At our carol services Reverend Fletcher always makes the observation that while our School has the tradition of celebrating Christmas, we are very conscious, and increasingly so, that our community includes many faiths. It might seem clumsy at times, but we are nevertheless sincere in working to embrace this diversity. We believe it is richness, and a treasure. We want to include everyone who also respects that diversity. A possible task, we believe.

Of the three gifts the wise men brought to the baby Jesus, the one I could never figure out was myrrh. When I was in school we didn’t have Google, so it was the encyclopaedia that revealed that myrrh was a pungent substance applied to the body for medicinal purposes, or burned as incense, or used to embalm and preserve the dead. Such a gift does beg questions in a young mind, as it did increasingly in mine. I was fortunate enough to go to a school, like ours, that encourages such questions. You could say things have come full circle: at one venue or another during this season we always sing the Christmas Carol, We Three Kings. The tradition is that I sing myrrh, the last king. Myrrh “breaths a light of gathering gloom, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying.” Pretty grim for a birth.

Religion has puzzling moments, regardless of which. Almost all of the great religions and mythical cycles include the story of a god who dies and is reborn. In his poem, Journey of the Magi, T.S Eliot’s wise men ask the question, “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” And of course without the circumstances of his death and rising again the life of Jesus would not have its meaning. Myrrh is the gift that foreshadows all this, introducing when Jesus is just a baby the poignant note of his destiny, his death, which is paradoxically an uplifting one. It has taken a long time, but I have come to understand that myrrh is the most complex gift, and my favourite.

This is a season I especially love. Many people write about it more poetically than this blog can. May the light of this season be everyone’s.

When I consider “difficult” things, I avoid using that word. Rather such experiences are “challenges” – or if I am feeling particularly euphemistic, “opportunities”. So this entry is a bit of a challenge, mainly because some personal threads are woven among the SMUS threads in its fabric, and I shy away from personal stuff. As you will see, though, my challenge is a comparatively tiny, tiny one.

One of the distractions this week has been to follow the progress of our youngest son, Graham, class of SMUS 1999, as he runs, climbs, walks, treks about 250 kilometres through the Annapurna region of Nepal. He is participating in Racing the Planet: Nepal 2011,  a race over seven days that takes him to the foot of Annapurna I, and three other of the four highest mountains in the world, all of which happen to be within viewing distance in this region of Nepal. My wife, Joan, and I were in this very location two years ago on sabbatical, and I wrote about it in a series of blogs beginning here  . If you want to see these four mountaintops, I took a video of them you can view here .But while Joan and I had a team of porters and guides for our trek, the competitors in this race have to carry all their own food, clothing and sleeping bag (water and tents are supplied at camp each night), and they have to cover the equivalent of a marathon each day. This is up and down the steepest mountains in the world. On the fifth stage of the race, they have to run a double marathon, or in this particular case, 75 km. The average altitude is 8,000 feet, about 2200 metres. I am very happy to know that he will be on his last stage tomorrow, having successfully completed the double marathon section yesterday, almost 18 hours before the cut-off time. Tomorrow he is looking forward to the relatively leisurely 15 km finale.

Like many SMUS students, he is taking this opportunity to raise money, in this instance for students with learning disabilities; in the past he has raised money for leukemia research, cancer research and other worthy causes. Writing about the end of the double-marathon stage yesterday, he says,

The final 20km are a bit of a blur. It is remarkable how hard you can push yourself. I didn’t stop at any of the final 2 checkpoints because I couldn’t afford to stop moving. The fatigue, pain, level of discomfort and frustration of knowing that the incredibly unhealthy meal you are salivating for that would normally help you get through the last part of your run isn’t a possibility for three more days are crushing.

Seriously. For 19km all I could think about was sitting at Vera’s Burgers with a turkey burger in one hand, a lamb burger in the other, and a double order of fries.

One of the great things about training for marathons, or running them, is that you can eat anything, and your body can use it constructively. Those of us who are not marathoners have to be a bit more abstemious.

He finishes off by observing, This has been a learning experience the depth of which I am unlikely to understand for many more months. As opposed to learning more about myself I have discovered how little I actual I know. For this opportunity I am grateful.

I and many of my colleagues at the school continually observe that in working with our students we are kind of like the volunteers at checkpoints in this race: helping them along a path, to a destination that we will marvel at, and which will humble us. We are teachers, after all, and don’t occupy the world stage that many of those we teach will occupy. So we are proud and humbled at the same time. One of life’s most satisfying paradoxes.

Graham on Day 1, trekking poles in hand, suffering from a gastric ailment that ripped through the competitors.

Joan and I with Annapurna 2 in the background. From this same location you can also so Daulighiri 1 and 2, and Annapurna 1, making up four of the highest mountains in the world.

The row of cedars out behind Reynolds House was ravaged by disease a few year ago and many had to be cut down. Just a couple of weeks ago, another cedar had to go; its limbs and trunk are stacked now just outside the black wire fence, against the stone wall that was put in to retain the earth for the row of holly bushes that we believe are more resistant to disease.

The earth that was brought in must have been good earth; the holly bushes are thriving. Luckily, deer don’t like them. The deer also don’t like the flowers that have sprouted from this earth – volunteers, my wife Joan calls them – the residue of some former location, or from a field where the earth came from. The clumps of poppies sway whenever there is a breeze in this protected spot. Some hyacinths have also strayed into the scene, eccentrically purple against the gray of the rock, the green of holly, and the reddish brown of the peated soil.

These volunteers come to mind because I noticed them after our Remembrance Day Service last week, after the School had emptied and things were quiet. Later, driving up island, I noticed how many more of these poppies were swaying in the dusty median of the highway, shuddering but secure as cars passed them. Like many minds, associations my mind makes are perhaps not as random and free as we sometimes think: I thought of the poppies on our lapels, obviously. Similarly: our Grade Two class recites In Flanders Fields, where the poppies grow, at their own special Remembrance Day Service. I thought of the bagpipe lament, Flowers of the Forest, that Bill Buckingham plays, an old old tune lamenting the deaths of so many young men lost in an ancient highland battle. The names we read out at our service, and preserve, the memory blooming again and again, both by accident and by design,  like these flowers. Volunteers all.

The days are getting shorter. Most of this week, early in the mornings, we have had frost. People who know my wife, Joan, and I, are aware that we are early to bed, early to rise people. So we have witnessed the frost on the roofs and the landscape. It doesn’t last long, usually gone by the time cars roll into school delivering students. About three years ago deer started to move into the neighbourhood of the Richmond Road campus in some numbers, and in this gray light, with the luminescent wrap on the fields, they are easy to pick out. Sometimes they are outside our back door,  sometimes they are walking sedately across the main fields, and sometimes they are just on the hill by the statue of Reg Wenman, as if they are waiting for him to hold his hand out with a few lumps of sugar. From what I know of Reg Wenman, he would have been quite capable of these secret moments of tenderness and amusement.

At the Senior School, these days signal the onset of academic seriousness. November. Students have now found their feet, met new friends and re-met old ones, and they have gotten the measure of the new teachers (one of them has already said to Susan Stenson, our Hinton Chair holder, “you can’t be leaving us next year, Mrs. Stenson.”) Especially the senior students are very focused on the realities of their academic life, because they are deep into university applications.  Last night I spent the evening at Senior School Parents’ Night, trying not to get in the way for more than the shortest interval of the parents’ main purpose, speaking to their sons’ and daughters’ teachers. The Middle School yesterday went out for their schoolwide service day, performing helpful deeds all over the city as part of our service and leadership program. The Junior School students get their injection of solemnity in the preparations for their own Remembrance Day Service, an event briefer than the service at the Senior School, but poignant in its appropriate way. We will all catch our breath next weekend during half term break, and be ready for the final surge toward Christmas.

According to the weather report, we might have seen the last of frost for a while. September and October have been relatively calm and sunny months, and every bright day now is a bit of a gift. Today is such a day, frost or not.

Outside my office a cool drizzle is falling, even though on the horizon under the gray sky  a band of sunnier cloud is visible to the south near the Olympic mountains. Soft rain, the hint of sunshine. A good day to pause and think a bit.

Helmuth von Moltke, a Prussian general and disciple of the great theorist on war, Carl von Clausewitz, said about strategy: “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Sometimes that quotation is spoken portentously by those who would rather not spend too much time planning the future. To misuse the quotation this way is hardly in the spirit of the phrase, since it was originally used to make the opposite point: that planning is essential, that it has to be complex and rich, that it has to be guided by unassailable first principles, and that it has to be executed by people who are perceptive and responsive to unforeseeable situations – anything the enemy throws at them. In our case, the unassailable first principles are the Mission and the Vision, laid out at the bottom of this little article.

One of the elements in our planning and implementation is the “retreat” – not a retreat in the military sense, of course, but in the sense of an opportunity to step back from daily demands to a more reflective place to ponder the School’s present in the broader context of both where we have come from and where we want to go. Last weekend a small collection of about sixty alumni, parents, governors, staff and students did precisely this. We gathered to discuss the ramifications of what is known as “Twenty-first Century Schools”. This concept of Twenty-first Century Schools encompasses many ideas, but those that tend to surface repeatedly are as follows. First, the learning environment is going to be a collaborative one, where everyone will have to develop not only individual skills but also the skills implicit in the notion that both individual and group purposes can be achieved better by working together. Secondly, technology, which till now has had a more or less experimental and only modestly positive influence on learning, will come into its own as an educational tool. Next,  learning will become more personalized, so that students will advance more according to their strengths and learning styles, a process that will be guided by the cascade of legitimate brain research of the last twenty years and which will be facilitated significantly by technology. Similarly, creative thinking will become more important, as students will be expected not just to analyse and think critically about information they receive, but they will also be expected to re-assemble that information in ways that make a contribution to the world. In addition, character education will become more important in schools, because schools increasingly are becoming the only place where different backgrounds and cultures (even though they may all share similar values) intersect and find a common ground against the glamourized toxic culture of many celebrities, sports figures, politicians and financial villains, as portrayed in popular media. Finally, at the core of any future success will be excellent teachers, who embrace and understand how the best learning will take place.

Our retreat put these issues out on the table, and allowed us to check in with an engaged spectrum of people who care about the school and where it should go. We heard from staff, from students, from parents and from alumni who had thoughtful reflections on these topics. This afternoon I am heading to a retreat of Junior School staff that over the next two days is going to consider many of the related topics. At the end of all this work, in a few months’ time, we believe we will have good starting principles, good focus, and the right people, so that we can manage all the balls that are in the air in this bursting school of ours. As I said at the close of proceedings last week, offering a metaphor for how our ideas move through the present and future: quite a juggling act.

SMUS Mission – Our School seeks the excellent in all of us, with passion and compassion. We are a community shaped by the pursuit of truth and goodness, providing outstanding preparation for higher learning and for life.

SMUS Vision – To learn, to lead, to serve; discovering the promise in our selves and the world.