Each spring, the AFS campus bursts to life after a long dormant winter. Even though we know it is coming, the surge of greenery, flowers, bright sunshine and longer days brings an irresistible joy to the last month of school. In the renewal of the natural world around us, we are reminded of the wonder of life itself and are renewed in energy and hope just in time for a joyful close to the school year.

The surge of life on campus is mirrored in seeing a year of creative, inspired work coming together for students and their teachers. This is the season of final performances, special curriculum nights and wonderful recognition of our students’ work from the outside world. In my role, I have the honor of seeing these events in every part of our school community. Here’s a smattering of good news and wonderful work witnessed from the last few weeks:

Much Ado About Nothing, our Upper School play, was brilliantly staged. I sat near a Kindergarten student who had a blast watching the play, guffawing at the broad Shakespearean humor and delighting in the brio of her Upper School classmates on stage. You know that Shakespeare is done well when a Kindergartner gets it! The Friday night performance I attended was also the evening when the Cappies critics from other regional high schools attended. They were moved to nominate our production for 15 (!) awards. Just this past Saturday night, at a raucous Tonys like awards show in Voorhees, NJ, we won six awards from among the 39 shows represented, including Best Play, Best Critics Team, Best 11th Grade Critic, Best Comedy Ensemble, Best Comic Actor and Best Props.

The same week as Much Ado, our intrepid Roobotics team was in St. Louis competing with 600 teams from around the world at the Robotics First World Championships, having qualified by reaching second place in their alliance in the local competition and sixth place in the Mid-Atlantic Championships the weekend before. In only our fourth year of competing, this is an extraordinary accomplishment, especially following a fairly disastrous first outing at Hatboro-Horsham High School in the fall, from which the team completely re-grouped and re-tooled to reach the Worlds. Upon learning of their qualification, the team had 48 hours to figure out all the logistics, raise $12,000, build a crate, dissemble the robot and ship it to St. Louis. It was the experience of a lifetime for this relatively new team, with lots of international friendships and connections made that will continue to fuel new learning and open future doors.

The following week was an Arts Night featuring exhibitions from all our Senior artists and performances from our acting classes given in the round in a transformed Stewart Lobby. In the gallery walk of exhibits, our seniors told of the themes of their work, the techniques they explored, inspiration they had derived from other artists and spoke a language of sophistication, exploration, problem solving and expression of powerful ideas that was truly inspiring. Each child’s voice rang through loud and clear, coupled with works of great accomplishment. And the acting and singing performances that followed also showed fearless, joyful choices and a camaraderie among performers that is at the heart of our culture where students delight in the talents of their peers.

Last week, the signature evening in my calendar was Fourth Grade Writers’ Night where we heard the original realistic fiction stories of every member of the class. At the start of the night, Karolye Eldridge, their teacher, showed us the progression of their learning about writing throughout the year. The process took students from models of idea generation, lists of themes of emotion and experience that make for compelling stories, in-depth development of character studies, playful exploration of the arc of narrative and an editing and refining process that burnished words, played with structure and tightened the action. The result was stories of craft, complexity, detail and emotional resonance that would surpass any reasonable expectation for fourth grade writing. And the hushed, reverent and confident presentation of each story was moving in itself.

I could go on about the amazing events of the past few weeks: our Nature Playdate and Eco-Fest; EGIS Night; Author Grace Lin’s two-day artist in residency in the Lower School; awards won such as first place in the National History Day state competition for junior Eli Russell… But I’ll have to let these few examples speak for the vitality that has filled our campus as we come to the culmination of the 2014-15 school year.

At AFS, education starts as a process of learning to fall in love with the world in all its wonder, complexity and sense of possibility and continually finding one’s place of significance in it. We focus on education that enlarges us as human beings, extends our grasp, deepens our understanding and illuminates a larger terrain than that which is right in front of us. That such an environment also leads to such joyful accomplishment inspires me as an educator.