Head’s Blog

As we head into the fourth week of school, the students and faculty are beginning to hit the regular rhythm of the school year. New students have settled in and have begun to see the school and the campus as their own. One faculty member told a wonderful story at a recent faculty meeting about a young 9th grader who was participating in some of the opening of school activities and gushed, “Isn’t high school just the BEST!”

Well, we certainly hope it is, although for new students the transition to Loomis can be difficult—or at least a little anxiety producing. I have had a couple of lunches with our new 9th graders and have listened to their stories of adjusting to the Loomis homework regime. They come, of course, from an amazing array of backgrounds. Some of them have never really had much homework before. Others feel well prepared to tackle the workload but have not been expected to participate in their education in quite the same way. Some come from large public schools, others from small, even very small, private or parochial schools. I was delighted however by the energy and enthusiasm that they all projected—there’s nothing quite like a 9th grader’s energy level when they are really excited about something, and they are excited to be here.

A number of students, both new and returning, have switched classes—probably around 35 percent of the overall school. Students change their schedules for a variety of reasons. Seniors are switching classes primarily to get a different elective or term course. They may have received their second choice for something and have now decided that it is not a course they want to take, or they have developed a new interest in something that they want to pursue.

While most seniors change courses to get a different elective, most of the changes in the schedules of younger students come because of placement issues in math or language. Placement, as you can imagine, is tricky given the variety of different schools and backgrounds our students come from. Remember we have students from over 20 different countries and from all across the United States. We use several sources of information to try to get the right placement including the student’s previous school transcript, letters from their math and language teachers that explain what they have studied, and a skills assessment done on entry by our own faculty. So, for example, a teacher at one student’s previous school wrote that this particular student “was still struggling with grammatical structures” and she recommended that he be placed in Spanish 1—a placement confirmed by the other information that we had. Sometimes, though, a former teacher will recommend the more advanced course, and two or three weeks of work here prove that the placement was overly ambitions and we must make a decision to move the student to a more appropriate placement.

It can be frustrating if a student has done three years of a language and then finds that they come to Loomis and end up in the first-year class. It is not so much that the work they have done up to this point is all for naught, but rather that they do not have enough of a foundation to begin the second level language course. So often these students who have some background, but not enough to move on to the next level, do very well in the introductory language course and then go into the second level advanced course. Placement in mathematics courses follows a similar process—although while in the languages most course changes are from more advanced levels back, in mathematics the changes up and down the curriculum are more balanced.

It is very difficult to understand from a transcript or even a quick skills assessment just how well prepared a student is. While for the most part the system works well and the academic deans work hard to get kids into the appropriate classes, we do end up adjusting student schedules as we seek to find just the right placement for them. Our intention always is to ensure that our students succeed and that they have the necessary skills to do as well as possible. (For most students their schedules are now settled for the year, although we will continue to see a trickle of changes leading up to the October 20th deadline—after which any changes show up on a student’s transcript.)

One thing for parents to keep in mind as their children confront the challenges of a new school year is for them to encourage the right mindset. Remember that children do better when they are told that their success comes from hard work, perseverance, and a willingness to struggle with new concepts than when they are simply told that they are smart and that we’re sure that they can do it. Intelligence is not a finite substance that we either have or don’t have—it is much more flexible. The brain is like a muscle—the more we challenge and push it, the better it ultimately works. So encourage your students to take intellectual risks and to enjoy the process of learning.