What’s Happening at Bement
Three times throughout the school year, Bement suspends classes for a day to allow time for faculty and staff to engage in concentrated professional learning. These “PD Days” offer a chance for the talented professionals at Bement to dive deeply into their commitment to ongoing learning and professional development. This winter, the first day of the school’s Winter Long Weekend was a scheduled PD Day, and Bement’s faculty and staff spent the day visiting schools across the region to learn from peers and colleagues across a range of educational environments. Teachers formed small groups and spent time at fellow junior boarding schools, secondary boarding schools, local public schools, and a variety of additional schools depending on their particular interests. In addition to the on-site learning and networking, Bement’s faculty will continue to build on these experiences by reflecting and sharing about their school visits during an upcoming faculty meeting. All of us at Bement are grateful for our neighbors and friends across the school world who hosted us this winter!
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To
Over the last few weeks I have been enjoying Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know. McEwan’s narrative follows a literary scholar in the middle of the 22nd century as he pursues a lost masterpiece, a poem written by a mid-20th century master that was lost amid the dissolution of the poet’s estate and a series of climate disasters that reshaped the globe in the late 20th century. Besides the transporting prose and brief glimpses of a future Earth McEwan has imagined where the oceans have risen to shockingly high levels, the central idea of the book is a fun one in this digital age where so much of what we do and think is recorded, shared, cataloged, and replicated: would the possibility of a lost unique artistic achievement spark obsession or ambivalence in the lives of the literary class a century later? Both perspectives have their moments in the novel, and there have been enough features of a typical novel (love stories, adventures, twists and turns) to keep me engaged.
What Else Is on My Mind
Like everyone else in the northeastern United States this winter, the weather has dominated much of my idle thinking of late. This prolonged period of deep cold has reminded me of the winters of yore, and it has been amazing to see how resilient and intrepid Bement’s students and staff are under such conditions. Our lower school students have continued their regular trips to Pine Hill throughout this winter’s unrelenting cold & snow–what a gift for them to be able to learn how the landscape adapts to the conditions! Our upper school students continue their daily walks up to Deerfield Academy for sports and dance classes, and our skiers have been on the mountain almost every day for both competition and recreation. And, of course, every recess is full of snowy play, from snow sculpting to fort building and everything in between. Deerfield in winter is a special spot when the weather cooperates, and in many ways, a deep snowy freeze is exactly the weather we deserve and enjoy the most out here in our corner of Massachusetts. Here’s hoping that the snow continues!