WINTER 2010Bruce Haines
Head of School
Friends School is off to a wonderful start this fall! On a warm sunny day in September, 185 students, fresh scrubbed, in new clothes, weepy parents with cameras in tow, arrived at our doors bouncing and running, glad to be with their friends again. The joy and energy was palpable!
Special events this fall track a theme that is spot-on for a Friends School. So far we have celebrated International Day of Peace, the Monarch Butterfly Parade, Middle School World’s Fair, and Middle School United Nations Day. Soon we will celebrate El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. This is the Mexican holiday to recall and celebrate those who have come before and are now dead. For this we may even engage is some service to help clean up the graveyard.
In conjunction with these internationally themed events, the query at the lower school meeting for worship this morning was: “We live in a world filled with many different cultures. Why is it important to reach out to people who seem very different from ourselves?” Out of the silence students shared many different kinds of things we can learn from someone not like ourselves: customs, culture, food ways, language, problem-solving skills, and so forth.
Each of these events helps our students think about living beyond themselves. Beyond what they and their immediate family need and want. What do others in the world require from us? How can we make a positive and peaceful difference in our family, school, neighborhood, town, state, country or world? How can we learn to hold a dream and start to make it come true?
These lessons are not limited to what other people require of us. Following the Monarch Parade through campus, down the meetinghouse drive and back in past the Cope Building, different classes took turns releasing mature monarchs that had transformed from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly in their classrooms. Even I got misty-eyed as I too waved goodbye to a monarch rising above the crowd, realizing that it was embarking on a 2,000-plus mile journey to Northern Mexico, where it would hang in a tree for two months with thousands of its cousins, before it would hopefully return to us to lay eggs and begin the process all over again! How did these beautiful creatures evolve into such a complex life form? How could each butterfly possibly survive the journey? How could I have such firm belief that the butterfly I was waving to would come back to me, or at least to this area? These are mysteries we all need to ponder, not just our students.
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Last modified:
Friday, November 19, 2010 at 03:45 AM
