This week and next private schools everywhere will be getting ready to teach and everyone is making this the year to “get back to business.”
With Covid behind us, we can restart delayed projects, begin new initiatives, and upgrade programs. “The agenda for our opening meetings is packed,” I keep hearing.
That’s a mistake.
For your opening faculty meetings, I dare you to do any of the following:
Host an Olympiad of Scrabble, cribbage, and charades. (Humanities vs. sciences?)
Make animal balloons, finger paint paintings, and play dough sculptures.
Have small groups each invent a new school dance. (No phones are allowed anywhere near this room, obviously.)
Ask five faculty, two admins, and one parent to spend an hour to come up with much better versions of the above, a meeting that is pointless, communal, and fun.
Don’t like fun? O.K. Try this: Ask everyone to answer these two questions:
Why are you here?
Why are we here?
Let people write it out. Talk a little and then show the calendar date when you will get back to this conversation.
Because you and they and parents and kids need to know that school as will be cannot be school as was.
School is the greatest invention ever. People of different generations come together to look after one another in service of the future. Fantastic. So fantastic you might expect that the campuses of top schools where everyone is smart, caring, and well-protected would be overrun by skipping kids, smiling adults, and jolly staff.
But school is now fraught rather than healthy, at elite schools in particular. Students are unwell, faculty don't trust the administration, and nothing about getting on Zoom for two years helped address the anxiety and stress that were already peaking in 2020.
Address it now. Change what you are doing now. Rather than recycling the same disconnection do something different. Insist--as but one example--on fun. I dare you.