HEADLINES…….September 6, 2013

Dan Hendey is out of town this Friday, so Headlines come to you from Teacher Mary……

I haven’t done the same job for 30 years because I resist change in general. It’s not because of inertia. I haven’t stayed only because some student glued me to my chair years ago or because I’ve become forgetful about the location of the doors. If I’d started out in some other field, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have held my interest for three full decades. Selling shoes wouldn’t have kept me engaged; my interest in finance or advertising would have faded over time; and I’ve never felt that I was cut out for academia. I seem to prefer the hands-on, germs-on immediacy of working with…or maybe just near… young children. They are ever-changing and breath-taking beings who fascinate me on a deep and endless level. An infinity level, as they would describe it. They are miracles and I’ll never really get my fill of them. I couldn’t have chosen a better way to spend a life.

I was saddened last week by the death of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel-winning Irish poet and a long-time favorite of mine.  Most of you have been blessed by his words on your way in and out of my office, perhaps without knowing it. There’s a somewhat tattered copy of his poem ‘Doubletake’ taped to the wall just next to my door. It contains words I touch each morning as I begin another day at school. “Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells”, it says, words that are good to hold in my mind just before 120 really interesting children walk through the door. It’s not that I deny science. I believe in evolution, climate change, and the moon landing. I believe in the science of human development. But a lifetime of observing children has led me to believe that their metamorphosis involves much more than science, much more than a series of predictable and foreseeable steps and stages. It involves miracles with physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. It involves changes that are sometimes subtle and small, sometimes enormous and awesome. It involves miracles and cures and healing wells, things we can’t always see or understand.

As I was re-reading some of Mr. Heaney’s work this week, his poem ‘Postscript’ became a new favorite.  In it, he describes driving on a windy day, through changing light, on a dramatically lovely road in the west of Ireland, a road between the sea and the rocky, lake-filled land. He ends the poem with these lines:

Useless to think you’ll park or capture it

More thoroughly. You’re neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart and blow it open.

Could there be a lovelier description of childhood, I wondered, and of the effects of it on those of us who observe it? These young people I spend my days with are neither here nor there, neither babies nor adults. They’re in a misty, magical in-between state that doesn’t last nearly long enough, a ‘hurry’ during which they experience all sorts of things from the hard, known science of developmental stages to the strange and miraculous flights of their imaginations and fantasies. They buffet us every day, and they blow our hearts open at the most unpredictable and surprising moments.

None of this is to say that they don’t shout and trip, chew with their mouths open, and experience great bursts of energy at the worst possible times. They have thrown up on me, they ignore my ‘good mornings’, and they never wash their hands before they hug me. The fact that I still think of them as miracles seems to prove that there’s much more than science at work in this world.

Mary Ziegler

Reminders & Announcements:

**Our potluck dinner for our K/1 families will be held tonight---Friday, September 6---from 5:30 – 7:00 in the school’s Community Room. This is a fun and informal way for the families of our youngest students to get to know one another.

**Thanks to everyone who attended Back to School Night last evening. We were delighted by the attendance and hope you found the evening to be informative. We experimented with holding the event at an earlier hour this year. (It used to be from 7:00 – 8:30.) What did you think of the change? 

**The Annual Report edition of A Friendly Voice will be arriving in mailboxes this weekend.  It is also available online in full color; the photos really come to life. Please email Lori Pacchioli, lorip@scfriends.org if you do not receive your copy within the next few days.

** The All-School (K-8) Potluck is Friday, September 27^th.  Please read details online - www.scfriends.org – and in upcoming weekly email from teachers.  This event is a great way for families to build community within the school.  We hope your family will join us. Please let Diane know if you are able to lend a hand with set up and clean up.

**Be sure to check your child’s Friday Folder for information about the start of three after school athletic programs; tennis (K-4^th), soccer (3^rd-8^th), and track (2^nd-8^th).

Mary Ziegler

Assistant Head
State College Friends School
1900 Univeristy Drive
State College, PA  16801
814-237-8386
Fax: 814-235-1446
www.scfriends.org