From the Desk of: A time for Thanksgiving
BY INTERIM SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT ROBERT PARRY
On behalf of the teachers, the support staff and the Board of Education, I thank you for entrusting your children to the Shelter Island School.
These kids, of all ages, are your most valued treasures (even if you sometimes wonder!). We who get to spend the days with them are also enriched by their joy of life, their smiles and their curiosity about most things. We can share your sense of pride when we see incremental growth in their academic skills and in their growth as responsible citizens who sometimes need to stand up and say to another student, “That’s wrong and I’m not joining you.”
Of course, many of our kids also come to school with burdens we know they don’t deserve. Some reflect the challenging family situations they live in day to day. Others bring learning problems not of their making.
While many kids start school knowing their alphabet and their numbers and are “beginning readers,” others are still working to develop these basic learning skills, well beyond 1st grade. We do provide special help for these kids with reading teachers, resource room teachers and inclusion teachers. We also have several teacher aides and a teacher assistant.
Every teacher realizes that different children learn differently and that it is all of our responsibilities to promote “differentiated learning.” Very few kids learn simply by listening to a teacher or by participating in question and answer and discussions in class. For many children they only learn by doing something tangible that makes the classroom learning come alive. Creating such exercises for little kids and for big kids is the skill of a master teacher.
At this Thanksgiving, we thank the community for entrusting your kids to us. We also thank our teachers for the energy and skill they put into creating the activities that improve the chance that important learning will take place today and tomorrow. To that we add a hope and a prayer that the students who struggle mightily — academically, emotionally and socially — will find a new measure of peace and success in their near futures.
PS: Six students spent four days recently participating in the Young American Writers Project’s Playwriting Residency program at SUNY Southampton. They will return on December 10 and 11 for staged readings of their work.
National Honor Society students helped with the building of two homes for Habitat for Humanity’s program on Saturday, November 6. Thanks to Janine Mahoney for her leadership of that program.
