After five long months away from on-campus learning, I want to welcome everyone back to school. It will truly be great to see you tomorrow and the next day. Also I especially want to welcome our new students and ask all of you GDS veterans to welcome them. We all know what it is like to come into a new setting where you don’t know lots of people. Our job is to make our new students feel at home here. So welcome, newcomers--you belong at Gaston Day School.
He believed that being smart really doesn’t matter if you don’t care--first and most important, you must be committed to a cause--in his case the bank. Being smart helps, but only if you already care. The more deeply you care, the better. The knowing actually grows out of the caring.
“I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.”
I want to suggest to you that “how much we care about each other” will make all the difference this year, and I am asking all of us to do our best “to care for each other” more than we ever have before. It is a strange and difficult time we are living in and through. To return to in-person learning at Gaston Day has involved an extraordinary effort. All the changes you see and all the health and safety features and protocols you will experience are part of an amazing campaign to keep us safe and allow on-campus learning. All these changes represent the school’s best effort “to care for each other.” If the changes seem irritating or hard, remember they come from a place of deep caring.
We need each and every one of us to keep caring for each other if we are going to keep the campus safe. Seniors we need you to be our leaders in caring. We need everyone to do all the things that are both simple, yet annoying, and hard, at least until we get used to them. Wear our masks, wash our hands, stay six feet apart from each other. If we do that, then we minimize the likelihood that Covid-19 will make us sick or force us to have to shift to virtual learning again.
We know how to do virtual learning. Some of us are choosing to do that as our primary way of learning. That is a good choice for those individuals. All of us may have to switch to virtual learning if safety dictates it. But won’t it be great if we can stay safe and healthy here, and learn together in person.
And, yes, I do care how much you know. That’s why we go to school. To learn. To be curious. To solve equations. To write poems. To formulate hypotheses. To hit a perfect note. To choose the right colors. But the learning grows out of the caring. We are going to learn a lot because we care so much.
Especially this year, the learning starts with the caring, and whether we learn on campus or virtually from home really does depend a lot on how much we care for each other through observing the safety practices and protocols that we have put in place. And I want you to hear me say this: I care about each of you, and I want the best for you. When you see me wearing my mask, I hope you can see my eyes get real narrow, because that means behind my mask I am smiling at you. And I am going to do everything I can reasonably do and personally practice those things that keep all of us safe and healthy. I am asking you to join me and all the other Gaston Day people who care. We want to become a community or a school of caring people.
I believe that if we create a school full of caring people then we will all be part of one of the greatest years ever. And we will see with our own eyes, wide open right above our masks, that caring for each other really is the most important thing in life.
It is going to be a great year. And the greatest lesson will be how we all pulled together and cared for each other in all sorts of ways that we never have before. Thanks, everyone. I’ll see some of you at school tomorrow and most of the rest of you the next day.
