The Song That is Global School

You can learn a lot about life when you work with children. You learn about life's ups and downs, about success and failure, and you learn about how long and winding the road of life can be. But most of all, you learn that in almost every circumstance that life presents, you can find joy. For me, there is no greater experience in life than to see the joy in a child's face when they feel they have accomplished something.

This joy of accomplishment was more than evident in the faces of the children of Global School yesterday afternoon when they participated in our Winter Sing. Their long hours of practice - and my long hours of enduring their practices (see earlier blog) - finally bore fruit. From the traditional carols of the season such as 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and 'Jingle Bells', to the less traditional but no less satisfying 'You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch', the children's voices soared and their faces shone. And the Chanukah play - with all of its memorization - was performed with much good spirit and aplomb.

Have there been better holiday plays in the history of school holiday plays? Maybe. Have their been louder singers, better bell ringers, and more fluent speakers? Possibly. But have students ever performed with more heart, more effort, or in the face of greater odds than those faced yesterday by our Global School students? Almost certainly no.

For you see, known to most, but still news to a few others, Global School will be closing its doors for good at the end of this week. As if saying goodbye to students and faculty for the long holiday break were sad enough, these students were singing their last songs and performing their last plays as Global School students. While everyone in the audience knew this, and certainly the students themselves felt the same, even this news could not disguise the joy in their voices, their hearts, and especially in their eyes.

If a school has to have a culminating event, where everyone can come together one last time - parent and student, faculty and staff - I can think of no better way than to be in the midst of our own students performing their best. There is something about a child's voice, their hesitant delivery of memorized lines, and the pregnant pause before the proper hand bell is rung, that encapsulates the joy of working with children - all the more so as you realize that this is last time you will do so with these special children.

Come January, everyone at Global School will find themselves elsewhere - new schools, new friends, new experiences. What they will not find, no matter where they may go, is a better vision of what a school can be, a new school community that loves learning more, and finally, a place that prizes children - their hopes, dreams, and their lives - more than we have.

Our doors may be closing, but the vision that was, and still is, Global School will live on. We have all tasted and experienced what a great school can be. As a result of our Global School experiences, we now know what it means to be part of a true learning community - what it means to be the best. Better yet, each of us has been enfused with a responsibility as we move on, to make sure that wherever we go, wherever we learn, we help the people we come to know and to work with, to understand the power of the vision we are leaving behind.

If there is a song for Global School, it is a wordless melody in the faces of our students for all that they have accomplished. It is, at its best, a song from the heart. It is in fact, despite the circumstances, a song of joy . . .

May you have a wonderful and blessed holiday season from all of us at Global School.