April 27

Dear Families,

Welcome back to the continuing unusual world of school!  I hope you and your children found some creative and enjoyable ways to take a break from at-home learning.  How did you celebrate Earth Day and a few beautiful spring days?

Friends in Barcelona, Spain, the first country to be locked down, wrote this morning:  "Emma and Albert have been great.  Explaining things to kids is absolutely magic and they both understand.  They make the best of it and have a complete talent of making every single thing special.  They decorate the kitchen towels we use as napkins and draw on them and all of a sudden we have a very special table."  But both parents are working from home and report that "we are going a bit crazy, honestly," and the children have only been able to play on the rooftop over the past 40 days.  I'm pretty sure most of you can relate!

We have passed the midway mark in our at-home learning stint.  Lindsay Holt is back with us in her virtual 3-4 classroom and has been joyfully reconnecting with her students.  As FSP trademark spring events appear on our calendars, we'll do our best to celebrate them.  Wheel Fun Day, the art walk and talent show, Grandfriends' Day, graduation assembly and commencement will certainly take on unique and likely quite memorable forms.  The ArtLuck evening before break, put together by the brilliant Assembly Committee, brought out the loopy, loving spirit of FSP.  Thanks to students and parents giving of themselves!

Planning for next year continues to be a focus for the Board of Directors and me.  It is now even clearer to all of us that an FSP education best happens in the context of physical community.  Our hundred daily face-to-face interactions in the classroom, hallways, Meeting Room, fields and forest are critical parts of the mosaic of learning.  Thus, with the approval of the faculty, we are designing a school calendar that will allow us the flexibility to make changes depending on the potential need to close our building again periodically.  If we were prevented from attending school in person, this calendar would add up to 5 weeks or more of on-site school (incuding up to 4 weeks in June).  We are also prepared for any additional periods of on-line learning should closures go beyond what we can reasonably recoup using summer and/or school break weeks.  As we fine tune this, we will keep you in the loop.

I try to keep the Quaker concept of "the light within" in mind as these days pass.  You are doing the beautiful and gritty work keeping your households running; your children are finding new strengths and motivations; the FSP faculty is modeling that teachers are learners; and each of our actions to take care of ourselves and one another is leading to the health of the larger community (and world).  Keep that light shining, friends!

Sincerely,
Jenny
—-
Jenny Rowe
Head of School

A Culture of Joyful Learning

The week before April break I found myself in the middle of a battle royale with one of my children, who shall remain nameless.  He was refusing to do a math problem.  I had already given him choice, narrowed down the requirement, and helped him to get organized.  He was perfectly capable of doing the work, but he was emotionally stuck.  He was frustrated and angry, and he chose this one problem as his last stand.  And I was stuck.  I needed him to do the problem so he could practice math. I needed him to do the problem so I would have five minutes to reply to emails and answer a million questions from my other two children.  I took a deep breath and tried to take my harried parent hat off and put my educator hat on.  I needed to remember what the goal was.  I needed to remember that making him do this math problem was not going to help him to understand the math. In fact, it might well do the opposite.

There's a lot we don't know about the brain and learning, but one thing we do know is that stressed brains simply do not learn well.  Our hearts and minds must be open to learn. When we are engaged in deep learning, it often feels challenging and messy, but it doesn't feel stressful.  That's one of the reasons Friends School teachers are so deeply committed to creating a culture of joyful learning.  Joy is essential in and of itself, of course.  But it also undergirds deep and meaningful learning. 

There is no question that one of the most challenging aspects of creating at-home learning is that we've lost most of our well-honed tools for creating joyful learning spaces.  It's much harder to find joy in a stilted Zoom meeting or an assignment on Google Classroom. Joy is still there, though.  It's there when Billy visits the 7th-8th advisory meeting and the students all show him fake (and extremely gory) "injuries" they've gotten while participating in PE activities.  It's there when Aliza and two of her students spend 30 minutes puzzling through a tricky math problem on Zoom, just for fun. It's there when Dareth calls a student on the phone to "chat in Spanish."  It's there when Jonathan reads a story or sings a song to his beloved preschoolers.  It's there when James and Pam Grumbach share the gift of their music at the end of Meeting for Worship.   

This week, we will continue to focus on ways to better use small groups in our distance instruction and how we can create an assessment system that captures both school-assigned learning and student- and family-led learning.  We're still working on figuring out the balance between students and families who would like more in-person zoom time and those who need less of it.  Teachers are also thinking together about how to recognize and foster joyful learning in their at-home programs.

As teachers, our job is to get better at this new work each week, finding ways to build a culture of joyful learning from afar. Our job as parents is to recognize that joy is as essential as grit in real learning, and to focus on ways that we can foster both.  This isn't easy.  It isn't easy for students, or parents, or teachers, or anyone.  But the red winged blackbirds are back, and the perennials in my garden are putting out new growth, and my son will have plenty of opportunities to complete math problems in his life. So I will take a deep breath and try to look for the joy in small things today, and to help my children do the same, and to learn something in the process.

Nell
——
Nell Sears
Director of Studies