Fun at Work

Dear Families,

Just below the eighth grade classrooms on the Bleeker Street side of the building, there is a small dedication plaque in honor of Rank Smith who followed Elisabeth Irwin as the school’s second director. You have likely walked past the plaque many times, but may not have read its words. It says, “Where school is fun at work.” Simple, but profound.

At our beginning-of-the-year meetings, the Middle School faculty talked about this quote and its relevance to our teaching practice. For us, the use of the word “fun” pointed to something deeper and more purposeful than just having a good time. A recent article in Educational Leadership by Steven Wolk explores similar ground as it examines the idea of schools as “joyful” learning communities. For Wolk, joy is the “emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something good or satisfying.” This “something” can produce moments of unexpected or easy joy, but the pursuit of joy most often requires a fair amount of dedicated and committed work. Seen through this lens, schools that are a joyful places are ones where “the hearts and minds of children and young adults are wide open to the wonders of learning and the fascinating complexities of life.” I find LREI to be just such a place; I hope you do too.

In our meeting, I asked the members of the Middle School faculty to think about some of the ways that they’d like to bring more joy into our work with your kids and with each other this year. Here is a collection of some of their responses:

  • Help students to discover that the creative process is the learning process
  • Ensure that learning process is safe, meaningful and personal
  • Create opportunities for students to explore literary genres that interest them
  • Continue to explore the ways in which math is embedded in other subjects and in day-to-day experience
  • Allow students to engage in independent inquiry that is driven by their own interests
  • Connect student interests to key skills and concepts that are part of the curriculum
  • Provide more authentic opportunities for students to publish and share work
  • Allow students to build on skills developed in PE activities by having them create their own games that we can then play
  • Make sure that students know that they have a voice and that their ideas are valued
  • Use student input to help shape projects and activities
  • Let a sense of excitement enter into our investigations
  • Use student-built models and machines to explore and discover how the natural world works
  • Connect students’ science understandings to a better understanding of how things are interconnected
  • Discover the joy of community service and giving back
  • Allow students to be teachers
  • Make sure that students are really getting to live their learning experience
  • Challenge students to explore the range of places where learning can take place
  • Make more room for laughter
  • Provide a sufficiently wide range of “tools” for students to use as they play with ideas
  • Make sure that students have “time to tinker”
  • Connect language learning to real lived experience
  • Engage parents in the learning process with their children
  • Make our learning spaces comfortable
  • Shift from working with to exploring with students
  • Help students to discover themselves as active citizens within and beyond the LREI community

Taken individually and collectively, these statements provide clear evidence of our commitment to a program where “school is fun at work.” I hope that you were able to sense this potential for joyful work in your meeting with your child’s advisor and in your child’s comments on her/his first few days of school. I encourage you to join us in this on-going inquiry by spending time as a family thinking about ways that you can help to make this a truly joyful year.

In this spirit of collaboration, the members of the Middle School faculty are looking forward to seeing you this Tuesday evening at 6:30PM for our Middle School Curriculum Night. At the event, you will get to meet your child’s teachers who will provide you with an overview of their classes and their class expectations. We hope that all of you will be able to attend as Curriculum Night helps to provide a meaningful frame for the work that we will undertake together over the course of the year.

Finally, the Middle School marked the 9/11 anniversary by attending and participating in the September Concert at Washington Square Park. The concert was coordinated by High School music teacher Vin Scialla and featured performances by the High School Jazz Band and Chorus and high school and middle school bands. All of the participants took part in a community singing of the Beatles “Let It Be.” In their advisory groups, students also had time to reflect on the significance of this day. Their comments were thoughtful as was their participation at the event.

Be well,
Mark

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