Head of School Blog "A Reflection on The Orchard School"

Tom Rosenbluth
This is a beautiful school. Visiting and working in urban, landlocked campuses, we sometimes take for granted the wilder spaces we have preserved, the lovely architecture that invites in sunlight and affords room to move and explore, gather and break apart, in almost endless configurations.

The mission of this school is beautiful. What we aspire to do is rarer than it should be in education: inspiring children to joyfully learn, reaffirming the passions and gifts of each, encouraging young citizens to find their brave voices to make their world a little more just and inclusive, connecting, challenging and supporting. At our best, we foster curiosity, demand critical thinking, support creativity and act as a positive, propulsive spring -board for our students.

This is an inspiring faculty and staff. It is hard to teach in response to the learning profiles of each student. It is difficult to create new curriculum and varied approaches to units of study. It is challenging to design lessons that lead to deep understanding and invite engagement with complex questions. It is often a long journey into the heart and mind of each student in order to assess what he or she truly understands and can demonstrate. It takes an open mind and disciplined commitment to push oneself to continue to grow as an adult professional, to stay abreast of the latest research or an effective new approach to a problem. Yet the Orchard teachers and staff often do all these things.

I also want to thank the administrative team. I do not think there is a more thoughtful, creative, hard working group at any school. It has been an honor.

Over the past five years we have accomplished so much together: a strategic plan, a new faculty evaluation system, arrived at a communal understanding of progressive education, launched a capital campaign, attended to many of the plant and campus needs that had been deferred or neglected, hired over 45 inspiring new faculty to join inspiring veteran teachers to help deliver the best educational care, recruited a new administrative team, appointed a Diversity Director, launched a new website, improved campus security and generated a multi-year plan for financial sustainability. This partial list should encourage you all to keep growing, keep challenging yourselves. A growth mindset is, after all, an essential element of being a progressive school; the commitment to refining our practice, learning, and growing does not mean we are not celebrating what we already do well, rather, it is the pathway to future excellence because it is the antidote to complacency. The problem with pioneers is that eventually they become settlers. I hope you keep exploring and leading the way for other schools.

I wish you all well, particularly the smiling, smart creative children. You are the best.

Sherri Helvie will be a wonderful leader. I know you will be inspired by her, embrace and support her and understand that together you are all journeying toward the beautiful promises inherent in the school’s mission. You may not totally fulfill them at every instant and in every detail, there will be fantastic successes and challenges, but the journey of learning, hope and creativity with children, always at the center, is a beautiful one. Keep your hearts full and your eyes clear.

I leave you with one of my favorite poems as I move on to my next adventure.

Ithaka
By C.P. Cavafy, Translated by Edmund Keeley

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Farewell Orchard,

Tom
 
Back