What’s Happening at Bement
Earlier this month, over 350 members of the extended Bement family gathered to put an exclamation mark on the school’s yearlong centennial celebration. The events kicked off with an extended Bement Day for current students and families, followed by an alumni event at the Brewery at Four Star Farms in Northfield. Roughly fifty alumni and their families made it out on Friday night to start the weekend off with lots of storytelling and reconnecting. Saturday began early for a few hardy souls who joined Dave Belcher for a fun run around Historic Deerfield, and the rest of the day was full of campus tours, alumni and faculty panels, and an immersive look at historical photographs and memorabilia from Bement’s first century.
Saturday night was the main event: the Bementennial Celebration. Under a massive tent on the field hockey field 300 alumni, families, trustees, and faculty feted Bement as it officially launched into its second century. The dance floor was lively and the food delicious, but what made the evening unforgettable was the feeling of community togetherness across so many generations and demographics. If you were there, send us your photos! If you weren’t, we will see you at the 125th!
What I’m Reading, and/or Watching, and/or Listening To
After listening to Rebecca Winthrop on Ezra Klein’s podcast talk about the future of the purpose of education (you can listen or read the transcript here), I picked up a copy of her new book The Disengaged Teen. Winthrop and her co-author, Jenny Anderson, wrote their book with educators and parents in mind, and as the parent of two teenagers, I am definitely “feeling seen” after reading the first few chapters. One of the book’s fundamental ideas is structured around a few archetypes that Winthrop & Anderson use to describe the habits and behaviors of teenage learners: passengers, achievers, resistors, and explorers.
If “Explorer” sounds the most appealing, you’re not alone; it is, indeed, the mode of engagement that Winthrop & Anderson most promote and the one that independent schools are well constructed to reinforce. In reflecting on the idea of learners as explorers, I think about the way Bement students roam Pine Hill and discover the intersection of the past and present at places like Gettysburg, Plimoth Plantation, and Washington, D.C. Or how Bement student’s innate curiosity is stoked daily by dining with schoolmates from all over western New England and from countries scattered across the globe.
I have plenty of book left to read, and since grabbing my own copy, I have seen copies on shelves in a number of friends & colleagues’ offices. If you are a fan, drop me a line to discuss!
What Else Is on My Mind
I recently attended a conference for Heads of School in Newport, Rhode Island, and one of the featured speakers was Logan Powell, the Dean of Undergraduate Admission at Brown University. Dean Powell spoke with us about how independent elementary and middle schools can best prepare young people for bright educational futures, and he used a phrase that stuck with me: “well-lopsided.”
One of Dean Powell’s slides showed a set of six characteristics that they look for in future Brown students. Arrayed in a perfectly balanced circle, these six traits were more or less what you’d expect from a highly-selective university: curiosity, resilience, task focus, empathy, cooperation, and independence. But he stressed that most students they accept do not feature these characteristics in perfect balance–they are still teenagers, after all!--but rather are “well-lopsided.” Each attribute is present and identifiable in the applicant’s file, but some are prominent and others still emerging.
Why did this stick with me? Because it accurately captured what we see in K-9 education; every child has gifts and passions, but also undeveloped skills, undiscovered talents, and outright areas of weakness. Learning how those assets and deficits intersect and focusing the learning process on a mixture of playing to strengths and fortifying weaknesses is a core element of a Bement education, the aim being to produce graduates who know themselves well as learners and emerging leaders so they are primed to thrive at the next level.