Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Spectacular: How To Make a Kid Who Can Build a Boat

Honestly, Instapundit finds some of the most incredible gems on the internet.

This story really moved me. 

"Adam Green, straw-haired and earnest but with a rebellious streak running through him, enrolled at Bronx Science in 1987, one of the few New York City schoolchildren to be accepted among the 25,000 who apply each year. He hated it. He transferred to a private school and hated that too. He felt he was getting a curriculum, not an education."

"This was the best society had to offer, and it didn't do much for me at all," he says. "I thought, screw this. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do again." During college a teacher friend who worked with an environmental educational group asked Green if he would volunteer to help some students build a boat. It sounded like fun, and in doing it, Green noticed that the kids picked up some math skills in the designing and building of a boat, skills they hadn't gotten from textbooks or standardized tests."

"In 1996, Green founded Rocking the Boat."

"Green soon realized that his modest after-school boatbuilding program might double as a form of therapy for these very poor, sometimes deeply troubled kids. This was wonderful in theory, but Green wasn't trained as a therapist.

"In the first year alone, three different girls told him on different occasions that they had been sexually abused by their mothers' boyfriends in their own homes."

(Always the boyfriend. Women sell their souls and the safety of their children for the boyfriend...)

"I thought, okay, I officially got in way over my head," he says. Rocking the Boat soon hired its first social worker."

Read the whole thing.

It's absolutely delightful.