NFTH: February 18, 2020

The son of an SMH alumna was recently diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Since then, he has undergone three rounds of chemotherapy; however, he needs a bone marrow transplant to survive.

The family has been unsuccessful at finding a match on the Bone Marrow Donor database. They are asking that members of the SMH community come forward and get tested to be a match. The process of entering the database is simple, and just requires the swabbing of the cheek.

The Donor Drive will take place on Sunday, March 1 from 12pm – 5pm at Trinity University. View a map of Trinity’s campus. The drive will be in the Coates Student Center, with parking across the street in the Alamo Stadium parking lot. It is easy access off 281 if you exit Hildebrand either from the north or south. 

This is a life-threatening situation, and it is critical the family find a bone marrow transplant.  Donating your bone marrow could save his life and that of others in the same situation. Please help! Our thoughts and prayers are with the family.

The Upper School One-Act play began rehearsals this week. The 10 students cast in this play will spend two hours a day rehearsing for their April performances. This long and involved process of art making is part of a shared experience for all students who participate in the fine arts. The trials and errors, the successes and failures, and the determination to produce something of quality and importance is the motivation that fuels student achievement in the arts. The product that audiences enjoy come show time, or at the opening art reception, has taken our students months and months of perseverance.

This week the Form 5 drama production, Dusty Diner, opens. The show is the result of nearly a year of effort. These Lower School Drama students begin their journey in Form 4 when they learn the process of creating an original piece of theater for the stage. Then in the fall of their Form 5 year, the students brainstorm concepts and improvise scenes that ultimately become their script. Under the expert direction of Lower School Drama Teacher Clea Underwood, these young actors are learning how to write and perform a play. Meanwhile, they are also learning valuable life skills such as teamwork, cooperation, empathy, hard work, and stage presence.

I know we all will enjoy Dusty Diner and will be amazed how easy these young performers make it all look. We may even forget that this show came together because of their commitment to the process. I am proud of our students and Mrs. Underwood for undertaking the grand adventure of bringing the Form 5 drama production to life.

The artistic journey of the Form 5 drama performance is concluding at the same time our Upper School actors are just beginning the road to their opening day in April. We look forward to being there in the audience to enjoy the efforts of our all drama students’ creative work.

Artily yours,

Bethany Bohall
Wanda Wiley Atkinson Director of Fine Arts
Tobin Fine Arts School at Saint Mary’s Hall
bbohall@smhall.org
(210) 483-9253

In recent Chapels, we have been talking about the transformative power of love.

On February 10, we continued our discussions about love, and a related topic: compassion. As is tradition, all Chapels began with the call and response from Psalm 118, verse 24: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Each Chapel ended with prayer.

Valentine’s Day has passed, but reflecting on the need for healthy relationships and maintaining them is a perennial event. The research is clear. Humans are social beings that need to interact with others.

One could argue that this is a vestige of our ancestral society: humans were interdependent for survival reasons. It goes deeper than that though. According to a recently published article in the New York Times, by Emma Pattee, titled, How to Have Closer Friendships (and Why You Need Them), she cites Dr. Amir Levine’s work on human bonding: “Social connections are the most powerful way for us to regulate our emotional distress. If you are in distress, being in proximity to someone you’re securely attached to is the most effective way to calm yourself.”

Relationships are Critical to Child Development

When children are small, they rely upon their primary caregivers for support. It is the primary responsibility of parents to effectively meet the needs of their children in consistent, thoughtful ways. Children learn to trust others when they can rely on their primary caregivers for consistency. In addition to trust, children learn about kindness, safety, intimacy, honesty, and empathy through their daily interactions with parents. These relationships truly set the stage for children’s relationships later in life. This concept is known as attachment.

In Lydia Denworth’s article in The Atlantic titled, The Outsize Influence Of Your Middle-School Friends: The Intensity Of Feelings Generated By Friendship In Childhood And Adolescence Is By Design, she references a number of research studies that explain how relationships impact the developing brain in children and adolescents. She cites Dr. Dylan Gee, a neuroscientist, who determined that mothers were able to help their children from birth until 10 years of age engage in emotion regulation by calming down the amygdala, or emotion brain. Dr. Gee also determined that in children between the ages of 11 and 17, the mothers no longer had the same effect. In the tween and teen years, friends begin to take on a critical role where sometimes they help their peers with emotion regulation and other times they trigger it.

What Can Parents Do?

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the most important things that a parent can do prior to a child entering school is to be present, model, and redirect behavior guiding children through effective strategies for peer interaction. During the school age years, parents may consider coaching their children about effective ways of interacting with their peers and providing them with opportunities to engage in less structured ways. Later in adolescence, parents will want to be available to their children and will want to know their teenager’s friends and take an active interest. Befriending their children’s friends’ parents can also be very helpful in supporting teenage relationships in healthy but less intrusive ways. It is critical to have conversations throughout a child’s development so that children know they can talk with their parents and rely on them for support. For more ideas, please visit healthychildren.org.

More than anything, it is important to remember that relationships are necessary for positive human growth. Supporting prosocial behavior and positive peer relationships throughout development is a critical component to life satisfaction and a buffer against mental health issues.