(3/2002) - When I have read the Little House on the Prairie series to my three children, I find that in Wilder’s day students were obligated to demonstrate to the entire town community mastery of their subjects: history, geography, math, literature. This demonstration took place in public and was a great civic celebration and cause for pride. The stakes, consequently, were elevated for both the student and the teacher. The students were evaluated in front of friend and family, neighbor and mentor; implicit in the success of the student’s demonstration was the student’s commitment to and passion for the subjects and the effectiveness of the teacher’s own passion and commitment.

A special graduation requirement of Asheville School holds its students accountable to a similar culminating experience: the Senior Demonstration. The Senior Demonstration, or Demo, is a rite of passage that allows students the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of written, oral, analytical, and research skills—skills essential for college (and work or life) success. Students explore a topic of particular interest, whether chosen from a provided list of over 150 topics, or a self-designed project. To fulfill the requirements of the Demo, students write two analytical papers, the second of which requires the use of secondary sources, and maintain a reading journal. The project culminates with an oral defense of the work before a panel of faculty.

Topics in recent years have ranged from study of such traditional writers as Dante, Shakespeare, Austen, and Lawrence to more contemporary authors such as Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, Allan Gurganus, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Several students have designed interdisciplinary projects combining interests in, for example, literature and medicine or illness and death. Other topics have ranged from the Manhattan Project to Relativity, from medieval music to the blues and even punk music.

Given the range of possible topics, the self-directed aspect of this program, and the rigorous, collaborative work with the faculty sponsor, the School’s truly gifted students generally enjoy the Demo process the most. Although the Demo challenges all of the School’s college prep students to meet a high standard of achievement, those students with the strongest passions and academic interests working in conjunction with curious and engaging faculty members often enjoy the greatest degree of intellectual growth and exchange.

The expansiveness of the topics allows a student an opportunity to become something of an authority or “expert” in an area. Students have interviewed writers for their papers incorporating secondary materials and have been able to send their papers to current writers for feedback and constructive criticism. For example, a few years back one student of mine with a particular interest in punk music had used several works by Greil Marcus as part of his readings. I had asked him to look at the writings of Marcus because of my own enthusiasm for Marcus’s ability to limn the connections between the Sex Pistols, dada poetry, and the ’68 French student and worker uprisings. Indeed, I had interviewed Marcus when his collected essays (Ranters and Crowd Pleasers) on punk music appeared, so I was eager to have my student’s reactions to Marcus’s writing inform his thinking about punk music. My student sent his first paper directly to Marcus, who responded that he found the paper “very fine,” although he did suggest the paper “could be better if [the student] trusted himself more and quoted others less.”

Two years ago I worked with a student with an interest in both literature and science, so we developed a topic that explored literary connections to disease in such pieces as, for examples, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Sontag’s work on illness and metaphor. I had also suggested that the student include Allan Gurganus’s novel, Plays Well With Others, an artistic coming-of-age novel set in New York City in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the 80s, knowing that she might have an opportunity to interview Gurganus as a source. We sent Gurganus a copy of the student’s analysis of Plays Well’s use of metaphor in the context of her other readings, and, after reading the student’s paper and after her interview with him at his Hillsborough home, Gurganus gave her in appreciation an as yet unpublished story he had written about a doctor treating a midwestern town during the cholera epidemic of 1850. Thus, Asheville School students are provided an opportunity to develop unique, interdisciplinary, and personal approaches to topics.

The Demo creates an intellectually charged environment until year’s end, allowing students the freedom and latitude to explore a topic of interest throughout the spring semester. The Demo also fosters close intellectual partnerships between students and faculty. Most students enjoy the process of discussing the readings with their faculty sponsors.& A student often works through multiple drafts of a paper with the sponsor before submitting the final copy. This connection with the faculty member as a fellow “investigator” creates a collaborative approach to education and to learning that will serve students well in college and in life.

Finally, students engage in a public discussion of their topics in a year-end colloquy. Interested seniors join faculty, as well as younger students, to share with other classmates and with faculty their work from their final months at Asheville School. Students question peers who have studied Freud and Jung or the poetry of Pablo Neruda. This give and take session is often one of the most exciting aspects of the semester’s work, a chance for the pure intellectual excitement to play out without the need for assessment or evaluation.

The Demo has engaged students even beyond their time here. A student’s examination of disease served her at a personal level when she suffered Hodgkin’s disease later in college. After successful treatment, she returned to college and undertook an independent, interdisciplinary course of study following the same topic explored in her senior Demo. Her work on the Demo provided a stable framework for dealing with her own personal health, served as a course of academic inquiry in her undergraduate major, and led her to her current career interest in pediatric oncology as she finishes medical school—high stakes, indeed. No stronger public statement or example is possible. She is one exemplary demonstration of what such a program may entail for curious and committed students. Even the citizens of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous town would be proud.