From the Director
Dear ABC community,
I do hope you are all safe and well.
Our plans for re-opening school in hybrid learning mode in the new year are almost complete now (and we have submitted all of the information that MinEd need at this stage). I will present them in full to Senior Management Team on Tuesday afternoon and the Full Board on Wednesday morning and, presuming they are approved, hope to communicate them out to you soon thereafter. Please remember that no one is going to be forced to return to school; if you (and 34% of you are in this category according to the survey results) do not feel ready or able to send your child into school we will still provide a full online learning experience for you. Please also remember that it is, especially in secondary school, extremely complex to balance the twin priorities of health and safety on the one hand and high-quality educational provision on the other. There will have to be compromises but we believe that the plans we are presenting, which respond flexibly to the different needs of children in different grades, represent the best possible solution for our children.
In other news, I can confirm that we will be having a drive-in style Graduation event on December 14th to recognise and celebrate the achievements of the Class of 2020. We always said that we would do whatever we could to try to arrange an in-person graduation experience for these students and families and so I am pleased to be able to make good on that promise with an event that I believe will be both safe and enjoyable.
Huge congratulations to all of our students and staff involved in the recent CIMAT event, especially the organisers.You made us all very proud! Read more about it all below…
Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American brethren (and I am sure many others who likewise celebrated yesterday). Some musings below on the concept of thankfulness….
Thankfulness
So I learned something recently……did you know anything about the origins of the word “thank”? It turns out I certainly didn’t, and I honestly feel rather ashamed about that. I mean, I have been on this planet for all but half a century and until now I have never thought to look into the origins of a concept that is central to so much of human custom and etiquette. Language is just a device (albeit an incredibly sophisticated one) for trying to give expression to all of that rather messy, nefarious stuff we call thoughts and feelings. Because the meaning of words can be distilled, refined or diluted over the course of time, we can often find that our understanding of not only a word, but also of the concept it is trying to give meaning to, can be enhanced by researching its origins. So what are the origins of the word, “thank”?
thank (v.)
Old English þancian, þoncian "to give thanks, thank, to recompense, to reward," from Proto-Germanic *thankojan, from *thankoz "thought; gratitude," from Proto Indo-European root *tong- "to think, feel." It is related phonetically to “think” as “song” is to “sing”
Online Etymology Dictionary
In other words (sorry!) the word “thank’ has a shared heritage with the word “think”. There was a time in my Scottish childhood when I was guilty of using the word “thank” as the past participle for the verb “to think” and it now seems I was not so terribly wrong as I was then led to believe!
Look again at the definition of the original Proto Indo-European word, “tong”- “to think, feel”. It seems that the heritage of the word thank lies right in the middle of the aforementioned “messy, nefarious stuff” and, therefore, right at the heart of the things that distinguish us as a species from the rest of the animal world. The verb “to thank”- expressions like, “to give thanks” and, “to feel thankful”- these are our best attempts at giving expression to something really quite profound, to a very unique human experience. They mean that we have reflected on (hence the links with the concept of thinking, I suppose) that action, that person, that experience and found it/him/her quite special in some way and we are also aware that a distinct and quite wonderful emotion has been evoked in us, as a result, that we feel we want to give expression to; that, I think, is why we say, “Thank you”.
The rules of custom and etiquette mean that we are all a little guilty perhaps, of using the phrase, “thank you” as little more than culturally demanded punctuation rather than an attempt to really express gratitude. So perhaps we should take a moment to think a little more deeply about the things, the experiences and the people in our lives that cause us to feel that elusive emotion we call gratitude* and, having felt that emotion, then see if we can find some satisfactory way to give expression to it.
*”Gratitude” shares its etymology with the word “grace”, by the way…
Stephen Lang
Director
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