Skip to main content

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. 

Popular posts from this blog

"The Wisdom Within" - Building Student Motivation Through Choice

In the third entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative quarterly blog series, Master Teacher Jim Barbieri explores how providing boys with agency to choose builds motivation and enhances learning. BUILDING STUDENT MOTIVATION THROUGH CHOICE By the time I was eight years old, I had become completely absorbed in all things baseball. Living in New York was perfect for a baseball fan; although I was a Mets fan thanks to my idol, Tom Seaver, I was also interested in learning about all the amazing Yankees stars of yore. How could I call myself a baseball fan if I didn’t know the history and records of stars like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Yogi Berra? I loved collecting baseball cards and reading the career statistics of each player on the back. Looking through my collection one day, I discovered that I shared a birthday with the legendary Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Roberto Clemente. At eight years old, I was crushed to hear the news that he had died tragically in a plane crash while trying to ...
Read more

"The Wisdom Within" - Bringing Sound to Space

In the second entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative's quarterly blog series, "The Wisdom Within," Saint David's reflective practitioner and Master Teacher Cathy O'Neill explores the pedagogical power of play in the education of young boys. BRINGING SOUND TO SPACE It began with a mound of mangled metal and the vapor of a vision gleaned from recent comments and random fact-dropping by the Pre-K boys. Unsure of what exactly I was looking for, but fueled by the idea of a makeshift rocket to dovetail with our upcoming space unit, I gingerly picked through the scrap pile until my hands grazed an old VW control panel devoid of its dashboard. Eureka! An array of knobs, dials, and buttons - while in reality, dead as doornails - in the right small hands, would become the epicenter of our NASA-inspired dramatic play corner. With a couple of lawn chairs and some old CB radio microphones to round out the set, engines would be ignited by the power of imagination. All systems go...
Read more

"The Wisdom Within" - The Superpower of Performance

In the following entry of our Teaching Boys Initiative blog series, Saint David's Director of Music and Master Teacher Jeffrey Moore explores how participating in performances and productions build transformative competencies, transmit values, and inspire boys to excel. Jose Antonio Abreu, one of the leading educators in classical music and the founder of El Sistema said this: “Music has to be recognized as an agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values  — solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it can unite an entire community and express sublime feelings.”¹ At Saint David’s School, performance begins in the very first years. Each class, from Pre-K through Eighth Grade, presents their work to an audience of peers and parents, whether it is a story, a skit, a play, a lecture, or a musical presentation. But the increasing complexity and demands on our boys to push themselves to another level is the key to their development and succes...
Read more