Message From Head of School - Jean Waller Brune
I think December may be my favorite month. It is the beginning of winter with the undeniable beauty and grandeur of snowfall. Snowfall – beautiful though it is – can also be hazardous. Please know that student and employee safety is always at the forefront of my mind. So is education, and when at all possible, I try to maintain the day-to-day continuity of our teaching program as scheduled. But winter often brings late openings and school closings. Please check our phone answering machine and our website for weather related announcements. We also post these announcements on WJZ, WMAR and WBAL TV, WBAL Radio and baltimoresun.com.
In my family, December is also the month of Christmas, filled with treasured traditions that span generations, including cookie recipes from my great, great grandmother and ornaments that were on both of my parents’ childhood trees. For me it is also a time of joy and splendor, love and childlike delight.
A treasured RPCS December tradition is the Upper School Christmas concert, featuring the uniquely special living reproductions. I remember them from my student years here and from when my daughter Marion, 1984 was a student. For years I came to see them with my mother, a graduate of the Class of 1933, until her death in 1998. The format has evolved over the years, but the tradition goes back farther than my own memory can travel. 85 years ago the following was included in the 1922 Quid Nunc – our School yearbook: “The last day before School closed for Christmas vacation, the Upper and Lower Schools joined in carol-singing and in a series of tableaux depicting famous Christmas paintings.” It is said that English teacher Helen Irvin was so inspired by the tableaux she saw while in Oxford, England, she brought the idea back to RPCS. During these early days, Miss Irvin supervised the production’s staging and costuming. In 1945, under the guidance of then-art teacher Elizabeth Winn, an industrious RPCS eighth grader volunteered to help paint her first tableau flat. That marked the beginning of a long and rewarding relationship. Today, that student, Judy Waters, a graduate of the Class of 1950 and a former, long-time Upper School art teacher, continues to oversee the artistic design and direction of these living reproductions of religious paintings and sculptures. For over 60 years, Ms. Waters’ meticulous attention to detail and her demand for perfection have given life to breathtaking images and provided the RPCS community with treasured memories. Yesterday, I attended both performances as the Head of School and as a dedicated alumna – joined by generations of alumnae: grandmothers, mothers, daughters, cousins and aunts – united across generations by a tradition that spans almost a century.
We have newer traditions also – one of which is our tri-School coordination which allows us to offer 11 foreign languages in the Upper School. Recently, Michael Scott, our Arabic teacher, handed me a print advertisement for SKY TV, one of the largest cable networks in the United Kingdom. Their campaign, Believe in Better, refers to channels of different foreign languages, but it is the letters used for their slogan that made me stop and think. Each stylized letter in the phrase comes from a different alphabet. It is a concrete representation of the diversity of the world in which we live and which our students will one day lead.
It is a world of diversity with which our students are already familiar. December is also the month of our 9th biennial Birgit Baldwin International Poetry Festival, a newer tradition sponsored by our Upper School Foreign Language department. Students in all Upper School language classes learn poems in that target language; some are then selected to perform at this assembly, along with other students who share poetry in their own native or family language. Music and dance are integrated with the poetry recitations. In all, 14 languages were represented – an amazing and awesome testimony to the strength of the teaching and learning at RPCS. The Poetry Festival was created to honor Birgit Baldwin, 1978, an RPCS alumna and gifted linguist who tragically lost her life in an automobile accident in 1988. It is particularly moving that Birgit’s parents have attended most of these special assemblies and made special travel arrangements this year so they to be at RPCS on December 11.
In my little Vermont “hometown,” I found some snowflake ornaments, handcrafted from Vermont maple hardwood. Carved on each is a quote from Martin Buber, an Austrian-Israeli Jewish philosopher, translator and educator: “Those we love are the snowflakes of life. None are the same, each is beautiful, and all bring something special to our world.”
May our RPCS community continue to be joined together this December, throughout this academic year, and for the years to come in bringing our own special personalities and talents to the education of our students
~JWB