At first it’s easy.
“Mr. Wales, I have four guitars!”
I hadn’t even opened my guitar case in the Nursery share circle and I had already been upstaged.
It was my weekly visit to sing with the threes and fours. If I had any thought that I would be the show, I had to quickly let go of it. I had merely stepped on to someone else’s stage.
At any moment it might become open mike in an early childhood classroom. Opinions run rampant when young minds are unleashed. Provide a topic, or, in my case, merely represent one, and they’ll run with it, in many different directions.
The Nursery teachers always make sure that the children give me a turn to play my guitar and sing and that they always say, “Thank you” before I leave. At Gordon, there is an emphasis on the rules of engagement. Gordon’s explicit social curriculum and, even more so, Gordon’s underlying values of respect and empathy, demand a balance between a child’s budding self-expression and the development of the even more demanding skill of listening to others.
This scaffolding is necessary in an academic culture like Gordon’s where learning is an intentionally exposed act. Gordon students must put their ideas into play with those of their teachers and classmates. More often than not, a child will be required to consider a math problem with at least one other thinker, or take on the side of an argument that is counter to what they believe.
A Gordon thinker learns to sift through information and assess it. Herein lies a primary gift of our talented faculty: igniting and sustaining a student’s voice while expanding the student’s capacity to refine, rethink and rework an idea or a skill.
So, let’s read the words of a thirteen-year-old, member of the Class of 2012, ten years after her first open mike opportunity in Gordon’s Preschool. In a recent essay that required her to describe her inheritance from this school—the school she will have attended for more consecutive years than any other in her life—she wrote:
Every single day, in these hallways, I pass the teachers who taught me to write my name, to read, to multiply, to think for myself, to detect bias, to look at things from yet another perspective.
Since I was little, the teachers at Gordon have been teaching us how to be presented with information, analyze the information, compare it with other information, form an opinion, and present an opinion.
If there is one thing I am sure of, it is that everyone who graduates from Gordon will be tossed into the world able to form an educated opinion.
Compare these words with those of Crystal Spence ‘02 in the second What Matters video, which went online this week. Spence and this eighth grader are both remarkable individuals, and in the intersection of their observations, you can see the impact of Gordon’s teachers: the freedom they allow students to find their own voices, and their high expectations for students’ engagement with the ideas and opinions of others.