The Full Range

Aloha Island School ‘Ohana,

Well, here we are at the end of a packed week with many of you on campus to peek at the Book Fair and find something special, move about campus to various teacher classrooms for parent-teacher conferences, or join your child for a field trip. We are so very lucky to have such engaged families in this important work of a school community. 

I love that our Nā Pua Keiki families were up at Kokeʻe Thursday evening to connect, explore, and wonder at the beauty of the world together. Iʻm thrilled that our own high school students as well as many from across the island will be on campus tomorrow morning to test their robots against each other. I am so proud that our Middle School students were working across the island on Thursday for their Hoʻokupu Day to provide their strength to community organizations and our school and help make our island and campus even better. I was so glad to marvel at the hard work of our 4th and 5th Graders in their Science Fair presentations – such earnest questions about the world…and now I know how many earthworms are too many around a plant and that Shout is NOT the best clothing stain remover!

And while life around campus was full, this wasn’t just any week... 

Together we moved through a historic election with weeks of anticipation and strife leading up to November 5th to come out the other side with a stillness that surprised me. I’ll be honest, this has been a hard time to navigate, and I’m an experienced adult with lots of life lessons under my belt with many different kinds of people. So if it has been hard for me, how might your children / our students be feeling right now?  

Why is it hard? Well, I think it would be false not to acknowledge the inherent tensions in the months leading up to November 5. And through all that, we asked of ourselves (I know I did and I asked it of our faculty and staff) out of respect for the full range of perspectives that co-exist in our community, to always engage with respect and never assume we know what the beliefs of another person are. Please don’t get me wrong, being respectful is not hard for me, it’s just that I think too often when we engage in difficult topics, where we don’t share the same point of view, the veneer of politeness falls away and anger and name calling can too quickly ensue. And in this context, maintaining respectful engagement can be hard, facing that tension can be hard.

And that is why, now more than ever, our children need us, our students need us, to find ways to negotiate and navigate together the full range of feelings present in our community, on our island, in our nation. Children / students need us to invite their questions, be open to their curiosities, share our own questions and wonderings about the future. As parents, we have this incredible opportunity to model what we want our children to practice so they can have confidence in their own skills to make their own music in a world that holds dissonance. As teachers, we have a duty to help build in students the skills to engage in respectful discourse, both listening to others’ ideas and challenging their own and others’ thinking. We can hold space for them to process and engage with us about what they are seeing in the world around them. All of us together are responsible to help the next generation feel hope and know that they have agency in the world around them. They don’t need us to tell them what to believe; they need us to engage with them as critical thinkers and consumers and problem solvers in our world. They need us to support them as they seek to understand the full range of what the world holds. And because that can be hard, I am so glad to be in this work with you.

 

I wish you all a wonderful long weekend, and I hope that Monday off from school gives you and yours a chance to pause and reflect on the impact those who have dedicated their lives through military service have made in small and big ways in our world. And as always, thank you for choosing us to be on this journey with you and your family during these incredibly important years in a young person’s life.

Together,

Nancy Nagramada

n.nagramada@ischool.org