Once every seven years, CAIS sends a team to each of its 90+ independent schools (our team had 10 members from CAIS schools across the country) to accredit the school across 11 standards of practice. These standards span all areas of a school, including such things as academic program, co-curricular program, strategy development, enrolment management, finance and governance.
The CAIS visiting team spent four days with us this week, and I thought you might like to hear how I introduced the process to our
students through a story about 9 3/4 I told them at assembly this past Monday.
I walk from one end of the School to the other a lot. Most often that’s done when the School is full of students, but yesterday I was here pretty much all by myself, getting ready for our visitors to arrive for noon on a Sunday. I was on my school-wide trek, unlocking all the doors and turning on the lights when I found myself staring at a poster in 5M.
The simplicity of the poster struck me - 9 ¾ - an obvious reference to the train station platform in the Harry Potter series. However, standing there in that moment, I began to infer my own meaning of the poster that simply had the mixed fraction 9 ¾.
With the CAIS visit top of mind, my thought process meandered away from the original intent of the poster, to that being “out of 10.” What might the mind be thinking if one was at 9¾/10? Well, I suppose you might be inclined to rest easy as you are close enough. Or you might be angry that you came so close. You might obsess about the ¼ point missed and over-react with a self or societally-imposed notion of failing to meet the mark.
Or, you could adopt a positive mindset and view the whole situation as opportunity to improve. That, I thought must be the lesson here - that the human spirit is remarkable in that it has a powerful instinct to move forward and progress …
To run a few hundredths of a second faster
To find the sweet spot of intonation in a musical group
To craft a moving sentence with deep meaning
To find the warmth of shadow and tone in a painting
To make it to the final level of Halo on your Xbox
I even began to wonder, if philosophically, 9 ¾ was, for this reason, an even better place to be than 10/10.
Well, I don’t presume that our school is at 9 ¾ necessarily. We are certainly at a number less than 10, and as I’ve just illustrated, that puts us in a great place. We are in a place where you can always strive to take things a little further forward from where you are at. That is what CAIS membership is all about.