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Learning and Connecting Through Shared Experience and Tradition


On any given school day, along the East 90th Street Ferry Pier you may see a group of 12- and 13-year-old boys from Saint David’s with their teachers, using professional tools to carefully monitor and measure oysters and water quality. Working in partnership with the Billion Oyster Project, they are citizen scientists helping to restore the oyster population in New York Harbor. The boys will return to their science labs and use their new knowledge and understanding about water quality to construct water tanks. They also take this knowledge with them on a three-day trip to the Pocono Environmental Education Center, where they conduct field work in the mountains, comparing the water quality of streams with that of the East River. 

These learning experiences, outside of a classroom setting, allow boys to engage in real-world work, ask real-world questions, and be part of real-world solutions. They are an ideal way to reach and teach boys. Because boys are active. They learn best by doing and by moving, and when they are engaging with big ideas. 

Curricular programs like this are plentiful throughout all disciplines at Saint David’s and while they directly incorporate research-backed evidence about the value of learning that occurs outside the classroom, they also speak to the value of shared experience. For boys in particular, relationships form and flourish through activities they participate in together, and through tradition and ritual. Get a group of boys together — to watch a movie, play a sport, work on a project — whatever, and more often than not the words spoken might not be plentiful, but the bonding is substantial.  

Today, while at our annual third-grade gingerbread house decorating party, where dads join their sons in decorating the boys’ architectural gingerbread creations, I started thinking about the shared experience of traditions and rituals. Saint David’s is a school with a rich heritage of traditions. Be it the armband ceremony that recognizes a first-grade boy for doing good, daily Chapel talks, the second-grade turkey run, or the eighth grade Italian Study Tour, these rituals and traditions unite our boys. They know that every Saint David's boy before them has gone through those same experiences, that every boy currently at the school is going through them now, and that every Saint David’s boy in the future will as well.

 
That connection to tradition through ritual helps to foster community and connection among boys within a society desperately hungry for both. It also instills within each boy the desire to excel—to be the very best he can be. 

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