To encourage dialogue and reflection about what is important in our lives, our question of the week is: What are the most important things in your life? Why? What's Important (Week of 5/8/22) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
Starting off last weekend with Blake’s performance of Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales was a great ‘vitamin boost’ - the students did such a wonderful job! Please join me in recognizing and thanking Tracy Allen, Joe Knaus, Maureen Doctoroff, Maureen Barrett, Nancy Deveno, Alice O'Connor, Kaitlyn O'Connor, Diane Horvath, and our custodians. And, a special thanks to our high school helpers, particularly Caroline Harrington, Adam Price, Olivia Price, and Silas Trotter. Our Saturday was full of basketball - for both the boys and also the Celtics! On Sunday we had my parents over for dinner to celebrate Mother’s Day. For all of the mothers in our community, I hope you had a Happy Mother's Day - and I also want to again convey full recognition and understanding that this day and time of year can be hard for some/many and ‘create the space’ for support.
This quote from William Faulkner is one that I have shared many times before - it holds a very special place in my heart and mind as it was ‘given’ to me by an educator I admire and truly consider a mentor - speaks to the importance of leaning into our convictions, values, beliefs, vision, inspiration, and hope (#willfulhope #willfulaction #longasIcanseethelight)...
Breaking Up with Perfectionism
(41 minutes)
from the WorkLife with Adam Grant Podcast
Perfectionism is on the rise–and not just in job interviews when people claim it’s their greatest weakness. But the desire to be flawless is not always productive—or healthy. As a recovering perfectionist, Adam dives into how he managed to abandon the quest for 10s while holding onto his drive for excellence.
‘We Have Essentially Turned a Blind Eye to Our Own Children for Decades’
by Judith Warner in The Washington Post
The pandemic hasn’t created a children’s mental health crisis out of nowhere; rather, it’s shone a spotlight on a catastrophe that has been hiding in plain sight for a very long time.
“We’re suffering from a crisis that until recently people didn’t dare to speak aloud,” Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer for the American Psychological Association (APA), told me in a recent phone interview. “We have essentially turned a blind eye to our own children for decades. And because we’ve spent decades not doing anything for children, we’ve seen this escalation.”
Much of the evidence that the pandemic has catapulted a generation of children from “normalcy” into a full-scale, broad-based mental health crisis is anecdotal. What statistics we have from the past couple of years actually show a more nuanced story…The data shows a rapidly evolving situation that looks somewhat different according to when you look at it, how you slice and dice it, and what emphasis you put on the results.
…there is a huge body of research that consistently and unambiguously shows that children’s mental health in the United States was already really bad before the pandemic.
…the idea that good mental health can and should be taught, not just at home but in school, has to become a valued and normalized part of our culture.
It’s hard to apply the words “silver lining” to anything having to do with a disease outbreak that has claimed nearly 1 million American lives and brought a secondary epidemic of loss, grief and fear to even more survivors. But it’s nonetheless true that, when it comes to children’s mental health, the past two years of collective trauma have had some unexpectedly positive side effects: The subject has come out of the shadows to be part of the conversational mainstream. It has bridged what was once a seemingly impassible gulf between parents of children with and without emotional, behavioral or learning issues. By creating an unprecedented amount of shared pain, it could inspire a very real demand for change that’s based on compassion and clear-mindedness, not on fearmongering and division.
That’s why it’s dangerous to allow the children’s mental health conversation to get stuck in the toxic loop of pandemic politics. The acute traumas of the covid era will end, and with them some of American families’ situational distress. But the children’s mental health crisis won’t. If we don’t open our minds to its totality, then all the new and ramped-up attention from the past two painful years will end up little more than “mealy mouthed statements … like the ‘thoughts and prayers’ after a school shooting,” as Peter Jensen put it. That is to say: just talk.
This small sampling of responses offer thoughts for how we can support the process of learning - again, ‘what’s important’...
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What do teachers do that help their students improve and become better learners?
- They ask them questions and give them opportunities to think of their own examples that relate to their lives/interests.
- They give us feedback
- Play interactive games
- Help you
- Teachers answer students' questions about their schoolwork and that helps students improve and become better learners because it makes students understand their work better which always makes learning more fun!
- Go at every student's own pace.
- They ask them questions and give them opportunities to think of their own examples that relate to their lives/interests.
- Tell us how something is solved without telling us the answers
- Teachers listen to their students to help them improve and become better listeners.
- We are already great learners but if something is hard, teachers help us get through it.
As always, let me know of any questions/concerns.
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Take care.
Nat