Mr. Bondi

Rigour is being in the company of a passionate adult who is rigorously pursuing inquiry in the area of their subject matter and is inviting students along as peers in that adult discourse. 

We have reached Spring Break and what a past month it’s been:

• Varsha Sharma and Gavin Randhawa meet the Governor General;
• Basketball playoffs have come and gone;
• Wrestling Team off to Provincials;
• Intervention Night School Classes beginning in April;
• J Olympics (over 800 elementary school students participated in the one day celebration);
• Kyle Jacques selected as a torch bearer and student reporter for the upcoming Paralympics;
• Olympian, Christina Hughes, donating $10,000 to Take A Hike and visiting JO to speak and skate with our students.

At the last staff meeting we spoke about the importance of growth mind sets for both students and ourselves.  We looked at Carol Dweck’s article, “Mind-Sets and Equitable Education,” and discussed the “fixed mind set” which saw learning as the students’ responsibility and the “growth mind set” where learning is seen as a collaboration in which the teacher has great responsibility.  In all that we have accomplished together these past two years what has remained constant has been the belief that through their effort and our support JO students can develop their abilities.  They, like us, will struggle but now they do not experience difficulty as insurmountable. 

The most invigorating aspect of John Oliver, from a professional perspective, is that we are continually engaged in growth mind set discourse around examining and improving our practices.   Our discussions this year have focused squarely upon our classroom practice because as Ridile rightfully asserts, “responsible change always leads directly to the classroom, because it is in the classroom where the business of school – teaching and learning – takes place” (Ridile, 2010).  So, what do we know about our “business” partners? A recent article by Robyn R. Jackson, “Start Where Your Students Are?” answers the question for us: 

“The explicit curriculum is the stated objectives, content, and skills that students are expected to acquire. But to access that curriculum, students need to understand and possess certain underlying knowledge and skills [currencies]”.

 “. . . students need to have the right currencies. They need to know how to take effective notes, study from these notes, independently practice applying their skills, learn from their errors and self-correct, pay attention in class, monitor their comprehension, and ask for help when they do not understand [soft skills]”.

Start Where Your Students Are – Robyn R. Jackson 

Our students struggle in school not because they can’t learn the explicit curriculum, but because they don’t have the currencies needed to access this curriculum.  We have said that to access these currencies students need an understanding and appreciation of ‘rigour.’  But, what is rigour, how do we shape it, how do we embed it in our classrooms? 

Larry Rosenstock, from “Project Based Learning at High Tech High,” presents us with the starting point that links rigour with passion.

 Rosenstock – Rigour 

Passion but in an accepted and appreciated structure that values soft skills and promotes a growth mind-set – this is where we need to go.  Over the next few months we will collectively look at our instructional delivery and how we can define the ‘stages’ of our classes to maximum learning opportunities that stress process as much as product and help our students access the currencies needed in a high-performing school. 

I wish you all a restful Spring Break and in parting I leave you with the words of Robyn Jackson:

Great schools are not a matter of circumstance.  They are a matter of will.  Building a culture of success is not about money.  No amount of money will buy mind-sets, high expectations, beliefs, commitment, or dedication.  A culture of success is about will, determination, and persistence.

Here we are in February, more than half way through the year (already!).  A few highlights from the past couple of weeks: 

• Articulation with our incoming Grade 8 students has begun;
• The completion of mid-year department reviews;
• A very successful Mid Year Exam and Special Instruction Week;
• JO Wrestling Team finishing fourth at the Miri-Piri Invitational Tournament (Manpreet Virk winning Boys’ MVP and Rowena Cacapit earning runner up for Girls’ MVP);
• Basketball Playoffs commencing for our Senior and Junior Boys’ and Girls’ Teams (as well as our Bantam Boys’ team);
• The UBC Gilbert and Sullivan troupe will be performing “Fiddler on the Roof” in our auditorium from February 3^rd to the 6^th ;
• And, of course, a huge ‘congratulations’ to the students of John Oliver who in one week raised $14,475 in our “Hope for Haiti” Relief Campaign. 

This past week has resulted in the setting of yet another outstanding milestone for our community.  On Friday, January 22, the presidents of each of the school’s clubs, including student council, worked together to develop a fundraising campaign for Haiti Relief and set a goal of raising $5,000 within a week. The five day campaign included direct appeals to students and staff, a student-staff soccer game and a raffle where a student would become ‘Principal for a Day’. When the money was counted on Friday, January 29^th, we nearly tripled our goal, raising $14,475. 

Now as we head into the second half of the school year, we can build upon this sense of connection, this ideal of shared responsibility by focusing upon the ‘community’ each of us builds within our respective classrooms.  As I shared with you at our mid-year department reviews, our community has acted upon their collective will to ‘make a positive difference’; now it is our time to focus upon that change with regard to our own educational practices and the expectation and appreciation of academic rigour on the part of our students. 

The article I am passing on to you this week, Jay McTighe and Ronald Thomas’ “Backward Design for Forward Action,” touches upon the key points that I brought up at our department meetings.  McTighe and Thomas offer a three-stage, backward design process to assist teachers in centering their curriculum and assessments on big ideas, essential questions and authentic performances: 

1. determine learning goals;
2. collect, analyze, and summarize evidence from multiple sources to determine how well students are doing on external accountability tests and the extent to which they really understand what they are learning;
3. consider the root causes of present achievement and then – and only then – implement and create curriculum.

Backward Design for Forward Action – McTighe & Thomas

I look forward to February 11^th when we will have the opportunity to once again engage in discussion around O’Connor’s 15 Fixes for Broken Grades as we continue to ask ourselves essential questions that propel us forward along our path of continuous school improvement.

Have a nice week.

Hello everyone.  “It’s been four weeks since my last message”: language resonating with a confessional tone!  School has begun and the second term is well under way.  As we enter our mid year departmental reviews, I have spent the past few weeks looking at first term marks, data and statistics.  What has become evident to me is that your efforts and commitment have helped students make positive gains with regard to their learning.  What has also become clear is that the multitude of educational services and interventions we provide reveals that our school improvement process is a complex puzzle with many pieces.  However, despite the many pieces the final picture has one interpretation: to create new and enduring knowledge for all stakeholders – students, staff and parents. 

In their article, “Creating New Knowledge: Evaluating Networked Learning Communities,” Steven Katz and Lorna Earl write from the following premise: “When educators work together, they will create new knowledge and spread it to others . . . it will influence practices . . . and have an influence on students.  What they are writing about is the ‘art of collaboration’ which encompasses much more than relationships:  “It is the intensive interaction that engages educators in opening up their beliefs and practices to investigation and debate – building commitment through group understanding. 

Over a year ago, as a staff, we agreed to engage, collectively and collegially, in the assessment of our teaching practices.  Our conversations initiated and now continue the process of ‘open[ing] up our beliefs and practices to investigation and debate’ and these interactions (both formally at meetings and through daily conversations) have engendered huge gains at a school level: 

• discipline and hallway traffic (which will always be prevalent with adolescents) are no longer primary issues in our community;
• academic intervention programs – Homework Clubs, Special Instruction Week, Night School (study skill/content acquisition) Classes, Reading Support Classes – have increased our student success rate;
• Celebration of Excellence assemblies have made it ‘cool’ to be on the Honour Roll;
• social responsibility initiatives have helped us come together, celebrate our community, “tell our story” and foster a deeply rooted belief that John Oliver is an extension of our own homes. 

Our purpose now, as we meet in departments over the next month, is to focus our discussion around the ‘art’ or ‘science’ (if you will) of effective and ‘nurturing’ classroom instruction and assessment.  What are the common principles that are driving and improving student achievement in our classrooms?  What are we doing well and what, within the context of a non-judgmental and supportive conversation, do we need to improve upon?  

The article put forward to you this week, Carol Ann Tomlinson and Kristina Doubet’s, “Reach Them to Teach Them,” focuses upon four effective high school classrooms and shows how teachers can reach adolescents – by creating classrooms in which students discover one another’s gifts, by connecting with students, by creating a sense of urgency and excitement about learning, by putting inquiry at the root of instruction, by celebrating students’ lives and their successes, and by creating a learning environment in which everybody feels safe, competent, and valued. 

The Adolescent Learner – Reach Them to Teach Them (Tomlinson and Doubet)

As I visit with all of you over the next month, my plan is to continue our conversations around examining the quality of the John Oliver ‘learning experience’; my hope is that together we can focus on what this ‘learning experience’ actually looks like in our classrooms; my belief is that the trust and confidence we have developed in one another and the supportive, caring relationships we have created together will allow us to move forward in our efforts to ensure student success and meaningful professional development for all.  

Have a nice week.

It’s been a busy three weeks!  A few of the highlights:

• JO Annual Canned Food Drive kicked off on Nov. 16^th;
• All students “ran” to the office to submit their Daily Physical Activity Logs;
• Grade 8 Literacy Initiative – “Decoding Texts” took place in all Math, Science and Social Studies classes;
• Over 2000 parents at our Mini School Information Night;
• JO Cafeteria students entered the Hyatt Regency Gingerbread House Competition;
• Peer Counsellors and Peer Tutors attended a one day workshop on Nov. 23^rd;
• The 8^th Annual Jokers’ Classic Basketball Tournament is underway;
• JO’s first wrestling meet of the year on December 1^st;
• Grade 11 students, Annie Gurvis and Tasha Johal travelling to Ottawa to participate in “Encounters with Canada”;
• Grade 9 student, Hazel Mamaril, has had a story published in the December edition of Youthink Magazine.

Our upcoming school newspaper is devoted exclusively to the theme of community:  our definition of it and what it looks like in and around John Oliver.  I would like to share with you what “community” means to me.

I believe that everything is and everything exists through our connection to it. 

I believe that our community grows through the thousand unmarked interactions of the everyday and the commonplace. 

I believe that who we’re with and where we are with them is very much who we are. 

I believe that one of the fundamental purposes of community is to unite through our differences, and in doing so become one. 

Ours is a community whose growth is documented and expanded upon through the power of narrative.  In asking to define what the John Oliver community means to me, I’ll draw upon the story of our recent “Sock Wars” initiative in which we donated over 4000 pairs of socks to the homeless. 

A few nights back, on the Sunday night prior to our hosting of the Vancouver Coastal Health “9^th Annual Sox in the City” campaign (which had its media kick off here at John Oliver), I was in the auditorium with my son, Daniel.  He looked at all of the socks piled up on the stage and in what reminded me of the scene from the “Grinch who Stole Christmas”, Daniel turned to me and in his best high pitched ‘Cindy Loo Who’ voice asked: “Why dad? Why are there so many socks here?”

I stopped for a second.  I knew the answer was quite simple: to clothe the homeless.  

However the bigger answer was wrapped around the two themes particular to our community, themes we share with each other on a daily basis: family and love.  The family we speak of is not confined within these four walls.  It extends to our neighbours and all of those around us.  The love we refer to is grounded in goodness and compassion and we measure this love by how we respond to those in need. 

What John Oliver students showcased through this altruistic initiative was not that they could donate a large amount of socks but rather that within this community, within each of us there is inherent goodness and compassion:  a goodness and compassion that is not an act but rather a habit, a way of life; a goodness and compassion that states, quite simply, there is no ‘they’, only us.

And this is the point, this is our community mantra:  you are they, they are us . . .we are family.   

The article I am passing on to you this week, Fran Norris Scoble’s, “Is School Good for the Soul,” speaks to this ideal of school as community and family: “It matters far less that we know what time class starts than that we know why we gather and how we are changed because we do.”  She argues that “in the simplicity of relationships and the demanding nature of familiarity in intimate space, there is the grounding for a deeper understanding of ourselves and of what we care about.” 

Is School Good for the Soul – Fran Norris Scoble

Norris Scoble’s essay puts into language the sentiment shared by all of us – that the relationship between each of us and our school community is reciprocal:  we simultaneously shape our school and are, in turn, shaped by it. 

Have a nice weekend.

Two weeks have passed us by and the November rain has begun in earnest.  Highlights from the past two weeks include:

• UBC Information Night attended by over 100 families;
• A highly successful Post-Secondary Evening organized by Ms. Thomas and our Counselling Team;
• Informative Parent Teacher Conferences took place in our Cafeteria;
• Well received Remembrance Day Assemblies hosted by Dilraj Chohan and Keerit Brar;
• Social Committee starting to plan our Staff Christmas Party;
• Senior Girls Volleyball Team competing in the City Playoffs, Senior Boys’ Volleyball Team in the City Playoffs and the Junior Girls Field Hockey Team placing second in the City;
• The commencement of our Basketball season for boys and girls.

I have spent the past few days reviewing Course Outlines and will continue to do so this week.  In reading them over I am impressed at how each of you have addressed the two essential questions put forward by Ken O’Connor and discussed during our collaborative morning:

How confident am I that the grades students get in my classroom are consistent, accurate, and meaningful, and that they support learning?

How confident am I that the grades I assign students accurately reflect [the Ministry’s] published content standards and learning outcomes?

In a recent article, Tony Winger’s “Grading What Matters,” the author began analyzing his grading practices several years ago and was embarrassed by what he found. Although he claimed he wanted his students to think more critically and engage in the world more fully, his grading practices communicated that student compliance was more important than student learning. He came to understand that the learning he was assessing focused on memorization, not the higher-level thinking that all students need to master. He adjusted his grading practices to give knowledge, understanding, skills, and personal responsibility weights that better reflected their importance and ensured that all students were held responsible for developing high-level thinking skills.

Grading What Matters – Tony Winger

As we move forward this year, your course outlines can serve as an opportunity both for professional learning and dialogue about grading.  In working together, we can further refine our grading practices and move forward from an “assignments, quizzes, projects” evaluation construct to the development of course outlines that grade and give percentages around four domains: skills, knowledge, reasoning and the ability to create products. 

Have a nice week.

Halloween has come and gone and two months have flown by.  Highlights from the past few weeks:

• Sock Wars have ended with over 3400 socks being donated by our staff and students.  Grade 11’s turned in 1000 and our grade 8’s answered the challenge donating 610 socks;
• A President’s Club has been established (the Presidents of every school club meet twice a month to share news and plan collectively).  They now have a link on our website;
• Our Environmental Club is helping to plant a community garden in the Fraser and Broadway area;
• Mr. Price has his Bike Club up and pedaling in the neighbourhood;
• Grade 11 student, Dinesh Sunthareswaran has just returned from his week long “Encounter with Canada” experience in Ottawa;
• Volleyball, soccer and field hockey teams are all involved in City Playoffs.

 In a recent Sports Illustrated article, Joe Paterno, 84 year old football coach at Penn State, commented on the responsibility he undertakes as a “moulder’ of young men: 

…once you have kids, life changes.  You’ll find that your happiness is defined by your least happy child.  You’ll understand.  Every player we have, someone – maybe a parent, a grandparent, someone – poured their life and soul into that young man.  They are handing that young man off to us.  They are giving us their treasure, and it’s our job to make sure we give them back that young man intact and ready to face the world.  

Paterno’s comments remind me of the words spoken by author and educator Herb Kohl over 10 years ago in an interview with Marge Scherer. 

 The Discipline of Hope – A Conversation with Herb Kohl 

Kohl talks of how as educators we all “grapple with the challenges of creating environments where kids feel they belong and where they learn to love learning.”  At the core of this “environment” is the central premise behind what we do, the reason as to why ours is the noblest of professions:  

A teacher’s task is not only to engage students’ imagination but also to convince them that they are people of worth who can do something in a very difficult world. 

This past week, I received a gift in the form of an email from a staff member.  With the teacher’s permission, I’d like to share it with you because it speaks to the commitment and connection espoused by Paterno and Kohl: 

X failed grade 10 Science last year (tough kid with a tough life, like so many) and hasn’t been around much this year.  

If the Ministry pulled her report card and disregarded her attendance, they would see by summative assessment alone that she’s intelligent and knows her stuff. Formatively, she gets it; sits alone in the front row and asks great clarifying questions while doodling away (like I did when I was in school). 

Her mark is an A so far this year, with an 88% average though her attendance is abysmal. Does she know her stuff, most likely; is she capable, of course (and a fantastic Fine Arts student, some of her better sketches are posted on my back wall for all to see); will she fall through the cracks, if by cracks we can say she accidentally lands on the laps of admissions at Emily Carr with glowing reports on her capabilities, then I sure hope so. 

Someone talk to this girl please and find out what the heck is going on… she’s amazing and I want to see her succeed. And while I can’t do this for all of my students, I couldn’t help commenting on this one as I’m reviewing their reports at home. 

This teacher speaks about hope and optimism from a place of caring and responsibility.  The email, for me, reaffirmed, yet again, my belief that John Oliver is a special place filled with amazing people.  Our school community, at its core, is led with hope and optimism and as a result has a built-in momentum that you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere.  Optimism breeds passion.  Passion creates energy.  Our community is engaged and filled with positive energy because, as this email makes clear, everyone here is recognized as an individual of distinction. 

Thank you for the gift!

We’ve reached the mid point of October.  Noteworthy news from the past two weeks: 

• Our Grade 8 and 9 Mini School students went to Bamfield;
• Ms. Heppner, Constable Neufeld and twelve students are off to Albertville and Paris for 14 days;
• Literacy Leadership 12 students have started visiting our Family Elementary Schools where they are helping primary students with their reading;
• A great collaborative morning in which staff discussed grading practices;
• Senior Girls Volleyball Team placed second in their pool at the Ogopogo Tournament in Kelowna;
• 130 students attended the Vancouver Film Festival’s screening of “Kabuli Kid”;
• Over 1200 socks have been donated in our “Sock Wars”;
• Grade 12 student, Jonathan Senn, was awarded the Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Medal;
• Kyle Jacques will be representing SET BC as a student reporter at the Olympic Games and he has been chosen to go to Ottawa for a week with Encounters with Canada.  Congratulations Kyle!   

In his online essay, “A Vision of Students Today (& What Teacher Must Do), Michael Wesch, through the retelling of a story, differentiates between learning and school:   

Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.”  The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed.  And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love.  And there’s the rub.  We love learning.  We hate school.  What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning. 

Sorensen’s comments lead us to ask some fundamental questions: What is the purpose of school? What dispositions about learning, reading, school, the world, and the self do we want to cultivate? Ask any adolescent why they go to school. You will hear nothing about joy. 

Many of our greatest joys in life are related to our learning, but, unfortunately, most of that learning takes place outside of school. Steven Wolk in his article, “Joy in School,” writes of how we can put more joy into the experience of going to school and get more joy out of working inside school by focusing on several essentials. Help students find pleasure in learning by giving them the freedom to explore what they love. Give students some choice in how they will go about their learning and how they will demonstrate their knowledge. Allow students to create original work, and show off that work. Give students and teachers time to tinker. Make school spaces inviting. Get students—and teachers—outside. Read good books. Offer more classes in gym and in the arts. Use more authentic assessments and student self-assessments. Get teachers, students, and administrators together from time to time to have some fun.

Joy in School – Steven Wolk 

Towards the end of his article, Wolk draws attention to a recent visit he made to a school: 

I was standing in the hallway talking to a teacher when a tall 8th grade boy from another classroom exuberantly walked up to that teacher. They began some good-natured ribbing. Back and forth it went for a few minutes with smiles and laughter. What was this about? The teacher-student basketball game held earlier that week. Here were two people—an 8th grader and his teacher—having a joyous good time. 

Walk in the JO hallways and you will see students joking with Mr. Harapnuick who deigns to don his Flames jersey; come midway down the first floor and watch Mr. Wiseman exchange jokes on the fly as a student is running to class (trying to beat the bell); come up to the second floor and listen to the counsellors have good humored fun with students; head to Mr. Sommerfeld’s class and listen to him kibitz with his senior biology students. 

What we have here is special – a connectivity that speaks to a learning which has at its core a sense of belonging.  We are learning, we are having fun and, to borrow from C.S. Lewis, we are “surprised by joy” everyday. 

I hope you all had a nice weekend – see you tomorrow.

Two weeks have passed us by and September is now a blur.  A few highlights from the past two weeks:

• Our Senior Mini School students attended the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon;
• The West Program students “cleaning up their community” was  featured on City TV’s “Breakfast Television;
• A well attended PAC Meeting (the first of the year);
• Senior PE students going to Deep Cove for a day of kayaking and hiking;
• Over 30 students attending the “Me to We Day” conference at GM Place;
• Over $2,500 fundraised (with less than 24 hours notice) for the Terry Fox Run;
• The kick off of “Sock Wars” – our school wide initiative to help the homeless.

 In her article, “What Leaders Need to know about School Culture,” Joye Hall Norris defines the staff within a “forward moving school” as possessing a “set of beliefs that causes them to value the following ideas: self-examination, non defensiveness, working together, power to effect change, unwillingness to believe that certain students can’t learn, effective program design and implementation, continued evaluation, willingness to work through problems and staff leadership.”  In reading this I reflected upon the forward moving school that we are creating and have begun to realize that we are comfortable in being “risk takers” because we feel safe.  This sense of safety goes beyond physical security to include a sense of purpose and belonging – of being able to be ourselves and claim ownership of the place where we learn.

 As it is for us, so it is for our students.  We want them to have ownership of classroom and school rules; we want them to be open to the ideas of others, willing to admit to mistakes, trust those around them, have a sense of humour, energize others, and believe in continuous improvement.  One way we do this is to inspire them through the power of “Service Learning.”  The article I am passing on to you this week, “Service Learning: The Power to Inspire,” offers students the opportunity to master the core curriculum while simultaneously becoming engaged in local, national, and global challenges. This approach helps students learn to think independently and become more aware of the connection between their academic development and their ability to influence social change. The authors describe two different service learning projects: an elementary unit developed by a student teacher in which 4th graders raised funds to support a foundation that assists sick adolescents; and a high school unit on child welfare issues that differentiated for 10th graders in an honors class and an intervention class.

 Revisiting Social Responsibility – Service Learning -The Power to Inspire

 At the moment, our students are yearning to make a difference.  Under the umbrella of Social Responsibility, they are becoming energized around a vision of helping the homeless through “Sock Wars.”  It is a “true” vision because it has not been imposed.  Instead, it has evolved through students having a similar altruistic picture of what they want and knowing that they can achieve this goal most effectively by their collective, not individual, actions.  Forward thinking students surrounded by forward thinking adults in one very special community: this is what people need to know about our school culture. 

Have a nice weekend.

It’s been a great first two weeks of the school year. A few highlights:  

• A well received “Grade 8 Welcome” on the first day of school;
• Grade wide assemblies;
• Fall sports, Volleyball, soccer, rugby, cross-country and field hockey have begun;
• Grade 11 student Tasha Johal will have a movie review published in the October 5^th edition of Youthink Magazine;
• Grade 8 student, Angie Dhillon, received the first J.O.B. card of the year;
• The scheduled opening of the Galileo Room (Student Lounge).  

Stepping back and reviewing our first two weeks together, I can’t but help and think about the power of our community, the hope that flows through it and the inherent goodness within all of our staff and students.  As part of my reflection, I am drawn to the introduction of Malcolm Galdwell’s book, Outliers.  Gladwell writes about the relative good health of an Italian-American community in Pennsylvania and asks us to think about their positive medical data in terms of community.  He writes:

 “[the medical community] wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation.  They had to look beyond the individual.  They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” 

Defining who we are is in large part determined by the community that surrounds us.  This idea served as the foundation beneath the positive and inspiring grade wide assemblies that were held this past week.  Students understood and appreciated the message that individual achievements would always be recognized but that the greater honour came in celebrating the community that continues to provide inspiration and sustain all forms of excellence.  

The article I am passing on to you this week, Eric Schap’s, “Creating a School Community,”   reinforces our belief in the benefits of building a strong sense of community.  The article lists “community-building approaches” that we already engage in at John Oliver (as with most examples of “best practice,” we’re ahead of the curve!).  Schap succinctly lists the benefits of a strong school community: academic motivation; ethical and altruistic behaviour; the development of social and emotional competencies; a decrease in problem behaviours. 

 Creating a School Community – Eric Schap

Thank you for maintaining our sense of community and in doing so providing our students with the opportunities to excel academically and demonstrate their commitment to John Oliver’s norms, values and goals. 

Have a nice weekend.

I hope you have enjoyed your summer and that you are anticipating the start of the 2009-10 school year with excitement and a strong feeling of renewal.  Before our doors officially open, I would like to thank you on behalf of the administrative team for your commitment to our community.  Your efforts to help our students and increase their potential for present and future success are fully recognized and valued.

In looking at the year ahead and the impact we have on our students’ lives, I’d like to convey what every good teacher (all of you) already knows: that a meaningful learning experience for the student is also a meaningful learning experience for the teacher.  What exactly does this learning experience feel like to you as professionals who  work in a 750-square-foot office with 30 different ‘co-workers’ every 80 minutes; a learning experience that asks you to make over 300 decisions a day?  What does this learning experience feel like for our students with their varying degrees of ability, their personal stories and their difficulties in navigating the tumultuous waters of adolescence?

As I was thinking about these questions, I came upon a passage from Nino Ricci’s novel, The Origin of Species, which seemed to capture the essence of our professional existence.  The description of the fictional “K’s” circumstance led me to laugh – I hope you too enjoy the passage:

He had gotten an idea for another of his projects, about a character, K., who woke up one morning to discover he had somehow got trapped in a novel.  Suddenly the most casual objects became meaningful; conversations, rather than the wordy things they had been, became aphoristic and terse.  It wasn’t long before K descended into paranoia wondering at the menacing haze of significance that seemed to surround the smallest act.  Bit by bit his life was stripped down to its most basic elements, parent, antagonist, spouse, the blood-stained dagger, the smoking gun; all the rest, the hundred meaningless people he might have met in a day, the endless hours in front of the TV, replaced by disorienting jump cuts and elisions, action piling on action until it seemed the whole of creation had become a flood tide whose sole aim was to raise the frail vessel of him to some monstrous height in order to smash it.  Then, out of the wreckage, just as baffling as the rest, came the ray of light, the not-so-distant shore.  Hope.

The demands of our daily learning experiences can sometimes feel intensely magnified with all of their nuances and challenges.  However, as it is for ‘K’ in his fictional conundrum, so it is for all of us in reality: the ‘sight’ of hope, as Thomas’ published article made note of last year, is what keeps us and our students moving forward. It is a hope that is not fictional and although it’s appearance may be baffling at times, it arises because of your sensitivity in understanding that interactions with students always have a significance beyond the immediacy of a particular situation; it arises because you design classrooms that encourage reflection and introspection; hope arises because, in the end, every learning experience at JO builds understanding within the context of human relationships.

I look forward to seeing you all on September 8^th and once again having the opportunity to work with you in developing our individual and collective capacities to support students and . . . each other.