School portraits / A memory and a visit
A School Where the Report Card Is a Reading Assignment
At Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, nobody hands over a letter grade. The parent has some reading to do.
Mary Watson, who attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights and later taught there, remembers a father who planned to take her out of it. She told New York magazine in 2004 that he thought she seemed too happy to be learning anything. Then she fell in love with Latin, and he came around completely. I sympathize with him. Most of us were raised to believe medicine works only if it tastes of something unpleasant.
The school’s current parent FAQ offers a fresh complication. Teachers needn’t issue year-long syllabi. One classroom might investigate the ocean while another explores space. I like this arrangement enormously, as a spectator. As a parent, I think I would want a clipboard. What, exactly, would I be comparing?
For an outsider’s view, there is a student newspaper exchange published in 2020. A boy from Browning, an all-boys school in Manhattan, took the 5 train to Borough Hall one Thursday to spend a day at Saint Ann’s, where students call teachers by their first names.
There was Latin again, in a course that read only about the decline of ancient Rome. That is a narrow syllabus, though Rome has never been in a position to complain. In a class called The Science of Math and Music, he joined an experiment on how well the ear can locate sounds.
What I like is the question he brought with him. How, he wondered, does something this loose hold together? The answers boiled down to students who want to learn needing less scaffolding. He saw students debating their teachers and recognized the enthusiasm he knew at home, reached by a very different road. He declined to say which school was better, which is wise in a newspaper exchange and essential at dinner parties.
The answer for parents involves reading. The school describes twice-yearly narrative reports, with checklists beginning in fourth grade. Written feedback starts in kindergarten. Division heads or grade advisers read the reports before families receive them.
The fuller midyear reports for older pupils explain both the curriculum and the child’s learning. This seems a useful place to start when you are not entirely sure which planet the classroom has been on.
A letter grade lets you hurry to the verdict. Here, the explanation is the verdict. I would put down the clipboard and make some tea.