Yesterday we had our annual Back-to-School gathering. Depending on where you read about it – in a newsletter, on the calendar, in an email, online – it’s either named a Potluck, Barbecue, Picnic, or Cookout. After years of trying to land on one name, I’ve decided to just lean into it and call it all four names, separated by a slash. Anyway, this back-to-school event (a fifth name!!) . has become an unofficial alumni gathering. Sophie came for a visit. Chris, matriculating at Loyola University, stopped in as well. Even during the year, it’s quite common to find an alumni stopping by and getting involved in a game of Southern Dodgeball, and with five alumni now Toddler parents, the scroll continues. In short, “once a Cornerstone kid, always a Cornerstone kid”.
One of the aspects of being a teacher is the continuity of task that occurs as children move through your classroom year in and year out. For a 6th grade Social Studies teacher at a large institution, it must be somewhat numbing after eight, ten years to see a group of 25 children through your Day 1 Period Four class, largely teaching the same lessons from the the same textbook. On bad days, I would imagine it feels a bit like being preserved in amber while the world moves on and forward in the lives of students you barely got to know into lives you’ll not be privy to following. Do these students feel compelled to return, often, to those schools? To those classrooms? To those teachers?
Our Montessori schools are a community of all of our families, but most acutely it is a family of children, guided by adults that are with them for well over 3,000 hours in any one level (Primary, Lower El, etc…). By graduation, a child may have spent virtually the first 12 years of life within the relatively small and cozy confines of their Montessori school. They toddled down those hallways holding the hand of an older sibling. With a friend, they sought out examples of spheres and cones from each classroom. As a young emerging reader they had a Reading Mentor in the Early Adolescent Class (a Big Kid!); six years later, they WERE the Reading Mentor. Performances ranging from mouthing the words in a group choir, squinting at the bright lights and trying to find Mom and Dad in the audience to taking a lead role in a Spring Musical were all experienced on the same stage. Sleeping bags were set up in the gym, in his or her classroom, on the soccer field, at a campground, with classmates who doubled as pseudo-siblings. As your child travels through their school, from upstairs classrooms to downstairs classrooms and finally back up again, it becomes much more than their school. It becomes another home.
Fall often brings a Parent Conference Day. For many eighth- graders and their parents, the day is tinged with melancholy. Is it any wonder that the excitement of entering your last year and the search for your future is balanced with a sense of loss for what you will soon be leaving behind? We temper those emotions, and they can be just as acute for the adults, with the knowledge that these young adults will always be “Our Kids”. Mostly they come back.
Follow the Child 