When we were researching various schools, I created a mega-spreadsheet on the curriculums and reading lists of every great private school in the country. Any course description or book name on a school’s website or catalog went in. By the end the document was over 150 pages.

We also spent weeks in schools like Saint Ann’s, Brearley, Dalton, and St. Alban’s in DC.

I met Betsey in early 2011, when I was still in graduate school at NYU. Betsey has served as poetry editor at The New Yorker, published criticism in The New York Times, and taught for years at Sarah Lawrence and Barnard College, but she started her career at the Storefront school in Harlem, and her passion for K-12 education eventually brought her to Ascend. When we first met, I not only knew I wanted to join her project immediately, I also realized I had just found a new model for how to be in the world (Betsey’s also a really great Mom).

Unlike most charter schools, Ascend does not co-locate, in large part because Steven has such high standards for his school spaces.

This was one of the first lesson sequences Betsey Schmidt and I wrote when we began developing the Humanities program together in early 2011.

Students start with Ovid’s version of the myth, then look at multiple painted representations (including Brueghel), and end with Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams' “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”

Here are some of the questions we ask during this lesson sequence:

• “Who shows hubris in this myth—Icarus, Daedalus, both?”
• “How would you describe the relationship between Icarus and Daedalus?”
• “What are the shepherd and plowman doing in the painting as Icarus falls? How is it different from what Ovid writes in lines 39-45?”
• “How can two artists paint such different paintings about the same myth?”
• “Do you think that Auden and Breughel have the same idea about Icarus?"

One of the eureka moments as we developed and eventually as I taught the lesson – framing these very old stories as stories about families. When you ask students if they ever felt their father was too distracted to pay attention to them, they begin to understand and connect very quickly.