Students end first week of classes with Club Bazaar, house- and form-specific activites.
September 11, 2024
Rector Kathy Giles officially opens the 169th academic session of St. Paul’s School with Fall Convocation.
Good morning, and happy new year! Special welcome to our new faculty members and new students, new to this Chapel and to chapel as we know it.
You might not know it, but the grounds are really busy in the summer. For the past 68 years, we have welcomed in New Hampshire public high school students for the Advanced Studies Program, and they live here and attend classes for five weeks, from late June to the end of July — and then the work on our campus truly begins. From the Academic Office to the Deans of Students, with a special thank you to Ms. Fithian for her great work during Opening Days, it is a huge effort to launch a great school year. As a community, let’s make sure we thank everyone who does that great work, especially our Facilities and FLIK colleagues. When you greet a member of our Facilities Team or say thank you to a FLIK colleague in the dining hall, remember that a little thanks goes a long way and a brief “hello” can make someone’s day. Let’s be a great place not only to live and learn, but also for good people to feel great about coming to work, every day, to support your learning.
I’d like to spend a moment today on this concept: the community we are as we learn, live, and work together. We tend to lean hard on that word — “community” — without really defining what we mean. Sure, we say hello on the paths, and we are “loud, proud, and positive” at games. We red-out, black-out, and white-out. We are the Big Red. All good. But a community is more than a group of people who share a mascot or work together in an organization; more than people who chat or like or friend or follow, who live near each other in a neighborhood and every so often say a nice hello. Real communities are by invitation; they are opt-in, because a community stands for, and its members embrace, shared values, interests, and goals. This sharing creates a sense of fellowship, a shared sense of meaning in the worthiness of the shared purpose, and — critically — a sense of belonging. In a community like ours, in which we live and work together intensely, it isn’t enough to just say the values or to accept the values; to be credible, you have to live the values, or at least try your best to do so. And for the community to have integrity, for us to really BE the community we say we want to be, we have to share the values — to walk the walk, as they say, and not just talk the talk.
Let’s quickly remind ourselves of our community’s values and priorities this year, a year in which we can expect bluster and partisanship and a lot of controversy in the outside world, and in which we can find room to breathe and grow and debate and learn through our covenants — the agreements and promises, based on our values, that we share.
MISSION: St. Paul’s School educates students to build purposeful lives in service to the greater good. We engage young people in a diverse, inclusive, and equitable community, dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in character and scholarship and inspired by the beauty and spirit of our Millville home.
You’ve come to St. Paul’s School, a school community in which we are indeed dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in character and scholarship and believe that those go together — the pursuit of learning, not just of achieving, with the understanding that honesty, truth, and integrity validate everything we invest. We’re after the cultivation of real intelligence, not learning to manipulate the newest, latest algorithmic thing.
In a community like ours, in which we live and work together intensely, it isn’t enough to just say the values or to accept the values; to be credible, you have to live the values, or at least try your best to do so. And for the community to have integrity, for us to really BE the community we say we want to be, we have to share the values — to walk the walk, as they say, and not just talk the talk.
— Rector Kathy Giles
During last summer’s Olympics, a friend sent me an article by Caroline Mimbs Dyce, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, as follows:
Google is running a new commercial during the Olympics. It’s about a cute little girl — she’s a runner, and she loves Team USA’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, a world-record-holding track star who won two Olympic gold medals in 2021. The little girl wants to write her a letter. So Dad fires up an AI chatbot.
“Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone how inspiring she is,” he asks Google’s Gemini. He instructs it to add a line about how his daughter plans to break McLaughlin-Levrone’s world record one day (and to be sure to include the phrase “sorry, not sorry.”) The ad never shows the final letter in full, just pans over snippets of it. The whole thing is supposed to be endearing, demonstrating to viewers how AI can help forge human connection and facilitate creativity.
Really? Think about it for a minute. A little girl wants to write a fan letter, so Dad fires up an AI chatbot? Why not let the kid write it herself? Why would the athlete want to receive it?
- Would you use AI to write a thank you note?
- Would you use AI to write your college essay?
- Would you use AI to write your capstone project, the one you put your name on?
- Would you want someone to write you a thank you note using AI?
- Would you want your adviser or favorite teacher or coach to use AI to write your college recommendation?
Why or why not? The answers to those questions are interesting and complex — and the cultivation of your real intelligence is critical to being able to answer those questions now and in the future, when the next big new thing splashes down. Humans will indeed find ways to use AI that will be good, and we will learn to play defense against the bad, the untrue, and the fake. But do you really want to be dependent upon algorithms that produce answers to your questions by scouring the web, regardless of the source or validity of the information they cobble together? You don’t. When you use AI in your process and product, and you don’t know what you don’t know, you run big risks with your integrity, your credibility, and your learning. Okay, use AI if you want for your fan letters and thank you notes — faculty, NOT for college recommendations! — but use only your real intelligence for anything that requires you to take ownership and responsibility for having done the work yourself. Your real intelligence will be more than good enough, and nothing — no grade, no prize, no test score, no award — is ever as important as your integrity and the excellence of your character.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES: Perhaps these get less airtime than our other guiding ideas and documents, but they offer great ground rules for the ways we interact with each other on a daily basis:
- We gather to address important questions with open minds, robust dialogue, and mutual respect.
- We inspire one another with creativity, self-discipline, and an eagerness to learn.
- We embrace the benefits of a diverse, global community, cultivating and deepening our empathy, compassion, curiosity, and intellectual vitality.
- We thrive through personal accountability, moral courage, and service to others.
- We share responsibility for cultivating a healthy, equitable, caring, and joyful school culture, integrating social and emotional competency into every aspect of the St. Paul’s School experience.
- We value the learning process as much as the achievement outcome, we fail with patience and humility, and we embrace humor, enthusiasm, and friendship in our lives and work together.
How do we do these things? Everywhere we do these things. When we are sitting here in our chapel seats, or in our humanities classes or math classes, when you are on your team or in your cast, when you are in the studio or the field or the court or the common room, you participate — you give and you take, you listen and speak, you teach and learn — you engage in discussions with that open mind and mutual respect toward your fellow learners. You treat others the way you want to be treated. You are curious about what someone from a different background or different perspective can offer you. You give grace rather than jump immediately to an assumption of the worst — you are “slow to anger and rich in kindness,” as Psalm 145 goes. You ask good questions that challenge the legitimacy of an idea, not a person. You debate not whether a classmate is right or wrong, good or bad, but how an idea works or does not work, using robust evidence, analysis, and discussion. You bring the good energy to class or to practice so that others can thrive. In short, you engage, you give, you show up not just so that you can get what you want out of St. Paul’s, but also so that you can give that same experience to others — because the “we” is bigger than the “me,” here, and making your contribution makes you and everyone else better. This is the conviction behind asking — nay, requiring — us all to keep our phones put away: that when we are together, there is much to be gained, and our time together is short.
SCHOOL PRAYER: Grant, O Lord, that in all the joys of life we may never forget to be kind. Help us to be unselfish in friendship, thoughtful of those less happy than ourselves, and eager to bear the burdens of others. Through Jesus Christ, our Savior, amen.
Our School Prayer was described by a SEAL Team Six commander who happens to be an alum as “the best mission statement for becoming a good human that one can imagine.” Dr. Drury, our Fourth Rector, learned about this prayer from his friend Bishop Charles Slattery, and it first appears in St. Paul’s materials in around 1931, almost 100 years ago. But Dr. Drury made a really important change to this prayer: He changed the pronoun from “I” to “we.” Take a minute and read this prayer from the “I” perspective, then read it from the “we.” All of a sudden, this prayer became a foundational community covenant — the way we strive to be in all aspects of our lives here at school, and then, carrying that way of being on beyond high school into real life. That last line embraces Jesus’ vision of Beloved Community, the community we want to be and build — the community in which we love our neighbor as ourselves, and everyone is our neighbor.
At another time I will follow up on my request from last June to hear from you about the three kind acts — the response was good, and what you did was great to read about because it was easy to see that you didn’t need to plan your acts of kindness; when the opportunity presented itself, you just did it. One student wrote, “I am sure there are much more impressive actions I could take, but the point is that kindness is a choice we make every day, and whether big or small, it can hugely impact others. I will be continuing in this mindset throughout the school year. In all the happiness, sadness, stress and relaxation that I encounter, I want to remember my personal impact on others.” So very well said! Kindness is a threshold to service to others.
In short, you engage, you give, you show up not just so that you can get what you want out of St. Paul’s, but also so that you can give that same experience to others — because the “we” is bigger than the “me,” here, and making your contribution makes you and everyone else better.
Back to Dr. Drury again: At about the same time as the Prayer appears in SPS materials, he mused in a letter to a friend about our School shield — the book representing scholarship, the crossed swords representing service, and the pelican, piercing her breast to feed her chicks. Dr. Drury wrote, “the book is a menace without the sword of service, and the sword of service tends to egotism without the bird of sacrifice.” The three are inextricably entwined. Thank you, Mr. Smith, for bringing this important point to our attention last week in faculty meeting. Obviously, there is more here for us to talk about, but it will have to be at a later time.
If you haven’t let me know how it went for you, those three acts of kindness, there is still time, and then there will be the Golden Moments throughout the year that the SFOs will bring to our attention. Acts of kindness never go stale. And kindness can be the threshold to service to the greater good. So if you forgot, or somehow chose not to participate, you might take a moment to ask yourself why that was — the point being that “never forgetting to be kind” is a habit of being that starts somewhere, a mindset that starts sometime, and there is absolutely no time like the present.
No new news, any of this — you see these statements all around school. Be Kind. Live Honorably, the powerful, simply mandate behind our Living in Community Program: works on the skills necessary to be that good human. Fifth Form Seminar; Sixth Form Seminar; leadership work across the school. And so, we grow. Taking advantage of opportunities to learn is this community’s priority — everything that develops our knowledge and understanding of this incredible, beautiful, complex world. Imagine the kind of community we can be if we get this right. And imagine the kind of world we can make if we can, through our own good work and service and through the grace of the Love Divine, be the light that shows others the good we can do, the good we can be, together.
May it be so, and amen.
This year will be full of invitations and opportunities. May we greet them with humility, seeking grace and strength; may we greet them with courage and good spirit, and energy and optimism; may we find fun and joy in friendship and in good times together in this beautiful place; and may we grow in hope, in wisdom, and in the Love Divine that lights our paths forward and ahead.
