About the School

People who visit MindStretched Junior High for the first time usually spend the first ten minutes looking for whatever makes it different. They expect unusual classrooms, mysterious symbols on the walls, perhaps an odd dress code or a school song nobody else has heard of. Instead they find lockers that occasionally jam, seventh graders who are somehow capable of producing an astonishing amount of noise before eight o'clock in the morning, and teachers reminding students that no, putting your backpack in the middle of the hallway has never been a particularly effective storage solution. At first glance it seems disappointingly ordinary.

The first hint that something is different usually happens in the library, although not always immediately. Someone eventually opens a book and discovers writing in the margins. Not a signature. Not graffiti. Entire conversations. A student in 1994 wondering whether an author had confused confidence with certainty. Somebody else, twelve years later, drawing an arrow into the margin and replying, "I wondered the same thing." Another student adding, "See page 183." The librarian never erases them. She says books should show evidence that people have been thinking inside them. Most visitors need a minute before deciding whether they find that horrifying or wonderful.

Questions have an unusual status around the school. In most places they're expected to lead toward answers. Here they're often treated more like trailheads. A question that survives an entire semester without anyone settling it earns a certain amount of respect. Teachers have been known to stop in the hallway on the way to lunch because somebody pinned a particularly inconvenient question to the bulletin board that morning. Lunch can wait another five minutes. Good questions have terrible timing.

Nobody actually keeps score, but the unofficial competition among the teachers has always been who can leave students thinking about class the longest after the bell rings. The math teacher insists the answer is mathematics because numbers refuse to care how anyone feels about them. The English teacher believes it's novels because people quietly carry stories around for decades. The Professor rarely enters these conversations. She has an annoying habit of making everyone else's examples connect to one another, which tends to end the debate before anyone is completely finished making their case.

Students eventually discover that Period 5 doesn't really begin when the bell rings. It begins whenever the Professor notices something she can't quite leave alone. Sometimes it's an article. Sometimes it's an argument she overheard at the grocery store over the weekend. Sometimes a student says something on Tuesday that quietly reappears on Thursday because, as she'll casually point out while erasing the board, "I've been thinking about what you said." The unsettling part is that she usually has been.

The school has developed a reputation for asking awkwardly early questions. Not awkward because they're rude. Awkward because most people don't expect to be asked them until much later in life, if ever. Why do intelligent people disagree so confidently? Why do families remember the same childhood differently? Why do some ideas spread through an entire culture while others disappear almost unnoticed? Visitors occasionally assume the students must already know the answers. They don't. They simply become accustomed to living with questions long enough that easy answers stop looking quite so satisfying.

One thing surprises nearly everyone who spends enough time around the faculty. They disagree constantly. Not dramatically. Cheerfully. Nobody seems especially interested in protecting an idea simply because it was theirs. Changing your mind after somebody points out a better explanation is treated with the same quiet satisfaction most schools reserve for getting the right answer on the first try. It saves everyone time. Besides, if the evidence has improved, why shouldn't the explanation?

Former students have an odd habit of returning years later with stories that begin, "I didn't understand why we talked about that at the time..." The story is usually followed by a wedding, a difficult conversation, an election, a new technology, a family argument, or a child asking a question in the back seat of the car. Somewhere in the middle comes a pause, a laugh, and the sentence everyone at the school secretly hopes to hear.

"I finally understood what she was getting at." Nobody ever seems to mean the lesson. They mean the way of looking.