Gifts of I
Perspective: Boarding Students across OES
magine, as a teacher, having a small cadre of international students from all over the world to offer their perspectives and talents to whatever lesson you are teaching. Tat’s what it feels like to Natasha Busick, OES fifth- grade teacher and dorm parent, when she draws upon the talents of the school’s boarding students to enrich her students’ learning. Busick recalls countless times when these OES students have directly contributed to the learning at hand in her classroom by their willingness to share their life perspectives.
Te contributions the dorm students make to the life of the school are myriad, in ways both seen and unseen. In 2016–17, there are 55 boarding students from 11 countries. Tey live on campus in two dormitories known as Rodney and Jackson Houses. St. Helen’s Hall was founded in 1869 with a boarding component that has remained an integral part of OES’s history. In the mid-1970s, international students joined domestic boarders, increasing the school’s diversity.
Busick dips into this diversity naturally because as a dorm parent, she knows the boarding students well. For her, at every turn, the dorm students can contribute in some way. She states, “Tere’s so much we do in the classroom every day that I can think of a dorm student who can actually connect to something we are doing.” For example, in a recent conversation about UNICEF and
Malala Yousafzai,1 Busick referred to Nahida, a
boarding student from Afghanistan. Nahida herself has met Yousafzai and spoken at a United Nations conference.2
Nahida spoke to Busick’s students
about life in Afghanistan and the challenges of being female in a country where women’s rights are clearly subordinate to men’s.
One can imagine the valuable and tangible connections made by Busick’s students on education and women’s rights as a result of Nahida’s perspective. Tis larger perspective is a gift the dorm students inherently offer to the OES community. Robin Weitzer, Upper School English language support teacher, reflects on the dorm students’ special contribution: “Anytime a person new and different has contact with somebody in our community, there’s an exchange. It’s a learning experience. If you add the cultural and language piece on top of that individual personality each student brings, I think there’s so much learning to be done.”
Te dorm students tie in perfectly with the fifth graders’ multi-week unit on immigration. Last year, Busick’s students wanted to learn more about Vietnam. Andrew Ngo and Tod To (both class of ’19), dorm students from Vietnam, spoke to her class. Busick recalls, “Tey talked about things ranging from their favorite sports to what life is like right now in Hanoi. Te kids absolutely loved them. Tey thought everything about them was great.”
1 Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate at the age of 17. In 2012, she survived a shot in the
head by a Taliban gunman, and since then has garnered worldwide attention for girls’ rights to education. 2
Nahida spoke at the UN conference on the HeForShe campaign, an initiative that urges men and boys to act as agents of change by encouraging them to take action against inequalities faced by women and girls.
Winter 2017 17
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