2020-2021 Education Guide
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2020-2021 Education Guide
Having Hope A Time for Resolve, Resilience and Reinvention
Dr. Meera S. Viswanathan HEAD OF SCHOOL
THE ETHEL WALKER SCHOOL
“…hope I often think … [is] a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. . . . Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . ” –Vaclav Havel
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spring like no other—this is how I began my dedication to the seniors in the yearbook this year. It is a dizzying time—so much is happening even while so little is happening. Throughout it all, faculty, staff, students and parents at schools have approached each day, each week with hope even as we acknowledge the pragmatic realities of where we are and what the future might bring to the contours of each of our schools. The COVID-19 crisis has offered all heads of schools a mirror to reflect on our strengths and areas of challenge, both greater and smaller. While many of the latter were already known to us, especially around sustainability for independent schools, the great and
joyous discovery has been the strength of spirit and creativity that has infused campuses over the last two months in their distance-learning programs and is evident in every aspect of community relationships. Resolve and Intentionality Havel speaks in the quotation above about hope as “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” Much of my time as Head of School over the recent weeks has been spent in a never-ending carousel of Zoom calls, with various colleagues at nearby schools, around the state and nationally, both in general discussion and in numerous webinars. I have been struck by the hopefulness of all the heads participating, and also on their resolve and intentionality. Every head, I know, is working valiantly to determine the best course of action for their school, orienting themselves according to their mission statement toward hope. In their resolve, everyone has become an autodidact on COVID, reinventing themselves as part amateur epidemiologist, part attorney, part public accountant,
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shifting from PPE to PPP, from closures due to RO to clauses dealing with force majeure. We madly read everything we can about the situation from government directives to CDC recommendations to The Lancet, sharing with one another all that is most current and thoughtful. We wonder when a vaccine will emerge in the next twelve to eighteen months, whether there will be readily available, on-site antigen and antibody testing for COVID and sign up for courses on contact tracing; we worry how many individuals each room on our campuses will accommodate with social distancing of six feet, and how we will feed people (grab and go, staggered mealtimes, etc.) and what the viral load might be
“As educators, it behooves us to think about how to leverage relationship to strengthen students’ sense of self and capability as well as consider other ways of teaching resilience.�
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at school this fall; most of all, we ponder what the impact of all this will be on our students, especially thinking about the equity lens, knowing that some of our students struggle to have space, time or resources at home to function well, some, for example, caring for siblings while parents are on the front line in the medical field or are first responders. As well, we struggle to support our faculty and staff with their working remotely and distance teaching and learning, even while caring for their own children and families, and, of course, ourselves. Some heads grow beards, some make masks, some maintain a stoical mien, and all continue to feel a sense of unease below the surface. Underneath the overarching worry and concerns, we remain determined as well as daunted, intent on teasing out that path to the future despite the formidable and seemingly insurmountable challenges that confront us. Resilience and Adversity Contending with this startling world inverted upon itself, our students are experiencing a widespread trauma that because of its ubiquity has become the
2020-2021 Education Guide
“new abnormal.” Deprived of the normative rhythms of school life, friendships, in-person mentoring, they yearn for the traditional punctuation points of the year from prom to the awarding of prizes to graduation itself, yet often rejecting the ersatz virtual equivalents, feeling there can be no substitutes for the real thing. From week to week, the moods shift, as they weary of Zoom classes and wonder what the future holds, from anger to dejection to denial to acceptance and even imaginative creativity. We’ve seen brilliant aesthetic responses from students on life in the era of COVID from dance to photography to painting to poetry. They have rallied one another through playful and incisive virtual morning meeting videos, offered specific recipes for rigorous workouts, learned to cook and so much more. Most of all, they are learning how to cope with situations beyond their control. Educators spend a great deal of time discussing with students the importance of developing a sense of resilience as a part of adolescent development, but unfortunately resilience is never learned vicariously. One discovers resilience through an encounter with adversity and being able to draw on inner resources
to find one’s way through. It is often a painful process with the outcome never assured ahead of time. The ability to stay present, endure and continue to strive without succumbing or capitulating to adverse circumstances is perhaps the most fundamental quality of success in human endeavors. Here is our ready-made opportunity, thanks to COVID, amid a world that has often been so buffered and cushioned for many of our students that they have had relatively little opportunity to develop the kind of grit that is so often lauded in self-help books of late. Can we seize this time intentionally to help our students understand how to work their way through this despite the fact that no one can offer assurances that this situation
“The ability to stay present, endure and continue to strive without succumbing or capitulating to adverse circumstances is perhaps the most fundamental quality of success in human endeavors. ”
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will end quickly or that all will be as it was? We know that one important asset in developing resilience is relationship and the trust it fosters, a cornerstone for independent school missions. For most schools, this spring has not merely been about distance learning as a substitute for delivering academic content. Instead, it has functioned as a means of reinforcing the connections between faculty and students as well as students and students. As educators, it behooves us to think about how to leverage relationship to strengthen students’ sense of self and capability as well as consider other ways of teaching resilience. As one of my students commented, “It doesn’t take much to change a girl’s life; just give her an issue to solve, something to lead, and people to change, and you’ll see how she’ll shape the future.” Resstoration, Adaption and Reinvention What most of us yearn for is a return to all of the quotidian elements of academic life—the engaging classroom, wondering what might be served for lunch, who will triumph in this week’s interscholastic athletic matches, and the usual antics and rituals of schools.
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But this nostalgia, “the pain of return” in Classical Greek, is magical thinking, we can’t go home again (at least to that home), as Thomas Wolfe might have said. What we can think about is restoration—a restoration to wholeness, to a sense of ourselves as complete and possessing agency, as opposed to the current context of uncertainty, doubt, fear and powerlessness. But to achieve this restoration, we need to model a stance of flexibility and adapt. In other words, we need to change internally to accommodate the shifts we witness externally. Here is the rub— while what we crave is an external return, what is needed is movement forward internally. It is only by reinventing ourselves, that angst-filled journey of discovery and uncovery that we arrive at recovery. But reinventing ourselves does not mean self-judgment; it means self-assessment. Recently, in trying to accomplish a flood of things all at once, I told my spouse despondently that my performance that day merited only a “D.” He looked at me quizzically and responded, “Never let us forget that a ‘D’ is a passing grade.” We need to remember that sometimes just passing is all right.
2020-2021 Education Guide
What does this mean? It means we cannot dwell in complacency and certitude about who we are and what we can do. It means we need to engage in continual, real learning—the kind that requires us to butt our heads against a wall and keep trying to find solutions, again and again and again. Rather than viewing ourselves as fixed vessels with contours of our making, we need to become more fluid, more adaptable, willing to bend and flex and experience the world in different ways. We must become our own students, trusting that we will learn about the world and ourselves that is transformative and meaningful. We need to be willing to be wrong, to fail, and still persevere. It is not a time of incremental, tentative toe-dipping. This is the hour when we must muster courage far beyond any we have known. Postlude Lest we droop at the immensity of all before us, we can also reframe this time of adaptation and flexibility as a form of play—a time of seemingly arbitrary rules and conventions, a time to try out different postures, a time of imagination and what-if scenarios—a time of
creativity. It is when we are engaged in deadly earnest that we most need the liberating forces of play. The die is cast; the games have begun. Ending as we began with this thought-provoking comment from Vaclav Havel, statesman, writer and dissident: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed… In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things."
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