Head of School's Message: November 25

On Friday, 8th-Grade Science Teacher Arpa Ghazarian shared a rhyming comic book with me about the history of the atom written by one of her students. Combining creative writing, drawing and scientific research (the works cited page included ten references), the fourteen-page book included such poetic gems as “Let’s go to Germany, 1907/ Despite the looks it’s scientific heaven/ We meet Werner Heisenberg who tackled the idea/ Of spectrum intensities of the electron/ That’s how he founded quantum mechanics.” Some of the rhymes were stronger than others, but the science was sound.

 

In kindergarten, following a morning of pumpkin breadmaking, students were working with Director of Innovation Kimberly Edwards and Director of the Innovation Lab Pete Carlson on a Chandler-style Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The students learned simple computer code to program ‘bee bots’, toy cars shaped like bees that respond to the direction coordinates that students program. The students stuck decorated balloons to the bee bots. When the bee bots were lined up,
they looked like miniature versions of the floats that will roll through Herald Square on Thanksgiving Day. Programmed by the students to follow a route on the classroom floor, the kindergartener’s floats were filmed against a New York City backdrop and played back on their ipads.

 

Comic books featuring Werner Heisenberg, and programmed robots carrying decorated balloons are two examples of the kind of engaging, innovative teaching and learning that take place at Chandler every day. They are reasons to be grateful.

 

Starting in September, three kindergarten girls, the younger siblings of brothers in the Lower School, have taken to freezing me when we cross paths in the Johnson courtyard or on the field. They crouch, thrust their hands out in my direction and scream, “Freeze!” I indulge them by remaining motionless for a few seconds before one of them shouts, “Unfreeze,” and we go on about our business. The writer Andrew Sullivan, raised in England and a resident of New York, calls this behavior “the distinctive form of American manners: a strong blend of careful politeness and easy informality.”

 

It never occurs to the little girls that they should be silent or know their place, or defer to an elder. In America, kindergarten students and heads of schools are equals. There on the Johnson courtyard is the democratic essence of the United States. It’s one of the reasons why I love this country, why I love Chandler School and as Thanksgiving approaches, it’s another reason to be grateful.