Tenacity

 
One summer about ten years ago, I decided that I needed to test myself and try something new, really new. For several weeks, I dragged myself to the Connecticut River at 6:00 a.m. to learn how to scull. I had an especially romantic vision about what sculling would be like after watching shells racing on the Charles River while I was in graduate school. It looked easy, and it wasn’t. I learned a lot about myself that summer in Hartford—some of which I was proud of and others which proved to be less laudable. There were mornings of mesmerizing beauty when I glided up the river with only my breath and the oars breaking the silence. Other mornings, I felt awkward, incompetent, and on the cusp of giving up. Not surprisingly, I also had flashbacks of other times when I was learning skills for the first time. Whether it was riding a bike, muddling through a geometric proof, or trying to find all of the imagery that my teacher saw in Lord of the Flies, similar emotions washed over me. The language describing fixed and growth mindsets had not yet arrived in my professional orbit, but it was clear that I was bouncing between the two. 

These last few weeks of physical distancing and remote learning have tapped similar feelings in all of us. Whatever our role, the overwhelming sense of “I didn’t sign up for this” is hard to ignore. Still, every constituency in our community—students, families, teachers, staff, administrators, alumni, and trustees—has risen to the occasion by responding to this new situation with generosity, forthrightness, and optimism. Characteristic Poly tenacity and ingenuity has enabled all of us to change the way we learn, teach, and engage overnight. It has not been easy, and we are not out of the woods yet, but we have continued to honor the promise of our mission and the legacy of our community.

More than a hundred years ago during the influenza epidemic, Poly closed for nearly six weeks. In a letter to parents in December 1919, Grace Henley, Poly’s principal, wrote of the school’s “duty to the community to minimize the chances of spreading the epidemic.” She went on to describe the school’s primary tenet, “the establishment and preservation of [the children’s] health,” and urged the students “to drill in and to review their spelling, reading, penmanship, letter-writing, and arithmetic” at home. Today, we adhere to these same beliefs and guidance with the lessons of history and the advent of technology reframing our approach. Health, today, means much more than it did then as the impact of social and emotional isolation is very much on our minds. While technology has modernized the “drill” by allowing us to interact in ways unimaginable to Principal Henley, its newness still leaves us missing the familiar. We will figure this out and find comfort in our routines again, and we will have changed. With the thrill of being together again, there will be a newfound sense of independence and gratitude, resilience and humility, and appreciation for what our community has done together.  

JWB 



Back