Hi Everyone,
I’m currently multi-tasking, writing this week’s edition of Grey Matters while watching the Patriots play in the AFC Championship game. If New England struggles in the game, I’ll need to proofread this newsletter a few extra times to make sure I haven’t mistakenly transcribed whatever it is that I’ve shouted at the television. While many of you might be watching the game after spending the morning plowing and shoveling out from last night’s storm, I will admit, a bit sheepishly, that I am watching the game after spending the morning going for a run along the beach. Melisa and I were fortunate to have the opportunity to take advantage of the long weekend, and a cousin willing to stay with our kids, to take a quick trip to a warmer climate. When we took this same trip last year, our daughter Addison wrote us a note telling us how she’d miss us and how she felt a bit “abandoned” by her mother and father. This year, no such note and really no sense of loss and sadness expressed by our kids. The cynical part of me suspects that one reason for this is that our three angels were themselves plotting a weekend free from our watchful eye when it comes to screen time and their access to technology. Melisa and I continue to have mixed results with our approach to managing screen time and overall reliance on technology, including a recent mini-meltdown by yours truly that included my declaring a blanket ban on all technology on the second floor of our home (and then an hour later my finding one of the kids huddled in the basement with an iPad saying, “you didn’t say we couldn’t be down here in the basement!”). As I continue to clumsily navigate this particular terrain I get easily drawn to articles that offer all types of opinions, strategies, and viewpoints about how to help kids develop a healthy relationship with technology. Here’s two recent articles that advance viewpoints that I’m going to need time to digest and think about: first, a piece at NPR.org that profiles a new book by Temple University professor Jordan Shapiro who, among other things, is advocating for kids to be starting on social media at a younger age as part of “leaning in to parenting your wired child.” (I’m definitely gonna have a hard time with that one…) The second is an article in Scientific American inspired by a paper out of the University of Oxford that presents data to suggest that worry and concern over the negative impact of screen time on adolescents is overstated. So far, no reason for me to throw anything at the television, and hoping it stays that way.
Here’s some updates and reminders for the next few weeks:
Our school district is currently going through its annual process for building a proposed budget for the following school year (2019-2020) and presenting it to the School Committee and the community at-large. Superintendent Light has already made a few initial presentations that outline include the requests for new positions and programs that we’d like to include as part of next year’s budget. Our efforts to provide the budget story for next year always culminates in Budget Saturday, which is a daylong presentation to the School Committee that includes details of the proposed budget and reasons behind new requests. Budget Saturday will be this coming Saturday, January 26 from 8:30am to 3:00pm in the Junior High Library and is open to the public. If you can’t make it, but would like to review the documents outlining our budget proposal for next year, you can find them here.
A friendly reminder to families that we have our next early release scheduled for Thursday, February 7. This will be a professional learning session for staff, and students will be dismissed at 11:06am. Please plan accordingly.
Our Exploratory rotation (i.e. Art, Music/Drama, Minuteman Tech, Digital Literacy) will be switching after this Friday. Students who were enrolled in two of the four Exploratories for the first half of the year will now switch to the other two for the remainder of the school year.
This is a reminder to 7th grade families that we will be starting our Signs of Suicide (SOS) lesson and screening tool to 7th grade teams. The lesson will be delivered on Tuesday to 7 Red students, and then to 7 Gold students on Thursday the 24th. Students on 7 Blue and 7 Green will participate the following week on the 28th and 30th. Also, a final reminder that the Eliot Community Human Services will conduct a suicide prevention workshop for members of our adult community on Tuesday, January 29th at 6pm, also in our Junior High Library. QPR - Question, Persuade and Refer is a community-wide program that teachers the warning signs of suicide and an effective emergency response. If you are interested in attending, please contact Dr. Deborah Garfield at [email protected].
Finally, we had our latest installment of Poetry Fridays at the end of last week, with staff member Valery Gransewicz offering a special tribute to American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver, who passed away last Thursday. There were many well-deserved tributes for and about Mary Oliver that appeared via social media and news outlets, including this Washington Post piece, and this Postscript in The New Yorker. On Friday, Ms. Gransewicz read A Voice From I Don’t Know Where. Many of the tributes on social media posted her piece, Wild Geese, which I have also included below.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Have a great week, everyone.
Cheers,
