I won’t lie to you, the last two weeks, however enjoyable, have not been easy. We have hosted and participated in several events, including, grandparents’ day, choir festivals, an inter-school quiz, and an information morning for Grade 0 2024. As I write, the Grade 6s are away on camp (their first in three years), the Little Saints children are rehearsing daily in The Edge for their annual performance, Little Saints Sings, and the athletics team is preparing to participate in the Prestige event on the weekend. All this while temperatures continue to soar, allergies and assorted ailments do the rounds, and some of the girls fuss and fixate on what may or may not await them in 2023.

This time of year is, inarguably, exciting and demanding and, as the building project gathers momentum, thoughts of change and renewal are on all of our minds. The teachers and I spend time now planning for the new year as well as trying to bring this one, the old one, to a happy, wholesome close. It is second nature to our teachers to observe and document our children as they exert themselves inside and outside the classroom, learning, playing, negotiating and performing, and very little of what they do goes unremarked and unrecorded.

When our Senior Primary choir participated in the Ridge Choir Festival at the Linder Auditorium alongside four other school choirs (the Ridge orchestra accompanied the combined items) earlier in the week, I found myself watching our girls closelyv– not, as they believe, for any sign of aberrant behaviour, but more to see how they responded to different demands and input in a relatively unfamiliar environment. Emerging from years of isolation is a clumsy business, and mass choir events are a good test of how we are adapting to situations involving co-operation and mutual consideration and endeavour.

While I was quietly and conscientiously scanning our choir and the others for signs of social progress and potential strain, my attention wandered onto the audience momentarily, and I noticed a row of our teachers sitting on the far left, near the front. What drew my eyes to them, I think, was the intensity of their engagement with what was happening on stage. Their connection to the performances, most pronounced when our girls were involved, was, to put it mildly, compelling.

Watching them, you would think there were invisible threads running between them and our girls: they moved with them, clapped with them, almost sang with them. They seemed – and this really is the only word I can use to describe what I saw – enraptured by their performance. Like proud parents, but with a scope that was so generous it included every child, their facial expressions and bodies responded to every action and utterance on stage.

I wish I had an image to show you what I saw; as usual, my words will have to stand in for pictures and try (and fail) to convey what was spellbinding about our school that night. Not the performance, not the girls only, but the undivided attention given to them by teachers who were willing them, wishing them, wanting them, to do their very best. If children’s author, Katherine Rundell is right about attention being the thing we most owe the world, our teachers live up to her standards and recognise “You are such a marvel that to do anything other than to live focused and alert is a denigration of that which we should be.”

SARAH WARNER
JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS