Everyone Is Your Friend Here – January 13, 2011

Dear TCS Community,

At our last community meeting, we welcomed one of our new students in Tamara’s class. (Our other new student wasn’t in school that day but we will soon find an opportunity to welcome him to our school, as a community!) The meeting offered hearty Touchstone applause—using the upright waving hands that signify clapping in American Sign Language. When I asked why we used that kind of applause rather than the more usual clapping, we had several student responses, including the information that attendees were also welcome to make pretend crowd noise (ask your child about both of these if you don’t know).

Already impressed with how well TCS students expressed the school’s habits, I asked students, faculty, and staff for any additional insights about our culture in the form of advice to new students. The answers flew across the common room to welcome and orient their newest schoolmate. I paraphrase some of them here, in part for the benefit of our other new student and even some parents who may not know all of the special traditions at TCS, including:

• Any child in a game of tag can signal the desire to take a pause from the game by putting hand on head (allowing for children who are beyond their comfort zone to catch a breath before getting back into the game).
• “Just because you have the freedom to go wild doesn’t mean that you should go wild.”
• You always sit with your class in the same spot in community meeting.
• “At the end of community meeting, Sheryl’s class gets to leave first because they are the youngest children, and we wouldn’t want to run over them going to our classes.”
• No one has the right to exclude anyone from a game, a practice embodied in the mantra from Vivian Paley, “You can’t say you can’t play.” (That same student asked where the Paley plaque had gone. The answer is the plaque is in disrepair and will need to be reconstructed or replaced and then remounted in a prominent place in the school.)

When I heard another student exclaim that everyone is your friend here, I knew we were ready to end the meeting.

Scientific research about how the brain operates has shown that our minds focus on ensuring that our physical and emotional needs are met (that we are warm, fed, rested, and secure) before we can focus on learning something new. We left the meeting with fresh reminders that Touchstone students feel secure in the learning environment that envelops them here and that they feel fundamentally invited to take the huge risk of being their own distinctive selves in a community of like-minded souls. Can’t ask for anything better from a community meeting…or a school, for that matter.

Warmly,
Don Grace, Head of School