Understanding Their Range
Rooting for Their Success
A Letter from Robert Marchand
Principal, Boys Grades 7-12
Dear Parents,
As you can imagine, the emotional highlight of my term was the performance of the boys at the Advent Service last week. I've have had countless parents, teachers and friends comment on the singing of the junior boys and the poise of the senior boys. It was, I think, a turning point in the history of Fountain Academy in many ways and a moment of great pride for me and my colleagues. Of course, much of the credit for the singing performance goes to our wonderful music teacher, Kim Umphrey.
Kim is clearly a gifted educator who is able to bring out the best in her students. I'm not much of a singer myself, and I know even less about teaching singing, but I would guess that much of Kim's success begins with choosing material that is in the boys' range. The selections that she chose were not only beautiful but somewhat masculine in their tone, and as a result the boys felt that they truly belonged to them and took great pleasure in singing them. If you were in the halls of the school in the weeks leading up to the service you may have heard the boys spontaneously breaking in to song as they moved from class to class. That, I would imagine, is the hallmark of success for a music teacher.
I have used the metaphor of choosing music within the boys' range in other contexts, and I think that this approach is what characterizes much of the value that a boys' school such as ours has to offer. All of our teachers exhibit this same sense of what the boys need and where they are at any given moment. We set the bar high and ask the boys to move out of their comfort zone, extending their reach in the process. But we always begin where we find the boys; we always start with the boys as they are. This isn't as much of a contradiction as it may seem. You can't take the boys to an unfamiliar place if you don't begin with an understanding and appreciation for where they are right now. The beautiful balance that is at the heart of inspired teaching is this apparent dichotomy between understanding both who you are now and who you can become.
I was thinking about this a few days ago as I sat in the exam room and watched the boys wrestling with their exams. Those exams are a way to assess progress certainly, but their real value lies in their ability to stretch the boys and allow them to not only learn about the subject matter, but to learn about themselves. Each new struggle, stumble, or success carries with it a valuable lesson.
Many of the boys, and I suspect their parents as well, might see exams as an adversarial exercise in which the teacher is doing his or her best to trip up the boys and make them jump through a series of increasingly demanding hoops. It's true that the process can seem like a game in which the teacher is jealously guarding their marks like the troll under a bridge in some medieval fairy tale. And that can be the case in some schools and with some teachers, but I don't believe that it is the case here. While we ask our teachers to design a challenging exam, and they do, they then immediately swing around and sit with the students on the same side of the table facing that challenge together.
When Kim Umphrey prepared the boys for their performance, her only thought was their success. Their success was her success. Similarly, all of those teachers who are right now busy marking exams have that same aspiration. We have prepared our students well, understanding their range and always rooting for their success. Now we wait, as you do, for their successes to come to the fore, and win or lose we will be sitting on the same side of the table next January as we begin again.
Robert Marchand, Principal
Boys, Grades 7-12
Boys, Grades 7-12
Fountain Academy of the Sacred Heart
