Greetings, GreenMount Community,
In
case you have been wondering about our Monday Morning meetings (I’m sure you
have), they have been going well so far and the students have been great. At these meetings we discuss the ways we can
demonstrate excellence specifically through our Pillars. The first week, we began with our academic
pillar and the idea of students putting forth their personal best. Last week, we discussed being prepared to
learn, and today we talked about what it means to be an active listener. I have been very pleased with the responses
of the students and also happy that the teachers, who are always on hand, often
can add significantly to the conversation.
But it is the
kids who impress me the most. Over the
years that we have been talking about our Pillars, it has become obvious that
they (the Pillars) are becoming a part of our culture. The responses that we receive are insightful and certainly
represent the ideas we have been talking about for the last four years. Even new students appear to have an intuitive
sense of what these Pillars mean. This
is especially important because it means that the positive peer influence is
working to everyone’s advantage. We all
know that adults can talk until they are blue in the face about values and
positive behaviors, but when something like putting forth your personal best
becomes cool, it is snatched up by
everyone as the right thing to do. It’s
kind of funny how these things work, isn’t it?
I am sure that as parents you have experienced the same thing. I know I did.
When did it become cool to wear mismatched socks? Evidently, it did because many of our
students do just that.
More
importantly, I have noticed that it is cool to READ here at GreenMount. Every day, as we get ready to enter the
building, several students are sitting in the gated area reading. I have also noticed over the last few years
that students who did not appear to be interested in reading can now be seen
with their faces in a book. I even see
kids at recess sitting under the
playground equipment reading. Now, you
can say that this is extreme and that these individuals should be playing and
getting exercise. This is probably true. But the point is that reading is becoming
more a part of the GMS culture.
As we work with
students this year, our goal is to create that culture of excellence, where it is cool to be excellent. You
can help by using the language of excellence that I described in the first
newsletter on September 5. Let’s all
work together to make it cool to be
excellent.
Cheers,
Steve
