| MPH Home |
Upper SchoolThere is a scene in my favorite movie, Harold & Maude, where Maude, a sixty year-old survivor of the Holocaust, is holding a daisy and basking in its infinite beauty, its perfect balance of form and function. The camera pans out to see her sitting in a field of daisies and she says (I am paraphrasing): “what a travesty of human nature it is when people who are this (she holds up the individual daisy) allow themselves to be treated like this” (she gestures toward the field of daisies.) In many ways my decision to become a school leader epitomizes Maude’s comparison. Being an educator affords me the opportunity to celebrate the infinite beauty and nurture the expression of individuality in each student. Rather than championing a proscribed curriculum that is essentially the same for all students, I encourage students to chart a course of learning, helping them find their voice, valuing them as individuals with thoughts, opinions and beliefs all their own. As a school leader, I believe I have a responsibility to ensure that students see the relevance of their learning within the context of their lives. This process of sorting, separating, rating and ranking students—to see who’s smartest, who is the most athletic or artistic, who should attend the Ivy League, who should be homecoming king and queen, who should be valedictorian—compels students to internalize an external appraisal of abilities and worth. Students begin to see themselves as “A” or “C-“ students, made valid by the frequency with which they receive such grades. Such assessment defines students, and once defined, the struggle to shirk such appraisal, if undertaken at all, is an arduous one. As learners, students form a fixed mindset in large part because others define their capacity for them, rather than them forming it for themselves through struggle and adversity. As a school leader, my goal is to foster an internal valuing of effort and progress rather than merely an external valuing of product and achievement. I believe educators can help students embrace their full potential by providing students with opportunities to connect powerful experiences within their lives to the learning that they do in school. . I recently went with a teacher of mine to visit an organization called Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships (SOAR), a site where we placed two students. I try to regularly visit internships to see students invested directly in their passions and this visit was no exception. Her project was to convince legislators to pass a law denying convicted abusers the right to purchase guns. She chose SOAR to dispel the demons within her; to turn the trauma of watching her mother get abused daily into a source of empowerment, a motivation for changing the laws that still favor the abuser in domestic disputes. This student would have been successful in any school but without the personal expression, the personal investment so central to learning, her level of engagement would diminish. It is essential for educators to guide students towards a deep understanding of learning. To help students realize that the struggles they are having in their families play out in the classroom; that their fear of failure, for example, invariably shapes their world and the opportunities presented to them; that their passionate conviction toward social change has ripple effects in all areas of their lives. In short, that the depth of learning is largely dependent on the extent of self-awareness. As educators, we are a critical link to that larger perspective. We must help students identify and verbalize the connections in their learning and nurture within individuals the freedom to be unique. I believe my role as principal is to nurture within individuals the freedom to be unique. Sincerely, Chris Hempel Upper School Course Descriptions  |
|
Print Page
E-mail Page