Partner Time

9/30/19
By Liza Ewen
Acting Head of School

Last week, the FSH community began the Thursday ritual of “partner time”--a half-hour set aside each Thursday before Meeting for Worship for older and younger students to spend time together. Each week, our older students join the younger students in their classrooms or on the playing field and have the opportunity to play, read, create, and learn side-by-side. While the early weeks of this require scaffolding by teachers (not every 8th grader knows or remembers the ins and outs of being three, and not every preschooler is ready to greet unfamiliar “big people”), by the middle of the year, partner time will include high-fives, hugs, and laughter. When our youngest students begin to attend Meeting for Worship in the meetinghouse, they typically sit with their partners, allowing our older students to shepherd their younger counterparts into this important feature of a Quaker school--a weekly event that gains importance when it’s your turn to help someone understand and participate in it.

One of the greatest strengths of FSH is its smaller size, which allows our students, from ages three to thirteen, to know each other and to recognize one another as an integral part of this community. It provides middle school students, who often (rightly) feel they exist in a state between childhood and adulthood, with an opportunity to step up to be a role model. Partner time is a developmentally appropriate way for them to check their own worries and anxieties at the door and show up as a warm presence for someone else (which is, I’d say, an apt metaphor for adulthood). It provides our youngest students a chance to connect meaningfully with someone who might otherwise remain in the distance.

If thinking about partner time in the abstract still leaves you wondering about its value, I offer this in closing: this week, two graduates of the Class of 2019 are returning to campus for a visit and reached out to see if they could pop into preschool to see their Nursery partners from last year. I can’t think of a more fitting reunion.