I and Thou

Dear Brandeis community,

 

One of my mentors and coaches in the wonderful and challenging work of school leadership is Debbie Freed, an organizational consultant who has been working with heads of school in the Bay Area for more than 25 years. A concept that she has written about is the notion of what she describes as a “fractal”—that any given moment in a school or organization can be seen as a self-replicating pattern, one that expresses a fundamental truth about that organization’s core beliefs and values. It’s an idea that I return to with some frequency with my team, and one that I found myself thinking about this past week.

 

One of the metaphors that Freed uses to explain the notion of the fractal is a snapshot—that you can take a picture and it will tell you a fundamental something about the school—and it was a digital snapshot that sparked my thinking about this topic last week. On Thursday, our yearbook staffers went out into the school to interview students and teachers, get a feel for what was happening at various grade levels, and, of course, start taking some pictures to document the year. As we started flipping through the pictures at the end of class, one in particular stood out: a 4th grade student on the playground, in the midst of what appears to be a fairly complex handshake ritual with resident teacher Torin Coffino.

 

It’s a great photo, one that speaks to a joyful connection between students and their teachers. I saw Torin later the same day and mentioned the picture to him, and he shared with me that he was trying to create individual “secret” handshakes with each of the 4th grade students (an idea, I suspect, that is rooted in his experience as a basketball coach). In that photo, and in Torin’s plan to share a personal greeting with each of his students, I see a number of core truths about Brandeis: That we are a community of learners; that we are purposeful and joyful in our connections with one another; and, perhaps most significantly, that we see students for their individual humanity.

 

I have begun reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou, out of a long-time curiosity sparked by its title. In it, Buber distinguishes between the I-It relationship and the I-Thou relationship. The former is fundamentally about distinction and boundaries—“every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others”—while the latter is about connectedness and relation. I think about the I-Thou relationship as being reflective of the Jewish value b’tzelem Elohim, recognizing our shared divinity and, therefore, shared humanity, the same that in my mind undergirds the fundamentally American notion that we are all created equal. Those are also the values I see reflected in this one fractal of a moment, in the joyful connections we are busy building each day.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of connectedness and fancy handshakes, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan