This Monday is Veterans Day – the 105th since President Wilson brought it into being as Armistice Day in 1919. It is interesting to note in acknowledging this day that there are no calls for students to be released from schools on this day as there are for other holidays. A part of this might be attributable to the growing rift between those who have served, especially in combat roles, and the ordinary citizens they have served to protect.

Culturally, Ridgeview is a borrower. Any individual or institution that makes a mainstay of self-examination is likely to become a borrower. It is almost inevitable that, in inquiring about themselves, they will discover that others are doing better or more interesting things, and to incorporate those things into their own doings. When an individual does this, we call it a habit; when an institution does this, we come to call it a tradition.

Without wanting to give the indication that we are content or have grown complacent, there are no alarm bells to be rung—neither doom on the horizon nor terrible portents. Instead, what I should like to have discussed with our community in these missed addresses is the state of our cultural affairs as they relate to parent volunteerism and student welfare.

The other day, my daughter queried me asking whether I could believe that the year was nearly over, and that this would mean the beginning of high school for her. That aspect of this progression is distressing, but instead of self-indulgent forlornness I told her that it all felt as though it were happening too quickly.

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. While it is not at all what Eliot intended, this line comes to mind each spring when the pace of the work feels relentless. Fortunately, it is a bit like a duck swimming about: the feet are paddling like mad beneath the water and all seems serene above the surface.

Our first term of the year, Michaelmas, has been a rather remarkable one. As I reiterated at our assembly this past Friday, we have witnessed dramatic progress in relation to several initiatives, and the vigor and industriousness of our students merits recognition.

A “new year” is an arbitrary event in the sense that time and our various demarcations of it (e.g., seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, etc.), are contrivances of convenience rather than natural phenomena. We are, for reasons both rational and irrational, obsessed with time as the register of our lives and the events we have assigned significance.

Historically, a perspective has appeared prior to the Thanksgiving Break urging everyone to celebrate this most American of holidays with the deepest, sincerest, and most unreservedly sentimental intent. This Thanksgiving, however, I look back at the break reflecting with a more contemplative frame of mind—one in which the gratitude felt was less abstract, more pragmatic, and more firmly fixed on Ridgeview’s community.

Ridgeview will resume its annual tradition of a Yule-time book flood, or Jólabókaflóðið as it goes by in Iceland. This is a tradition we embrace at our school for three reasons. First, reading, but more importantly, the promotion of reading as a joy is something that every school ought to regard as one of its foremost duties. Second, it should preference texts that it believes are more worthwhile than others—there should not be any anodyne relativism in this. Finally, it should assert that the education of students is not a thing that stands apart from the edification of the community they are drawn from.

Today marks the beginning of a new physical education initiative. Our ninth-grade students will work with faculty to complete their physical fitness assessments, and their scores will be used as a benchmark to measure their progress and improvement over the course of the coming year. Our objective is to provide every student with individualized guidance in improving their health. Not only this: our larger goal is to ensure that students possess the knowledge and mindset that allows them to make fitness a priority into their adult lives.

To claim that we are ready to begin Ridgeview’s twenty-second academic year is too bold a statement. Some of us are ready, some of us only in some ways, and many of us yearn for summer to linger awhile longer. Nevertheless, we return to an activity—the education of adolescents—that has change and transience as its only permanent features.