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Daily 171: Staff Election Day

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Summary

Back from week off - Math Pebbles progress (7 years of work ahead). Extended school year by 3 weeks due to pandemic. Beautiful day. Quick JC - past clerk stepped down, need new one. Staff speeches (hour long) - young/new students asked about staff history. Then voting. Everyone came out to tent and stayed for whole speeches. Speech focus: trust between students, staff, parents. Unusual for children to have power shaping community. School meeting tomorrow at 1pm.

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to ANI In the Air, Under the Tangent Around, multiple daily podcast briefing of
0:04 all the goings ons, ins and rounds, arts and ideas, Sudbury School.
0:07 So I'm back.
0:08 I took a week off and it was a great week.
0:12 I got a lot done on my project, Math Pibbles, and I mean I've got seven years left of stuff
0:20 to do, but it was very heartening to have that good start and hopefully over the summer
0:26 I can make some real, real progress.
0:31 So I appreciate that.
0:32 I also managed to take care of a variety of things around the house.
0:37 Preparation for being here for the next four weeks.
0:40 Typically this would have been the last week of school, but we extended the school year
0:48 by three weeks because of all the pandemic shutdown and so we've got three more weeks
0:53 after this one.
0:54 So that's exciting.
0:55 It will go very fast.
1:00 If the weather would stay like this for the next four weeks, it'd be awesome, but it's
1:04 not.
1:05 It's going to get hot.
1:06 But today is beautiful, absolutely beautiful, a little on the cloudy side, although that's
1:11 quite helpful.
1:12 But yeah, it's great to be back.
1:17 And what a day to come back to.
1:19 We did announcements in the morning and then had a quick JC of a couple cases.
1:26 I had to run it.
1:28 Our past JC clerk has decided to step down for now.
1:34 I thank them for their service and if anyone listening wants to be JC clerk, let me know.
1:40 I'm going to probably announce it in Discord and we can have an election tomorrow if somebody
1:49 wants to be the JC clerk for June.
1:53 In any event, let's see, what else?
2:00 So after JC we had our staff speeches, wonderful as always to hear lots of what the staff say
2:06 and all the questions.
2:08 What I noticed about the questions was it came from a lot of young people or new people
2:12 to the school who essentially were asking for a history of how the staff got here, which
2:17 I thought was really nice and brilliant.
2:20 We tend to forget that the history that we know about ourselves is not what the history
2:28 of what all these other kids do.
2:30 So it's a really great time to actually get to know the staff.
2:35 And then after that we did the actual voting.
2:40 As of right now I do not know the results of the election, so we'll see.
2:47 Typically it's pretty favorable to the staff, but you never know.
2:55 And yeah, so it's kind of a nice calm time after.
3:03 What was really impressive was that everyone actually came out to the tent.
3:09 I had to push a few people, if you will, I mean not physically push them of course, but
3:16 go around and tell them and there was one young one that took some persuading to actually
3:22 come out and do it and sit under the tent.
3:26 But I think everybody stayed for the whole speeches, which was like an hour long.
3:32 And then I think everyone did the voting, it's all mandatory, so I'd hope so.
3:38 And so that was exciting.
3:42 For an hour just sitting here listening to all this stuff and being of pretty much good
3:46 cheer.
3:47 So that was really great to see and experience and to see everybody kind of treating it seriously
3:54 with respect and just hearing what everybody had to say.
4:00 I think a big focus of what I ended up saying, and I didn't really know what I was going
4:03 to say until I said it, was just about trust and my love of how much trust there is in
4:09 this school.
4:11 The trust reflected between the students, between the students and staff, between the
4:15 parents and the students and the staff and just everything.
4:20 This whole community is just so much built on trust and I'd say most communities are,
4:24 that's what makes a good community, community really is trusting one another to some extent.
4:32 And then, yeah, so yeah, I just kind of kept saying that when they answered, asked questions
4:40 about things and so forth.
4:42 So that's great.
4:43 In my talk about Tuesday for today, I talked about what staff do, thought it was topical
4:52 given that, you know, we are, that, you know, that was what was essentially being decided
5:03 on.
5:04 I did mention during my speech about, you know, how it is actually quite unusual for
5:10 students to, or children to have the power of shaping the community around them in such
5:16 a direct way.
5:18 I mean, I kind of knew that, but you know, certainly compared with say conventional schooling
5:25 or other things that kids just find themselves in.
5:28 But I think even, you know, even more historically, tribally or whatever, it's like they come
5:38 into what they have, you know, like it's, it is what's existing around them.
5:52 You know, and they just kind of accept and they figure out and they figure out how to
5:55 navigate things and that's just, you know, so the idea that
6:11 they're actually participating in this, I mean, it's quite amazing to think of putting
6:19 that out there for them and I hope they appreciate it somewhat, it's a good thing, but alright.
6:29 I've kind of droned on enough, so I guess I'll call it there and I will see you when
6:36 I, oh, school meeting is tomorrow at one.
6:40 It was shifted because of staff election stuff.
6:44 So yeah, I'll see you when I see you, bye bye.