The Hill Academy Newsletter- November 22nd, 2020

November 22nd, 2020 HILL Message (from Academic Director Rick Kunc): Highest Level of Achievement. That is a lofty goal, and probably one that in the end you never actually reach. Great companies do not get to be great and then say “perfect, we can just do it this way forever”. They find a way to get even better. The message is that there is always room to get better, there is always an opportunity to raise your level of achievement. Our message this coming Monday is about “diving in head first”. Sometimes to be the best, you just have to go for it. And to be better, sometimes you just have to go for it. This week I dropped into two classrooms where faculty members were taking risks, they were going for it, in order to be better. I was in a grade 10 math class where students were flying paper airplanes. They were learning about and calculating downward slope. And I was in a grade 5/6 science class where students had built paper houses that had to stand up to a “hurricane” created by a leaf blower. I’m sure there were easier ways to teach the concepts they were addressing, but those easier ways may not have been effective. So they took the risk. In both cases, students were engaged and they could explain why they were doing what they were doing. They could explain the learning goals. And they were striving to be their best, to reach their highest level of achievement. I do not know if they were all intrinsically motivated to learn about downward slope and external and internal forces (I’m betting they weren’t). But I do know that the conditions had been created by the teacher that engaged the students and motivate them to be their best. In each case the teacher probably didn’t know if was going to work or not, but they decided to “dive in head first”. At The Hill we strive to create these conditions every day. Whether it is in the classroom or on the playing field, we want our student athletes to dive in head first. We want them to take that risk to be their best. And yes, sometimes that means you will fail, but we learn our best lessons when we fail, and that will provide us with the feedback that will allow us to reach our Highest Level of Achievement the next time. </