Head of School's Message: September 9

In this week’s New Yorker, there is a cartoon of a group of boy scouts sitting outside on a bench their ankles weighed down with a ball and chain looking perplexed at their group leader dangling a carrot over a candle. The caption reads, “Following the confiscation of our iPads, we were forced to seek other forms of entertainment.”

 

As Chandler’s Director of Outdoor Education, Pete Carlson, wrote in last week’s Cloverleaf, one of the goals of taking Chandler students for a few days during middle-school years is to unplug from technology and social media. Being in nature has an inherent calming effect, and last week the eighth-graders felt it during six days backpacking in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness and Sequoia National Park.

 

I accompanied a group of eleven students, six of whom I have known since kindergarten, on a trip from the Wolverton Trailhead in Sequoia National Park to Alta Peak and back. When we arrived at the trailhead last Wednesday, a National Park Wilderness Biologist also known as a ‘Bear Tech” was setting a humane trap for a bear that had been spotted several times in the trailhead parking lot. The trap was a large pipe with a trap door at one end and a mix of cat food and sardines at the other. When the bear climbs in for the food, the trapdoor shuts. Biologists then tranquilize the bear in the tube, tag the ears, take measurements on-site and when the bear wakes up and gets out of the tube in the same location that it was caught, the bear techs pummel the groggy beast with paintballs and pepper spray. It’s called hazing, and the experience deters the bear from ever returning to the same location. It’s meant to be a highly successful program. The goal of the program is to reinstill a natural fear of humans and breaking them of a bad habit.

 

One of the goals of Chandler’s outdoor education program and a goal for all of us as parents is to instill in our children a natural love of nature. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting we pummel our kids with paintballs and pepper spray if they spend too much time on their computers, but unplugging and getting outside are good habits to get into.

 

Without a phone, iPad or laptop in sight, the group I was with spent a memorable week together. The students grew in friendship, learned about wilderness ecology, and realized that as they begin their final year at Chandler, they have the capability to take on rigorous challenges. 

 

 Following dinner, on the final night of our trip, a group of six students huddled together in conversation. One was teaching the group how to order a meal in Mandarin and another was teaching how to order a meal in Bengali. All the students in the group were trying out pronunciations. It was just one of the lessons from last week that can happen spontaneously when the students are together without outside distractions. Later that evening as we sat in a circle debriefing from the week, one 8th-grade girl said, “Applying to high school will be the easiest part of this year, leaving my friends at Chandler will be the hardest.” What a wonderful perspective with which to start the year.