We are a school that affirms the essential interaction between knowing well (academic excellence) and caring well (empathy, compassion, standing up for others). As we approach the sixth grade’s Freedom Week program, we are reminded that our community continues to stand as a bulwark of knowing well and caring well against the forces that lead people to mistreat others on the basis of misguided and malicious beliefs.

From our least biased pre-kindergartners to middle school students engaging in Honoring Differences Seminars, and curricula across the developmental spectrum, we are continually fostering intellectual curiosity, upholding the need to honor differences, and encouraging meaningful contribution to make BDS and any part of the world BDS interacts with smarter and more loving.

In parallel with providing curricula that foster knowing and caring abilities, we are sometimes called upon, often directly by students, to be responsive to situations in the world that intensely reflect in real-time the complicated dynamics of human interaction we study in our classrooms. The volatile dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lead us, on behalf of students who are aware and wish to learn, and on behalf of community members for whom the dynamics have significant resonance, to offer the following acknowledgments.

Sixth grade students are putting the finishing touches on their Freedom Week projects, and look forward to sharing them with the community throughout next week. As they designed these projects to wrap up their study of civil rights, students had several degrees of freedom themselves.

Students could select any topic related to the civil rights issues studied in class. The range of their interests is vast: historical events we studied like the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, and Selma; contemporary issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement, LGBTQ+ rights, the rise of hate crimes targeting people of AAPI heritage, anti-Semitism, and bias in standardized testing; and everything else from the Black Panther party and diversity in television and books to civil rights music, the pay gap in women’s sports, the Armenian genocide, and the story of the first Black NASCAR driver.

Students also chose their own project formats, such as graphic novels, websites, poetry, paintings, models and dioramas, slide shows, and even some research papers. Students set their own work schedules and deadlines over the last five weeks, relying on help from their peers in project support teams and some structured guidance and feedback from faculty.

“Choice is a powerful learning tool. The magic of these projects comes from combining choice with structure, giving the students enough time, and drawing from a rich curriculum that resonates in some ways with everyone. Every year I learn new things from the students, and every year many of them create things I could only dream of,” observed Dean Spencer, sixth grade social studies teacher.

We as a community have agreed to only idle our cars as we are moving through the pick-up and drop-off lines. If you arrive early, please turn off your engines and open your windows. At BDS we turn off our car engines to help conserve energy, promote good health, and model good citizenship. Not only that, Massachusetts has an anti-idling law that states:

“No person shall cause, suffer, allow, or permit the unnecessary operation of the engine of a motor vehicle while said vehicle is stopped for a foreseeable period of time in excess of five minutes.”

• Every time you turn off your car engine instead of idling you will:
• Make the air healthier by cutting down on hazardous pollution in your town or community.
• Help the environment. For every 10 minutes your engine is off, you’ll prevent one pound of carbon dioxide from being released; carbon dioxide is the primary contributor to global warming.
• Keep money in your wallet and save fuel. Save between 1/5 to 7/10 of a gallon of fuel for every hour of not idling.

Thank you for being a steward of the environment AND keeping us healthy.

– Kathy Jo Solomon, art teacher and sustainability coordinator

We are pleased to collaborate with Kevin Mahoney, our Singapore Math consultant, to provide an opportunity for Lower School parents to learn the philosophy of modern math approaches and ways to create a nurturing math environment at home.

This self-paced virtual course will engage parents in supporting their child’s mathematical development, build background knowledge, and provide effective teaching and learning strategies to help them to develop:

• the ability to solve problems logically
• mental flexibility, independence of thought, and self-esteem
• the ability to persevere

Please reach out to Deborah Brissenden to participate in this complimentary course.