Tom Pike was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where he graduated from Eastern High School. He studied engineering and philosophy at Stanford University and as a graduate student at Princeton, trained as a teacher and educator, and returned in 1967 as Assistant Headmaster of St. Francis School. In 1977, he became founding Headmaster of St. Francis High School. He retired in 2003 and continues to reside in Louisville.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………….. 9
Author’s Note ……………………………………………………………………. 9
Senior Prank ……………………………………………………………………. 11
F.O.I.L. …………………………………………………………………………… 19
Fools Friday ……………………………………………………………………. 28
Third and Broadway ………………………………………………………… 49
Tree of Life …………………………………………………………………….. 61
Sudden Death ………………………………………………………………….. 64
Second Chances ………………………………………………………………. 71
The Sign Out Policy …………………………………………………………. 75
The New Lunar Society ……………………………………………………. 83
Vinegar and Oil ……………………………………………………………….. 90
Recovery ………………………………………………………………………… 97
Discomfort ……………………………………………………………………. 102
Boundaries ……………………………………………………………………. 110
A Chick Course ……………………………………………………………… 116
Questionable Acceptance ………………………………………………… 124
LEO ……………………………………………………………………………… 132
The “N” Word ……………………………………………………………….. 140
Esther …………………………………………………………………………… 149
The Counterfeit Caper …………………………………………………….. 154
Senior Projects ………………………………………………………………. 167
The Sacred ……………………………………………………………………. 177
About the Author ……………………………………………………………. 184

Julia Brennan, 9th grade class of St Francis, 1972-73
Comments on Fools Friday, An Educator’s Journey, by Tom Pike

Tom Pike’s book is a bit of a trip down memory lane, back to a magical year in my life at St Francis School in the Bluegrass Country of Kentucky. I still smile and ask whoever is in the car to slow down, look at the giant fabulous abacus and low geometric buildings. That’s where I piled out of the bus everyday after a very long ride (when I learned word for word every top 100 songs of 1972-73), excited and eager, to be greeted by a Falstaffian figure – white haired, suited, with a booming bass voice welcoming us. Mr Cayce! He reminded me of a circus conductor, with a huge laugh and languid lyrical drawling language. I was sort of overwhelmed by him, but I knew my mother adored him. Her friend Frank, brother or son of the famous mystic, a visionary, a raconteur……It was their friendship that landed my sister Adik (means ‘little one’ in Indonesian) and me at St Francis on several occasions while visiting my grandmother in Louisville. The deal was we would share our ‘exotic’ and worldly life by doing classical Thai dancing performances and chanting our Thai multiplication tables for our school chums. It wasn’t embarrassing; it was just life, as we performed for all my parents dinner parties. Still today, an unknown person will come up to me and ask if I was that girl that did funny dancing at St Francis….

This was my school. But it wasn’t school like I’d ever experienced before. The walls were brightly painted and special balcony-like classrooms rose up from the blue-carpeted floors. You could see everyone from up in one of these pods. There was artwork everywhere and the concrete was soft and warm. (I learned from Mr Pike’s book that this was an intentional part of visual literacy and open education.) My 9th grade year was transformative. I encountered math through 3D puzzles, colorful Lucite logs, and a gentle man named Mr Gander. I journeyed through a year of ‘Utopia’ with Mr Hines, chill soft spoken and longhaired. Mr Hines treated us like adults, or at least more than any other grown up in my life. He challenged us to think and talk to each other about philosophical topics like loss, hope, dreams, war…. I learned about Quakers and Shakers, rebellions and religious freedom, Funk and the Black Panthers. Sometimes I didn’t even feel like I was learning. But I was. I’d been in six schools prior, and I was a wild teenager. St Francis anchored me, gave me confidence, assured me that I wasn’t an outlier, and it stimulated a curiosity and love for school and teachers that continued through college. At the end of the year Mr. Hines gave each of us a large black and white photo of our class perched on and around a big old Ford van and printed lyrics of Crosby Stills Nash “Teach Your Children Well”. I’ve treasured these mementoes forever and seen the same photo today in other classmate’s homes.

Reading Mr Pike’s book took me behind the scenes to understand and appreciate the thoughtful and gentle, reciprocal approach that each and every teacher embodied. It explained some of the inspirations for St Francis, and Mr Cayce’s and Mr Pike’s determination and vision to create a nurturing experiential individualized way of learning everyday. He acknowledged the present and future human in each student and created constructive pathways to engage onward in the world. While I did not attend the HS downtown, the stories of Mr Pike’s implementation of that school, his respectful relationships with students, were there in our middle school. What struck me is what a challenge it is to give young people a meaningful and useful education, navigating parents, politics, religions, racism, and adolescent rebellion and agency. I deeply respect Mr Pike’s thoughtful approach to solving school problems, digging deep into a child’s history, seeking counsel from other mentors and community leaders, finding extraordinary teachers, and taking risks to do the ethical thing – the best thing for each student and collectively for the school body. Stunning fact – almost all students took at least one physics course because of
an amazing teacher.

Through his stories and ‘case studies’, I learned how thoughtful he was to each student, honoring their opinions, strengths, shortcomings, and devising solutions that met each person’s needs. He was constantly learning himself and applying those lessons and discoveries to the school. And he had overwhelming challenges – the suicides one boy whom I recall, personally rocked the school and families, still do today. Counterfeiting money and dealing with the Feds – only Mr Pike could have navigated that bringing the kids through whole, with a deeper understanding of actions and consequences. I know how most other schools would have handled them, and young people, demoralized, rejected, lost, start in a cycle of hopelessness. This is all around us today.

Mr Pike’s ‘lessons’ are a blueprint for goodness in daily life – micro and macro. He quotes Diana Eck as the last line of the book and it sums up his approach at St Francis: through dialogue, both critically and self-critically,…..begin to live with maturity and integrity in the world house. If only our governments, agencies, churches, non profit organizations –invested with a responsibility to support society at large – were as conscious of acknowledging the humanity in each of us, striving for resolution and compromise, championing peaceful and non violent outcomes, remembering to be kind and generous, constructively discussing and applying important lessons of history today…. We wouldn’t be sending cluster bombs to Ukraine in 2023, we might have more robust and compassionate care for the elderly and people with disabilities. We might have more consensuses in seeing our world as a collective, interconnected and fragile, with so much life to protect and nourish. Thank you Mr. Pike.