Thank you to the members of the Parents Association’s Faculty / Staff Appreciation (FSA) Committee, and to all of their helpers, for last week’s incredibly generous daily “appreciations.” We are grateful for the treats and for the heartfelt messages decorating the lobbies. Thank you for the delicious snacks throughout the school year, as well. They are always a pleasant surprise.
I join the FSA in expressing gratitude for all that LREI’s teachers and administrative staff do each day. Creating our progressive program and encouraging and supporting an involved student community is challenging work and LREI’s teachers excel at it. Your children, our students, spend their days in the school’s classrooms with adults who model the reflection, collaboration, creativity and dedication that we ask of our students. Outside of the classrooms, teachers have additional roles as advisors, coaches, and directors, for example, adding dimensions to their relationships with the students and deepening the opportunities for long lasting learning.
The administrative staff who, collectively, are the engine that keeps the school functioning every day can go unnoticed, mostly due to how smoothly LREI runs. We so appreciate your deep commitment to the school’s work with families and your dedication to managing the school’s affairs and to making sure that the institution runs like a finely calibrated machine.
And to all, while you are expert at your particular area of responsibility, know that it is the ways in which you open up the world for the children, the ways in which you model what it means to be a growing, learning citizen that truly inspires LREI’s students to be their best, to take risks, to contribute, and to succeed.
I have been reading a book entitled, A Schoolmaster of the Great City, A Progressive Educator’s Pioneering Vision for Urban Schools, by Angelo Patri. This insightful, timeless text, written in 1917, is Patri’s memoir of his days as a pioneering teacher and principal in the New York City public schools. In one passage he wrote of a principal for whom he worked and who was particularly inspiring to the author as a young professional. This principal, unnamed in the book, and working in the first years of the last century, says to his teachers, Patri among them, “’You must not think too much of arithmetic, and rules and dates and examinations, for these are not teaching; the children don’t grow because of them. They grow because of their contact with you, the best that you know and feel.’”
We know that the children do indeed grow due to their exposure to arithmetic, as well as to other subjects. However, we understand this notion to refer to the fact that learning, at its most effective and longest lasting, is relational and is deepened and strengthened not by connections to the content alone, but by meaningful interactions between students and teachers, and students and their schoolmates, and by these relationships being a tool through which children connect to the world around them. Thank you to all who work with the students and who make this work possible, to all who take the time to create the relationships that make our students’ interactions with the world the long lasting, transformative moments that they are.