic and illogical."

The native Georgian had attended and later taught 10 years at Atlanta's independent Paideia School. Adolescents, he learned, are old enough to appreciate complex concepts yet young enough to play with them. Down south, however, he worked from an established campus and curriculum. Here, he was starting from scratch.

What makes a good school? Birdsey sought a room with a table and chairs, books, paper and pencils, a copy machine, first-aid kit and, in the case of North Branch, a dog.

(Birdsey's younger son, Calder, was 3 when he suggested a class pet.)

But in the teacher's mind, the bulk is philosophical: a place without one-size-fits-all expectations or intercom commands, where 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds — "half children, half adult" — instead can dissect the college staple "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," then run outside for recess.

"As a teacher I did not so much want to impart some body of predetermined information but to present the world as a realm to be sounded, charted and uncovered," he writes in his book. "Maybe it was my Southern upbringing … I thought school should be more of a gumbo, where we threw in everything we had."



Nonstandard ways

North Branch abides by the state Education Department's Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities, albeit creatively. History can be reading the 1876 diary of Salisbury farmer Silas A. Bump. Physical education can be hiking, biking or stacking two cords of firewood — the latter exercise leading one boy to form an "awesome" fort for snowball fights.

"Nick clearly exhibited forward thinking, an awareness of possibilities and an irrepressible, positive mental outlook," his teacher writes. "I called that a good lesson."

For literature, Birdsey introduces such books as blind French Resistance leader Jacques Lusseyran's autobiography "And There Was Light" and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's memoir "Night."

"Why is Elie telling us this story?" he'll ask. "For what purpose does Elie live?"

His students aren't afraid to express themselves in everything from dreadlocks to a rhinestone tiara. But reveal what's underneath?

"They were not accustomed to such questions or doing the hard work," the teacher writes. "Maybe they were used to never having to venture any ideas at all, staying within the pages of the book and never involving themselves in the interpretations, as though literary study were somehow divorced from experience. … I wanted them to be able to say things well. Even more, I wanted them to have something valuable to say."

And so Birdsey prods them to feel, then think, then communicate. He nurtures a classroom climate of respect and safety in hopes students grow comfortable enough to fumble or fail yet learn from their mistakes.

"Teaching is like baseball," he says. "You're doing great if you bat .400."

That may sound scandalous in an educational era of structure and "testable standards." But Birdsey's book reports inspiring results.

One student, reading Wiesel's account of a violinist playing a Beethoven concerto to a room of dead or dying men, summed up the passage as well as the school's purpose by noting in an essay: "That is what 'being whole' is. It is having what you need to drive you forward and the knowledge of how to drive."

A classmate who was adopted from Honduras used his composition to describe struggles with peers in his old school and support in his new one.

"I don't want you to think that miraculously I could suddenly read and write," the student is quoted. "No, my mom was still my reader and scribe. But the difference was that I suddenly had insights and ideas that were okay. And that made me feel like I wanted to actually do something. I had never felt like that in school before."

For Birdsey, that's the ultimate test. He cites a line from a Seamus Heaney poem: "Let go, let fly, forget."

"Forget what you can't do," he tells students, "and build from what you can."



The story inside

Many authors go on book tour. Birdsey must go to school, so he's promoting his 304-page hardcover from St. Martin's Press on his Web site (www.talbirdsey.com) and in an occasional after-class interview.

Students ask how he's selling on Amazon.com (his memoir ranks No. 190,846 on its sales list — perhaps because he's pointing readers to local independent booksellers). Vermont Public Radio, for its part, surprised him by inquiring, "Do you ever worry about a cult of personality?"

The short answer: No. Birdsey hopes readers of all ages will take charge and learn for themselves.

"The book for me is a chance to show this is what it could be like, this is what it should be like."

Since opening eight years ago, North Branch has grown from an initial 10 students to a maximum 27 — nine each in grades 7, 8 and 9, with half receiving assistance with its $8,000 annual tuition.

Birdsey's two sons are old enough to attend now. (That's a whole other book, their proud father says, if only he could write it objectively.) The three commute with the class dog, Charlie, "a humane society variety" who's student-friendly but camera-shy.

Everything here is a work in progress. Take Emma, an alumna who used a writing assignment to tell classmates about being abused.

"I wish people would open their eyes," she wrote. "See the world as it is. …"

With permission, Birdsey read her essay to her peers before including it in his book.

"Emma had more work to do, more words to write," he notes near the end of the book. "For now she had come as far as she could. She had brought us to a place we had never been. Beautiful survival. Did I make her story beautiful? No. Did I teach her to write? No. But she and they and I had made the place where her words could be written, read, heard and felt. The story was inside her. She found a key, and she let us in, and we all walked out together."



kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com