I’ve been thinking lately about the rhythms of the school year.

Have you seen the new copy of The New Yorker? The back page is a Steinberg cartoon showing downtrodden people climbing up from the basement of February and coming upon spring and March. Though I love winter and snow, it’s always a relief to emerge from February, that four-month stretch between January and March. The daylight is already starting to stay longer again, and the hope of an early and glorious spring sustains us. Our moods lift with the longer days—or will lift soon, we hope!

It’s curious to me, then, that Valentine’s Day should fall in the middle of this moodiest of months. For many of your children, Valentine’s Day is mostly an abstraction, as this comment overheard in the Student Center suggests: “It’s hard to get a girl by quoting The Aeneid.” For others, it’s a chance to indulge in crushes both mutual and unrequited. And for a very few, it’s a time to celebrate young love.

We welcome these distractions in February, after the intensity of exams and the transition of semesters. The end of any semester always looks far away at the beginning, but it looks closer
to you as parents and to us as teachers than it does to your children.

February started with what faculty jokingly call “Black Tuesday,” when students meet every class and receive back their first semester exams. No matter how students fared, the day is an emotional strain for all. We were relieved and happy to settle into the regular class day rhythm on Wednesday, February 2. Many students and faculty began new semester courses, and Class I students, having finished their last Milton exams, begin their senior spring (and here I’d like to remind them and you that their Spring Project proposals are due shortly).

Valentine’s Day, Faculty Appreciation Day (thank you, Parents Association), The Sins of Sor Juana on the main stage, Spinning Into Butter by Rebecca Gilman on the small “1212” stage, Presidents Weekend, an impressive string of speakers and presentations (see the article summarizing our speakers thus far), winter dances, Beatnik Café, Dance Concert, Culture Fest (and throw in US History term papers in late February)… This short stretch of school between exams and spring vacation is a series of intense bursts of activity at Milton, punctuated by vacations, long weekends, and special events.

This stop-and-start rhythm characterizes the middle of our school year. We start the year with a long, hard-working stretch that begins with the opening of school and ends with Thanksgiving, and we end the year with a helter-skelter push from spring break to graduation. In between, we work hard and pause often to catch our breath.

If the school year is a marathon, then this is the stretch of the race in which we settle into a sustainable pace, after going out hard from the starting line and before sprinting to the finish.

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