From the Middle School Director

January/February 2012
Jackets, a mitten, water bottles, a pair of glasses, textbooks, a student planner, last night’s or possibly last month’s homework -- all of them crucial items -- forgotten, misplaced, neglected. Often it seems, so is most of life in middle school. As a parent, confronted by these constantly disappearing items or activities, you may find yourself labeling your child “forgetful”, “lazy” or as I so gently put it “soul draining”, while secretly fearing that this shortcoming is a serious reflection on your student’s developmental abilities. But I have good news, there really is a natural and normal reason for it. This phenomenon of forgetfulness is actually due to the timing of the development of the prefrontal cortex that attends to “executive functioning” skills. Now, if you are blessed with one of those children who were born gifted in the executive functioning world, the rest of us don’t want to hear how you cannot stop getting your child to color-code the world. The reality of the age is that disarray and lack of forward thinking are the norm in a middle school aged child.

If it sometimes seems that your home is a shrine of bewildering insanity presided over by a pre-teen or teenaged priesthood, oscillating between moods of hyperactivity and inert indifference -- and if you think you are alone in such a setting, then I highly recommend the comic Zits by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. As a parent of a pre-teen/teen myself I have found that Zits not only brings a smile to my face but assures me that I am not alone. The Comic strip in a humorous way taps into the truth that middle school is that special place and time where children begin to stretch their wings and initiate much of the foundational behavior that underpins who they will become as adults. This independence often manifests itself with children pushing away from parents and listening to peers and hopefully other responsible adult mentors. At Blake we attempt to provide such adult mentors through your child’s advisory program.

May/June 2011

Talk about scared. After 15 years in three different very comfortable classrooms at Durham Academy, I was now facing 13 of the most hormone-addled, unfocused, and terror-inducing seventh graders a man not thinking quite clearly could imagine.

February/March 2011

It’s been cold since late October, and we’ve had more days with below freezing temperatures than not over the course of the school year. We haven’t seen the grass in our neighborhoods or on the school’s playing fields since early November. We’ve been indoors more than we’d like. Nerves are a tad frayed as the work grinds on, and, despite the recent break in the weather, Spring still seems a long way away.