Upper School Newsletter – February 19, 2025

Good evening Husky Families,

For over a decade, my family has embraced a bit of small scale farming at our various homes. “Small scale” might not be clear enough to emphasize that we are normally talking about a couple of tomato plants, maybe a pepper plant, and usually one basil plant. It probably started when my youngest child just liked playing in the dirt for hours, so this became something fruitful (pun intended) to do while he continuously moved dirt around with his toys. Over the years, our family has started to think about our little “farm” whenever we hit the coldest days of the year. Maybe it’s some mindful trick to make us think about warmer days ahead. With last week’s snowfall in the midst of February, which is somehow both the longest and the shortest month of the year, our thoughts turned again to when we might plant. Though it is months until I could actually pick a jalapeno and a tomato to make salsa, there are little things that we do now to be ready. When we started our mini-farms, we would buy plants that had already seeded. As the years rolled on, we started using seeds when possible. It was fascinating talking to my youngest about the seed, trying to assure him that under the dirt magical things were happening. The time we spent watering and weeding didn’t have a visual result immediately, but if we were patient we would eventually see results. I think there’s some portmanteau to create between agriculture and Schrodinger’s Cat here, but I can’t come up with it. (Email me if you come up with one).

Those of you who know me are already thinking, “This feels like he is slowly drawing us into an anecdote that he’s going to turn into a statement about learning.” Guilty as charged. We are exactly three months and three days from the first exams in May. Though it might seem early to make a statement about preparing for those exams, the neuroscience demonstrates that this is exactly the time to think about preparing for those exams. Just as preparing the soil for the seed happened months before the plant bore fruit, such is the same for preparing the mind. Some of those preparations might not have visible results for a while, but, in the end, they are integral to internalizing and consolidating the knowledge and skills delivered in our curriculum. In other words, it is our long-term habits and not our short-term actions that most impact our learning.

Moving from the loose anecdote to detailed recommendations, here are some things to discuss with your student.

1. How are you storing and organizing the knowledge that you are recording in class? When it comes time in May to look back at all of it, where will you find it?
2. Are you taking time to do the various practice activities that the teachers provide you, even when it isn’t graded? That might be as simple as speaking up in class when a teacher asks for someone to suggest a way to analyze a concept or as tangible as problem packets given in a math or science class.
3. The greatest return on consolidating information comes when a student has to teach it to someone else. Teaching something far surpasses re-reading material or being quizzed on the material. I often encourage my students to prepare for an assessment by trying to teach the material to a parent or sibling. 

These are just a few suggestions of what students can be doing now to be successful down the road. If students would like more strategies, they can talk to their advisors, their teachers, or use the open office hours that the learning specialists hold every afternoon.