The following post was adapted from SSFS Head of School Tom Gibian's remarks at the beginning-of-the-year all-school assembly on Sept. 23, 2014:
Welcome back to Sandy Spring Friends School, 2014.
People always ask me about Sandy Spring Friends School. Where is it? How many students go there? Are the parents difficult? (It’s funny, nobody ever ask me, are the students difficult.) The answers to these questions are Sandy Spring (not Olney); 550; and no.
The school year is off to a great start. I went to see Sandy Spring on It's Academic on Saturday. Spoiler alert: You ready? Our step dancers are ridiculously good. Another spoiler alert: Jake brought a little stuffed Wildebeest and put it next to his name. It was awesome. Oh, the score? You’ll have to watch it on TV to find out. [Editor's note: the morning of October 18 on NBC4!]
It’s not easy step-dancing flawlessly in sync in front of TV cameras. And it’s not easy being on TV with people firing questions at you and the other teams are pretty good and people are counting on you and you don’t want to let down your school and you don’t want to let down Eduardo and you think you know the answer but you’re not sure but you hit the buzzer anyway.
I’m describing situations when you get out of your comfort zone. Playing and beating Good Counsel in men’s varsity soccer; getting on a plane in Ho Chi Minh City, or Hangzhou, or Istanbul to go to a high school you have never seen before; volunteering for the Middle School Diversity Conference; finding a seat at the lunch table with kids you have never talked to before. Sitting quietly, with nothing to distract you, in Meeting for Worship, waiting for inspiration, for what Quakers call the soft still voice. By the way, in the Bible, God speaks to Elijah in a soft still voice; sometimes it’s called a gentle whisper.
So I invite all of us--students, faculty, all of us--to leave our comfort zones, abandon them every once in a while. Discover that you not only can do what you didn’t think you could do, but that you are actually good at it.
Have a great year.