Professional development in the summer is a powerful way to submerge oneself into a topic. This summer, Tuxedo Park School faculty are doing interesting things in California, Delaware, Massachusetts, Quebec and Manhattan… Light the fire? Check.
See what some of our folks are learning at BLC2012in Boston this week:
http://blcconference.com/about
I look forward to hearing about their experience!
KM
This video was shown by a colleague at the NYSAIS Think Tank I attended two weeks ago. An amazing message about really seeing each other and taking advantage of the small opportunities to connect!
Watch it.
Watch this.
How do we engender creativity and innovation in our schools?
The TPS faculty is reading Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds
RSAnimated video link here:
Sitting at the AISAP Summer Institute 2012 at La Jolla Country Day School in CA, listening to Don Yaeger on the topic of greatness, telling some great stories about sports legends and greatness…
More to follow…
Having just completed my first year at Tuxedo Park School, I have had the enormous pleasure of watching a full year, in its entirety, with peaks and valleys, busy times and quieter times. I am a big proponent of learning a new skill and making sure that even as adults in schools, we are never too far away from the edge of discomfort that most students experience all the time: learning new skills, acquiring new knowledge and working from discomfort to mastering something new, and sometimes wildly different. For me, this summer, that experience is in a long, narrow scull on the waters of Tuxedo Lake.
I have been taking sculling lessons with a local pro and trying to master the art of keeping the boat upright, maintaining even hands with the oars and relaxing my hands and shoulders. On a calm, quiet morning when the lake could be mistaken for a mirror, this is easy. On windy days, I tense up and panic; uneven hands and tense shoulders equal a flipped boat. The terms pull, feather, breathe, recovery andrelax take on new meaning and carry new importance as I try and move through the water calmly, rhythmically. It’s a lot like a day at school. It’s a good reminder to mush through discomfort and challenge myself to do something I spend time thinking I absolutely cannot do. I think of our students and I admire their strength and courage. They take risks every day; they make progress, try and again, succeed, fail and repeat the cycle all over again. I admire them. I want to be just like them. And so, I row.
Once I am in the zone, making my way from one side of the lake to another, I relax and settle into my strokes, feeling connected to the boat and the water, in awe of the beauty and the wonder of this magical place. A red tail hawk here, a fish there, some folks cycling along the road and a few guys fishing in their boat. It’s amazing and I feel so lucky. Enjoy your summer and learn something new.
In preparation for the Tuxedo Park School exhibit this fall at the Tuxedo Historical Society, we have been conducting interviews and creating digital archives with various TPS alumni. This happened all day long on Alumni Day, June 9. Tuesday, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Alex Salm, class of ’33, our oldest living Alum. At 93 years old he is articulate, funny and full of stories. Whether sharing his memories of getting in trouble with the then heads of school, the Eneboes, sledding down the hill to school at its previous location or flying B29 bombers and landing them at Iwo Jima in his twenties, he is amazing. It was a privilege to be there and chat with him and Chris Sonne, Tuxedo Park historian and TPS alum, John Ham, TPS history teacher. It is amazing to witness history in this way!
I am at the NYSAIS Think Tank 2012 with various NY Independent School folks. We are now sitting in the Carey Conference Center in Rensselaerville, NY (just outside Albany) listening to Michael Brosnan, editor of Independent School Magazine. We are having one of those 30,000 foot conversations about inclusive schools and our missions and philosophies; we are being force to think, again and again, about moving our schools forward in multiple ways and make sure we are serving the children and families in our charges. It is heady work, but I am happy to be on this hilltop in this moment in time doing this work. I feel privileged to say that I love my job.
Over the past month my thoughts have often turned to China as I recall an episode, a visit or a conversation while traveling with Tuxedo Park School’s 9th graders to Shanghai, Xi’An and Beijing. It is interesting to me that the trip continues to settle in, in stages, as I think about that nine-day whirlwind that had us in a constant wide-eyed state. I’ll glance at a 9th grader here on campus and be transported back to a restaurant where we sat together consuming piles of dumplings… or I think about tai chi, or a tiny fraction of the Great Wall or watching silk be spun from threads that are pulled off a cocoon. There are many sensory images and “Madeleine-like” moments, where I am absorbed for minutes at a time recalling a scene or revisiting an image in my mind. I’m no Proust, but I believe him when he wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” I know those sensory images are meant to remind me to keep thinking globally: to use my new eyes to keep looking for the lessons of the trip, all that we saw and heard, all that we need to remember and integrate into our lives back at home.
We had one guide who was with us for the entire trip, a lovely man named Jackie, who greeted us at the Beijing airport and shuttled us through every experience until we departed Shanghai nine days later. In each city, there were different guides: Kai in Beijing, Jasmine in Shanghai and Tony in Xi’An. Tony gave us wonderful history lessons about the Cultural Revolution and about the “One Child” policy in China. He kept remarking that he was so glad to have been born when we was, that the opportunities available to him were so dramatically different than those available to his parents’ generation. He told us of his own aspirations in school, of what he wanted to study and think about doing in his life. He said that his parents couldn’t understand any thinking beyond making a structured vocational plan early on. They were not trained to aspire to something better for their children than they had, themselves. They had been trained to conform and to dream only incremental dreams about what was possible for them and for their family.
Marcel Proust wrote: “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us.” Then what wisdom do we take with us as we move forward from this remarkable journey? There is so much ingrained in our American culture that tells us we can dream and achieve and reach far beyond where we currently are in our lives. So as we and our students grow, learn and interact in an increasingly global world, knowing where we come from is important. But even more important is the capacity to understand the mindset and experience of another person, from another culture—the man sitting across a dining table piled high with dumplings, the person whose story will ultimately become entangled, inextricably, with our own.
The Real Meaning of Global Education?
By Kathleen McNamara
March brought with it an embarrassment of riches for me. I feel very lucky to have been a participant in the “Istanbul to Athens” spring break trip run by Mrs. Sweeney and to serve as a chaperone for the 9th grade trip to China. One of the major recommendations of the NYSAIS accreditation team is for Tuxedo Park School to continue defining and delivering to students the skills and mindset of forward-thinking, globally-minded citizens, a mandate ideally paired with our school’s rich history and tradition. I am happy to report that TPS curriculum and opportunities are indeed focused on the future and the world outside even as we celebrate our school’s 112-year history. I have long heard claims of global education made while serving on independent school leadership teams as well as on evaluation teams looking at school curriculum—but it has historically proven difficult to find in the actual curriculum. Not so at TPS. These two unique opportunities abroad highlight some of the ways we are making good on our claim of espousing a true global view of the world, a perspective we foster without sacrificing the traditional hallmarks of a TPS education.
First, our family travel trips at Spring Break: Mrs Sweeney has been organizing these for the last few years, taking over where Madame Abrahams left off. Opportunities exist for families to sign up for an international trip and travel together through EF Tours (education first). This year’s group included thirty people and there were three families where grandparents were part of the equation; we ranged in age from 8-80! There were two second graders, a third grader, a fifth grader, multiple sixth and seventh graders and an eighth grader, in addition to a few alum and many parents, and together, we embarked on a journey through the bustling city of Istanbul, down the coast of Turkey and across the Aegean Sea to Athens. We visited mosques and museums, palaces and historic landmark, local artisan workshops and many, many eateries. We learned together and created memories together. It is a unique way for families to see a new part of the world, to have children hang around with school mates and yet still have a family experience. While I traveled solo, I enjoyed floating in and out of the families comprising our group, and experiencing new places with them.
My memories focus on the call to prayer in Turkey, the spice market, the weaving school and the visit to Ephesus in Turkey. In Athens–a place I have traveled before with students–I was thrilled to be able to visit the new Acropolis museum, recently opened and in the shadow of the site it details and archives. It was such an amazing experience to watch the archeological process being documented.
The 2012 Freshmen Trip to China was one of the educational highlights of my life. As someone who has traveled almost exclusively in Western and Eastern Europe, I was captivated by how exotic and foreign things seemed in China. Our intrepid Freshmen took six plane flights over the course of ten days. We traveled to Beijing, then Xi’An and finally, Shanghai. We ate marvelous new foods, climbed the Great Wall, visited the pandas at the Beijing Zoo, visited silk and pearl workshops, learned Chinese calligraphy, saw the Terra Cotta Warriors and stood on the highest observation deck in the world atop the Shanghai World Financial Center.
One both trips, EF Tours provided careful guidance and knowledgeable local guides who gave us safety tips and bargaining pointers; they taught us to be reverent of these most spectacular sites and to appreciate the insight that came with our visits to them. I am pleased to report that on both trips, TPS students represented their families, and their school, very well.
Global Education? Yes, we are indeed preparing our students for their multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-faceted futures…and by means far beyond just these fascinating trips abroad. From our Primary School’s annual Cultural Studies, to language study including French, Spanish, Latin, Chinese and Arabic, to vigorous coursework in world history and geography, to the global perspective of our faculty, we making good on our promise that TPS nurtures and prepares the next generation of global citizens.
Our last day!
Our resourceful guide, Jacky, suggested a visit to a water village about one hour of the city. We were up and packed and had breakfast and checked out by 8 am.
We drove to Zhu jiao ju village, the Venice of the East. We took a boat ride along the canal, visited the village and had a local lunch, before heading off to the airport where we have a 4pm departure.
This was a wonderful opportunity to get into a village and really see how regular Chinese live in the countryside. We started in the town square with a Tai Chi lesson by Jacky.
An amazing end to an unbelievable stay in China.
It will take a while to digest and understand all that we saw and experienced.
Head's Up, Kathleen McNamara 