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Pastel Thinking. Last year Los Alamos got a new superintendent, F. Robert Wegner, who gave it to them with bells on. Puckish Bob Wegner, 49, a man with shock-white hair and a youthful spirit, had once started a near-rebellion in Roslyn, Long Island, when he set his students to baking nut bread to teach them arithmetic (TIME, March 21, 1938). He went to Los Alamos from the Navy, where, as a lieutenant commander, he had bossed radio and rocket schools...
...first thing Bob Wegner did was to repaint the drab classrooms green, blue and yellow, because he said the soft pastels helped students to think better. Wegner also added music, art, commercial courses, home economics and industrial arts to the study program, introduced self-government in the classrooms. At Los Alamos, teacher and students sit in a semicircle, with one of the students acting as "chairman" of the classroom discussion (it's less autocratic, Wegner says, than to have the teacher out in front "dictating" to his class...
Superintendent Wegner also "clubbed" (i.e., combined) such courses as English and social sciences in 100-minute periods, teaching both at the same time. Last week the class held a miniature Moscow conference, with boys & girls acting as foreign ministers and arguing the case of each country...
...Juice. Superintendent Wegner was stumped for a while when he tried to equip his science courses. Though it was next door to the world's most fabulous science labs, Los Alamos School could not get any laboratory equipment. Says Wegner: "It was like not being able to buy orange juice in Tampa...
...TIME, March 21 I read that Superintendent Wegner [of Roslyn, L. I., whose "progressive" system of education was recently favorably reviewed by the New York State Education Department] says "in making nut bread the pupils learn to add, subtract & multiply." A similar method of education was used in England in the time of Charles Dickens. In Nicholas Nickleby, the schoolmaster, Squeers, gave the verb "weed" to be spelled, defined and conjugated by the class and then sent them out to weed the garden...