Meditations on NYC, Our Great Teacher

September 18, 2025

Dear LREI Community,

I sat in my office early in the morning, making the day’s to-do list, looking out of the window at the City passing by, and listening to our neighbors at WNYC.  The newscasters shared a story about the nation’s new Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. The piece ended with: 

When I asked Sze what poem he thinks everyone should read, he said it was Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” He said there were moments in it that were stunning. It’s a poem about people and travel and the wonder that is our fellow person, whether they’re on their way to work or coming in from another country. The first section ends like this:

On the ferry boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose. And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

I had not read the complete poem in a long time (maybe never?), though I know I have read excerpts. As I sat to read it later that day I reflected on what it means to live in this glorious city, and more importantly, what living here means to our learning here.  

Students arrive at school, the very young and the older, eager to experience concepts both smaller and larger, though what seems smaller to me now might seem insurmountable to our youngest colleagues. There is always the danger that school, in its nature and in its structure, will dampen the spirit of investigation, the curiosity, the eagerness, that drives these exercises. Our goal is just the opposite. How can we take advantage of students’ innate hunger for understanding and natural inclination to engage with the unknown?  That is the founding mission of the school.  

There is something about being a child in NYC that feeds on this same desire to learn and connect, and to grow while we are sharpening these skills. LREI’s program, connecting the acquisition of academic skills to our everyday experiences, practicing in school and through our time out in the world  – teaming the efficiency of learning in school with the vibrancy of learning out in our city. We know that your children are exposed to countless opportunities to apply all that they learn as they move through their lives in NYC.  New experiences and sites and sounds and interactions around every corner.  The City is a classroom and practice field without comparison in all of its hard, messy, beautiful, ever changing wonderfulness.  We are all of and by the City and if your child’s experience is like that of so many others who have moved through these halls, the City will be, as our fellow NYers are, “years hence [they] are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”

If we work at it hard enough, with great love and support for this city we call home, we will have as great an impact on it as it does on us. The city that never sleeps is also the city that never stops learning nor teaching and our students are right there with it.  

A few last words, though not mine. 

At the Battery

I am standing on one foot

at the prow of great Manhattan

leaning forward

projecting a little into the bright harbor

If only a topographer in a helicopter

would pass over my shadow

I might be imposed forever

on the maps of this city.

-Grace Paley’s “At the Battery”

Best,