With the close of last school year, I completed my 30th campaign in education. Each of those years has been filled with joy and sorrow, challenges and successes, ups and downs and a ton of stories worth sharing. My (True) Life in Education Thus Far will detail 30 or so of those stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed living (most) of them!
ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER REDUX
NOVEMBER 23, 2022
I was blessed to spend 10 years at Regis Jesuit High School Girls Division as teacher, Dean of Students and Assistant Principal for Faculty and Curriculum. While my administrative roles were my primary roles during those years, I taught at least one class each semester when I was serving the Girls Division which was very important to me.
My time at the Girls Division followed nine years teaching in the Boys Division: nine years as a teacher which came after four years as a student. I was very familiar with all boys education when I made the move to the Girls Division, far less familiar with all girls education since I had never taught all girls. In my first year in the Girls Division, it had been nine years since I had taught any girls.
I was not alone. As I recall that first staff, less than a handful of our faculty had taught in an all girls environment. Some of them had, and some had gone to all girls high schools, but our collective experience was limited. We spent a lot of professional development time learning about and discussing all girls education and the development of young women, academic, social and spiritual. We talked about what this would be like, how we would conduct ourselves, what it meant to be engaging an all girls school.
These were heady and exciting conversations.
They had little to do with what I would find in reality.
What I found was that young people desire the same things overall: to be heard, to be treated with respect, to be challenged, to be loved. It was true, I think, that young women could express their need and desire for these things more readily than young men, but I realized that I did not need to modulate much of who I was as an educator (and a fairly experienced one at that point) with the young women.
But one experience stands out that did illustrate a difference: my standard practice on the first day of school to this day is to put students in some kind of seating chart, usually an alphabetically arranged one. Once the class has settled I ask if anyone from the back needs to move to the front for any reason. This pursuit is made easier now as our learning management systems note students with hearing or sight issues and I can address these concerns as I make my seating chart but, for years, I would ask if anyone needed to move. I cannot remember many boys that said they needed to do so but, if they did, plenty of boys in the front rows would volunteer to relocate further back.
I do remember this exercise was quite different during my very first class of girls.
Upon asking the question, two or three girls raised their hands to move. Assuming there would be no issue with relocating them to the front, I asked the girls in the front rows if any wanted to move.
None did.
I do not remember how I negotiated this moment, but I do remember, for years, speaking about this as a difference in my experience of all girls.
Frankly, What I found in my years in the Girls Divisions was that all of the positives for young women were there. The sense of sisterhood was very strong. The connections the students made to one another were powerful. Young women felt they could be themselves and were freed from societal expectations and restrictions. The young women I taught noted an ineffable quality of “sisterhood” upon their graduation and that was powerful.
But I became concerned over those years about the manner in which the girls thought about and talked about boys. I was worried that the environment we had created was so far away from reality that the benefits were outweighed by the distance between the students’ experience at school and away from it. I was worried that the more challenging aspects to being with all girls all the time were potentially damaging. I was fairly certain that this was not the best model of education (to be fair, I observed similar shortcomings in all boys education in the 10 years I spent at Regis Jesuit Boys Division and I wrote about that in an earlier post).
Looking back now as the principal of a co-ed school, I feel that this is the model of education for the whole person that works best. Perhaps I would select a different model were I in a different context, but I do not think I would. I am very blessed to have spent 10 years in an all boys setting, 10 years in an all girls setting and almost 10 years in co-ed settings.
What a gift all of this has been.
