alternative learning environments: the library cafe
Housing Works Bookstore Café, Crosby Street, NYC
Nothing puts us to sleep faster than a difficult book. Studying. Trying to understand something difficult. Study circles, obliging and mentally superior friends, discussions and debates, and yes, a nice beverage or snack, these are the answer but one rarely offered at high schools. Study halls however, are a long-standing high school institution, and the library cafe is a powerful way to make them more productive. Informal, resource-rich and caffeinated or not, it beats sitting at home alone to get that homework done. For those of you scandalized by the thought of coffee stained resources, we suggest that heavily used and margin annotated and graffiti marred books have more to offer than the pristine volume nobody reads. We always appreciated the notes in our used textbooks from last year's students, and often learned a lot from them.
Lamont Library Café, Harvard University