Looking for Joy's Latest Letter?  Find it here: Gratitude as the Foundation of Community

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Good morning … and welcome to Fall Family Weekend!

A huge thank you to our parent trustees and our parent Saints Fund co-chairs—and a huge thank you to all of you who support the school. It is appreciated and seen! 

I want to mention one more thing, as I look out at this room of people I admire and adore—we are in the admission season and building future classes of Saints. I want more people like you and your kids—and you are hard to find—to be sitting in these seats in the future. Our very best applicants, who are most fit for our mission, come by word of mouth. This school, this program, is not for everyone—but all of you know what it looks like. When you find Saints in the wild, send them our way! It is one of the best ways you can help us.

I cannot remember a year that has started as well as this one. There is a sense of optimism and purpose everywhere on campus—especially in the places we gather as a community. Thank you all for being a part of it.

When I last saw most of you on drop-off day, I mentioned Rebecca Winthrop, who had recently visited campus to share with our faculty her research on modes of learning, especially what she calls achiever mode and explorer mode.

She says that the world often pushes our kids into achiever mode, through the pressure of competition, the fear of failure, and the goal of perfectionism. It’s not great. But explorer mode?! The term is active for a reason!  Picture a ship captain with her map, compass, looking over the horizon!

At St. Andrew’s, we want our students to be seeking in their education: experimenting, creating, and debating! Our goal is to shift students from being mere achievers to become true explorers. This idea got me thinking of one of my favorite books: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The book is a fictional conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. As a renowned conqueror, Kublai Khan can easily be described as an achiever, and Marco Polo is of course the very archetype of a great explorer. The premise of the book is that Kublai Khan’s vast empire included many places that he had never actually been, but Marco Polo had explored every corner of the realm, so he could describe those unknown lands. Khan seeks the answers he needs to perfect his empire, but Polo’s tales show that facts alone have their limits. Ultimately, the question of the book is whether societies and civilizations are defined by laws or ideas, by facts or by stories?

Of course, any society—and any education—requires both. Humanity advances in counterpoint: planning and dreaming, reasoning and wondering. And students need that same counterpoint to thrive: fact and meaning, responsibility and compassion, achieving and exploring. Sometimes it’s hard to see all this in the moment. Last week, I shared an update about St. Andrew’s to a group of alumni in Boston. It was an impressive group, comprising several generations with a wide range of accomplishments. They, in turn, shared with me the things they remembered most about their time here.

Yes, they remember the rigor—writing and studying at a high level. But they also said that as time passed, they came to believe that their unstructured time at St. Andrew’s was just as important—ranging across the pond and trails, perusing the shelves of the library, lingering in the chapel, and rambling in common-room conversations until the wee hours. These features of our all-residential, Episcopal boarding school are critical to finding the truth and meaning in our lives—and just as important as essays, problem sets, and tests. 

If Calvino invites us to the realization that both fact and story are needed to understand humanity, the poet Mary Oliver takes us even a bit further. I hope you read her poem, “The Teachers,” which I sent earlier this week. It reminds us that there is a much bigger context to our work as educators and parents. I quote:

 

Owl in the black morning,

    mockingbird in the burning

slants of the sunny afternoon

    declare so simply

 

to the world

     everything I have tried but still

    haven’t been able

     to put into words…

 

Oliver goes on to beautifully describes a space built from wind and sunbeams and a crystalline sky, and yet she simultaneously acknowledges the inadequacy of her description—or even of the very act of describing! She grapples with the futility of putting into words what is already apparent around us. We need only look. Nature’s teachers mentioned in the poem—owls, mockingbirds, sun, and skies—space and time—pervade and surround our beautiful campus. These are the teachers who are not on your child’s schedule, and we must make time for them too.

Families sometimes come to Fall Family Weekend with clear, if not quite empire-building, plans. They are armed with timelines, conferences, questions, and checklists—like Kublai Khan, ready to conquer the weekend in search of clarity, conclusions, and action items. And, in fairness, we push you in that direction, with our sign-up sheets, portals, and schedules.

This weekend, instead, let’s shift into explorer mode. Let’s be like Marco Polo, exploring the edges of your student’s education and your child’s emerging and evolving human story.

Yes, ask your children about what they have accomplished this fall. But also ask them: What’s most interesting to you? How do you spend your free time? What are you curious about? What fills you with wonder? What moves you?

And ask your kids about what they do when they encounter their own limitations, as Mary Oliver does in her poem. How do they make peace with what’s incomplete, imperfect, or undoable? This last bit is the hardest part of learning—and possibly the hardest part of life—especially today, in a world where we are told that if we are not moving ahead, we are falling behind. But the truth is that, if we never hit that wall, we never really learned anything.

In this world, there is no doubt we must be ready to work, do, and grind—but we also make time and space for wonder and imagination, exploration and rest. And sometimes that means saying no to expectation—even our own.

In closing, I offer you a line from our traditional Wednesday evening chapel prayer: “What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.”

It is pure joy to work with your children, and it is a special treat to have you here with us. I hope you have a lovely weekend, full of exploration, awe, and stories.

Thank you.