Teaching Patience

Hearing children repeat requests over and over can make adults feel dizzy—especially when saying “Please wait a moment” intensifies the volume of their demand. “I need scissors!” (louder) “I need scissors!” (louder and louder) No one wants children to shout their way to gratification. Yet in this fast-moving age, children often seem to acquire a false assumption: “If you heard what I’m saying, you wouldn’t pause an instant before satisfying my needs!”

Parents often teach children to say “Excuse me,” but as we all know, chanting these words doesn’t develop consideration. Children’s assertive behaviors are so common that they seem like inevitable parts of their growth and development, with hoped-for abilities to wait emerging some time in the future. In this more enlightened and forgiving age, it’s parents who demand patience of themselves—certainly a good role model—when desires prove overwhelming to a child.

The challenge of teaching children to develop quiet self-control when they are asked to wait is a challenge we can all work on together. Holding the perspective that we have to cooperate to meet everyone’s needs in a household or a classroom provides a good foundation. “Look, Molly wants scissors too, and so does Tim. If you sit quietly, I can get the scissors out.”

We can also let a child know after the first request that we have heard what he’s saying. We can get down on the child’s level and say, “I’ve heard you. But I need you to wait. If you keep shouting, I won’t be able to do what you ask.” If we can’t comply, we can honor the child’s request by saying, “I wish I could give you scissors (ice cream, a video, a ride on my back), but I can’t right now. Maybe you’d like to draw a picture.”

Since we are so bombarded with noise, it’s hard not to react children’s intense requests with irritation: “Don’t talk to me like that.” However, if we think back to our own childhood, we can remember that we only wanted gentle reassurance that we wouldn’t be invisible to our caregivers and that our needs wouldn’t be neglected. We can expand children’s ability to self-regulate even when they feel a need intensely by commenting, “Look how quietly you’re waiting for what you want.”

Preparing for the Next Chapter: Insights from Meher School Alumni Survey

A parent recently expressed concern about her child graduating from Meher School and entering a public middle school because, as she explained it, “Meher School is this perfect, golden place, and the rest of the world just … isn’t.” 

As we journey through the academic year, we want to share some insights gleaned from our recent alumni survey, which included parents of students from the last three graduating classes. The survey was designed to shed light on the experiences of our graduates as they transitioned into middle school, aiming to identify areas of need for our program and to answer commonly asked questions from current families. 

While it's true that Meher School holds a special place in the hearts of our community, we also recognize the importance of equipping our students with the tools they need for success beyond our halls. Here's a glimpse of what our alumni survey revealed:

Where do they go for middle school? 

Of our responding alumni families, 59 percent opted for public middle school, with Lafayette’s Stanley Middle School being the most common. Saklan, St. Mary, and Athenian were the most popular private schools. This data is fairly consistent with data from prior years as well, with most classes split fairly evenly between private and public schools.

Parents reported a range of reasons for their school selections, including location, cost, reputation, and good fit.

Academic Readiness

We received overwhelmingly positive feedback when we asked about academic readiness. On a scale from one to five, with one being “not at all prepared” and five being “very prepared,” our alumni families rated their preparedness with an average between four and five for every subject when asked questions like “How well prepared did your child feel for sixth grade math classes?” 

The question “Overall, how well did your child's time at The Meher Schools help him/her prepare for middle school?” also received an average of between four and five on the scale.

Some notes from parents about their children’s academic preparedness include:

• “He was very well prepared academically, but most importantly the Meher Schools taught him the right attitude and mindset. He is thriving in middle school because of everything he learned at the Meher Schools.”

• “He is a star math student in his class and a skillful artist. Terry's coaching on getting the kids ready for life outside the school was very helpful.”

• “Her level of preparation/readiness for sixth grade was superb.”

• “She felt very well prepared for language arts (writing and reading) because of the essay making throughout fifth grade.”

• “[The Meher Schools] prepared him academically as well as supported his social/emotional growth.”

• “We are currently in one of Texas's top public school systems. After Meher, it's a letdown. There is a lot of rote memorization in his current curriculum. Mr. Joseph's fifth grade class was exceptional in every way, and we wish we could have a teacher like him.”

• “Her book reports, essays, and lessons in fourth and fifth grades at Meher probably exceed what she's doing now.”

Friendship and Social and Emotional Preparedness

When asked about meeting new people and making friends, a universal concern of parents with children at that age, our alumni families once again reported average scores between four and five.

Some feedback from families include:

• “Her time at Meher remains fundamental to her ongoing success and her breadth of development as a person. She remembers her time there with tremendous fondness, for her friends and teachers, and Meher could not have given her a better launch toward her further academic and personal growth journey.”

• “Meher provided deep connections with other kids, teachers, adults, and community. There were a large variety of subjects for learning. Teachers often genuinely cared for him and the family.”

• “Meher School provided an amazing foundation, both academic and emotional, to both our kids, and they were fully prepared for middle school. They have very different personalities and interests, but they were both able to find ‘their people’ and they are thriving in their unique ways.”

• “[The Meher Schools’] character development is outstanding.”

• The Meher Schools prepared our child well with “social skills (calmness, kindness, grounding); dealing with difficult people (e.g., tolerance); academic proficiency.”

• The Meher Schools prepared our child well with “... a sense of compassion, a willingness to learn. It gave her the chance to be in an environment that is conducive to [helping] children to take risks because they feel safe and accepted … I am so happy our child attended Meher School.”

• “The Meher Schools prepared our child well by “building confidence, understanding perspectives, developing specific key skills (e.g., English Language Arts).”

It’s natural for families to have anxiety around leaving a comfortable and supportive environment and heading out into the unknown. Middle school is a transitional period marked by social, emotional, and academic growth, newfound independence, and the navigation of peer dynamics. It’s bittersweet for us to say goodbye when students graduate, but we’re always pleased to hear their reports of success in middle school, and we’re honored to know how much their experiences here have helped prepare them for their next chapter of life.

Physics Lesson: Things Aren’t What They Seem

A snapshot in time

Think that image you see in the mirror is you in real time? If so, you’d be wrong. As our fifth graders can tell you, when it comes to physics, things aren’t what they seem. That image you see in the mirror is you some infinitesimally small fraction of a second ago.

As part of a lesson on light and distance, fifth graders traced each other’s shadows on the playground. When they came back a few minutes later, they observed changes in the length and position of their shadows, a function of the movement of the earth relative to the sun. The earth, teacher Joseph Schneider notes, spins at 822.13 mph in our neighborhood (more than 1,000 mph at the equator).

“We tried different games with our shadows,” Joseph says. “We tried to detach from them (jumping will do the trick), touching your real hand to your shadow hand (which is harder than you think), and trying to disappear completely in someone else’s shadow.”

The students learned that light travels at 186,000 miles per second and that we’re about eight “light minutes” from the sun—93 million miles. (A light year is 6 trillion miles.)

“The most critical idea conveyed in these discussions is that light travels very fast, but not infinitely fast. A great many of the stars we see are ‘ghosts’—long-dead, collapsed, or exploded husks whose light continues to reach us until we catch up, temporally speaking, with the star's death.

“As soon as the students grasp the concept that sunlight is eight minutes ‘old,’” Joseph continues, “we can scale that down to any distance—even a couple of feet. Two people conversing don’t perceive each other as they actually appear, but only as they have appeared. And considering our other senses, whose respective stimuli travel at the merest fraction of the speed of light, we process nothing in real time. Everything exists to us sometime in the past.

“We can then begin to appreciate the fallibility of sense perception (like that image in the mirror), and perhaps begin asking deeper questions about the value of what we're able to perceive relative to what we can't. The illusion of the physical world as we experience it begins to crack.”