Restoring our Essential Connection

 

I’m here to speak briefly to this year’s theme of reconnection, a reconnection that we seek at every level of our community and among the entirety of the community.

 

This year we are striving to restore our essential vibrant connection that has been interrupted for a year-and-a-half.

 

However, we have seen a strong beginning of this initiative already with the engaging opening activities last week—field games, outdoor adventures, and food trucks; parent coffees, homeroom and advisor meetings, academic classes, and a good deal of just hanging out together. It’s wonderful to see on this campus the reconnecting of friends and classmates, students and teachers, players and coaches, and soon, Mr. J. and Ms. Underhill-Curtin, actors and directors and many other restored relations.

 

It’s also the time to reconnect with the familiar patterns and habits of school, such as:

 

 

I’m feeling the reconnection.

 

Strangely, in our time it seems a bit ironic to have to reconnect, for we live in the most interconnected age ever—we have cell phones or other devices that provide us access to every kind of communications and social media--text messages, email, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, radio, television--you name it, and we can connect with it. So why do we need to reconnect? Because these are all media. MEDIA are the “intervening substances through which our impressions are conveyed to the senses of others—at a distance.” At a distance.

 

It’s now time to close that social distance so that we can re-engage our minds, to reconnect them with big ideas, creative ideas, collaborative ideas as we look to re-connect to the habits of mind that make us all successful learners. So, close that distance and reconnect.

 

Hold on though, that’s close enough—just keep that 3-feet for a bit longer, just in case.

 

At this point it is time to declare the 2021-2022 school year open and for me to no longer say anything but, as EM Forster might say a century later, to finally “only re-connect” within the Brimmer community.