What Anchors Us

Melissa Soderberg, Head of School

November 14, 2022

 

Dear Columbus Academy Families,

My mother died last spring, and only now I am beginning to fully enjoy the juiciness of a Honeycrisp apple and the energy of an afternoon meeting full of vibrant people. I find this fall, that as I experience my own ebbing grief, the students and faculty around me seem to be doing the same – coming out of a gloomy time over the past few years, trying to interpret feelings as familiar patterns of our days regain their shape and form. We are all beginning to “get our sea legs again,” as my mother would say, adjusting our emotional balance to a more predictable world. And, however much we feel our foundations have shifted, stability is what we seek, and it’s important that we reach out to the best sources that provide it.

 

When our boys were both in high school, my husband and I agreed they could take a friend out on a small boat for the first time by themselves. Not long into the evening, when throwing the motor in reverse, the propeller dropped right into the bay. The sun was setting, the breeze was picking up with the tide, and they were in danger of being swept through the channel out to the open sea.

 

Luckily, our sons knew enough to throw out both anchors – making sure each caught snuggly in the murky bottoms – before trying to call for help or wave down a passing fisherman and eventually finding their way back to land.

 

“Anchoring” something makes it strong, deeply rooted and reliable, and the story of our boys plays like a parable in my mind during these recent unsteady years – lest I forget the things that I have counted on as mainstays before 2019 whether they be people, institutions or ideas.

 

School is, by design, supposed to play an anchoring role in our students’ lives. There is a level of predictability in our schedule from assemblies to lunch, and an anticipation of growth in moving from fourth to fifth grade, that offers security about the future to young lives in great flux both physically and emotionally. But often, that year-to-year march through grades, classes and homework can lull us into believing the mere fact of going to school every day is the recipe for growing up even though we recognize that just focusing on “ABCs and 123s” does not constitute an education.

 

“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters,” writes Louise Erdrich, an award-winning Ojibwe writer, in her recent novel The Sentence – this sentence (ironically) lingers in its power to declare some of the anchors that we know are most meaningful and elusive.

 

Odd as it is for me to write about books falling short as the recipe for an excellent education, it became clearer than ever during our pandemic interruption that the act of being together at school, and all the messiness that comes with that sense of community, is as much at the core of what is essentially important than any online class, reading or project.

 

It seems that “what ultimately matters,” as Erdrich suggests, has more to do with the quality of our relationships and our beliefs about ourselves and others. 

 

No amount of reading can teach us to take a deep breath, as parents, from our indignations in carline. Assignments don’t tell a third-grader the best moment to be honest with a friend or when sophomores should step up to defend the object of vitriol on social media. Those lessons seep in during conversations with a favorite teacher, during a difficult orchestra practice, or while team members wait for the bus to drive them two hours back to school – and they are as essential to a child’s development as mastering good writing or identifying patterns in a math problem.

 

So while we are reidentifying the foundational pieces in our lives coming out of COVID, we can appreciate how Columbus Academy anchors all of us and our families in a community focused on learning, growing and treating each other well. As an institution, we are part of the values that we hope to instill in children and uphold ourselves: respect, responsibility, honesty, compassion and fairness – or what ultimately matters – and for those of us who seek these aspirations this season, I am most thankful.


Melissa