My weekly blog

Farewell Houston

Mon, 1 Jul 2013 11:48:25 +1000

This is my last blog as Head of Awty International School. The packing has been done, the movers have taken all our belongings and as you can see in the photos attached to this blog, they have moved all my books and files from my office. Dianne and I will hopefully be reunited with our books, furniture, clothes and other odds and ends in late August after they (and we) have completed the long journey to Australia. Tomorrow will be my final day of duty. As the great Irish existentialist playwright, Samuel Beckett, once wrote: “the end is in the beginning, and yet you go on”.
There are, of course, many things that I will miss about Houston after we leave. I have come to love the ease of getting around the city quickly using the amazing network of freeways (18 lanes wide in some places!). On the other hand, I am amused by the approach taken towards HOVs (or ‘high occupancy vehicles’) on the freeways, whereby an HOV is defined as being a vehicle with at least one passenger. I do also worry about the environmental and resource implications of placing such heavy reliance on private motor vehicles and profligate energy use.
I will miss the rule that allows drivers to turn right (with care) at any red traffic light, and I will miss the very sensible 4-way stop signs.
I will miss the great food at very affordable prices in Houston, although my waistline might appreciate the change.
I will miss the warm hospitality and open friendliness of Houston people – although if anywhere in the world shared that same openness and hospitality, tinged with a extravagant dose of optimism, it would have to be Australia.
I will miss the drive-through banks. I will miss phone apps that allow you to do most of your banking, and even fill a prescription at the pharmacy, using your mobile phone.
I will miss some of Houston’s quirkiness, such as the annual art-a-la-car procession, the cowboy church that we attended and the not-so-little antique stores in The Heights.
I think that more than anything else, though, I will miss the wonderful students at The Awty International School. Awty’s students are as bright, as engaged, as curious, as articulate, as confident, as polite, as balanced and as focussed as the best of any students I have ever seen in any school anywhere in the world.
An elderly colleague of mine, who was a Head of School in Australia for many years, once confided to me over dinner that “doing a good job as a Head of School is like urinating while wearing a diving suit – it gives you a warm feeling but nobody else notices”.
In that context, it has been very encouraging this week to have a steady flow of senior members of the faculty and staff from both the French and International Sections, as well as some parents who made a special trip to the school for the purpose, calling into my office to express their personal gratitude for my leadership and to say their own farewells. It has been heart-warming and uplifting to hear the lovely things they have said to me, and it has been great for me also to have the opportunity to express my gratitude to them for their support and friendship.
This week I sent a final e-mail message to all the staff and faculty in the school, using these words:
“Dear Colleagues,
In this, my final week of service as Head of The Awty International school, I am writing to say both ‘goodbye’ and ‘thank you’.
As most of you know, my time in Houston was marked by an ‘interesting’ period of board dynamics which provided me with insights into governance that very few Heads ever have the privilege of experiencing. Although it was not what I was anticipating before I arrived in Houston, I look back on my time at Awty as a wonderfully enriching facet of my professional life. Serving as Head of what is now the largest international school in the United States is a rare privilege that very few educators have ever had or will ever experience, and I am very grateful to have had that opportunity.
Much of the joy of working at Awty has come from being able to rely on the loyalty and support of such a skilled and dedicated staff and faculty, and for that I want to express my sincere thanks to you. I know you will extend the same level of support to Lisa Darling as you welcome her as your incoming Interim Head of School next week.
After I return to Australia, I expect to be taking up two (at least) new roles – as a one-on-one consultant to international schools, and as a study tour leader for the Geographical Society of New South Wales. Through these two quite different roles, I hope to continue my service to the world of international education while at the same time also sharing my passion for geography and travel with like-minded, curious, somewhat adventurous travellers.
I will continue to write weekly blogs on my personal website (www.stephencodrington.com), so if you are interested you are very welcome to keep up with my adventures.
Almost a quarter of a century as a Head of Schools leaves me with some great stories and many wonderful memories. I thank you for being part of them.
Warmest wishes to you all as you continue in one of life’s most rewarding professions – shaping the future.”
I read recently that for the third year in a row, Australia has been declared by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) as the world’s happiest country. I hope that my return to Australia does not lower Australia’s ranking when next year’s survey is completed ;-)
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I will resume posting weekly, or semi-regular, blogs after I arrive in Australia in late August. In the meantime, starting next week, I will be posting (hopefully) daily travel blogs describing Dianne’s and my one-way, circuitous trip from Houston to Sydney.

Future-proofing Awty

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 04:39:39 +1000

I can’t often make a statement like this, but the campus has become noisier now that the students have departed for their summer break.
The reason? The heavy machinery has arrived and work has begun on the third building project during my time at Awty – the 15,000 square feet extension to the Lower School. How some of our younger students must wish they could be at school to watch the action instead of having to be at home on holidays ;-)
When it is finished in early 2014, the new addition will have added nine new classrooms to the Lower School, plus a large media facility, a computer lab, a drama classroom, an art room that will be flooded with natural light, a teacher workroom, and a new medical clinic.
Also included as part of the Lower School extension project is a new playground where the old bus circle is currently located. It will feature shade structures, playground equipment, seating areas, and rubber fall surfaces. In the meantime, the old playground has been relocated so that younger children will still have a safe play area while the construction is underway.
Planning for the Lower School extension has been underway now for almost two years. Although we have had to work within some surprisingly tight financial and regulatory constraints, and thus prune some of the features that we had originally aspired to include, I am very confident that the new facility will represent a huge advance in the quality of the learning facilities we offer to our students.
When I first saw Awty International School with my own eyes about three years ago, I was often asked by people I met what I saw as the biggest challenge facing the school. At the time, I invariably answered “facilities”, on the basis that the student population was growing but the quality of facilities had not kept pace. Many of the school’s buildings at the time were converted warehouses made with corrugated metal and demountable (portable) buildings. Now that two major building projects have transformed the campus over the past couple of years, adding (among other things) almost 40 new classrooms, and given that a third building project is now underway, I no longer have to identify ‘facilities’ as being our biggest challenge.
Planning for a new building such as the Lower School extension requires a certain degree of what I call ‘informed prophesy’. We are, after all, starting to build a facility that will need to last for many decades, and yet we can’t really be certain of the characteristics that will direct education a few decades from now. Our draft Strategic Plan (that I mentioned and linked in last week’s blog) tries to identify some of these ‘megatrends’, but of course, predicting the future has always been and always will be a contentious undertaking.
A compelling article came to my attention this week on this precise point. Written by Milton Chen and entitled “The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It”, the article appears in the latest issue of ‘Independent School Magazine”. Focussing especially on technology, the article makes very challenging reading for those of us who are trying to “future-proof” school curricula and facilities. I especially liked his sentence “Changing our thinking about the nature of teaching and learning is the most difficult challenge we face, not unlike changing our political system or improving our environment.” Hear, hear! And to Chen’s comment, I would add the additional observation that it is also no less important. If you are interested in ‘future-proofing’ schools, and especially in the role that technology plays (and is likely to play in the future), please read of Chen’s article HERE.
Exciting though the new Lower School extension undoubtedly is, the real excitement will come shortly after the new building has been completed. The new extension will finally provide the space we need to vacate ‘Big Blue’, and in summer 2014, the 72 year history of that vast corrugated metal structure will come to an end with its demolition, thus transforming a large section of our campus into a spacious, green, open area for children to run and play.
Now, just in case you got the idea from reading this that the campus is a cacophony of construction noise at the moment, I’ll finish by sharing the photo below, which shows our very quiet quad. The Lower School may be abuzz with construction, but the heart of the school has begun to enjoy its annual placid summer hibernation.

How Children Succeed

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 01:11:28 +1000

I spent the first half of this week attending the biannual conference of Heads of ISAS schools in Santa Fe (New Mexico). ISAS, or to give it the full title, the Independent Schools Association of the Southwest, is one of Awty’s two major accreditation agencies, and its Heads’ conferences are always a treat, with wonderful atmosphere of genuine collegiality and guest speakers of outstanding quality.
On my way to Santa Fe, I took a quick weekend diversion to Moab (Utah), the location of two of my favourite areas of arid terrain – Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. An important reason for doing so was to meet up with a group from the Geographical Society of New South Wales which was passing through on a study tour of National Parks of the Western USA. After I return to Australia in a few months from now, I will be organising and leading some study tours for the Geographical Society, and it was great to see several familiar faces so far from home in Moab.
One morning while in Moab, I managed to get up an hour and a half before dawn in order to drive out to Canyonlands National Park and watch the sun rise through Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park. The photo at the top of this blog and the one to the right are just two of a large set of images I managed to get as the sun rose. When I experience this kind of visual splendour, sacrificing a bit of sleep loses all significance. All of the other photos illustrating this week’s blog are also from the Moab, Santa Fe, Taos and Acoma areas - they should help you to understand why I love Geography so much!.
I especially enjoyed two of the presentations at the ISAS conference. One was a one and a half hour session in which we were honoured to hear the retiring President of NAIS, Pat Bassett, share his thoughts on some of the 25 factors that make great schools great. I loved this presentation and found it highly affirming, as it seemed to paraphrase Awty’s own draft Strategic Plan that is designed to take Awty through to the next level of greatness. It was energising to have the direction of our draft Strategic Plan endorsed so strongly by implication by someone of the outstanding calibre of Pat Bassett.
Pat Bassett emphasised the importance of focussing on the vision and the mission of the school, adopting best practices that are seen to have worked elsewhere, making a strong financial commitment to faculty professional development, emphasising the so-called five sustainabilities (demographic sustainability, environmental sustainability, global sustainability, financial sustainability, and programmatic sustainability), committing to meeting the individual learning needs of the diverse student population that every school has, and so on.
I found one of Bassett’s points especially intriguing. One of the factors that he claims makes schools great is redefining the ideal classroom setting as one of intimate environment, not small classes. He says this because the former can occur in schools or classes of any size and even online, while the latter can miss the point of intimacy. I have often found the arguments for smaller and smaller (and thus costlier and costlier) class sizes to be flawed, superficial and anecdotal in that they tend to rely on emotion and teacher workload issues rather than solid data that demonstrates an improvement in learning outcomes (at least when discussing the impact of a change to an already small class from say, a maximum of 18 students, down to a maximum of 16). Bassett’s argument about environmental intimacy rather than class size as such is (to use an Australian colloquialism) “spot on”.
There is much more I could say about Bassett’s 25 factors, but rather than simply reiterate his points, I’ll simply direct you to the presentation he used with us that is now found on the NAIS website – if you are interested, please see the PowerPoint file that can be downloaded from http://www.nais.org/Articles/Documents/25%20Factors%20Great%20Schools%20061213.pptx.
Wonderful as Pat Bassett’s 25 points were, I think the highlight of the conference from my perspective – even better than the lovely farewell speech and gift I received from ISAS’ Executive Director, Rhonda Durham – was a presentation by Paul Tough on the topic “How Children Succeed”.
Paul Tough is author of the top-selling book by the same name – “How Children Succeed” – which I first became aware of just a few weeks ago when one of the lovely parents here at Awty presented me with a signed copy as a farewell ‘thank you’ gift. I therefore felt very well prepared to hear Paul Tough’s presentation which, I was somewhat relieved to find, was not a simple re-statement of the contents of his book as some authors are prone to deliver at educational conferences.
Paul Tough’s basic thesis was that while most parents and most schools see intelligence (as measured by test results) as the key factor that leads to success in life, qualities that fall under the label of ‘character’ are actually far more important. He identifies eight of these character traits – grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity and consciousness – as being especially important, adding helpfully that they are also far more malleable than intelligence if approached the right way.
Tough believes that these eight skills are better predictors of academic performance and educational achievement than IQ, and therefore they ought to be the direct target of interventions in schools. I really liked this approach, because it makes a strong case for differentiated instruction that meets different students’ individual needs to the greatest extent possible – just as our draft Strategic Plan and Pat Bassett have both advocated.
It would be difficult to do justice to all the excellent points that Paul Tough made in his presentation. Perhaps I can convey something of the flavour of his challenges to us as parents and as educators by citing his thoughts on the need for students to be taught how to achieve a balance between comfort and adversity, managing failure, and overcoming the chronic problem in many schools today that “everyone must succeed”. (The words that follow are my attempt at making a transcript of part of Paul Tough’s words as he spoke, so although it may not be word-for-word accurate, I am confident it correctly encapsulates his thoughts and ideas).
“I think of my own son, and I think there is something very deep in my DNA that just wants to protect him from all adversity of any kind. But what I think a lot of parents are coming to realise is that in doing this – trying to protect our kids – we are often doing more harm than good. This idea, that a certain amount of adversity might be good for our kids, has been gaining some support in the psychological literature. There is a study that has been done by a group of psychologists at the State University of New York in Buffalo. What they did was to take 2000 adults and they gave them two tasks. One was this – an adversity check-list, a questionnaire, a list of different adverse events in childhood – not terrible traumas, but things like parents getting divorced, someone in the family loses a job, a fire or a natural disaster. You get a check for each of these events that happened in childhood. The second test was a basic psychological test of happiness, mental health, well-being, and so on.
“For the most part, the researchers found that the relationship between these two lists was what they expected. Some people who had lots of adversity in childhood might check off 12 to 15 boxes, and they weren’t doing well at all on the measures of well-being (in adulthood). Their adversity had really gotten through their skin and it was affecting their mental health.
“But then they noticed something curious. There was a group of about 200 adults in the group who had not checked off a single box on the adversity questionnaire. They had not experienced any real adversity in childhood at all. And so the researchers looked at the slope on their graph and they thought these must be the happiest, best adjusted people of them all.
“But of course, they weren’t. Their mental health scores were no better than those who had scored 9 or 10 adverse experiences. And the people who were doing best were those who had experienced 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 adverse experiences. It turns out that the relationship between happiness and childhood adversity is an inverse U-shaped quadratic equation.
“But knowing that still led to the question ‘why?’. Why is some adversity good for us? I think it is because it gives us an opportunity in childhood to practice failing – to learn how to manage failure.”
Later in his presentation, Paul Tough acknowledged that the way in which we develop character is something of a conundrum for both teachers and parents. He concluded his address by saying something like this:
“I think there are two conversations that we ought to have about children and success. One is about how to help our own kids, and the other is about how to help kids across town or in the next city. And what I want to argue is that these are really the same conversation, and the more we think of them as being the same, then the better we will do on both fronts.
“Children need the same things to succeed, whether they are living in a poor neighbourhood or in the wealthiest suburb. They need love, support, and just a little bit of adversity.”
Of course, Tough said much more than this during his 45 minute address, and he gave several eye-opening examples and intriguing anecdotes to illustrate his points. Needless to say, his address was warmly received by all of us who are Heads of Schools, as we experience on a daily basis the challenges in children that are caused by too much adversity or too much pampering.
Paul Tough’s argument for balance was indeed a compelling one for anyone whose prime concern is the formation of young people to cope with both the successes and the challenges of adulthood.
Parents at Awty may be encouraged to know that this is a theme I have been pushing continually during my time here at the school because it has such a strong direct bearing on students’ learning outcomes and success in later life. Therefore, a key goal in the list of goals I have negotiated with all three Division Heads for their appraisal in the year ahead is that they must investigate the adequacy of the school’s provisions for students with individual needs (academic, financial, physical, etc) and they are recommend any changes that are required in time for implementation in the next budget cycle.
As Pat Bassett and Paul Tough have argued so compellingly, this simple step – now in place here at Awty – will transform many of the lives of Awty’s present students for the better for many decades to come.

Empty Corridors

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 02:24:52 +1000

No matter how wonderful its buildings might be, any school without its students is just an empty shell.
It is the laughter, the chatter, the curiosity and, dare I say, the antics of the students that give life and vibrancy to a school.
With the exception of a handful of students who are still doing their final French Bac examinations, all our students have now finished their school year. As a consequence, our classrooms have now entered their annual period of summer slumber.
Well, almost....
The faculty and staff were all still present this week, completing reports and holding various planning meetings for the coming year. Visually, though not in practice, the scene has been mildly reminiscent of the exquisite episode in “Yes Minister” where the Minister of Administrative Affairs, James Hacker, encountered a new hospital that had no patients but which was fully staffed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyf97LAjjcY and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-5zEb1oS9A).
On Thursday afternoon we had our last faculty meeting for the year. The final meeting is always a bitter-sweet experience as we farewell some colleagues who are moving on to new adventures in various parts of the world, we recognise the long service of several highly valued teachers, and we award the annual Guy Benet Awards for Teaching Excellence – this year’s recipients being Sylvaine Follini and Natasha Ramírez.

Among the sessions held with the faculty this week were the very significant planning meetings to prepare our 5-year report to the Council of International Schools (CIS). CIS is one of Awty’s two major accreditation agencies, and it is the ‘gold standard’ accreditation credential that establishes us as a top-tier international school. (Because CIS has a specific focus on ensuring best practice in ‘international’ education, the French Section has naturally chosen not to participate in the CIS accreditation process, which will thus only accredit the International Section of the school).
It is now five years since we had our last major visit, and CIS requires that we submit a report on the changes in the school since that visit together with our responses to the recommendations made at the time by the visiting team.
Since CIS’ last visit to Awty, CIS has refined its accreditation standards, and we are now required to show compliance in seven areas:
1. The school’s Guiding Statements
2. Teaching and Learning
3. Governance and Leadership
4. Faculty and Support Staff
5. Access to Teaching and Learning
6. School Culture and Partnerships for Learning
7. Operational Systems
Having served as a member of several CIS visiting teams to schools in various countries over the years, I know from my own first-hand experience how valuable the CIS processes of self-reflection and self-evaluation are in encouraging best practices in schools. Indeed, when I developed and implemented a new appraisal system for Awty’s senior personnel this year, I used the inspiration of the CIS model of self-reflection as its foundation.
Awty’s report, which is due to be submitted to CIS in early October, will be followed (probably in November) by a visit to the school by senior CIS personnel who will evaluate the accuracy and sufficiency of our self-evaluation study.
When the CIS visitors arrive, construction will be well underway on the new extension to the Lower School that began this week. It is early days yet, and most of the work this week simply involved erection of the perimeter fencing and establishing the boundaries and infrastructure of the builders’ construction zone (as shown in the photo on right, taken on Tuesday).
Nonetheless, the arrival of the builders marked an exciting step forward towards the next phase of our building program – a step which also signified the commencement of the third major building project under my headship at Awty.
Hopefully there will be some truly exciting construction happening during the coming weeks and months at Awty – construction not only of new buildings, but also the construction of new ideas, concepts and plans as we engage in the CIS-led process of self-reflection and self-evaluation.
And, reflecting the priority I have always seen as being at number 1 in schools, I am thrilled to say that the real winners will be our students.

Chinese mice do not eat cheese

Mon, 3 Jun 2013 12:04:22 +1000

As regular readers of this blog know, we had so many festivities, celebrations, dinners, ceremonies, graduations and functions for the Middle and Upper School students last week that I found myself writing daily blogs to keep up with them all. This week, as the Middle and Upper School have slipped into end-of-year examination mode, the focus of our celebrations has shifted to the Lower School.
Actually, the focus began to shift towards the end of last week. On Friday afternoon, we held a prize giving ceremony for students in the French Section in the Lower School, and I used the opportunity to present the certificates and hard cover copies of some books I have written to the outstanding students in the Lover School (Grades 2 to 5) who had participated in the ‘Where in the World is Dr Codrington?’ competition that I had been conducting during this school year.
I almost always illustrate my books exclusively with photos I have taken myself, and as the geography books I presented to them have over 1200 of my photos within their pages, my hope is that the students will have many happy hours browsing the photos, working out where they were taken, and then maybe even moving beyond the pictures and reading the text of the books as well.
We had two graduation ceremonies for Lower School students this week. On Tuesday morning, our 113 Grade 5 students ended their days as students in the Lower School with a marathon performance of Treasure Island, followed by their graduation ceremony.
On the following morning, Wednesday, 91 students delighted their parents and families by donning little caps and gowns and participating in the Kindergarten graduation ceremony, surely an important rite of passage for any five year old. The graduation ceremony was followed by a heart-warming series of musical performances on the theme of international understanding, organised by our brilliant Lower School Music Teacher, Ms Natasha Ramírez.
During my welcome speech at the Grade 5 graduation ceremony, I shared two stories with the students to encourage them to aspire for excellence as they enter the Middle School. So, before I show you a selection of photos from this week’s two graduation ceremonies (at the end of this blog), I will share one of these two stories that drew some very encouraging, warm, positive feedback from several of the parents present after the ceremony:
“As some of you know, I lived in Hong Kong for seven years before I moved to Houston. While I was living there, I discovered that there was a mouse in the house where I was living. So I went to the local market, I bought a little wire mesh cage which traps the mouse alive, and I baited it with a piece of cheese. A few days later, the cheese still had not been touched and I was becoming a bit worried, because the mouse was still in the house.
One day, after the cage with the cheese had been lying untouched for a week, one of the school’s maintenance staff came around to do some repairs, and he happened the see the mouse trap. He looked at me and said very seriously with a waggle of the finger “Chinese mice do not eat cheese”.
Now, it is commonly known that Chinese people do not like cheese. They can’t stand the smell of it and to them the taste would be like sun dried rooster’s feet or fermented seaweed to you, if you can imagine such a thing. But it had not occurred to me that Chinese mice might not like cheese as well. And then I thought about it. If there was no cheese in the average Chinese home, then even a reasonably intelligent mouse might have trouble figuring out that it was supposed to go into the cage to eat something it never encountered before.
There had to be a reason that the mouse had not been enticed into the cage, so I asked the man from the maintenance department what a Chinese mouse might prefer to eat. “Fish” he said confidently, “with soy sauce”. I had never thought of a mouse eating fish or that a mouse might prefer it with a little dash of soy sauce. In fact, that would have been the last thing I would have thought of using. As the maintenance man went out the door he added “Mice like a little ginger on their fish”.
And so I replaced the cheese with a little left over fish laced with a touch of soy sauce and, of course, some shredded ginger. Finding this more to his liking, the mouse was caught just a few hours later. You have probably heard the expression “When in Rome do as the Romans do”, which in its Chinese version is “When visiting a village, ask how the villagers do things”.
We can learn a lot from that mouse in Hong Kong, who sadly, is no longer with us. The mouse did not like cheese because he (or maybe she, I didn’t ask) had never tried it. He (let’s assume it was a ‘he’) had decided he didn’t like it but had never experienced it. If he had been told by his mother or father or teacher that cheese was dangerous and therefore avoided it, that would make sense. But without any knowledge or understanding of cheese, the mouse had decided not to try it. Like me, you can probably see the parallel with students who criticise subjects or sports they have never tried or knock people that they don’t know…
Never make the mistake of thinking that by doing well you are therefore doing your best. When I was in Hong Kong, I had a very good mouse trap, but while ever I thought that, I was prevented from making an excellent mouse trap. I had to depend on others for advice, and through that I achieved excellence, as I am sure the mouse would testify to you today if it had survived.
In the same way, I hope that you will always want to strive for the heights of excellence.”

Senior Graduation

Mon, 27 May 2013 12:12:49 +1000

The schooling of our 92 Grade 12 students came to a celebratory conclusion yesterday morning when we held our graduation ceremony, or as it is peculiarly known here in the US, “Commencement Exercises”.
Our special guest was Ms Niloufar Molavi, a former Awty student who is now US Vice Chair, US Energy Leader and Managing Partner for Greater Houston for Price Waterhouse Coopers.
After the ceremony, I lost count of the number of people who asked for a copy of my speech, and so in response to those requests and the very complimentary comments that accompanied them, I have reproduced my speech below. As several parents remarked with smiles on their faces over morning tea following the ceremony, this is probably the first time that Kim Il Sung has been quoted in a graduation speech in an American high school:
Our distinguished guest, Ms Niloufar Molavi,
Chairman of the Awty International School board, Mr Mark Schroeder,
Members of the Board, parents, guests, faculty and staff, and young men and women, soon-to-be-graduates of the Awty International School,
Much as I love computers, laptops and iPads, I love books even more. As my wife will testify, usually at great length and in considerable detail, I am addicted to books and I have (so she claims) far too many of them. I cannot visit a new city or country without taking the time to browse the bookstores, and I have my regular favourites in places as diverse as London, Sydney, Singapore, Hong Kong, Rangoon, Delhi – the list of “my” bookstores goes on.
In my favourite book store in Pyongyang, North Korea, there is a large sign with a quote by Kim Il Sung: “The book is a silent teacher and a companion in life. Young people should carry books with them at all times and read various good books zealously”. That is good advice – you are young people, and I hope you carry good books with you and I hope you read them zealously.
For some reason, which I am guessing might be to sell more books, book store owners seem to like displaying large signs in their shops. Earlier this year, while I was visiting a book shop in Philadelphia, a new one for me, I looked up from the shelves to see a large sign on the wall which read “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.
As I said, that sign was no doubt designed to encourage customers to buy books, and I found it compelling and provocative. If we believe the self-help channels on television, we can easily assume that that all we need to do to discover ourselves is look deeply enough within us. This ego-centricity limits our sense of enquiry and it runs the risk of diminishing our willingness to engage with other people who hold contrary opinions. Books, and talking with people we disagree with, are both important reality checks for us all.
We need to recognise that outside the orbit of our own lives lie riches that are far beyond our imagination. What the unknown author of the sign was suggesting is that we need to venture outside ourselves and journey into the mottled world of good and bad. And to our graduating students here this morning, I would say this – I hope that your education at Awty has been precisely that – a journey beyond yourself into the mottled world of good and bad, engaging with new ideas that I hope have expanded your perspective and taken you outside your comfort zone.
As I have often said to my ToK students, “if you want a definition of water, don’t ask a fish”. In the same way, I say that I hope you have seen and experienced both bad and good here at Awty, because unless you have experienced some of the bad, you have no basis to appreciate, or even recognise (for that matter), the good – and even more importantly, the excellent – when you encounter it. You need that external frame of reference as your reality check.
Well, the sign in the book shop worked. I bought a book. It was a biography of Nelson Mandela. I am not trying to name drop here, but Nelson Mandela was my (titular) boss when I was working in Hong Kong before I moved to Houston. He is now 94 years old, and from what I hear, he may not be with us for much longer. Reading his biography, I came to an even deeper understanding of something that I already knew – Nelson Mandela provides us all with an extraordinary example of the truth of that sign in the book store in Philadelphia – life is all about creating yourself.
There’s no doubt that luck exists, but success through luck does not exist. We’ve all heard of the story about how Isaac Newton discovered gravity after an apple struck his head when he was resting under a tree. But is the story as simple as that? An apple might have indeed fallen on his head, but the apple was not solely responsible for Newton’s conception of his second law of motion. Without imagination, he would not have pondered why the apple fell down instead of up; without knowledge in Physics, he would not have been able to link this to acceleration; without hard work, he would not have been able to utilise the findings of Galileo and other great scientists to come up with the concept of the gravitational force that keeps the moon in orbit around the earth.
Luck can open unexpected doors. Luck can even provide the opportunity of coming to Awty, an opportunity that (as I articulated at the graduation dinner last night) very, very few people can and will ever experience. But luck is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. You have been fortunate enough to have developed a certain level of intelligence, creativity, curiosity, understanding and open-mindedness, partly because of your genetics and your upbringing at home (so remember to thank your parents for those), and partly through Awty’s fabulous teaching (for which you need to remember to thank your teachers).
While you have been here at Awty, you may or may not have learned this or that bit of technical knowledge, or this or that set of skills. But, don’t worry too much about remembering the details of the content taught to you in your classes; most of it will be out-of-date within a decade, and in any case (to quote the words of George Savile that were written back in the mid-1600s), “education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught”. There is one exception – you do need to remember the message of this speech for the rest of your lives!
Regardless of what you have learnt and what you have already forgotten, you have been lucky enough to get into Awty, and you have had an educational and cultural experience that will make you stand out from the crowd. As you graduate together, I hope you think of those less fortunate than you are – which is the majority of people your age in the world today – who must choose between food and education. There are people who won’t have access to a fraction of your opportunities simply because of accidents of birth. Luck offers you the opportunity to work hard, but whether you take that opportunity or not is up to you. So I urge you to take advantage of the fabulous opportunities that lie ahead of you, and as you benefit from these opportunities, remember also to create opportunities for others.
Let me flesh this out for a moment. By the time you graduate from college or university, something like half a million dollars will have been spent on developing how your brain works, how you see and interact with the world – in other words, your education. Some of that will be from parents, some may be from governments (depending on where you study), and some may come through scholarship funding. Let’s place this figure in perspective. For that amount of money, you could build 8 primary schools in East Africa, or about 20 rural primary schools in Cambodia. I’ll express it in yet another way – collectively, you are the resource equivalent of almost 1500 Cambodian primary schools sitting in this hall this morning. And as I have found in my own life, with great opportunity comes great responsibility – as a minimum, each and every one of you ought to be making a significantly greater contribution as an individual to our world in the years to come than about 8 entire East African primary schools.
This is not intended to be a guilt trip, it is intended to be an appeal for awareness and responsible action. You have had an excellent international education, and you will enjoy the fruits of that. You understand global issues. You understand that in parts of Latin America, there is chronic malnutrition and so many families now simply have to eat less because food is twice as expensive as it was 10 years ago, but salaries are the same. We live in a global society, where hyperconnectivity means we can longer claim to be ignorant of the needs of the others. The singer Yusuf Islam, who you may know better as Cat Stevens, spoke about this issue just a few months ago, commenting that “We were given this earth as a spherical place; there are no corners – borders, for me, don’t exist”. I hope you appreciate the responsibility that flows from the education you have received, and that you have the strong ethical principles to act on that responsibility.
Accepting responsibility and acting on principle is almost never easy – if it were easy, everyone would do it! When I read the biography that I bought in Philadelphia, I learned that Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his principles. Okay, please don’t misunderstand me – I’m not comparing your life at Awty to Mandela’s life in prison. That would exaggerate the severity of the rules we have here at the school, and it would trivialise the agonies Mandela endured for his principles. In 1975, while he was locked away in Kroonstad Prison, he wrote these words to his wife, Winnie: “The (prison) cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings. In judging progress as individuals, people tend to concentrate on external factors such as one’s social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education… But internal factors are far more important in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities that are within easy reach of every soul – are the foundation of one’s life.”
In that same letter, he described himself as simply “an example of a mediocre man”. I suspect that Nelson Mandela is the only person in the world who would use the word ‘mediocre’ to describe Nelson Mandela – and what a powerful lesson in humility that is for the rest of us!
But he is right to emphasise the importance of humility. Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself; it means thinking of yourself less often. Humble people are so focussed on serving others that don’t have time to focus on themselves.
And, as I look across at all of you seated before this morning, I see almost limitless potential for improving the world in the decades ahead if you put your hearts, your minds and your wallets to the task. But as I look across at you, our graduating students, I also ask questions, questions that I hope you also ask as you look across at each other – questions that will be fascinating to review at your 20 year reunion in 2033, questions like these: Among you, who is going to have the courage to stand out and dare to be different? Who is going to have the nerve to take risks? Who is going to have the strength to choose change over the status quo? Who is going to have the integrity to ask ‘how can I help?’ rather than ‘what can you do for me?’. Who is going to have the fearlessness to lead, and the confidence to follow? Who is going to have the courage to look at others not as competition, but as potential collaborators to work with to build a more productive and more sustainable world? Who among you are going to dare to be themselves?
Just as you are leaving Awty today, I too am leaving this summer. You will go to your destinations in various parts of the world, and I will be returning to my home country of Australia. The Australian Aborigines have a saying that applies to situations like the one we share today, and it goes like this: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love – and then we return home”.
Which brings me back to Nelson Mandela. I would like to leave you with one last thought from Nelson Mandela this morning. In 1998, he started writing a sequel to his autobiography. It will almost certainly never get finished. The beginning of Mandela’s draft of Chapter 1 will be the finish of my words to you this morning, but I hope you will also see these words as the commencement of Chapter 1 of the rest of your life as an Awty graduate – that life that starts at the end of this ceremony. This is, after all, a Commencement ceremony.
This is what Nelson Mandela wrote: “Men and women, all over the world, right down the centuries, come and go. Some leave nothing behind, not even their names. It would seem that they never existed at all. Others do leave something behind: the haunting memory of the evil deeds they committed against other people… (But) there is universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings regardless of their social status. These are men and women, known and unknown, who have declared total war against all forms of gross violation of human rights wherever in the world such excesses occur. They are generally optimistic, believing that, in every community in the world, there are good men and women who believe in peace as the most powerful weapon in the search for lasting solutions… It is such good men and women who are the hope of the world.”
I hope it is you that he talking about!

Farewell from Awty's parents

Sun, 26 May 2013 08:03:49 +1000

People who know me understand that I hate farewells. It seems to be a basic tenet of my personality.
In that context, you will appreciate what a strong statement I am making when I say how much I enjoyed the farewell dessert evening that Awty organised for Di and me on Thursday evening. This was a superb event, and we both went home afterwards experiencing the full set of conflicting bittersweet emotions that are seemingly obligatory when farewelling good friends.
Although I struggle to understand why (!), I seem to have gained a reputation as one who enjoys desserts. And so it was a lovely touch to arrive in the Sarofim Library on Thursday evening and find a spectacular array of desserts and cheeses, with the chocolate dipped strawberries quickly becoming my dessert of preference.
I was truly touched by the generous and gracious comments made by Mr Mark Schroeder, Chairman of the Board, on behalf of the school, as indeed I was humbled by the seemingly countless tributes, expressions of gratitude and thanks from the guests who had given up their evening at this very busy time of year to attend.
The school’s parting gift, which Mark aptly and accurately described as the equivalent of a geography blog from the 1800s, will certainly remain a very treasured possession and reminder of Di’s and my time here in Houston.
As I mentioned in my brief remarks at the farewell, leading a school like Awty is a rare honor that very few educators ever get to experience, and it is been a privilege to serve the school community for the past couple of years. I remain grateful to the people who were on the board three years ago for the confidence they placed in me at that time to invite me to come to Houston as Head of this great school.
Although life in Houston has not always been what we were expecting before we arrived (are schools ever predictable?), we leave with many happy memories, a multitude of new friends, some gain in weight, very few regrets, and lots of optimism for the future.

Yes, achievement matters too

Sat, 25 May 2013 04:15:44 +1000

Two days ago, I wrote a blog about the importance of effort and the way in which we now recognise it at Awty through the Civitas Awards. I hope that no-one misinterpreted my statement that effort matters as implying that achievement does not !
Yesterday, I shook the hands of 480 students during two awards presentation ceremonies that focussed specifically on achievement. If I add the number of hands shaken at the Civitas Awards presentation on Wednesday (170) and the Honors Societies Induction Ceremony that same evening (140), that makes 790 student hands shaken in just two days. I have a couple of hundred more before the weekend (mainly Grade 12 students), and a similar number again next week (mainly the tiny hands of Lower School award winners and graduating students).
That’s a large number of hands (especially when quite a number of them yesterday were somewhat sweaty with excitement), but I loved every minute of it !
As our parents (and our students !) all know, Awty students work very hard. Some might claim they work too hard, and that would be an interesting topic for a robust debate one day. In any case, it is wonderful to be able to recognise and acknowledge our students’ achievements at the end of the school year in awards ceremonies such as those we held yesterday.
We began at 8 :15 am with the Middle School Awards Ceremony. This involved the presentation of 205 prizes, including to my personal delight, the books that I awarded to Amelia Ward and Gabriella Murdoch as the top students in the Middle School in this year’s "Where in the World is Dr Codrington ?" competition.
What especially impressed me was the enthusiastically supportive applause, and even the occasional cheering for special awards, that pervaded the entire awards presentation. This told me more clearly that words could ever convey what a positive, cooperative and mutually encouraging student community we have at this school.
The Upper School Awards Ceremony followed at 11:00 am, adding a further 275 hands to my ‘shaking total’. Like the Middle School Awards ceremony before it, the presentations were marked by positive displays of mutual support throughout together with a genuine esteem for those who had achieved such outstanding results.
The Upper School Awards ceremony finished with the presentation of several very special awards – first the top scholar awards for each grade in each section, and then the highlight of the ceremony – the Citizenship Award, presented this year to Rym Benchaabane.
In the years to come, I look forward to hearing about the inevitable successes and challenges of Awty’s wonderfully bright, curious, engaged, articulate students. Our students are surely this school’s greatest asset, and I know they are destined to make a significant and positive impact on our world.

Barnacles hate chilli sauce

Fri, 24 May 2013 01:03:10 +1000

Last night (Wednesday evening), students and parents gathered in the PAAC for what is a peculiarly American annual occasion. The purpose was to induct students into the various Honor Societies in which our outstanding students (of whom Awty has many!) participate in order to develop their leadership, their scholarship, their character and their service to others.
Awty has chapters of seven different honors societies: the National Honor Society, Société Honoraire de Français, the National Junior Honor Society, the National Art Honor Society, the Tri-M Music Honor Society, Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica Claudia López, and the Chinese Honor Society.
We inducted 140 new students into Honor Societies, and in addition, we presented 120 Honor Cords to our Grade 12 students who will graduate this Saturday.
In my opening address, I tried to challenge our Honor Society students to overcome the inertia they will inevitably encounter in their lives and act as a positive force in the world for what they believe is right. The ultimate theme of my address was that ‘Barnacles hate chilli sauce”, and here is the text of my address to the students:
Ladies and gentlemen, students of the Awty International School,
Welcome to this special evening in which we will induct many of you into our Honor Societies. To paraphrase the great French writer, Voltaire: with great honor comes great responsibility, and I want to spend a few minutes at the beginning of this evening’s ceremony to reflect on this a little.
I expect that most of you have never seen a copy of William Hickling Prescott’s massive book, ‘The History of the Conquest of Mexico’, written in 1843, and ‘The History of the Conquest of Peru’, written in 1847. Originally they were five volumes, but some enterprising publisher combined them together into one, to become the type of book that would sit on a school library shelf and then be thrown out when a methodical librarian noticed that it had not been borrowed in the past twenty years or so.
I knew someone who had once seen an original copy of this book, and although he is now old, he says that it is still etched into his mind, never to be eradicated. Even to this day, he says that the descriptions of Aztec human sacrifices chill the blood.
Not long after he left Harvard University in 1821, the author, William Hickling Prescott, lost his eye in an accident. Soon after that he gradually went blind in the other. So he amassed his incredible historical details by having specially trained readers read to him. Though he was almost blind, he wrote by means of a ‘noctograph’, which was a special frame made out of brass wires that kept him from running his lines together. His combined book, The Conquest of Mexico and Peru, took him twenty years to complete. While he was awaiting publication, all his manuscripts were destroyed in a fire. He put aside his understandable and very deep distress, and, by now completely blind, he re-wrote the entire work from memory.
Most of us, me included, are no William Hickling Prescotts when it comes to using our memory. Of course, we can manage irrelevant trivia, like 80,000 fleas weigh 30 grams, but memorising huge quantities of information, and even using our memory to learn new languages, is not easy for us because our memories are no longer trained as they were in past years. And even more so than Prescott’s memory, I suspect very few of us would have his persistence. We might be able to excuse not memorising huge amounts of material, because it is now so easy to access information using computers and the internet, where the problem is the glut of information, but how do we excuse the lack of persistence that was once taken as the norm?
Now, maybe I am speaking to the wrong group about this. After all, you are the ones who have shown persistence, and you have made the extra effort. That is why we are applauding you and recognising your achievements this evening.
Nonetheless, the reality is that all of us could always give more of ourselves to a task – any task – despite what we think to the contrary. In our hearts we know we are as lazy as we dare to be. We do have very well defined limits in our minds beyond which we will not pass unless we gain from it. Great schools like Awty have always been built on what I call ‘generosity of spirit’ – that spirit of giving more from our hearts and doing more, which leads us to keep on giving when something else within us says “no more”. Whether this is something as simple as turning off the television set and really trying to understand mitosis and meiosis, or reading all of Euripides’ plays when only one is on the reading list, or whether it is the committed teacher (of which we are blessed with so many here) spending time with a struggling student when it would be far more comfortable to be around a cup of coffee and some cake with colleagues, all these and many more are examples of the tension between ‘more’ and ‘no more’.
As you know, it is to encourage the ‘more’, and to discourage the ‘no more’, that we are recognising your efforts this evening. If ever the ‘enough is enough’ attitude gains traction here at Awty, as it has done in so many other schools here in the US, then Awty itself will be ‘no more’, at least in the sense that we know it today and it has been in the past. What made this school so special for so many has been the attitude of ‘going the extra mile’ from faculty, students, parents, board members and alumni. Of course, there will always be those who see the school only in terms of what it can do for them or their children, but that minority is not what gives us the great community that we all enjoy and benefit from today.
In fact, that minority that claims ‘enough is enough’ is a little like the barnacles on the hull of a ship. Barnacles on a ship are not deep thinkers, so they never know, I suppose, that that the ship may be 30% less efficient because of them, and 30% more costly to run. I once read that someone, by chance, found out that barnacles hated chilli sauce (there’s another of those useful facts like the weight of 80,000 fleas!). He extracted oil from the seeds of the chillies (which is the basis of their heat) and, because this is miscible with organic solvent in paint, he produced a marine paint that forever stops barnacles attaching to a ship’s hull.
So the thought I want to leave you with this evening is this – barnacles hate chilli sauce. The fact that you are here means that none of you is a barnacle. My challenge to you is to make sure you are the chilli sauce, and you do everything you can to stop those other barnacles having their way.

Civitas

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:30:32 +1000

There are so many good things happening this week in the school that I don’t think I can wait until the weekend to share them all through this blog. I think this will be a multi-blog week.
This afternoon, we presented our first Civitas Awards. Many months ago I announced that we were going to introduce a new awards scheme to recognise students’ effort. Since that time, the teachers have spent many hours fine-tuning the system, working through the criteria, designing the certificates, modifying our report forms and reorienting their own thinking in awarding grades for effort and conduct. The fruits of these labors were seen at this afternoon’s presentation assembly.
As I announced at the start of the assembly, the concept behind the Civitas Awards is the understanding that while very few students can be top of their classes in academic achievement (by definition, because ‘top of the class’ is a ranking exercise), every student is capable to achieving top grades for effort, because effort is criterion referenced.
Therefore, regardless of the academic grades a student is receiving, every student should be capable of working their heart out and scoring a top grade for effort.
We awarded three categories of Civitas Awards. Students who gained the top effort and conduct grade (a “10”) in every one of their subjects received an “Exemplary” Civitas Award. Students who gained a “10” in all their subjects except one, where they gained a “9”, received a “Distinguished” Civitas Award, while those who gained straight “10”s with two “9”s were awarded a Civitas certificate at the “Commendable” level.
I was thrilled that in this first awards ceremony, 170 students in Grades 6 to 11 qualified to received Civitas Awards. Of this number, 28 were at the level of an Exemplary Award.
Because effort is such a basic prerequisite for achievement, I hope that the Civitas Awards will come to be seen as one of the most significant presentations made at Awty International School in the years to come. For that reason, and because role modelling and partnerships with parents are so important, we invited parents and families of award winners to our presentation ceremony, and to the afternoon tea I hosted following the ceremony. I was delighted by the wonderful support shown by our parents for the Civitas Awards; a huge number of parents attended, many of whom had taken time off work to attend.
As I explained to the students at the assembly, the Civitas Award certificates are not just pieces of paper; they are very important components of their resumés. When they come to prepare their college and university applications, or job applications for that matter, one of the things that will make the deepest impression will be evidence of solid effort, persistence and consistent application – and that is precisely what the Civitas Awards document.
For those students for whom the certificate itself is not sufficient motivation, I am hoping that over time the food available at the afternoon tea will become an incentive. All the students who earn Exemplary Civitas Awards are invited to attend the afternoon tea with the parents and families who are attending, and I can testify that the food is definitely good enough to justify making an extra effort in the classroom!
I believe that this first Civitas Awards presentation was the start of an important long-term journey for Awty International School. By the end of next year, I predict that the number of recipients will have increased, the proportion of boys receiving awards will have increased (girls dominated this first awards presentation), and teachers will have a clearer separation of effort grades from students’ achievement levels. After two years, I predict that we will see achievement results in external examinations (including the Bac and the IB Diploma) increase on a sustained basis. This is because high achievement flows from a robust culture of solid effort, and I am confident that this is precisely what the Civitas Awards will build in Awty over time.
I am very grateful for the hard work that our teachers in the Middle and Upper Schools have put into making the Civitas Awards a living, breathing reality here at Awty. I am also grateful for the consistent support I have received for this initiative from the Head of the Middle School, Mr Tom Beuscher, and the Head of the Upper School, Mr Sam Waugh, ever since I first suggested it in late 2011. Both men have guided many discussions and planning sessions to establish the Civitas Awards, and I am delighted that their persistence has borne fruit.
I am also grateful to the many parents who supported the initiative with their presence this afternoon. Their enthusiastic and appreciative feedback over afternoon tea were very encouraging to all of us who had worked to get this initiative up and running.
Of course, the real beneficiaries will be Awty’s students in the years ahead. I believe we have launched something that will fundamentally enhance our school culture for many years to come.