Middle Schoolers, My Heroes

Ana
Dear Middle School Families,
 
It was terrific to see you all at curriculum night last week and to be able to watch the inimitable middle school faculty at work giving you a taste of what your children experience every day. Below are my remarks from that night. If you haven't already, please also take a look at the admin reminders included in the packets from the evening and consider coming to our first ever "open" parent rep meeting on the morning of October 10th. 
 
Warmest,
Ana
 

Middle Schoolers, My Heroes

 
Brain scientists say adolescence is a second infancy - an explosion of intellect and cognitive capacity. We can see it especially in critical thinking and fault-finding. Tweens are known for finding loopholes in rules, arguing, and pointing out hypocrisy. Here at school we can leverage this for deep learning. Students of this age are extraordinary experimenters, analyzers, speculators, arguers. They are learning to discern good from bad, valid from not, and to support their thinking with reasons. The next time you find yourself in an embattled moment with your tween remember this. It isn’t all bad. They’re learning to stand their ground, to build a case. Stretching these muscles is good. 

This is more important now than ever. In the Information Age, when you can have access to virtually limitless data, to every possible argument, being able to anchor yourself is not just valuable but essential. And still, it’s not enough. 

All this cleverness and guile is only valuable when employed in service to a greater good. And these years also see an explosion of independence. In a very basic way, middle schoolers start to see themselves as powerful and relevant. Their choices have impact. They can be the one to befriend the new kid. They can change the course of a class discussion with their question. They can start a climate strike. And our whole program is centered around this transition too - from what do I get to what do I give. This age is a real renaissance of two of our four Cs - critical thinking and citizenship. And they serve each other. 

As you listen to the teachers present tonight, I encourage you to consider how, in each classroom, in every subject, the teachers are attending to both: leveraging the very adolescent powers of critique and judgement in order to dig deep and asking the ever-important question: so what? How is this skill, this analysis, this insight, part of a larger story and why does it matter? Why does the hydrocycle matter? Why does compound interest matter? How does a bounce pass matter? How does Mesopotamia matter? 

Last weekend, they projected the bat-signal onto a building in Brooklyn. I watched it go up from a ferry on the east river with my family and several dozen other giddy New Yorkers. While most of us watching and taking photos were enjoying the novelty and artistry of it, the 80th anniversary of Batman, I couldn’t help but also feel some thrill at the idea of help being summoned from the darkness somewhere. These are times that call for heroics. We all need a rescue. 

But as any true comic book aficionado will tell you, the subtext of all superhero origin stories is that heroes are ordinary people who become extraordinary by rising up from hard times - for others. 

I like to imagine we have the opportunity now to help cultivate a heroic generation. Our job is to equip them with critical faculties so that they can keep their bearings in the sea of information, to keep pointed true north, undistracted by fake news, noise, naysayers. To help them develop the habit of staying oriented outward, to remember the ‘so what’ and the ‘now what’ of every lesson. And to keep a keen eye out for the signal that they are needed, as it’s not always projected into the sky.  


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