The View From Here: Communicating Across Cultures

 

The first view I saw on Monday morning was from the podium in the gym at PS. A sea of bright, excited faces—students happy to be back in school, happy to have returned from their Intersession adventures and be all together again. We're working on a photo album of Intersession photos to post on Facebook where you'll get a sense of how engaging these programs were in so many different ways for our students. Teachers return from Intersession with their own stories, of course, including running into two Sonoma Academy alumni at a tiny bodega on the isolated coast of Baja, Mexico; seeing the huge grin on a 9th grade boy's face as he caught an enormous fish during the Fly Fishing Intersession; being moved to tears by the impact of the assistive technology our students developed for the disabled students at Cook Middle School, and on and on. We'll send you the link to see and read more as soon as we have it ready.

 

Good spirits and high energy continued through mid-week as we welcomed students from Shanghai Foreign Language Middle School, which you see in the photo above. Mandarin teacher Pam Vincent and her students organized a Sonoma Academy style Chinese New Year celebration with tea, calligraphy, badminton, and Go, to name a few. These young students from Shanghai blew us away at Community Meeting standing in front of the audience and introducing themselves in impeccable English. The students were confident, outgoing, and clearly delighted to be here. We are so glad to have had a strong connection with various communities in China since the very beginning of the school.

 

As we close the week, today, Friday, we will have seen two student-produced plays; one entirely authored and scored by Connor Devlin '17 titled Don't Eat the Blue Snow, the other directed by Perry Parsons '17. To close on a theatrical note, you still have time to see Jen Coté in Stage Kiss at the 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. It's great fun and Jen is spectacular.