Chase - November '17
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“Thanks for the warning”, Chase responds, with a sly grin, every time someone announces they are leaving the room, but will be coming back soon. This is often followed up with his trademark observation – “fabulous”. In a place where everyone takes great pride in their word play skills, Chase is always happy to engage in any witty repartee.
Halloween is Chase’s favorite season, yes, for him it is not one single day, but a month-long celebration of all things dark, evil, and scary. He specializes in spooking his friends at DRC and making particularly bad puns, repeatedly. His entire collection of Halloween decorations resided at DRC for the month of October - with plastic rats (which squeaked), skeleton garlands, fake spider webs, and Styrofoam tombstones lining the stairway. This morning (two weeks after Halloween), he was wearing a half mask from his Halloween costume, along with his customary leather jacket, black hoodie, and dark sunglasses, when I met him at the St Lawrence County bus which he rides from Gouverneur, every day. When I asked why, he said, “I wanted to see how people on the bus would react.” |
I knew Chase was going to flourish at DRC, when I first met him, in August, to write his IHIP (his learning plan for the year). He was full of ideas on how he could fill his buckets. (At DRC we refer to each of the subjects as buckets and students get to fill each of their buckets with the things that they are most interested in learning about.)
As you can probably imagine, Chase’s are filled with fascinating themes such as rituals, tragedy, super-heroes, and villains, as well as the psychology of fictional characters. He is currently researching whether super-hero’s powers could actually be real. Not surprisingly, he has traced the history of Halloween back to its Celtic origins. He is also studying the rituals of demonology and has instigated a class about religion – to learn about the history as well as the differences and similarities of various theological beliefs from around the world.
Back in August, when I told Chase about our “Big History” class that covers everything from the big bang to now – he decided that he wanted to create a panoramic time line mural in the classroom to depict those hundreds of thousands of years. He researched the Big Bang to see if there was a visual representation. He then got sidetracked when another student told him about the Fibonacci sequence – consequently our depiction of the formation of the universe not only looks a bit like a Fibonacci spiral, it also has the made-up language from Star Trek captioning that panel. His version of the milky way and solar system are presented with similar, shall we say, creative license.
Chase fits in perfectly at Deep Root Center. Besides the fact we appreciate that he brings his dog Bella to visit every Friday, his innate love of learning inspires others to seek out their passions and his droll observations are a perfect complement to the never-ending daily comedic routines that keep us all laughing.
As you can probably imagine, Chase’s are filled with fascinating themes such as rituals, tragedy, super-heroes, and villains, as well as the psychology of fictional characters. He is currently researching whether super-hero’s powers could actually be real. Not surprisingly, he has traced the history of Halloween back to its Celtic origins. He is also studying the rituals of demonology and has instigated a class about religion – to learn about the history as well as the differences and similarities of various theological beliefs from around the world.
Back in August, when I told Chase about our “Big History” class that covers everything from the big bang to now – he decided that he wanted to create a panoramic time line mural in the classroom to depict those hundreds of thousands of years. He researched the Big Bang to see if there was a visual representation. He then got sidetracked when another student told him about the Fibonacci sequence – consequently our depiction of the formation of the universe not only looks a bit like a Fibonacci spiral, it also has the made-up language from Star Trek captioning that panel. His version of the milky way and solar system are presented with similar, shall we say, creative license.
Chase fits in perfectly at Deep Root Center. Besides the fact we appreciate that he brings his dog Bella to visit every Friday, his innate love of learning inspires others to seek out their passions and his droll observations are a perfect complement to the never-ending daily comedic routines that keep us all laughing.
