Shortly after 9.00am on August 30th, things started to feel ok again. As the students arrived on campus, everybody began to breathe a sigh of relief, hoping that this was the beginning of the long-awaited return to a sense of normalcy at Stonehill. Despite the shortened school-day, between 70% and 80% of eligible students (boarding students will return in mid-September) made their way to the school campus, finally able to see their friends after months of enforced isolation and separation.
It turns out that teenagers change quite significantly over the course of six months! Unexpected growth spurts since April, combined with new hairstyles and face masks, actually made it quite difficult to recognise some of our M4-D2 students. Yet that was somehow ok as well. The sheer joy of reintegrating into a physical community made up for any awkwardness in communication. It turns out that the thing I had missed most about regular school days was the ‘noise’ of school - that irrelevant, often incoherent buzz of chatter that you hear at break and lunch times when you walk around the campus. The silence rather than the absence of faces had been the most disturbing aspect of life at school before this week. I had already messaged our teachers to not worry so much about immediately picking up the rhythm of learning during the first week. There needs to be a transition time, as we get used to working with each other on campus again. New students need to get familiar with our structures and culture, IT issues need to be resolved, the Student Council needs to be formed, the Let’s Do More clubs need to get going, etc. There is a lot of heavy lifting to do over the coming month to recreate the kind of experiences we enjoyed before March 2020. With this in mind, there was a particularly poignant moment around 11.50 am on Monday morning at the end of the break time. All of the students were in the MYP courtyard, and we could see how much it meant to them to have the opportunity to chat with each other for an extended period of time. Those of us on duty were looking at the time, knowing that Period 3 was scheduled to start, but really not wanting to force the students to abandon their conversations and return to class. Thankfully the students made the decision for us, conscientiously filtering back to class without needing to be told. It really is such a pleasure to work with these young people on a daily basis. The State Government has given us the green light for M1-M3 to begin on campus classes from the 13th onwards. We will now move to the practicalities of reintegrating our younger Secondary School learners. I don’t imagine this will all be plain sailing and I’m sure there will be disruptions along the way, but I am optimistic that we will get to spend far more of our time on campus this year. That’s what our students need and that’s what our teachers want. Joe Lumsden Secondary School Principal |
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