For 10 years, a small private middle school has incorporated an unconventional element into its curriculum. One day a month, every month of the school year, students at the boys-only Seven Hills School make the James River and its environs their classroom.
Head of School David Dorsey helped found Seven Hills a decade ago. From the beginning, he and fellow faculty saw the potential in Richmond's riverine wilderness areas for a different kind of learning.
"Middle school boys are all about real-life applications," he said. "The question they are always posing is, 'What does this have to do with anything?' The James River really stands tall to that inquiry, whether it's history or the sciences in every form; whether it's mathematical calculations, laboratory work; whether it's recreation or taking inspiration on the banks for writing."
Dorsey and Seven Hills, along with river guide Mike Ostrander and Passages Adventure Camp, were honored recently as River Heroes, a new award jointly sponsored by The Boathouse restaurant and Friends of the James River Park.
As was written on the Friends' website, "with this annual contest, we hope to bring attention to the magnificent, scenic river that runs through Richmond and to those who have worked to make the James River a better place for both people and wildlife."
That certainly describes Ostrander and the people at Passages, both of whom I've featured numerous times in columns, but I didn't know much about Seven Hills until hearing about the award.
In their four years at Seven Hills, the fifth- through eighth-graders will spend a total of 32 instruction days in, on and along the river. But these aren't normal instruction days. They don't just take the classroom outside and open their books.
"Over the years, (society has) become more attentive to the testing side of learning," Dorsey said. "The inquiry-based model, where you ask questions and you ponder, is something that the river serves as a rich resource for."
Whatever the subject, there's a way for teachers to put it into to real-life context on the river.
Chris Prior, a history and social studies teacher and the school's River Days organizer, explained about teaching students the concept of water turbidity and using the Pythagorean theorem to measure the height of trees. For art class, they'll tell the kids to go out and find five natural objects to build a sculpture with. If an English teacher is getting the boys to write poetry, what better place than on a rock in the river?
The boys of Seven Hills also spend part of their time working with the James River Park System's head of maintenance, Peter Bruce. It's hard work maintaining trails, picking up trash and the like, but it's also a form of learning.
"Through the river service, the boys learn how to plant gardens, how to cultivate land, how to build a fence, how to handle tools and cut brush," Prior said.
In the first decade of River Days, 600 boys have performed more than 10,000 volunteer hours in the JRPS. But for Dorsey, the value of what River Days means to his students, both in instruction and inspiration, isn't easy to quantify.
"The quantity of time at the river is important because anybody can go to the river for an hour and pull off a cool exercise. Once you're doing your snacks and your lunch and you stay long enough to be really cold or really hot or really wet, you're entering a new kind of experience that, for today's adolescent, is not practiced elsewhere. It's an outlier experience."
After four years of learning-by-doing on the James, Prior said "Their horizons are a little broader and they can see a little farther."
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