Thursday, December 3, 2015

Community as a Criterion for Success


What did you do last Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving?  Do you join the many shoppers braving the Black Friday rush at stores and malls?  Did you rack your brain to repurpose that leftover turkey into another delicious dish?  Did you go for a hike, bike ride, or a long walk to work off some of the stuffing, sweet potatoes, or pie that you overindulged in the day before?  Or did you just stay close to home and enjoy the day off?  
 
 
For several Bosque administrators, teachers, and staff, we enjoyed the company of over 40 alumni at our “Blue and White” Alumni Reunion.  Graduates from the classes of 2004 to 2015 reconnected, shared stories, networked, and enjoyed each other’s company.  For those of us who work at Bosque, it was a time to hear about the wonderful things our former Bobcats are doing in college, graduate school, and the work world, and the ways that they are making a positive impact.  Some alumni are preparing for their first set of college exams; others are  playing college sports, working on Capitol Hill, or for non-profit organizations in Washington, D.C.  One alumna is tending to patients as a doctor in London, U.K., another is teaching fourth grade in a Texas elementary school, and some are having success in the business world.  They are doing very good work in a variety of ways, and we are proud of them.  

As I watched our alumni joyfully hugging one another and reveling in each other’s success, I thought of a column from that day’s New York Times by David Brooks, “Communities of Character.”  In this piece, Brooks discusses schools as places that teach young women and men how to be members of communities and people of integrity.  While schools as communities would seem to be an obvious concept, as Brooks explains, all too often, this is not so. Unfortunately, in this age of college placement anxiety and high-stakes testing, schools can be cold, uncaring institutions with cut-throat cultures that overvalue individual accomplishment to the detriment of student well-being and supportive communal norms.  This is not to say that each student doing well is not important; however, an individual’s academic success need not come at the expense of that student’s physical or mental well-being or to the detriment of a classmate or the school.  A Bosque alumnus with whom I spoke last Friday, shared that he thought Bosque was doing a much better job of helping students handle the pressure of today’s world than many other schools.  He specifically referred to Hanna Rosin’s cover story from the most recent edition of The Atlantic.

In “Communities of Character,” Brooks looks at schools that are intentional in their teaching values and mutual support.  He points out programs that reinforce those norms so their students can internalize how to be both individually successful and communally supportive.  Brooks also explains that this type of community does not preclude high academic performance; to the contrary, it can bolster all students in their intellectual pursuits.  
 
While there was a great deal to learn from Brooks’ column, I could not help but smile at the similarity between some of the school programs he cited and the programs here at Bosque, such as morning meeting, multi-year advisories in high school, beginning-of-the-year overnight trips, backpacking adventures in middle school, student-led parent-teacher conferences, and a “Harm Circle” (which sounds like our upper school Judicial Committee).  Brooks’ column reaffirmed that we’re doing many things right to build a sense of community in our school.
 
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the alumni who joined us last Friday seemed not only successful, but dare I also say happy. Yes, they were well-prepared academically as they referred to how well they were doing in college and graduate school. And yes, they are active participants on their campuses and in their communities.  But even more than these important indicators of well-being, they actually took genuine interest in each other’s accomplishments—just as they did when they were in middle and high school at Bosque, cheering each other on in the classroom, in artistic performances, and on the fields and courts of play. Our students have known for a long time what Brooks had come to realize in this column—being members of a tight-knit community enables everyone to excel at a high level in school and in life.  In the process, they become not only better students but also better people.