More Coffee, Please

This is coming—and acting as—a weekly update, and that’s fine, though it is a little more focused than that. Certainly, it’s been a week dominated by the events that came to fruition at graduation, and this is as it should be. Although the diploma is only an outward sign of the learning that has taken place, it’s something we should, and do, celebrate.

Still, there were, and are, other things to mention. One was the school board, which I popped in to briefly check in on after evaluating senior projects. One of the items up for discussion was the Building and Grounds Director, which will be studied.

Studying usually results in getting to the right answer. I’m hoping that this will be one of those cases—The fact that the district has a building and grounds director has been an astounding improvement. As one of those people who work “on the ground” I’ve noticed that far more gets done when it needs to be. I spend less time wandering around trying to get something fixed, repaired, or replaced and more time doing what I’m supposed to do because the Director has done his job so very well.

Let’s hope they choose the right answer. Education shouldn’t be about trying to get the building fixed. It’s one of those pieces that’s important, but so are many other things.

Senior projects, for example, Tuesday night. Once again, they were solid, though I’m still confident they could be made considerably stronger—that we could help strengthen those elements that are weak and also turn the whole evening the community could rally around.

To some extent, Tom Geheran¹ showed the way. Walking out of the building, there was a crowd of people standing around, looking at his senior project, just standing and talking. Given my current course at KSC², it was erie:

Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.

As Frost suggests, sometimes we need to stand around and explore, stand and think about the world and our place in it. The senior project can be a wonderful place to make that happen, and finding ways to open it to the whole community—that we can all point our thoughts in a new direction, and think something we had not before.

It’s already a public event—a milestone in its way every bit as large for families as is is the student. It ought to be—and can be, will be—more to the community as well. We serve amazing people, who do amazing things year after year—that should be celebrated by every member of the public as much as it is by individual families.

The senior project, for all its awesome potential, and the almost mythical role it holds in the minds of our kids³ is only a small part of what teachers, administrators, and support staff do for our students, of course. It’s one aspect of what has been put in place in order to allow them to succeed in their lives, but it hardly shows all of what occurs.

Graduation often shows the next—that part that isn’t seen by the public very often. So much of what is done in the school is done by people for people, and that’s not often appreciated—there are a million little ways that the stakeholders in the school make the task every day that must be done far more than just a job. It’s not often noticed, either, but it’s there—and when it’s pointed out, it’s pretty obvious⁴.

In many ways—and it’s appropriate that this is true—Miss Novak said it best in her speech as salutatorian⁵. The stuff that appears in the newspapers, the arguments about contracts, about money, about all the rest come from the people who don’t get it. These are investments we make in people, and it might be a decade or two—or a generation—before we really see the fruition. That doesn’t mean we don’t invest, it means we invest as much as we can, knowing that it will pay a huge dividend later.

1 Yes, it’s easy to point to someone as talented as the valedictorian, someone who is off to Tufts, and show the work he did and raise it as an example. There’s no doubt that Tom walks in with a great many advantages compared to some of our kids—but certainly we should try and raise all boats, try and give the support we can so all can get there. ↺

2 I’m not a huge poetry fan, though I am finding many pieces from Robert Frost I’m looking forward to sharing with my kids this fall. Still, this week was brutal, and next week as much so—memorizing 45 of his poems and the book they were first published in preparation for an exam on Wednesday and a paper this coming week has not been fun—which is the primary reason for delays in updates. ↺

3 One of the things that strikes me as most telling about how much more we can challenge our students is how great a challenge they feel the senior project is. 45 hours of work and a presentation is not all that much to ask of a person, and life will ask a great deal more.↺

4 As a side-note, I’ll throw in a plug for the class of 2009. I was asked to photograph graduation, and every photograph (over 1000) are available for prints at Monadnock Imaging with the event code “MRHS 2009.” [Note 6.23.09: The images are not yet up—a delay in getting them to the lab, which was entirely my fault. I'll post when they are ready.][Note 6.24.09: The images are now up...Monadnock Imaging with the event code MRHS2009: It's all one word. ] In addition to supporting a local business, all of the profit for the images goes towards the class and the school. ↺

5 If I could get a copy of her speech, I’d gladly post it here—and Mr. Miller’s comments as well. ↺

Gregarious

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