| Message From The Head of School |
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Welcome to The School in Rose Valley!
Teachers come (and stay!) at SRV because it's a place that allows them to teach with vigor and intensity while enjoying a playfulness and improvisation that many schools seem to have lost sight of. We're preparing children for the test, all right: life! We think education is a long term investment and our horizon is post-college, maturity, fulfilling lives and unique occupations. We are aware that many of the careers our students are destined to enjoy have yet to be invented. So to create tomorrow's leaders and inventors some of the time-honored skills for which progressive education is famous need to be our focus. We want SRV graduates to be resilient learners, ingenious thinkers who can use the surfeit of data so easily attained and synthesize it in productive ways. We prepare children to be sympathetic, generous, informed citizens who can play key roles in any society of the future. Come and look around. See if our purpose is a match with yours. Todd R. Nelson Sounds of SummerDelco Times, July 18, 2011. “That is such a summer sound,” said my daughter Ariel, She was helping me to hang the wooden screen door on the front of our house in Maine, so she had the privilege of letting it slam for the first time. The hinges creaked, the door swished towards the house, and wood met wood with a clap. Suddenly we were transported by this mnemonic of summer to the zone of lazy afternoons, popsicles, and flip-flops; transported to numerous prior houses and neighborhoods, and numerous seasons of childhood. We are accustomed to summer arriving dressed in longer and warmer days, and sightings of migratory species returning: goldfinches are back at my feeder; the bears are out; new deer are tentatively following their mothers; and summer people are taking the thermometers out of their front windows and airing out the porch furniture. Contractors are picking up the pace to finish winter projects in time for clients’ return. Golfers abound. But I’m noticing that summer arrives more secretively as sounds. The trees will have their rattling voices back, as leaves unfurl and catch the breezes. The peeper choir is pumped up to arena concert volume, and there is a bullfrog near my window that moans about true love nightly at 1:00am. My porch drip edge has a special patter that only spring rain seems to make. Can the annoying whine of the mosquito be far behind? In this aural equinox, even the sound of lawnmowers has a certain welcome auspiciousness—which won’t be the case by August. On our day of proto-summer chores, it was sunny and warm and the tree buds itching to rip out on the maple branch. It was time to hang the hammock, and Ariel rummaged in the basement to find where we had stored it last September. Soon we had it strung in its dedicated spot between a fir and cedar tree. The woven ropes clinched tight and the hanging chain creaked on the trees, like rigging flexing under sail—another summer sound. The hammock is always linked to languorous hours with my nose in a book. If summer reading makes a sound, I’m hearin’ it. I think I even hear the sound of raspberries “intending to appear,” to borrow a phrase from John McPhee, describing moose in Umbazooksus Stream. Last weekend, you could also hear the lupines growing. Our hummingbird feeders are up and we await our inaugural sighting. But of course we’ll hear them first. Just when I least expect it, there he’ll be ferociously darting around the beak of the nectar bottle and fighting off his ruby throated brethren. What are your sounds of summer?
Todd R. Nelson is Head of School at The School in Rose Valley, PA. He was principal at The Adams School in Castine, ME for six years. |
This is an exciting place to be a child--a place that honors the work of the hands, heart, and mind in a setting that invites exploration, inquiry, and enthusiastic play. SRV students spend their days in very purposeful pursuit of learning, experimentation, and collaboration--in a unique range of verbs. This school is about action!