Thank you to all who attended last evening’s middle school curriculum night. The remarks below were shared by Liz Gray, middle school head, to welcome families and kick off the event. (These remarks were edited for length.)
Welcome, everyone, to our middle school curriculum night, and thank you so much for joining us. First, I want to say how grateful and proud I am to be able to work with your children. Please also know that each of us here on the stage this evening plays an important role in your child’s day at school. I could not be more honored and fortunate than to work with this outstanding group of faculty to build and deliver our middle school program.
Only two weeks into the school year, and we are already up and running with lots of momentum. Before school opened, as faculty, we spent our opening meetings busily preparing to welcome students and all of you back to school. During that week, as our vision of the school year ahead started taking more definitive shape, Brendan introduced us to a theme for us to consider for our work together this year–the theme of bridge-building. This is a theme with seemingly infinite symbolism for education.
So I wanted to share with you how this theme has resonated for me in these early days of this academic year. As some of you know, I’m from the Midwest. I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when I was in middle school at the age of 13. At the time, my family and I drove across the country, and I remember us having a small celebration in the car when we crossed over the Eads Bridge, which spans the mighty Mississippi River and connects Illinois to Missouri. We also finally arrived at its companion monument, the St. Louis Arch. While not a bridge per se, the Arch, also known as “the gateway to the West”, connects what many 19th-century Americans considered the “East” to the “West” of the United States, serves a similar purpose.
For those who have never seen the Arch, the National Parks Service describes its structure like this: “The stainless-steel-faced Arch spans 630 feet between the outer faces of its triangular legs at ground level, and its top soars 630 feet into the sky. It takes the shape of an inverted catenary curve; a shape such as would be formed by a heavy chain hanging freely between two supports.”
It was designed by architect Eero Saarinen and was built by constructing the two inwardly bending legs of the arch simultaneously. The final piece. which was shaped like a slice of pie, was lifted by a crane over the gap between the two nearly touching legs, meant to connect the legs at the very top center. The architects’, contractors’, and builders’ margin of error for the two legs to meet successfully was within a fraction of an inch. Being outside that margin would mean failure at the top. The architectural plan had no shortage of skeptics, who were convinced that the two legs would never meet and that the architect’s vision would never come to fruition. The Academy Award-winning documentary that you can watch in the museum at the base of the Arch about this construction is hair-raising. But on October 28, 1965, the team successfully bridged the gap between the legs and put the final touches on the Arch.
Whether it is the East and the West, two pieces of land separated by a geological divide, or two people with different experiences and values meeting, bridges are always involved. And along with constructing bridges comes a good amount of risk-taking.
Last week, when I was able to join our seventh grade students and faculty up at the Kieve Wavus Leadership School in Maine, a sign on the wall of their indoor rock-climbing facility struck me as important. At the top, it said, “Healthy Risk,” and it went on to share its commitment to and prioritization of the safety and well-being of its participants, as well as this: “Risk and uncertainty, both perceived and real, are central to our experiential educational philosophy. We do not seek risk for the sake of risk, but rather it is our belief that we grow as individuals and as a community when we take positive, intentional, and well-managed risks in the face of real-time challenges and appropriate environments.” This is also true for our middle school. At the heart of our strong vision of excellence is healthy risk-taking and successful bridge-building.
Bridge-building is present in all corners of our middle school. Maybe it is a healthy risk to get on a ferry and travel across Boston Harbor for two nights with brand new classmates and teachers, but students come back having built new bridges of trust and friendship. Maybe it is a healthy risk to try out for an athletics team you might not make, but it builds courage and pride. Maybe it’s a healthy risk to speak up in class and share a heartfelt personal insight or opinion, but it builds a sturdy classwide network of empathy and understanding.
As you travel around the school tonight, be on the lookout for bold visions of what learning looks and feels like, bridge-building, and the inherent healthy risk-taking that comes along with it. I am excited that you get to hear from our phenomenal faculty–they are the architects with the vision of some of the most remarkable bridges that your children will build this year. Enjoy!
