Those of you who follow our Facebook page will have spotted that yesterday’s Throwback Thursday was dedicated to last year’s kindergarteners when they met the 1st graders for a preview of life in the Elementary and Middle School Building. It was a timely throwback because those same students – now in 1st Grade – had just won the Best Falcons award at the October assembly. In reality, only a few school weeks have passed between those two moments – when the shy, uncertain students who were our kindergarteners in June first discovered their future classrooms and when our confident, brilliant 1st graders won the award for their excellent adaptation to Elementary life yesterday.
Time flies, and milestones dash by. We had hardly finished the first week of school, and we were already hosting Open Houses for parents looking for a spot in Maternelle next year. The summer was just behind us, and we found ourselves facing record-breaking rain. The first month of school has just passed, and our 8th graders are already preparing their high school applications – giving us the opportunity this week to welcome our partners from Léman for an information meeting about our bilingual high school program and the benefits of enrollment for students of The École. And, of course, it seems like we’d only started back, and it is already time for the first break (that being said, you can see on our faces that it is very welcome after a particularly packed and intense month of September!)
Before leaving for the break (not that those of us working in the office or supervising the camp are going anywhere!), the team (at least those of us who had the energy!) gathered last night for a potluck (Fawzia’s moussaka, Adeline’s gratin dauphinois, Miriam’s mom’s pasta – the stuff of legends) and a bit of fun. Everyone submitted a childhood photo of themselves, and Franck Le Martelot did the rest: a laptop, a projector, a Kahoot, and twenty minutes of hilarity when we all tried to guess which baby grew up to be which colleague, whose rosy cheeks turned into whose chiseled cheekbones, and whose dimples still give the game away.
Without dwelling on the fact that I scored particularly poorly – the champion was hands down Sarah El, who recognized everyone immediately – it was hard not to see the photos (some, including my own, in black & white!) as a symbol of a time when everything moved more slowly. One of the speakers at the conference last week in Chicago spoke about the exceptional acceleration of progress our generations are witnessing and how it is illustrated by the development of the telephone – an object that was inconceivable for thousands of years, invented at the end of the 19th century, a rare item that went on to be firmly attached to walls, until it found its place in every home and every pocket, before becoming smart, and much more than just a telephone in the matter of a few years.
I don’t know if this acceleration of the world around us gives us a different impression of the passing of time, and I’m not sure if New York really moves faster than every other city on the planet. All I know are a few small things: that The École is attracting more families than ever, that our 1st graders are doing exceptionally well, that our 8th graders’ determination and hard work will result in them landing the high schools of their dreams, and that it’s a lovely thing to spend an evening eating and laughing with people you love and appreciate.