HEAD OF SCHOOL

A few weeks ago, I sat in on an Upper School Acting class. Their warmup exercise of the day was to answer the question: “What age would you like to be again and why?” When it was my turn, I told the students that a part of me has always been 16 or 17 in my heart. There is something about that age that feels particularly salient to me; a time when emotions and sensations were close to the surface, and somehow everything felt at once far away and yet impossibly close.

I think this is why I have spent much of my life working with teenagers. It is also why I love speaking with alumnae. My conversations with alums often take us back to their own formative teenage years at Westridge and the forward trajectories their lives have taken since then.

At our recent Alumnae Weekend, all of this came into play so powerfully, as friends embraced and laughed and picked up right where they left off—intimations of shared adolescence everywhere. Somehow the years between don’t matter as much when you can picture the face in front of you as a teenager’s face.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend was when the 50th reunion class spent time with the 4th graders. Members of the Class of ’73 shared advice with 4th graders, and here is one that stuck with me: Stay interested in learning; it’s a lifelong joy. Follow what sparks you inside. Work hard, laugh harder … Love is all that really matters, so give it and receive it freely. Trust in your abilities to land on your feet.

This gets to the heart of so much of what I see at Westridge every day. The profound lifelong joy in learning that teachers have and that they nurture in our students; the “spark” inside students’ hearts and minds as they choose new courses and activities; the peals of laughter as students gather for lunch; the sense of self-trust and emotional freedom that girls have in a space that is all their own.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Surgere. The past and present of Westridge are connected in our cover story on the evolution of Spyglass over more than 75 years. The future trajectory of the school is palpable in the story on our new Advanced Courses program (page 4). And the energetic, forward movement of our students is alive on every page.

Warmly,

Andrea Kassar