I love the vibrancy and energy of the start of a new term!  And this positive energy has been found in abundance this week as our Middle and Upper School students have returned to the campus, wide-eyed as they saw their new classroom building for the first time, and full of excited stories to share about their summer break.  The photos on this page show the ‘welcome back’

assembly on Thursday morning and some of the historic first classes to be held in the new building.

Classes began on Thursday morning, and I didn’t waste any time in taking the first lesson with my new class for the year, a Grade 11 Theory of Knowledge (ToK) group, in one of the new classrooms.  Theory of Knowledge is sometimes described as the “glue”

that binds the IB Diploma program together.  In that sense, it would have been a nice touch if the students’ very first experience in an IB class had been my ToK class to ‘set the scene’ for the coming two years, but 3rd period was not too long a long delay I think.

Over the summer break I had done some reading about effective schools – not the new management-style books by so-called experts, but the tried–and-tested books written by teachers and educators that emphasize philosophical thinking and the formation of the whole person.  I liked this passage, for example, from “Tales Out Of School” by Patrick Welsh:

1. “Risk and spontaneity are at the heart of learning.  The best moments in my class are frequently those that are totally unprepared when, for one reason or another, my students take me in an unexpected direction.  A sense of humor is one of a teacher’s assets.  But you won’t find the new literature on ‘effective teaching’ dwelling much on the need for fun and spontaneity in the classroom.  The longer I teach, the more determined I am to combat passivity.  Teaching often involves an element of trickery – the purpose being to ‘trick’ kids into suspending the ‘game’ long enough to let their natural curiosity and enthusiasm come out.  Words such as ‘delight’, ‘humor’, surprise’ and ‘feelings’ ought to be part of an educator’s vocabulary now more than ever.”
   

Welsh’s emphasis on spontaneity and risk-taking in the classroom resonates with a comment I remember hearing about 35 years ago as a young teacher in the late 1970s from the elderly Head of a Jesuit school in India.  Unfortunately I have long forgotten his name (I only met him on this one occasion), but I can still remember his wrinkled (i.e. highly experienced) face looking at me with penetrating eyes and declaring “A school is best when it is operating at the edge of chaos.  If everything is safe and secure, the students can’t make mistakes, and if they never make mistakes, they will never learn or mature”.  His provocative comment links comfortably with the theme of another book, John Marsden’s “Staying Alive in Year Five”:

1. ‘I don’t expect you all to talk: some people prefer to be quiet.  But be noisy and lively if you want to.  It’d be nice if there were a streak of madness in here.  But don’t be silly – there’s a big difference, an important difference, between being mad and being silly.’
   

2. It was funny: although he’d just said he liked a noisy class, this class was the quietest I’d ever heard.  I think we were all in shock.  We’d never heard a teacher talk like this before.  We sat there gaping at him.  Candice put up her hand.
   

3. 

   ‘Yes?’ he asked.
   

4. ‘Sir’, she said, ‘what happens if we all go mad and you can’t control us?’
   

5. Mr Murlin smiled.  ‘I’m the teacher,’ he said, ‘and although we’re all important in here, there are a few jobs that are especially mine.  And discipline’s one of them.  So I’ll take care of that.  But obviously, the more you control yourselves the quicker we’ll advance.  You don’t lend your Porsche to a drunk, but you might lend it to someone who shows sense.  Let’s not be drunks in here, and before long we might all be driving Porsches.’
   

6. Mr Murlin went back to his desk.  There was a pile of battered old text books there and he picked them up.  Everyone groaned.  We all recognized them.  ‘Exercises in English Year 5’.  We’d already done ‘Exercises in English Year 3’ and ‘Exercises in English Year 4’.  The only difference was that the Year 5 ones had yellow covers.  Last year’s had been blue.  Mr Murlin took them over to the bin and dropped them all in.  There was a gasp, then we all cheered.  He laughed.
   

7. 

   ‘Good teachers write their own lessons’, he said.
   

8. Into the bin went 28 copies of ‘A New Course in Maths’, 28 copies of ‘Discovering Social Studies’ and 28 copies of ‘Our World’.
   

9. ‘Now’, he said, ‘we’ve got rid of the rubbish.  Let’s start learning.  Unfasten your safety belts!’
   

Mr Murlin was not, of course, referring to car seat belts, or occupational health and safety belts, or legal accountability belts.  He was referring to the literal-thinking, grim and earnest, highly regulated approach that sometimes still pervades learning in some classrooms, sadly limiting the potential and the

curiosity of those wide-eyed students.  Through Mr Murlin, John Marsden is saying that it was time to unleash imagination, and humor, and inventiveness, and surprise, and color in the classroom.  It was time for risk-taking in learning.

At Awty, we have grasped this educationally liberating notion this year with the introduction of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program in the Middle and Upper Schools.  We expect that this initiative will balance the historic dependence on textbooks with a far wider variety of teaching and learning styles, thus catering more effectively for the vast range of learning styles found among our highly diverse student population.  We are very excited about the potential of BYOD, and the details can be found on the Awty website at http://www.awty.org/page.cfm?p=7350.

On Monday, the return of our students for the new school year will be complete when the Primary School children return to start classes.  My hope is that for our the sake of our students of all ages, our teachers will not play it too safe in their classrooms, because doing so runs the risk of locking out true joy and delight as we seek to share our lives and insights with the young and form their lives in a truly meaningful way.