I hope your children have had an engaging and positive first week. From our perspective, we have seen happy and active students getting stuck into lessons, making friends and getting to grips with systems. All seems well. But we are not complacent, and we
know that there will be challenges ahead – from academic assignments to committing to service; from mastering activity sign-ups to auditions for the HS performances. Some of these challenges will be located at specific times; others will be ongoing across the year.
It’s especially important at the start of a school year that we acknowledge this; I said in the first HS assembly that I hoped things would be difficult, because if they were not, then we were not challenging students enough. The difficulties may appear academically or in terms of being organised, or socially, or many other ways. In all cases they are opportunities for growth and for learning – which is, after all, what we are all about as a school, and as parents.
If we are to support our students through the difficulties, and to see past immediate issues towards long-term success and achievement, then we need to be mindful that the difficulties and challenges are features of learning, not bugs to be eradicated. We need to help students through the messy, knotty, trajectory of development, and not tease out the kinks for them to make it a smooth passage. To do so would be to do them a dis-service, even though it might be a short-term expedient solution to a problem.
