In the novel Flipped, author Wendelin Van Draanen has narrator Julianna Baker, then an 8th grader, describe one of the most important days in her life.
“I love to watch my father paint. Or really, I love to hear him talk while he paints. The words always come out soft and somehow heavy when he’s brushing on the layers of a landscape. Not sad. Weary maybe, but peaceful. (…)
Mostly the things he talked about floated around me, but once in a while something would happen and I would understand exactly what he had meant. “A painting is more than the sum of its parts,” he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you’ve got magic.
I understood what he was saying, but I never felt what he was saying until one day when I was up in the sycamore tree. (…)
I had always played in the tree, but I didn’t become a serious climber until the fifth grade, when I went up to rescue a kite that was stuck in its branches. (…)
It was a long ways up, but I thought I’d give it a shot. I shinned up the trunk, took a shortcut across the slide, and started climbing. Champ kept a good eye on me, barking me along, and soon I was higher than I’d ever been. But still the kite seemed forever away.
Then below me I noticed Bryce coming around the corner and through the vacant lot. And I could tell from the way he was looking up that this was his kite. (…)
“Can you climb that high?” he called up to me.
“Sure!” I called back. And up, up, up I went!
The branches were strong, with just the right amount of intersections to make climbing easy. And the higher I got, the more amazed I was by the view. I’d never seen a view like that! It was like being in an airplane above all the rooftops, above the other trees. Above the world!
Then I looked down. Down at Bryce. And suddenly I got dizzy and weak in the knees. I was miles off the ground! Bryce shouted, “Can you reach it?”
I caught my breath and managed to call down, “No problem!” then forced myself to concentrate on those blue and yellow stripes, to focus on them and only them as I shinnied up, up, up. Finally I touched it; I grasped it; I had the kite in my hand! (…)
I needed a minute to rest. To recover before starting down. So instead of looking at the ground below me, I held on tight and looked out. Out across the rooftops.
That’s when the fear of being up so high began to lift, and in its place came the most amazing feeling that I was flying. Just soaring above the earth, sailing among the clouds.
Then I began to notice how wonderful the breeze smelled. It smelled like… sunshine. Like sunshine and wild grass and pomegranates and rain! I couldn’t stop breathing it in, filling my lungs again and again with the sweetest smell I’d ever known.
(…) It wasn’t long before I wasn’t afraid of being up so high and found the spot that became my spot. I could sit there for hours, just looking out at the world. Sunsets were amazing. Some days they’d be purple and pink, some days they’d be a blazing orange, setting fire to clouds across the horizon.
It was on a day like that when my father’s notion of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts moved from my head to my heart. The view from my sycamore was more than rooftops and clouds and wind and colors combined.
It was magic.”
Van Draanen, Wendelin. Flipped. 2001: Alfred A. Knopf,
We wish for all of your daughters such life-transforming experiences this year, whether they occur in one sweeping revelation as happened for Julianna, or whether they occur over the course of the year in small ways that may even pass unnoticed at the time but add up nonetheless to something significant. One is tempted to think of the high ropes course the girls will be doing this coming Saturday, but really examples abound and opportunities for growth exist on a daily basis.
We are also acutely aware of the importance of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Some years ago, I read of a study on the importance of working with groups. The researchers created a maze and, as subjects worked the maze, the researchers recorded the total number of decisions made, with each decision made at a given turning point. They also put people into random groups, and had the groups work the maze. Groups, they found, were (if I remember correctly) about 25% more efficient than individuals in working the maze. For adolescent girls, the importance of working in groups may be accentuated by how their brains function. According to research, emotion and communication – in other words, connections – play a greater role in learning for girls than they do for boys. This research is the basis for much of what we do at Stoneleigh-Burnham.
This notion of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts extends to the design of the school itself. Literally thousands of studies have been performed on young adolescents in the past decade alone, and the National Middle School Association has taken the cumulative results and combined them with previous studies and previous writings to create This We Believe, a document which outlines in 14 principles what the culture of a successful middle school includes and thus what the school should provide. Many middle schools, working from a long-established culture with its particular structures and procedures, implement this model incompletely, existing in has been termed by professor Thomas Dickinson “a state of arrested development.” Research has clearly shown that if one or more parts of the model are missing, it affects the success of all areas of the school. For example, if a school does not have an advisor system, this has a negative impact not only on the social climate of the school but also on the academic climate and success. Therefore, when Stoneleigh-Burnham set out to begin its middle school program, we made a solid commitment to follow all 14 of the principles in This We Believe without exception.