AT THE GATE

I love the start of each day, greeting students, and some adults, at the gate. I have written about this to you before now. I usually start at the front gate, and then often end up for a few minutes at the back road, south of the field. What I love most about these early greetings is the enthusiasm of the students. 

Every now and then it is clear that someone has not slept well! Yet most of the time our students, your children, seem delighted to be coming to school, to be with their friends, and to learn. That is as it should be in schools. Sadly, that is not as it is in many schools, for different reasons. And so I often find myself asking this question: Do our students, indeed all of us, know how fortunate we are to be connected to a school like AISL? I think I do. And I think that many of us do. But we must not take this for granted, and we must nurture and protect this sense of appreciation, and indeed our school, both when we are in good moods with each other, and when we disagree. Even if we have ‘not slept well’ the night before, we should try to smile when we enter this space.

 

GOOD SPIRITS, AND LIGHTS

As a school, we showed good spirit last Saturday, when we hosted a range of swimming, football (soccer), and basketball events. This week the Primary students carried this spirit into their Spirit Week, with lots of smiling. Each day had a different theme. Tuesday was ‘backwards day.’ I enjoyed amusing different groups of students by walking backwards at times during the morning, and asking them to do the same. I am pleased that nobody fell over! Today we are asked to dress ‘like you are 100 years old’. I have a slight advantage here!

Early this afternoon, the Secondary students held an energetic Pep Rally to signal the start of the WAISAL season. This evening, our National Arts Honor Society students will carry the Halloween Spirit into  the Gym when they host their annual Fright Night. Experts in school timetable or schedule design sometimes refer to these days and moments when we deliberately break school routine and sameness with fun activities as ‘rally points’. I enjoy rallying like this, as do most of us.

A different and much deeper annual rally point is Diwali, the Festival of Lights. I wish you all very good spirits if or as you celebrate Diwali over these few days, starting yesterday. This is a special time.

 

BOARD MEETINGS

Thank you to those who were able to come to the community meeting hosted by the Board yesterday morning. I know that we will have more of these during the year, and I hope that more of you will come. 

Those who came spoke with clarity about things that might need attention in our school. It is very good to have sessions like this. I learned a lot.

Please remember that you are always welcome to come to see me if you wish to talk, about anything. In certain cases, it might make better sense to go to another person and, if so, I will redirect you. But I am available - that is my job!

 

SCHOOL CLEANLINESS

Some of you may remember the headlines at the World Cup Football tournament in Qatar towards the end of 2022, not only when there were surprise results, but also when the Japanese fans stayed behind at the end of matches to clean the stadium where their team had been playing. Spectators who were present, and watchers all over the world, were amazed.

This tradition is deep in Japanese culture. It is called o-soji. Every day Japanese students clean their schools, usually for about 20 minutes. In the Japanese school where I worked for the past two years, all students and adults had a work period of 20 minutes between the last two periods of the school day. I was part of the detail that cleaned the cafeteria. It was wonderful to do productive, daily housekeeping work, and also to have time to chat informally with students while cleaning together.

I have been thinking of this recently, partly because we have such amazing custodial staff who keep our campus clean, through diligent work day and night. But also because we can be way too casual about throwing things on the ground. It would be good to be less complacent about this, not to throw or drop things casually on the ground, but also to pick up the trash left by others whenever we see it. Our students follow role modeling, unconsciously at times. We need to provide it. 

 

GATE

Let me end more or less where I started, with a gate.

I would like to share with you a poem by a friend of mine. He is the Irish poet, Peter Fallon. Peter is a well-known poet in his own right, but is even better known for establishing The Gallery Press in 1970, when he was just 18. The Gallery Press has published many of the best known contemporary Irish poets for the past 50 years. Here is Peter’s poem ‘Gate’, from his collection News of the World, published in the 1990s. Thank you, Peter.

 

GATE

There’s no track of a hedge,
no trace of a fence.
In the middle of a field
an iron gate and no evidence

of path or passage.
It clings to rusty hinges
on chiselled stone,
it hardly infringes

on the course of stock –
for cattle a pair
of scratching posts,
for the colt and chestnut mare

a nuzzling place where you pause
and again you contemplate
in the middle of open grazing
your fate

by a gate that stops nothing
and points nowhere…
Say for a moment
the field is your

life and you come
to a gate at the centre
of it.  What then?
Then you pause.  And open it.  And enter.

 

I hope that we continue to find gates in the many fields of this school, and that we continue to open them and enter, individually and collectively.

Warm regards,

Malcolm McKenzie
Interim Superintenden