SPRING 2008Drew Smith
Headmaster
The following excerpt is from the December 2007 issue of Notes for Parents, a monthly publication of The Friends School:
You may recall that on December 10 we experienced a very light snowfall, the first of the season. At some point that afternoon I found myself staring through my office window, watching T. Peter lead a group of fifth grade students on a walk. I imagine that Peter was pointing to plants, insects, and birds, describing their characteristics so that students might identify any of these things on their own someday. When I asked Peter about the walk the next day he told me he didn’t want his students to miss the chance to walk in the snow.
Two former students who also walked with Peter are Princeton University students. One, Danielle Ponzio class of 2007, rowed with the crew team, and I see on the university’s website that she was awarded a fellowship this past summer based on her application entitled (get ready): Saccharomyces cervisiae DNA Mismatch Repair and MSH2 Regulation in Response to DNA Damaging Agents: Identification of Regulatory Promoter Elements and Transcription Factors. I don’t know what it is either; I do know that it has something to do with her major, Molecular Biology.
The other is current Princeton student Jessica Kloss. Jessica is a pole vaulter on the track team and is majoring in a kind of physics with which I am not familiar. She visited school earlier this year and was excited to tell me about the track team’s trip to China to compete against Chinese athletes from several of that country’s important sports universities. She was accompanied on her visit to Friends School by her boyfriend (nice guy) who was from France.
I am always stuck by the impact that a Friends School teacher can have on our students. In part, it’s about what they’ve studied and know. More importantly, it’s about sharing that knowledge person to person with our students. We all share with them the excitement we feel about Shakespeare, or Spanish language, or geology and botany, or yoga, or mathematics. And because Quakers so deeply value the divine spark within all young people, the most important task of every teacher at our school is to develop a deeply respectful relationship with their students’ hearts and minds.
I don’t know if your child will be a Princeton student someday. I do know, however, that they will have a walk, like Jessica and Danielle before them, with T. Peter in the snow. They will know what it feels like to develop healthy relationships with their teachers that go beyond the numbers; relationships that will inspire future academic achievement, and instill within them the confidence to know that they can succeed.
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008 at 11:04 PM
