At the request of the “Spoken Word Club,” I composed and then recited at assembly what could possibly be called a poem as an advertisement for a meeting of their club. The title (also the title of this blog) reinforced the point of the “poem,” which was about how getting together in groups over time can have positive human effects. The poem was essentially a celebration and defense of the 30 minutes we take each week to meet together.

Anyway, I’d like to deepen the point somewhat by referring to a quotation from an article I had read in a New York Times editorial the previous day. The article was about the value of going to church, and the quotation is as follows:

You must experience what can only be imagined as real, and you must also experience it as good…I want to suggest that this is a skill and that it can be learned. We can call it absorption: the capacity to be caught up in your imagination, in a way you enjoy.

Over my professional life I’ve wondered and worried a lot about the personal effects of intentional communities and the quality of experiences that such communities deliver. Schools are my kind of intentional community, and I find the above quotation particularly helpful in thinking about Lawrence Academy because it uses some of our own pedagogical patois.

Put perhaps too simply, understanding “the good” and turning it into something that increase one’s appreciation (“enjoyment”) of life must first be an actual experience (as in “experiential education”). No abstract expression of goodness and happiness or any other valuable thing will do what an actual experience of the same can do. And those experiences do not happen at random. They can be induced through practice and discipline. They correspond to the development of skills (“skill-based curriculum”)..

We assemble and gather and care for our skills and our experiences over a lifetime, but the foundation is built during these crucial years of development that we experience most strongly in high school. Another article I read recently suggested that the most “real” moments in life, the moments that define your identity, occur in high school.

So, we had better attend carefully to the way that we shape those moments together, and we had better use our imaginations and sense of right and wrong, and we had better develop our capacity to experience joy as crucial touchstones in the path to maturity. Community is the place where it all happens. Lawrence Academy is our place.

These points are subtle in times of ease, but they are crucial in times of crisis, such as the moments we have experienced locally in the weeks since the Boston Marathon bombings. At such times, we know that community is necessary to ground our sense of reality, our hope for the good, and our need to imagine a world governed not by terror, but by well-being and stability.

In conclusion, and against my better judgment, here are some of the concluding lines of my awful poem:

To be in the same place at the same time
To be a people
To laugh… when we need to
To be silent…when we need to

To sit
To contemplate
To fidget
To breathe…

And now you are assembled…
Connected, gathered, collected, put together

In life…there is some assembly required.

Amazingly, winter’s grimy grip has been reduced to a few sad, speckled snow banks. One of the more meteorologically disturbing March’s on record has yielded, as always, to the pleasantries of April.

On the subject of pleasantries, I would like to advance a few of the qualities of spring that we are likely to experience on campus. We’ve all heard of SAD, Seasonal Affect Disorder, but have you heard of the following happier syndromes?

SAP: Seasonally Appropriate Positivity. Just as SAD brings out the Grinch in us, SAP brings out the hopeful little puppy in us. Passing greetings on particularly sunny spring days might become euphoric, for as little reason as winter brings passing grunts and grumbles.

PETS: People Enjoying ThemSelves. Whether listening to the sounds of birds, skipping uncontrollably, cheering loudly for nothing in particular, or simply appreciating the taste of food, joy travels a little faster through the atmosphere in the spring.

MO: No acronym here. Just the nickname for Mbongeni Tshuma, LA sophomore from Zimbabwe. He’s one cheerful guy, and he’ll only get happier in the spring. Beware grouchy people!

YO: Youthful Optimism. Though stretched and strained in the bleak months of January and February, the promise of summer vacation unleashes this irrepressible force.

PERRENIAL: Prematurely Experienced Regret, Remorse, and Existential Nervousness, Involving Adult Life. Strictly isolated amongst seniors who, right around May 3^rd, realize that their time in high school is coming to an end, their relationships with places and people are ephemeral, and the rest of their lives are going to begin as changed people. Symptoms: intensified emotions and ability to appreciate things. Only known cure: graduation, followed by ample doses of life.

We are entering exam week as I write. Final exams bring up associations of over-caffeination, scattered index cards, writer’s cramp, and general joint and soul pain. Not exactly therapies aimed at improving the individual and human condition, educational or otherwise.

While we here at Lawrence certainly indulge in the sadistic traditions of high-stakes testing, we also have alternative treatments that differentiate the school. Some of these can be seen in the classroom: a trial in 10^th grade CSC in lieu of a sit-down exam, for example.

But I would point to the dance concert many of us witnessed here last week as a standard of a real and true culminating educational experience that delivers something no grade or amount of late-night skull cramming can. (I pick on the dance concert, but there are many other ready examples).

For our dance classes, the performances last Thursday and Friday were the final exam. They represented the end of a process of discovering, practicing, and internalizing that started back in late 2012. The dance concert was anything but an exercise in abstraction or memorization. It was a real and real-time expression of expertise, talent, and desire.

The words that came to mind watching the dance in the moment were words one would happily associate with any high-level academic experience: rigor, intelligence, creativity, courage, initiative, passion. Added to these, however, are associations not normally associated with “finals” of this sort: human connectedness, selfless teamwork, emotional expression, poise, dignity.

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It is self-evident in watching such a performance that it is “legitimate.” It is core work in a physical sense but in a greater sense as well: it builds up a source of strength that arises from within and extends through all manifestations of one’s presence and growth: physical, intellectual, ethical, spiritual. Here is another recent example of exactly this type of exercise—and one we will not soon forget.

Such experiences happen in many different places at LA…and thankfully our high standards of what should happen not just to the brain, but to the soul in the educational process extend from dance-floor to stage to field and right back to the classroom. The final goal of the educational experience should be to stir and strengthen the soul at the very core. A little more than caffeine and a highlighter will be needed.