Posted by Mrs. Wilson
Eight years ago, I left the classroom to take on the job I currently have, Head of School. This was a pretty challenging transition for me. Being a classroom teacher was a dream job! It was not in my plans to become an administrator; I viewed it as a job that would inevitably pull me away from children, plunking me down into a world of endless meetings with (gasp) grownups. My daily to-do list began to consume me and I got a little lost in details.
So, I decided to teach a class. I was guaranteed forty minutes of uninterrupted kid time. Guiding, transforming, grading, project work, parent/teacher conferences… it was wonderful. I remembered that I thrive in the rich soil of children, as opposed to the rocky and sometimes dry soil of meetings, reports, and phone calls. For me, the solution is a mixture of the two. I needed to find balance, which is vital in any person’s life. I needed authentic time with children while still tending to my tasks as a principal.
I am not teaching a class this year, the master schedules didn’t work out that way. However, what prompted this post was my field trip on Friday to the Yale Peabody Museum with our upper school science class. I volunteered to be a driver and was automatically granted thirteen hours of uninterrupted time with our students. I have said this before, and will continue to boast, our kids are the best. They are warm, goofy, thoughtful, inquisitive, and grateful. It was really something to stand back and watch them, on the campus of an ivy league school, straddling the line of childhood and adolescence by completing their scavenger hunt worksheets with pencils and clipboards to taking pictures of dinosaur structures and remarking how awesome it was that those bones were real.
Thank you, Mr. Close and grades seven and eight. I have refueled and I am ready to tackle the month of December.
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