What’s Happening at Bement
As the fall term at Bement wrapped up last week, students and faculty were treated to a handful of performances in the Barn, the fruits of many weeks of rehearsing, choreographing, and writing in performing arts classes across the school. In the final week of the term alone we saw a fourth grade class perform their original fairy tale, The Villagers, the Shapeshifters, and the Golden Opidigamadogeesea, the seventh and eighth grade drama productions of Romeo & Juliet and The Hallmarks of Horror, and season-ending performances from Bement’s co-curricular dance team. Stepping onto the Barn stage is a central part of every Bement student’s experience, from kindergarten through ninth grade. Students build confidence, flex their creative muscles, and learn to love all manner of performing arts, and their friends and teachers in the audience are invariably supportive and thrilled at their successes. I hope you had a chance to catch some of the term-ending performances this fall, but if you didn’t, come back in the winter to check them out!
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To
I’ve been glued to my television for the last week or so, consuming Ken Burns’ new documentary, The American Revolution, as fast as PBS has been releasing it. The stories of America’s founding conflicts are well known to this former teacher of American Studies, but Burns tells them incredibly well and weaves them together to construct a cogent narrative of what was a prolonged and diffuse war fought across wildly different terrains. It’s especially fun to watch as a resident of Historic Deerfield, where a number of scenes were shot (watch closely and you will surely recognize some historic homes from Old Main Street).
What Else Is on My Mind
With Thanksgiving on the horizon, gratitude is in the air at Bement. At our final all-school meeting of the term, I thanked the student body for the energy, positivity, kindness, and joy that they infuse Bement’s campus with each day. Both division heads, Mrs. Casey and Mrs. Doll, shared their gratitude for the strength of our community and for Bement’s amazing teachers. Throughout the last few days of the term, it was heartwarming to see so many students thanking their teachers and Bement’s staff, from the kitchen to our beloved campus photographer, Mr. Plager. Our emphasis on gratitude will carry over past Thanksgiving into Giving Tuesday on December 2, when Bement students will leave campus to offer thanks to those community members and neighbors who help our school: local firefighters, postal workers, Deerfield Academy staff, Historic Deerfield, and more. I hope as you gather around a Thanksgiving table with your family and loved ones that the recitations of gratitudes far overshadow the calorie counting!
Poetry Corner
In the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, I shared Alberto Rios’ “When Giving is All We Have” at the final all-school meeting of the fall term.
“When Giving Is All We Have” by Alberto Rios
One river gives
Its journey to the next.
We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.
We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—
Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.
Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:
Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.
You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me
What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made
Something greater from the difference.