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FALL 2000
Drew Smith
Head of School
Summer is always a hopeful time at school. The hectic pace of daily teaching gives way to imagining and dreaming about both the next school year and the school year that will come twenty years from now. To be sure, the classroom walls need to be repainted, supplies need to be ordered, and the campus repaired to make way for students and teachers in September. But it is the dreaming and the imagining that capture the hearts and minds of faculty and staff over these three summer months.
Much of our imagining this summer centers around welcoming: welcoming students into their new classrooms, welcoming new families and faculty members into our community, and welcoming a new classroom building to our campus. This welcoming that we imagine takes place for every child at the school. Not just welcoming them by their name, or sending them a note of welcome over the summer, but welcoming who they are, in their ideas, in their aspirations, and in their expressions.
Planning to teach children from the starting point of welcoming is not easy work. There are no prepackaged “welcoming” lesson plans that can be purchased and replicated for each child, no textbook series that covers “welcoming” in all of its aspects and component parts. In many ways, it is impossible to plan. How can a teacher know exactly when or where the spirit of a child will reveal itself? And how can a teacher plan to respond in order to help cultivate that spirit?
Queries like these guide our summer planning in a necessary way. If we are not welcoming of children in a way that helps children to know and explore themselves within a community of peers and adults, who must take this same journey themselves, then we cannot even begin to approach what can be called a Friends education.
For my part, I have a few interviews left this summer to fill all of our teaching posts. And the central part of each interview will be to explore these queries with candidates. For teachers and principals, these queries will become central to choosing new novels for their classes to read or new projects to undertake. And for all of us, these queries will recur each summer in order that our school continues to annually welcome the beginning of each school year at our Friends school.
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Last modified:
Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:19 AM
