Campus Voices
All School
Welcome to the first edition of The Link! This is our foray into electronic newsletters. With the simple push of a button we have retired The Notebook and ushered in a new age of parent communications. One of our goals is to deliver news to you in a more timely fashion. But another equally important goal is to give parents from one campus access to perspectives on educational issues from people on other campuses, too. In this issue of The Link, each of the campus directors joins me in sharing their insights and observations on these first few days.
There's an energy and excitement that comes with the start of any school year. But this year that energy has been particularly high and the excitement for faculty and students especially palpable. Upper School Director Jack Knapp captures in his letter the enthusiasm and pride all of us have for an extraordinary new building. Early in the design phase for the new US building and renovation project, I articulated the desire to create, with our new building, a heart to that campus. I'm stunned at how successfully our team translated that concept into reality.
Speaking of the heart of the matter, a defining characteristic of this School is the strength of the relationships that teachers form with their students. We have long known and sensed this is an important predictor of academic achievement and at our opening faculty meetings, speaker Bill Pollack affirmed this with a very startling finding.
Bill Pollack is an expert on boys' development. He is the Director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital and Assistant Clinical Professor (of Psychology) at Harvard. As a parent, you may know him as the author of Real Boys. Ironically, I first became aware of his work with boys when I was in a girls school. As an educator, I thought he was doing for the lives of boys what others (especially Carol Gillian and Mary Pipher) had done for girls. Believing that life has become more complicated for our boys and that the cultural messages they are sent increasingly confusing, I asked Dr. Pollack to speak to the faculty about boys, their development, and schooling.
From his early work, three things struck me: (1) how powerful the fear of shame is for boys; (2) their need to have the freedom to express their full range of emotion and capabilities (something not just devalued but discouraged by our culture); and (3) the observation that we live in a culture that constantly expects boys to disconnect from other people, to stand on their own two feet, when what they most seek are genuine relationships with others.
Schools can be tough on boys. The youngest among them need about five recesses a day. Lacking that, they need classrooms that are active. Normal neurological development follows different path and timetable from their girl counterparts and the ability to read usually comes 14 to 18 months later. That's hard, especially if the culture around you places too much emphasis on when you read and not enough attention to your interests and abilities. This is one reason I'm proud of the collaborative work taking place with the teachers and reading specialist in the Morse Building. Pre-literacy skills and interests are as important to us as the advent of decoding words and assigning meaning to paragraphs.
So, here's the startling fact. And it's one that links Pollack's early work on relationship with his more current work on schooling: For boys, achievement in 4th grade is directly linked to the relationship they had with their teacher in kindergarten!
We know relationships matter. Our teachers are excited to have the students back. Year after year, they report that it is the relationships they form with students at BB&N that makes the profession so rewarding and each year special.
(A follow-up note. Dr Pollack's remarks were very well received by the faculty. We hope to have him back for more in-depth, grade specific conversations with faculty later this year.)
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