Autumn Events

Dear Families,

I hope that this note finds you well. A quick all-community thank you to the adults and students who made the Halloween Fair such a success. I am already working on next year’s costume. Really.

A few autumn notes this week:

November brings our first theatrical production of the year. This year’s high school play is The Crucible, by Arthur Miller (LREI father and grandfather). The cast and crew have been working very hard and are looking forward to sharing the fruits of their labor with the community. There are three shows – Thursday, 11/7 at 6:00 p.m. and Friday, 11/8 and Saturday, 11/9 at 7:00 p.m., all at 40 Charlton Street. The show is fairly long and quite complex and likely best for middle and high school students. Click here to hear director Joan Jubett sharing some thoughts about the production.

Secondly, November brings the first round of family conferences for the year. Conferences will be held on Friday, 11/8 and Monday, 11/11 for the lower school and the middle school and Monday only for the high school. If you have not received the link to sign up for conferences, please sign into LREI Connect, the link can be found on the Resource Board.

Conferences are important moments, as evidenced by our allocating four days of school for these gatherings and by your making time in your busy schedules to engage with your child’s teacher(s). It is important to remember, however, that these conversations, while quite important, are only part of the process. They are a checkpoint, a snapshot, not a determination of who your child will be forevermore, likely not even who your child will be six months from now. Conferences are a catalyst for future work and conversations about your child’s school year, allowing us to plan together, to support the students, and to agree on when to check in again, maybe not until Spring conferences, though maybe sooner, as necessary

Teachers come to these conversations with a growing understanding of your child and a deep understanding of children, of development, and of LREI’s program goals. Families bring a deep understanding of, and love for, their child. They bring their concerns and questions, and their hopes and goals. In middle school and high school, the students join the conversation and bring first-hand knowledge of their experiences, of areas of struggle and of areas of success. All parties bring a desire for the school year to be as fruitful as possible, to find challenges and opportunities for growth. While we all want the same thing, our points of view and experiences affect the expression of these goals and the hurdles we imagine might be coming our way.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes:

Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other’s participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.

In many ways, the strength of these conversations is in fact that the points of view in the room vary though they are guided by shared goals. Dr. Lawrence-Lightfoot adds, “ Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.” We can disagree but should do so agreeably, as Chap often reminds us.

There is no doubt that these conversations are important, that families and school are focused on similar goals, and that all in attendance are well served by the generosity that the parties bring to the conversation. We hope that as we come together that we largely find areas of agreement. However, as your children do every day, we may find ourselves having to align our seemingly competing truths in service to the most productive path forward. I have the utmost confidence that we can do this. It is in this combination, working together and finding agreement, that real progress is to be found.

We look forward to sharing thoughts with you in the coming days and know that these conversations can, and should, continue as necessary throughout the school year.

All the best,