Through Christmas and Beyond

It has been as busy as Santa’s Workshop around here.  In preparation for the cold of winter, we’ve collected food, books, and coats for those less fortunate. Fifth grade student have put hours into earning first place in Georgia on the online math competition Sumdog, and our Academic Team has risen to tenth in the state. Preschoolers practiced and prepared a public presentation of the Nativity.  Lower schoolers engaged in the Posada, in which the Holy Family visits room to room on their way to Bethlehem. Four basketball teams, our cheerleaders, and our inaugural swim team have been working hard to be prepared for successful competition. More than forty members of our two choirs and praise band have been preparing for various performances.  Middle schoolers have been studying and preparing for exams, an exciting new growth experience for the 6^th graders.

That’s just what I can think of at the moment; I’m sure there’s more. The place is as busy and full of anticipation as the North Pole. But on December 24, Santa sets off to spread gifts and good will wherever he goes, and then, unlike here, the North Pole goes quiet and still for months.  Long after we have forgotten about Santa and tucked our decorations safely back in the attic, EDS will still be a hive of purposeful activity with every day dedicated to preparation and anticipation. Our students and faculty will remain fully engaged in laying the foundations for lives of meaning and purpose.

Already we are preparing for next year’s progress; in this Panther Prints is next year’s calendar; and when you return in January we will have a number of announcements about the future.  You will soon receive save-the-date information about this year’s State of the School presentation, which will be very different from last year’s and at which we will engage attendees in some brief but important work that will lay the foundation for our next stage of strategic planning. 

As with most of the rest of the world, EDS has certainly felt some of the impact of this economy.  But our hard-working, dedicated Board and administration have remained steadfastly focused on ensuring quality, maintaining our class size commitment, sustaining important programs, and protecting services to families.  We continue to find creative ways to be flexible and responsive to ever-changing conditions without sacrificing the student experience.  So although the waters are choppy at times and difficult decisions are necessary, we have a great crew, a steady grasp on the wheel, and a course charted for an even brighter future with exciting things on the horizon.

The Santa story is lovely, but it is temporal and temporary -- not enduring in the way the real Christmas story is.  That’s more like the work that we are doing -- ongoing preparation, working to build lives of purpose and service to God’s amazing world. We are hard at work laying the foundations for meaningful lives, with the sense that something momentous is about to occur, and our students will be ready. 

All of us at EDS wish you a wonderful, magical, fun Christmas break. We hope Santa visits your home. But more importantly, we hope you and your family find time to reflect upon and celebrate Emmanuel, God With Us.

“ ‘To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And all at once there was with the angel a great company of the heavenly host, singing the praises of God, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ”

Have a very Happy Christmas!  Turn off the bad news and celebrate the good news.

The "stuff" doesn't really matter.

I hope your Thanksgiving was a wonderful celebration of family for you, for the love of family is one of the greatest blessings in this life.

It is my fervent hope that at EDS we can sustain some of this attitude of gratitude as we enter the season of Advent.  Thanksgiving was not even over before the secular world had grabbed our attention way from gratitude and abundance and begun to turn our minds toward wanting and scarcity, away from giving and toward getting.

As Father Sawyer wrote to our faculty this week, Advent is “a season of hope, as prophesied long ago by Isaiah, who spoke of the coming of the Messiah, saying, ‘A people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.’  The focus of our Advent activities should be on God’s gift of Jesus to us and the light of God’s love that we can share with each other and the world.” 

In this context, it seems to me that Christmas flows naturally out of our Thanksgiving celebrations.  From All Saints Day to 8^th Grade Grandparents Day to Veterans Day to Thanksgiving, we have celebrated the abundant gift of others in our lives.  It is fitting to conclude this season and this calendar year (ironically the beginning of the church year) with anticipation and preparation for the greatest gift of all.

I invite you, the EDS community, to join us this year in being counter-cultural. Help us push back against the onslaught of secular distractions and mythology that have intruded upon this beautiful season of preparation.  Help us remind our children that the “stuff” doesn’t really matter.  Things will not make us whole, happy, successful or fulfilled.  Things are temporal and temporary; Christ’s love is eternal; and we are called in this season to reflect the light of God’s love to each other and the world – unconditionally.  While you are making lists and checking them twice, I hope you will join us by making a list of ways to tone down the commercial Christmas and upgrade your celebration of the religious holiday this year.  It doesn’t take much. A little bit of Christ’s love goes a long way (remember my October blog about how long it would take to transform the world).

Happy Advent. Prepare the way.

It's What You Don't See

As soon as I saw this scene of football shoulder pads drying in the sunny courtyard, I knew I had to write this column. I immediately asked Erica to take the picture above.  Most people probably didn’t even notice them as they scurried by, but as soon as I saw them, I saw an entire story with a large cast of characters spanning months and years, symbolizing in one snapshot the very essence of what makes EDS unique.

Okay, I can hear you now, “Only Ned would make a mountainous column out of a molehill of pads!”  But seriously, follow me on this little internal dialogue I had with myself.  Q: Twenty some shoulder pads upturned in the courtyard sun.  Why?  A: I suppose they must be drying!  Q: But from what? Football season is over.  A: I don’t know. I guess someone must have washed them before they are to be put away.  Q: Who is our shoulder pad washer and how did they know to do this?  I would never have thought about that! A:  Me neither!  I guess our athletic director Carol Trammell did that. I wonder how you wash shoulder pads and how long it takes and how she thought to dry them in the sun. 

And my mind was off and running.  Probably none of the people who enjoyed the games this year or whose children played football would stop to think about this little but important and time-consuming detail or the hundreds of other details that went into starting our first ever football team – researching student equipment, practice equipment, finding coaches, developing a schedule, arranging fields, researching safety and liability issues, transportation, equipment storage, and on and on.  Most people see only the tip of the iceberg, the end result.

Then I think of all the work and activity you don’t see around here.  If you look beneath the surface, you will be amazed by the volume, scope, and pace of the work life of a teacher.  Think for a moment about planning lessons that will engage students all day -- preparing materials, responding to questions and managing unexpected disruptions, grading papers, correspondence with parents, decorating the room.  Remember also that EDS teachers are responsible for much more than just academic instruction. We expect them to be expert at interpersonal and conflict management, using random events as teachable moments for citizenship and ethical decision-making.  Then think about the attention required for professional development: analyzing student performance and test scores, reading up on the latest in brain research, curriculum, pedagogy and use of technology.  Add to that minor first aid and the care and attention of emotional bruises that are collected along the way. And on and on.

As parents, we see only the tip of the iceberg, even if it seems like the entire iceberg to us. We see our children’s homework, graded work, quarterly progress reports, and their mood and recollections at the end of each day. Just a few data points from this vast enterprise called EDS.

Then look even a little deeper at all of the details you don’t see that are in support of the classroom: religious stewardship, pastoral care, complex financial planning, ordering, billing, facility maintenance and management, fundraising efforts, long range planning, governance, technology infrastructure, scheduling, carpool and much more!

What you do see – the tip of the iceberg – is remarkable enough. We have plenty of data to confirm that our students’ academic preparation is vastly greater than most and on par with the country’s best.  We have collected an impressive track record of success and participation in athletics.  We accomplish this with remarkable financial efficiency, increasing the value of your investment.

But it’s all the stuff beneath the surface and behind the scenes that truly makes the amazing, mysterious, magical difference of an EDS education.  It’s the dedication of our faculty to go way beyond the call of duty. It’s the engaged, supportive, and hard-working parent body.  It’s the spirit of community in which we all roll up our sleeves and lend a hand when it’s needed.  But most of all, it’s the fact that we are on a mission and that everything we do is Christ-led and student-centered.

There are plenty of busy workplaces in the world. But as General Foley observed to us last week, “There’s something special going on at EDS.”  Just remember from time to time to look beneath the surface.

Interconnected

We are in a season of celebrating community and interconnectedness at EDS. Last week we remembered All Saints and All Souls in chapel, and Friday we celebrated a beautiful 8^th Grade Grandparents’ and Grandfriends’ Day.  This Friday we honor veterans and those currently serving our nation in our annual Veterans’ Day ceremony.

These events are not just isolated holidays on the calendar for us at EDS; they are central to our identity and mission. EDS is founded on the understanding that Jesus doesn’t call us simply to be better individuals and into singular relationship with God -- although he does say the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul. Jesus quickly adds that the second commandment is as great as the first: to love one another. He clearly calls us to live in relationship with each other as well as with God.

In equal parts, we are called to be our best selves, to grow in to closer relationship with God, and to be in loving community with mankind.  This understanding is fundamental to the EDS mission and education.  Our mission calls for us to commit to much more than merely providing for the minimal literacy needs of our students.  Surely we provide that, but our loftier mission is to help students acquire and apply those skills in a theological context of meaning and purpose.  We don’t want to help grow just good students, but good citizens, good people, good parents and spouses.  Our goal is not to send students into the world well prepared merely for high school but also well prepared to make a positive difference and to be meaningful contributors to God’s community.  This, in fact, is the greatest aspect that sets EDS apart from other schools.

So it is important and meaningful that we take time to teach our students about the others in the world who have paved the way for them.  It’s not just a nice thing to do, it’s central to our educational mission to take time to learn about and remember the contributions of saints, grandparents, veterans, and others in our lives.  We are interconnected with creation, and we have nothing, accomplish nothing, and become nothing on our own. We all build on foundations laid by others and with the support of others, so it is fitting that we take time to recognize and remember them.

The Power of Story, a Story of Power

As an English major, I love the impact of narrative, the inspiration of poetry, and the power of words. But I am also a numbers person and value the way data and numbers also tell or enrich a story. This is about narrative and numbers combining to get at the essential matter of our significance.

It is generally agreed that the population of the planet reached 7 billion this week – today to be precise. The first billion people accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years. It took less than twelve years to grow from 6 to 7 billion.

So how big is 7 billion? CNN Reporter Kyle Almond helps us get our minds around that number with the following tidbits:

--7 billion seconds ago, the year was 1789. That was the year George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. president and Congress met for the first time.
-- If you took 7 billion steps along the Earth's equator -- at two feet per step -- you could walk around the world at least 106 times.
-- The average human is about five feet tall, accounting for children, and if you stack those 7 billion people end to end, they would reach about 1/14th of the way to the sun -- or 27 times the distance to the moon.
-- 7 billion ants, at an average size of three milligrams each, would weigh at least 23 tons (46,297 pounds).

If I am but a mere three milligram ant among 23 tons of ants, how can I possibly make any difference?

Those numbers tell a powerful part of a story, but this is where the narrative and poetry come in. Recently I was privileged to hear a Sunday morning sermon by Rev. Paulsson Rajarigam, an Episcopal priest ordained in the Diocese of Madras (India) who now is both a Vicar and middle school math teacher in New York.

He combines narrative and numbers – religion and math -- in a math problem he gives his students. Referencing the movie “Pay it Forward,” he poses two questions. Suppose one person (you) were to begin a chain by reaching out to one other person in an act of selfless, unconditional love (agape). We know from experience that we are capable of a powerful enough act of love to affect and change both the giver and receiver. And suppose that the next day that person reaches out to another. And if each day the person touched would reach out to another in a daily chain, Rev. Rajarigam asks, would it be possible to reach the entire world with a touch of transformational agape, and how long would it take? Easy, right? Each person, one act one day, would take 7 billion days, which is roughly 19 million years. But the task eventually, although daunting and overwhelming, is numerically possible – until you consider the rate of population growth. It is possible that the chain would never end, always chasing an ever-receding end point.

Now change the problem slightly. Instead of reaching out to just one person, reach out to two. And if each of those makes a commitment to touch two people and so forth, then how long would it take to touch the entire population of the planet?

Do you think that number of days will still be some incomprehensibly large number just smaller than 7 billion days? Maybe half of that? Or a fourth? It turns out that a chain of one person affecting the lives of two, who in turn each affect two more the next day, and so on, will take….(drum roll, please)…33 days.

Yes, that’s right. By making just a small change and a modest and manageable commitment, the world can be changed – every single life touched – in a mere 33 days. Father Rajarigam said, “Jesus is challenging us to join him in transforming the world around us by doing one act of agape – or maybe two – just like he did…you can love God in a meaningful way by showing agape love to the person sitting next to you – or better yet to a total stranger.”

That change can begin with us. The transformation of the world can begin right here. It’s actually quite do-able, if we just commit ourselves, redouble our efforts, align our purpose, and love the Lord, our God, with all our hearts, minds, and souls, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Let it begin with us. Isn’t that, after all, precisely why EDS is here?

Ahead of the Curve

In August of 2007 I wrote in this column about how we try to find a good balance at EDS for the educative value of challenge and disappointment:

We want to protect our children and delay the loss of innocence that is part of the human condition. We want to build confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously teaching the value of challenge and struggle.  We want to teach acceptance, understanding, and brotherly love, while recognizing that everyone will not always get along well with everyone else. Let’s set a goal this year to diminish our push for perfection.  Let’s embrace challenge and occasional disappointment.  Let’s try to bring that natural spirit of playfulness to our collective efforts to raise healthy, competent children.  This is an exciting time to be a citizen of the world.  It is also a challenging time.  Let’s commit ourselves to working together to help equip a generation of EDS students to have a meaningful impact on their world.

Again in January of 2010, I wrote about a Francis Drake poem that proclaims the value of challenge and leaving “comfort zones.”

And now the education world is abuzz about an article in this July’s Atlantic Monthly, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/), in which the author discusses the implications of parents’ obsession with their children’s “happiness.” She claims that we are making it more difficult for our children to grow into healthy happy adults by shielding them from discomfort and failure.

But at EDS we had already advanced the conversation further.  Through our leadership in the Elementary Schools Research Collaborative (ESRC), we had already begun work on a project with Educational Testing Services to develop a first-of-its-kind assessment for middle school students in important non-academic but mission-centric areas.  One of these areas is the key to making failure and disappointment a learning experience: resilience. Other characteristics we are assessing are ethical decision-making, intrinsic motivation, collaboration, creative problem solving, and time management.

At EDS we are not just talking about these skills. We are defining and describing them, and we are partnering with some of the best K-8 schools and cognitive psychologists in the country to learn how to assess and impact them.

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (the education issue) carried the following headline, “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?pagewanted=all).  It’s an interesting notion.  Woven into the article are comments about the importance of “grit” and resilience.  This is something that we not only know about at EDS, but we are actively doing something about it.  Because it matters.

At EDS we balance good, solid traditional education with an equal focus on the new demands of the 21^st century – without becoming victim to mere fads.  And it is clearly paying off. Our graduates report higher and higher levels of satisfaction and preparation.

The teachers truly are building foundations for learning and for life.  While the rest of the world talks about it, we see the results every day. Don’t forget to thank an EDS teacher.

What a Difference

You cannot believe what a difference it makes and so you take it for granted. I first observed it in the fall of 1977. I was a high school junior beginning a 2-year Advanced Placement course of study in English at a rigorous college prep boys’ school. The class produced 9 National Merit Semi-Finalists; 2 went to Harvard, 1 to MIT, 1 to UNC as a Morehead Scholar, 1 to UVA, and on and on. Despite the talent in the room, when the conversations about the reading would begin, there was often a distinct group who left the rest of us in their dust. The group was not divided by GPA or by writing ability; they weren’t identifiably “smarter” than the others. The clear difference was the depth of their knowledge of the Bible.

Now, I had taken plenty of Sunday school, sang in the church choir for a while, and had even read the “Good News” version of the New Testament on my own. But in my class there was a group of students who understood the Bible as much more than a collection of simple stories with simple meaning, as it mostly appeared to me. They seemed to grasp the complexity of the text as a whole. They talked about the stories as if they were about real, complex people seeking truth in the face of the ambiguities of the human experience. They didn’t always read the stories as about right and wrong or good versus evil, but often as about seeming conflicts between two goods, or the need to choose the lesser of two evils. In short, they understood the Bible to be more relevant to our world than I had ever realized.

This observation was reinforced years later when I was a high school English teacher. It did not take long at all to determine which of my students had a keen grasp of the Bible, which had only a surface familiarity with the stories, and which were completely clueless. And those distinctions usually translated into performance differences.

Recently I came across some research that supports those observations. According to a 1986 study, when college English professors were asked which book they wished incoming freshmen had read, the Bible was most frequently named. An analysis of Advanced Placement (AP) literature prep course revealed that 60% of the allusions were from the Bible. In a survey of high school English teachers, 90% said that Bible knowledge “confers a distinct advantage on students…for both college-bound and regular students.” Although it can be difficult to reach agreement as to how to measure Biblical literacy, in study after study, teachers estimate that only a small minority of their students – in public or private schools – are sufficiently familiar with the Bible.

The academic and intellectual advantage is not just in literature. How does one fully understand the development of western society, culture, art, politics and even law, without fully understanding the story of the people and the influence of the Book? And yet fewer than 25% of public schools include a unit or lesson on the Bible within the curriculum and fewer than 8% of all schools offer courses in Bible.

Our religion curriculum is second to none in Augusta or the Episcopal school world in the United States. Developing Bible literacy is an important cornerstone in the Episcopal Day School’s mission of helping these students build foundations for learning and for life, and just another measure of the value you have added by investing in their future. In fact, I would argue that this program alone justifies the difference.

Our Mission - Here for a Reason

It is clear that EDS students are here for a reason. Somebody has specifically and intentionally chosen this school over other options.
Certainly, the opportunity for a world-class academic foundation is one of those reasons. Our results speak for themselves. For example,
1) All of our students graduate with a high school credit in Algebra, and the vast majority are placed into an honors or advanced math class in 9th grade.
2) Our graduates can read deeply, think analytically, and write persuasively.
3) EDS graduates can begin to put things into geographical and historical perspective.
4) We have the most engaging hands-on science curriculum you can find anywhere.
5) Over half of our 8th graders this year earned National Honors recognition or better on the National Spanish Exam, which is given only to top students in the country.
6) EDS students have studied the fundamentals of ...and have explored expressing themselves through... art and music.

I could continue with this list for a long time, but I contend this is not why families have chosen EDS. This level of academic and intellectual preparation has come to be expected from us in our 67 years. The real difference.... the mortar in the bricks of their foundation, if you will...lies in the other ingredients. These elements are sometimes hidden from plain view, but evidence of them can be seen if you look for them. So I suggest to parents, grandparents, friends and visitors to look closely for the signs of the real difference and real measures of excellence at EDS that make us the school of choice for any PreK-8th grader in the CSRA.

First, at EDS we take seriously (and by take seriously I mean that as a faculty we study, read about, discuss, and experiment with) our mission to instill other competencies, the vital core competencies that will be demanded and expected of our children by the 21st century. At EDS, we are intentional about teaching and instilling them, and we even assess for them!

When you visit or think about EDS, think about our success in teaching and instilling core competencies such as:
1) Public speaking, presentation, and performance...at every grade level
2) Leadership skills at every grade level
(By the way, both of these areas will appear on our online curriculum grid next year alongside math, writing, science, etc. In addition, we are the first K-8 school invited to present our leadership program at a CSEE national conference that typically features high school programs. Who else can make those claims?)
3) Biblical literacy: not just memorization or knowledge of a dozen major stories, but true understanding and knowledge of lesser known stories and prophets, their meaning, where they fit in history, and how they were put together to make the Bible
4) And a whole host of other competencies like resilience, teamwork and collaboration, ethical decision making, creative problem solving.

I could go on. I only ask that you look for the signs of these teachings taking place, and you will see them.

Finally, and even more importantly, we establish a context for all of this learning and skill development. We teach, we live, and we model the important lesson that all that we are, all that we do, all that we teach, and all that we learn has meaning and purpose and is designed to help us better fulfill our God-given potential and our God-given purpose.

You see, we have a little secret around here. From the outside, most people would think we are just doing school like everyone else, teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. However, we are up to something else. Something different is afoot here. Something happens here - something significant, meaningful, life changing, and lifelong. AND THEN... we send it, via our children, the carriers of knowledge, grace, and possibility, out into the world.

So as you look around and watch what is happening here, consider the larger mission and impact. Think about what the world so desperately needs from us and from our children and allow yourself to see the possibility.

Resilience

“Are we attempting to prepare the road ahead for our children or our children for the road?” This is one of the many provocative gems I picked up last week at my annual meeting of heads from similar sized PreK-8 independent schools around the country. There are 25 of us from coast to coast who founded a research collaborative about 5 years ago based in a belief that our particular kind of schools has both unique needs and unique opportunities that could be more fully realized if we worked together as a group.

For example, our collaboration has led us to a groundbreaking project with Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization (http://www.ets.org/about/who/). ETS developed and administered many well known national and international standardized tests such as the GRE, the AP program, and NAEP. They are excited to be working with us on a first-of-its-kind standardized assessment for middle school aged children in critically important areas not traditionally assessed by schools, such as time management, resilience, creative problem solving, teamwork, ethics and intrinsic motivation.

As the project develops you will hear more from me about it, but for now I want to focus on this idea of resilience. We had a rich and long discussion about the growing importance of this characteristic in an ever changing, ever more conflict ridden world. The irony noted by many of my colleagues is that while resilience seems to be growing in importance, our culture seems to be doing more and more to rob our children of opportunities to develop resilience and self-reliance. Much has been written recently about the new parent culture, using terms such as “helicopter parents” and “bubble wrap parents” to describe the phenomenon of increasingly involved and protective parents. Headmasters from every region note that parents more frequently challenge school discipline decisions (spawning the term “defense attorney parents”) –even for minor infractions with small penalties -- and often in front of or with the knowledge of the student. Although I’m not sure it was entirely good, that simply did not happen a generation ago. Add to this skyrocketing pressure for good grades, leading to rampant grade inflation and higher rates of cheating in schools, and for athletic success, leading to countless stories about rule violations and violence in interscholastic athletics.

However, I don’t think it’s as simple as blaming parents for being over-protective. The issue is much larger and lies in matters of human nature and American culture. First of all, many in American schools, media, public service, and private industry do their very best to scare parents about dangers their children might face. Secondly, most schools and child service organizations have been better at driving home the importance of success than we have about the best ways to acquire the skills that lead to success.

So schools – and parents -- need to be counter-cultural in this area, but to do so means getting comfortable with seeming self-contradictions. If it is true that we learn more from our failures than our successes, schools and parents should orchestrate safe, productive failure. If we learn more from challenge than comfort, we must create appropriate discomfort. How can we do this? Consider some of these possibilities:

1) What if we didn’t always and immediately rescue children from frustration or conflict? What if we simply let them wrestle with it, sit in it, wallow in it, even?

2) What if we don’t try to wrap every conflict or disappointment up in a nice, neat explainable package? Some things in life don’t have apparent explanation. Some things in life are never resolved. What if we let our children learn and experience that sooner rather than later, and on some relatively small issues before the big ones hit?

3) What if we let young people take up their own challenges. If there is a conflict with a teacher, suppose we suggest that they go to the teacher to resolve it. And what if we let it be should they choose not to? When they have a conflict with a peer, what if we occasionally said, “How would you like to handle it?” And when the response is, “I don’t know,” what if we simply said, “Well, let me know when you have an idea.”

4) What if we stopped fawning over students about their grades and started commenting on the effort we see? What if our first question after an athletic event weren’t, “Who won?” but instead “Who played well?” or “How did you play? Give me some examples.”

5) What if you didn't rescue that last minute paper, project, or assignment for them? Is it really more important that they get a good grade on an elementary school project than experience the consequences of waiting too late to start or ask for help? I can assure you it won't keep them out of UGA or Harvard. In fact, learning the lesson early might well help them get in.

You get the idea. Make your own list. Yes, part of our job is to guide, protect, and teach our children – to show them the way. But I was reminded last week that part of our job is to “prepare them for the road, not to prepare the road for them.” As Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, writes, “Success in the 21st century depends more on knowing what to do when things go wrong than in getting everything right.” When they are young is exactly the time to give them the experience and practice with that, before the stakes are much higher.