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Dear Parents,

What glorious days these are!  Walking through the Arcade doors by Cribbin Hall Library, out into the Ohmes Family Circle, I can’t help but want to pause and take a deep breath. The aroma of leaves… the beginning of the bursting forth of color… the feeling of the fresh, crisp air―all conspire to fill me to overflowing, with gratitude, with wonder, with awe and, well, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins (priest and poet of the 19th century), with a sense of God’s Grandeur. As excerpted from his poem of that name:

 
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…
 
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…
 
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods…with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins’s poem and my own sensibilities are echoed in our educational philosophy. One means Madeleine Sophie Barat used to raise the minds and hearts of children to God was by surrounding them with beauty.
 
I was recently listening to an NPR segment in which the interviewee was reporting on a study comparing the convalescence rates of patients. The one variable in the study was the environment in which they were recuperating. One group spent time in an ugly room with no view save a brick wall from their window. The other group convalesced in a beautiful place with a view of trees and garden with flowers. With astonishingly statistically significant results, the convalescence of those surrounded by beauty occurred at a faster rate. On an intuitive level, this is not at all surprising!
 
I hope we all allow the beauty of these days to raise our hearts and minds to God whose Very Self is Beauty. This God is the One who ‘Was’ before Creation, who resides ‘deep down’ in all that ‘Is’ (the One Who wished to be known as I-Am) and who is made manifest when creation bursts forth in all its splendor and loveliness.
 
This God, whom we have come to know in the dispositions of the Heart of the person of Jesus, not only transcends the material world but is revealed to us through the beauty of the material world.
 
May we all enjoy the Glory and Abundant Beauty of these days!

Maureen Glavin, rscj
 

Dear Parents,

Perhaps you recall my opening comments at the Back to School nights, during which I suggested that the world of today is dominated by rapid change. I said that change, especially change in technology, is proceeding at an exponential rate. This was certainly not news to anyone. Yet, concrete examples of what is possible enliven my generic statement. The following are sample prognostications from a website of which I recently became aware—techcast.org:

• By 2022, cancer will be cured.
• By 2028, we will have artificially controlled body parts.
• By 2040, the average lifespan will be 100 years.

What does this kind of information have to do with education? Everything!

As the world changes, the nature of work for our children will be changing, which in turn is changing how we need to prepare them. In such a world, two aspects of our Sacred Heart education become absolutely essential:

1.      We need to educate our children to become agile learners.

We are not able to teach our students everything they need to know! Consequently, we need to teach them how to learn, how to adapt what they learn to different contexts, how to take initiatives and risks (in their learning and in life) and how to figure out how to answer questions – especially questions which can’t be Googled. An aspect of agility in learning requires that we inculcate in our children the understanding that mistakes are NOT the enemy, rather they are the key to success.

2.      We need to provide our children with meaning and a sense of purpose in life.

It is increasingly imperative that our children need to experience an authentic connection with Love’s Very Self. It is our belief that this interior connection, this relationship with the Creator of All, will provide our children the capacity to live a life from the inside-out with courage, confidence and clarity about the importance of Life and Love (whom we call God). This will develop in our children a reverence for others in all our relationships (especially reverence for those who are different or marginalized), a reason to engage in ethical decision making and a compass for living a life of integrity.

May we support and encourage each other in empowering our children in both of these characteristics, thus preparing them well for their future,

Maureen Glavin, rscj

Dear Academy Parents,

The halfway mark in the first quarter of the school year has just been crossed. Perhaps this is the time when we begin to think of evaluations, grades and report cards. Perhaps this is also a good time to begin to think about what we need to do (or not do) to help our children become successful.

In sync with these timely questions, it so happens that I am in the middle of reading How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough.  The author, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, calls into question what he refers to as the “cognitive hypotheses,” which, as he puts it, is…

… the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible. (introduction, page xiii)

What matters instead, Tough claims, “is whether we are able to help [our children] develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. (introduction, page xv)

The book not only affirms, but provides evidence for, an idea which Sacred Heart educators have believed for 200 years—that some traits, such as the inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task, the ability to delay gratification and the tendency to follow through on a plan, are valuable, not only in school but in the workplace and in life!

I suspect this information is not at all surprising to a group of parents who value education. It is certainly not an earth-shattering concept for us as Sacred Heart educators. Dare I say, the book’s claims are satisfyingly affirming.

So, as your children fall into the current cultural trap of claiming boredom while waiting for you as you run errands, or as they struggle with (or even experience a small consequence from not) completing a task, or as they complain when we ask them to try to accomplish something they don’t think they can do, let us smile patiently. Let us not allow ourselves to be drawn into our children’s angst. Rather, let us relish the knowledge that they are gaining skills and developing interior strengths which will, in fact, allow them to push through or carry on and, in the end, be successful adults!

United in our joint task of helping children to grow,

Maureen Glavin, rscj

Dear Parents,

This is the third of three Thursday Mail letters regarding this year’s theme. It is the culmination and the essence of what I hope you remember about Saint Madeleine Sophie’s educational vision: that it was indeed Forward Thinking Then and remains Forward Thinking Now!

We often articulate our more than 200-year-old educational tradition as a value. We proclaim it, we preserve it and we perpetuate it! Our history is part of our heritage and that history includes a successful philosophy of understanding children, understanding God, understanding human nature and successfully applying those understandings to our formative efforts for the sake of developing the hearts and minds of children.

Yet, I always like to point out―moreover, it is imperative that we point out―that an aspect of our more than 200-year-old heritage is our openness to change. In fact, I would say it more strongly:

We have a heritage of being on the forefront of change!

This aspect of who we are was adopted very early in the life of the Society of the Sacred Heart when Madeleine Sophie helped to develop a program of study for educating the nuns to be educators. The goal of this program was described this way by one who went through it:

“…to make sure that our teaching would preserve its progressiveness, its cultured breadth, its lofty scope, while
losing nothing of its orthodoxy or its beautiful uniformity and, concurrently, being perfectly suited to the times.”

Madeleine Sophie was always attentive to the constant need of adaption to new needs, new methods, and fresh approaches. The Plan of Studies of the Society of the Sacred Heart, first formulated in 1806, was rigorously modified at regular intervals to meet changing times and conditions. SMS wrote:

“It shows weakness of mind to hold too much to the
beaten track, through fear of innovations.”

And again:

“Times change, and to keep up with them
we must change and modify our methods.”

Modifying our methods and adapting our educational approaches as needed is an aspect of our heritage that must never be lost. The organizational ability to keep that which is of value because it is of value while moving forward when we need to adopt changes is the process of discernment and wisdom, which, in and of itself, IS part of our spiritual heritage.

So yes, let us celebrate, live, proclaim, preserve and perpetuate our precious heritage―both the timely and the timeless aspect of it. Only by doing so will this form of education STILL have meaning for the NEXT 200 years.

United with joy in our joint efforts to live this mission,

Maureen Glavin, rscj