April 27, 2022

Dear Columbus Academy Families,

April seems to be teasing us with “sparks” of spring without achieving the full-throated hum of flowering trees, warmth in the evening and the promise of summer ahead. It reminds me of my grandfather’s old Evinrude on Lake Erie, lurching and puttering. The outboard always managed to start but offered no predictability as to how long it would run.

Luckily, the bustle here isn’t directly correlated with intermittent rain and sun, and the spirit and energy on campus is especially sweet given the previous two years of a tiresome virus toying with even our best-laid plans.

The last few weeks have really seemed to regain familiar patterns and sounds of school – so much so that it is hard to hear there might be another variant looming around the corner. Some of my favorite activities occur in the spring: wax museum, state floats, bot competitions, Cabaret, band performances, field trips and the senior bell. Faculty and staff gratifyingly take notice of our students’ growth and watch them proudly demonstrate what they know and how they are ready for the next challenge another year has to offer.

One of the scenes once lost to Covid that we see now is the daily arrival of students, laden with instruments, baseball bats, bookbags and advisory treats as they get off buses and out of cars literally carrying their lives into our buildings. Initially, a sign of industry and participation – as they bring more of themselves and what they do into our hallways and classrooms – it also marks a permanent return of school days at the heart of children’s growing up. Naturally, I see this as a healing component of the isolated and disjointed experience remote learning offered us.

As the child and grandchild of headmasters, I was raised in a house that had great reverence for school. The sense of school my family cultivated was not necessarily a place of achievement or distinction – though my sisters, particularly, were some of the brightest students to graduate from ours – but a place to grow up in, a place to become someone, a place to develop my intellectual, social, athletic and artistic ways of being. It was more like a kind of retreat where the hard work of becoming a grown human being was the project. There were carefully chosen teachers, coaches, subjects and classes arranged to help me with that emotionally trying but exhilarating work. This kind of growing was going to have me bumping into all sorts of ideas and people with whom I might not agree or like, but there was a sense in my family and among other parents I knew that the independence we children experienced at school was the key ingredient to our maturation.

The pandemic’s disruption of all children’s growth has been dramatic and obvious. In addition, parents were thrust into an untenable position of helping their children become independent while they were unable to go to the one environment (school) that was most likely to help that happen.

Our dilemma as parents, Michael Thompson – author and psychologist specializing in children and families – describes in Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help Children Grow, is that some of the sweetest and most important moments of childhood happen without parents present. He adds that there are eight fundamental things we, as parents, want to do for or give our children but cannot:

1. We cannot make our children happy.
2. We cannot give our children high self-esteem.
3. We cannot make friends for our children or micro-manage their friendships.
4. We cannot successfully double as our child’s agent, manager and coach.
5. We cannot create the “second family” for which our child yearns in order to facilitate his or her own growth.
6. It is increasingly apparent that we parents cannot compete with or limit our children’s total immersion into the online, digital and social media realms.
7. We cannot keep our children perfectly safe, but we can drive them crazy trying.
8. We cannot make our children independent.

We cannot, he says, accomplish what are essentially our children’s own developmental tasks.

So while school continues to buzz this spring with the activity of full days and the energy of full involvement, I see the skinned knees, dress code issues, recess misunderstandings, funny assembly moments, poor quiz grades and great musical performances with a fresh sense of children at work, sorting out their lives as we all want them to. And, perhaps most importantly, I remain grateful that Columbus Academy continues to be the place you choose for your children to do this important work of growing.

Thank you.

Melissa