"First day jitters?" asked one of the mothers as she shut the car door and prepared to follow her daughter who was already pulling her backpack on wheels toward the twin front doors of the school. I smiled and told her about the time I phoned my mother, then an established and experienced physics teacher at Smith College, and asked if I would ever outgrow first-day jitters. "No," she told me, "I still feel that way, and I think most teachers do." Of course, there was a special quality to this particular set of first day jitters; this was no ordinary first day. In all the 135 years since Prospect Hill School (one of the schools whose mergers produced Stoneleigh-Burnham School) was founded, never before had 7th and 8th graders walked through the front door as enrolled students. But on this day Alice, Alicia, Bryna, Haley, Julia, Kate, Kathleen, Laura, Tadea, and Tiffany gathered by the Reception desk and waited for one of the teachers to bring them up to the classroom where they would officially join together and become the Founders' Program of the Stoneleigh-Burnham Middle School. Up until this day, SBMS was a dream. At 8:00 a.m. on September 8, 2004, just like that, SBMS became reality.
As we began to get to know each other, we learned (among other things) that Laura is already an aunt 11 times over, that both Kate and Kathleen are emphatically not Kathys, that Alicia can touch her tongue to her nose, and that no one was left-handed. When asked to form and then untie a human knot, the girls dove into the problem without hesitation and unraveled themselves with impressive speed. They brought the same energy, spirit, and willingness to get right down to work into their classes, and as the day progressed and I moved on to help the new upper school international students with their orientation, many many people came up to me and said how happy the kids looked, how nice they were, how it brightened people's days just to see them walk by. You could not ask for a better first day or a more auspicious beginning. Up to now, it was all just a wonderful dream, all our preparation was just work-in-waiting. This is better. Now, the real work begins. Now, the real fun begins.