"Snow, Confirmed: A Project Realized," by Mr. Bisson

During a recent weeknight, I left the snug warmth of my apartment to open one of the academic buildings after hours.  I felt tired.  It had been a long Monday, and I was beginning to rally my students for a two-week push to spring break.  Still, two of my guys needed to get into the building, so at 7:50 p.m. I got into my car and drove down the hill.

Two young men, James and Ben, were expecting me.  They had requested permission from their dorm heads to miss a portion of evening study hall to come down and work on their Edge project.  When I pulled up in my car, I saw that they were already busy.  They had attached the hoses to the spout, and once we greeted each other and gained access to the building, they began to move their parts outside.

The Snowmaker.  The brainchild of months of planning and collaboration.  It had started when James - overhearing Ben's work on a terrain park - mentioned the equipment needed:  a pressure washer, an air compressor, a fan, and some nozzles.  "It's easy!" he had said.  Not long after the conversation, the two had presented a schematic for the device that - when it came down to it - looked like a combination of an oversized hairdryer and a cannon.  They had described the interaction between the three major components, assuring the Edge Team that they would get the apparatus up and running.  We agreed to support them, and with that, they were off and running.

That night the Snowmaker emerged, piece by piece.  Onto the quad James brought forth a barrel that a friend had painstakingly transported from his local town.  One would think it an ordinary drum if not for one of the School's logos (double "K's") spraypainted on as well as the fan positioned at one end.  Ben led the air compressor outside, spurring memories of the two men crouched over the device pleading for more horsepower.  Finally, the two summoned their pride and joy:  the pressure washer.  Having realized that the device exceeded their financial means, James and Ben had begun a GoFundMe campaign a month earlier in an attempt to raise the $850 necessary to fund the component.  They saw small movement at the beginning of their drive, but with regular parental and faculty promotion of the profile, the two had made their way up to $585.  They decided to foot the bill for the remaining funds (with the idea of conducting a final push during the spring).  It was with no small sense of gravitas, then, that the two men brought that last piece of machinery outside.

With the device assembled at last, James and Ben flipped the switch.  As a mechanical droning enveloped us, the machine began to create elaborate clouds in the air.  The water particles danced in the mild, late winter wind.  James and Ben scurried between the plume and the machine, alternating between adjusting the rate of flow on the pressure washer and nozzles and feeling the water with their hands.  Measuring the temperature against the 39 degree air, sure, but also reveling in the feel of the spray.  As a boy might touch a sprinkler in summer.

At a crucial moment, James decided to pull out all of the stops on the nozzles.  The cloud began to writhe as the plume grew more furious, and James, Ben, and I touched the water more often to gauge its temperature.  We strained our eyes against the darkness to try to spot flakes either in the air or on the grass, but we could see neither.  It was with anxiety, then, that we knelt and turned the lights of our phones toward the ground.

And that's when we saw them.

Crystals.

Not the delicate snowflakes one sees after a storm.  Nor inches of accumulation.  But crystals nonetheless.  Crystals, alien-shaped and strange, gripping the blades of grass across a wide spread of the ground.

It was working.  The boys had done it.

The reaction I saw in James and Ben will stay with me for the rest of my life.  As they whooped and bro-hugged first each other and then me, I felt a profound moment of joy and tenderness.  And I thought back to a topic I had researched through my PLN but only really understood at that moment.  Part of the reason why students disengage from school, and part of the reason why there is such alarm surrounding education (alarm to inject more rigor, to reform it, to revolutionize it, to hold more individuals accountable) is the frequent lack of real stakes in schools.  For students, test scores and grades are abstract data points with no lasting, concrete bearing on their lives, their problems, their aspirations.  On one end of the spectrum, we educators and administrators step in and create surrogates for genuine concern (partly using the incentives and challenges that reach us at our own levels in the bureaucracy).  On the other end (on the more humanizing end, I think), we educators create new opportunities for our learners where they can feel invested in non-standardized work.  Where they transcend abstract data to the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of work that matters.  In allowing those opportunities to emerge and our students to control them, we not only prepare our kids for real projects; we prepare them for the turbulence of real life.

No other moment than James, Ben, and I hugging could have brought home that lesson more earnestly.  A thought experiment yielded to a schematic that, in turn, yielded to a machine that, in turn, led to the water vapor that surrounded us.  James and Ben's work constituted the success of a months-long process of design thinking and iteration, of entrepreneurial spirit and industriousness.  And those tiny, alien crystals clinging to blades of grass were the evidence of their achievement.

Though I left at 7:50 tired and worn down, I returned to my apartment at 9:35, my hair disheveled and my glasses foggy, beaming.  And that smile returned when I pulled up to campus the next morning.  For among the mud and sodden brown grass that reigned supreme in that 40 degree weather, an anomaly - a small patch of fresh, white snow - remained.