By Zoe Huber-Weiss ’13, Staff Writer (On Location)

When I decided to study at The Mountain School in rustic Vermont, I thought it would be a quaint sojourn to a peaceful little farm, a scene straight out of a Robert Frost poem. I could not have been more wrong. In fact, I quickly found out that anyone who has ever uttered the words “peaceful quiet little farm” has clearly never stepped foot on one. Here at the Mountain School, I am always busy and always outside. I have to carry my heavy coat around with me wherever I go because it has become a common occurrence for my English teacher to say, “Okay guys, we’re gonna go on a hike today! Meet by the grain silo in two minutes!” In essence, my classes are completely integrated with the outside world in a way that I never thought possible.

The connection to the world around me has noticeably increased the depth of the connection to my studies. In my Environmental Science class, for example, the most recent quiz involved identifying sixteen different species of tree, which meant that in order to study, I had to walk around the Mountain School campus. Because I see the trees every day—on hikes, during chores, etc.—the information had already cemented itself in my mind. I am also more in touch with everything around me, perhaps owing to the fact that the Internet barely works and the phones here are from 1982. We read literature about the land, study its formation, and learn how to live with it as opposed to in it.

Although the same exact practices cannot work at Newark Academy simply because the environment isn’t the same, we can apply the same principles. Science classes could focus on New Jersey environments, English classes could happen outside, art classes could center on depicting the natural world that we see. Integration with the land allows for a deeper connection to classes and to the world around us, and as the “Global Academy,” we should be striving for exactly those goals.