Pegasus Magazine - Winter 2016

The Pegasus School

Issue 12/Winter 2016

Battling Pressure Pegasus Magazine Winter 2016

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PEGASUS NOW

FEATURES

5 HEAD’S MESSAGE

20 TOO SMALL TO FAIL 24 THE GLINT OF GOLD

6 AT THE HEART OF 8 PROGRAM: SLOW DOWN AND SMELL

THE RHOMBUSES 10 PROGRAM: GOING LONG FOR THE WIN 12 INSIGHT: REMEDY FOR STRESS 14 FAMILY SPOTLIGHT: THE PARENT TRAP 16 INSIGHT: TURNING STUDENTS INTO SCHOLARS 28 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 30 THOSE WHO SOAR 32 ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

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36 MARK YOUR CALENDAR

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WINTER 2016 www.thepegasusschool.org

EDITORIAL BOARD

Nancy Conklin, Director of Admission Rick Davitt, Photographer Sue Harrison, Director of Advancement Karla Joyce, Writer Jason Lopez, Head of School Shalini Mattina, Director of Communications and Marketing Marrie Stone, Writer Nancy Wilder, Middle School English Teacher WRITERS

Benjamin Jenkins Karla Joyce Jason Lopez Marrie Stone CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

David Andrade Kristen Brady Beth Hallett Pooneh Khazei Kyra Sandstrom Devin Seifer Atoshi Shorey MISSION STATEMENT

The story of Pegasus begins with intellectual curiosity and compassion.

We are a vibrant academic community that inspires bright, motivated students to discover and develop their unique gifts. Teachers and students build trusting relationships that foster self-reliance, confidence, and innovative thinking. A Pegasus education equips students to achieve future academic success and make a positive impact on society.

COMMUNITY VALUES

Responsibility Kindness Teamwork Generosity Creativity Curiosity Courage Integrity Perseverance

PORTRAIT OF A GRADUATE

Academically Confident Well Balanced Critical Thinker Exceptional Communicator Collaborative Leader Responsible Citizen Environmentally Conscious Technologically Adept Economically Astute Versed in the Arts Globally Aware

CREATIVE AND ART DIRECTION

Shalini Mattina GRAPHIC DESIGN

Sund Studio PHOTOGRAPHER

Rick Davitt PRINTING

Orange County Printing Pegasus Magazine is published twice yearly by the Office of Advancement at The Pegasus School. It is archived on the school’s website: thepegasusschool.org.

We welcome your feedback! Please address queries and comments to Shalini Mattina at smattina@thepegasusschool.org.

Pegasus Magazine Winter 2016

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Rome wasn’t built in a day. But they were laying bricks every hour.

—John Heywood

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HEAD’S MESSAGE

Pressure How Much is Too Much?

Teaching takes time and patience, and—yes—requires a little pressure. Learning is a marathon, not a sprint. This concept alone can cause stress for students. In this winter issue of the Pegasus Magazine, we address the timely issue of pressure on our children. As adults, we understand some of our greatest successes were born out of adversity. However, as parents and teachers, we’re inclined to protect our children. Herein lies the dilemma. Children need to struggle a bit, because that’s where the learning happens. However, too much stress can undermine their confidence.

Many stories that surround the topic of pressure are highlighted in this issue. Some articles are uplifting, while others are thought-provoking. I trust you will look for yourselves in these stories and ask, “How much pressure can my child handle?” Or, “What’s my role in motivating my child?”

Pegasus classrooms overflow with children who have something special to offer the world. As educators, our responsibility is to strike the right balance between support and challenge in order to unleash the great power within them.

In her article, “Turning Students into Scholars,” Kyra Sandstrom highlights several innovative ways Pegasus faculty encourage students to both experience pressure and use it to their advantage. In “The Parent Trap,” Atoshi Shorey interviews a variety of parents and discovers while they want similar outcomes, they often choose opposing paths to get there. Both Sandstrom and Shorey report adults are aware of the challenges, and are actively helping children navigate them. “Too Small to Fail,” by Marrie Stone, identifies the struggles associated with pressure, but also provides helpful strategies to use pressure positively.

In his article, “Slow Down and Smell the Rhombuses,” Devin Seifer reimagines the study of mathematics, analogizing it to the slow, careful attention we give Shakespeare instead of a sprint to the finish line. David Andrade takes this encouragement a bit further in his article, “Remedy For Stress.” He parses the difference between pressure and stress, offering examples of how to support our children. “Glint of Gold,” by Karla Joyce, highlights four inspiring families, showing how pressure and stress helped parents support their children’s lofty goals and

propelled them toward personal success.

The faculty contributions reflect that we, as a school, think hard about how to properly position pressure for our students. This is intentional. Pegasus provides a safe place to build lifelong strategies for navigating intensity. Students learn to thrive under pressure, instead of succumbing to it. In the article, “Mission Accomplished,” Kristen Brady explains how this thoughtfulness is in our DNA as Pegasus faculty.

The Pegasus School’s history centers around helping bright, motivated students meet challenges in a nurturing environment in order to be equipped to make a positive impact on society.

Pressure exists. It shapes all of us, positively and negatively.

This is a topic we frequently think about, and why we have words and phrases in our mission like compassion and selfreliance. It’s why we believe the phrase “Pegasus teachers and students build trusting relationships” must be at the core of our school. We hope this edition of the Pegasus Magazine will inspire you to think about how it is shaping the lives of our children.

Jason Lopez Head of School

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At the Heart Of Marrie Stone

The Swiger Spark James Swiger, seventh-grade history teacher, grew up with boards beneath his feet—surf, skate, and snow. He chose Pegasus 15 years ago because it was in the heart of the surfing and skateboarding world. “I haven’t been more stoked about a decision in my life.”

Passionate people are passionate all the way down. It doesn’t matter where they direct their fire—it burns brightly enough to inspire everyone around them. Swiger gives that gift of enthusiasm every day. “His ability to connect with his students academically is astounding,” says Amy Weiss. Even students who once hated history leave his classroom loving it. It’s not uncommon for students to tell him, spontaneously and without solicitation, they once found history boring and now it’s their favorite subject. “Nothing makes my day more,” he says.

For some, the Swiger Spark is strong enough to ignite their own full-blown passion for history. Many of his students voluntarily participate in National History Day (NHD), which requires countless hours spanning across months, often for no academic accolades or any grade. “I’m blown away how many students tackle extremely challenging and time-intensive

projects, purely because they’re passionate about history,” Swiger says. “They produce creative, analytical presentations at the high school or even college level. It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve seen.”

Last year, several students shared that NHD moved them to reshape their worldview and bettered who they were as people. “That’s an experience I’ll never forget,” he says.

Passion is an excellent antidote to pressure. As Albert Einstein once said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Inspired students are engaged, enthusiastic, and willing to withstand a great deal of stress in furtherance of their passions. That’s not only the Pegasus way, that’s the Swiger Spark.

Earth Angel

For Orellana, it’s her love of God and others that inspires her. She’s memorized several Psalms from the Bible, all in Spanish, and loves to sing in church.

“She’s always kind with others,” says her mother. “That’s the first thing we tell her.

Go to church and be a kind Christian. It makes her very happy.”

Orellana cares more about doing the right thing, and standing up for others, than any kind of peer pressure. “She’s very headstrong,” says Brennan. “She stays focused on doing and being her best.”

When Mrs. Sarkin retired last spring, Jocelyn Orellana, fifth grader, wanted to do more than simply say goodbye. All alone, in front of an expectant crowd, Orellana took the stage and sang Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” When asked about her bravery, and what motivated her, she says, “I trust Mrs. Sarkin. I really love her. And everybody cheered me on.” It also requires a lot of deep breathing, she adds.

Orellana is a seasoned singer. She never misses a Pegasus talent show and is unflappable in the face of pressure. If the music cuts out, if the wrong song is played, Orellana stays strong and composed. “She doesn’t care what people say or think. She only cares about doing her best,” says Jessica Brennan, Orellana’s fourth-grade teacher.

In fourth grade, Orellana performed Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “She grafted on his voice and assertiveness,” says Brennan. “It was so powerful and moving.

The whole class had chills.” And, Brennan added, you should hear her do Maya Angelou!

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AT THE HEART OF

MAX-imizing His Strengths Fifth grader Max Razmjoo thrives on competition. In kindergarten, he memorized Pi out to 210 digits. By first grade, it was 500. He planned to stop there, but a science teacher said, “You’re going to let someone else beat you?” And so, in one week, he added 300 more, memorizing 800 digits.

In second grade, at another shcool, Razmjoo entered a Greek Mythology contest intended mostly for older students and took second place. He also took second place in the Pegasus Geography Bee, beat only by one student three years older.

Additionally, Razmjoo is the youngest ever to make it to finals in the 2016 National History Bee, which he entered on his own initiative online last year. In Chicago, he took first in Women’s History, third in Citizenship, and eighth in Popular Culture. He plans on competing again in 2017. With most of his competitors graduating to middle school, he feels he has a strong chance to dominate the Bee next spring.

Razmjoo’s real passion, though, is U.S. Presidents. He’s read every book in the school library and, with his photographic memory, remembers them all. Ask him.

Yet what’s most lovely about Razmjoo isn’t his mind,

but his heart. He’s kind, patient and empathetic. “One of my favorite images is Max with his four-year-old buddy, Tatum,” says fourthgrade teacher Kelly Barlow. “He held her, read to her. He laughed with her, and pulled her back into their activities. He beamed the entire time.”

For Razmjoo, Pegasus is the perfect place.

“The students are supportive of each other,” his mother says.

“They embrace each other’s achievements. They celebrate each other’s successes.”

In the next few years, Razmjoo plans to attend the Envision Experience Junior National Young Leaders Conference. He looks forward to meeting some political icons. Someday, he may even become one.

The Face Behind the Facelift Jeanine Chen is designing our future, and it’s beautiful. Step inside the reception and administration offices, the CMPR, the middle school forum, the teacher’s lounge—Chen’s signature is painted all over them.

“Interior design requires a lot of problem solving skills and psychology,” she says. This is why, Chen says, she prefers working for Pegasus. “Pegasus allows me to be who I am. They trust me, and I’m honored by that trust.”

The lobby was the defining moment. “I showed Jason Lopez our bold color palette—bright red and turquoise—being used for the new website. He looked at it and said, ‘You’re in charge.’ He wasn’t afraid. That made all the difference.”

Pegasus does for parents what it does for students. Identifies their strengths and talents, gives them support and a long leash, and lets them run. As a result, Chen’s rooms feel personal and authentic, instead of institutional. Every space shows her love for what she does.

“Look at your own childhood as a guide for what to do in life,” Chen says. “Those early interests and passions are good indicators of what you love.” Chen changed her bedroom around every week which, for the sister she shared it with, was a little disconcerting. “I should have known then,” she laughs.

Chen has never advertised her work, which comes through word-ofmouth referrals.

That speaks volumes about her skill. And her enthusiasm is infectious. There’s rarely a moment she’s not scanning the room, looking for ways to help.

She embodies all that is Pegasus—creativity, generosity, and kindness. A very deserving choice for the Pegasus Spirit Award she received last year. For Chen, recognition is difficult. “I work best behind the scenes,” she says. But she creates those scenes.

And they’re gorgeous.

Marrie Stone is a local writer, interviewer, and the Co-Host of “Writers on Writing” at KUCI, 88.9FM and the mother of Haley Rovner (‘15). Contact: marristone@gmail.com

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Slow Down and Smell the Rhombuses Devin Seifer When did we, as a society, decide that mathematics is a race? It’s okay to take whatever time is necessary to study the language and meaning of Shakespeare, or to grapple slowly and carefully with the complexities of environmental sustainability, but let’s fly through linear equations—we’ve got a deadline!

After a couple of decades of teaching middle school mathematics, I have come to the conclusion that all the finish lines are mirages. After all the tutors, after-school programs, summer programs and added pressure, the tortoise can still come out ahead because the real goals are “whats” and “hows,” not “whens.” Mathematics is not so much about completing this course or having the prerequisites necessary for that course, or even about whether or not you’re in the “high” class.

Rather, mathematics is a way of thinking, an approach to problem solving that can be applied to just about anything.

The challenge here is that the ability to apply mathematical reasoning to other subjects is by far the highest level and most creative skill, and the students who can do this are only those for whom understanding and problem-solving has become second nature. It is not just that these students can rapidly figure out how to use a procedure to solve some basic problems—they own the material; it becomes a part of how they think. Many of our Pegasus students have become experts at studying and doing well on individual tests, but they struggle with hanging onto the knowledge and making it a part of themselves. Ownership of the material requires a great deal of practice, frequent review, and some experience with the joys of struggling for understanding without help.

Outside the classroom, there are two basic uses for mathematics.

One is to apply a known procedure to a familiar type of problem in the hopes of getting accurate results. The other is to come up with a new and creative solution for a problem that has never before been successfully tackled. Any accountant or pastry chef knows that the former, though common, is extremely important. The latter, mostly the purview of scientists and mathematicians, is not nearly as common, but equally important and quite a bit more challenging.

Teachers of mathematics need to decide where to put the focus. Do I concentrate on injecting students with concepts and procedures I

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PROGRAM

know they will need at the next level, or do I use at least some of the time to give students the opportunity to figure things out on their own? Given the sheer volume of mathematics that is already known, and the high percentage of people that are “math users” rather than “math creators,” most teachers (and school districts) put the emphasis on imparting specific knowledge. And while this decision is both reasonable and utilitarian, it’s also somewhat unfortunate.

I always tell my classes that every shred of mathematics that they will ever be taught was created by someone who did not know how to do it. Mathematics was not discovered. It was created by humans over thousands of years, and it involved incredible amounts of hard thinking, lots of trial, and just as much error. The people who created it were subject to the same careless mistakes and insecurities that students are today. And, of course, mathematics is still being created. I often imagine the student who, having earned a doctorate in mathematics and having learned all that can be taught, stands at the very edge of what is known. Will she be able to extend our knowledge? She is clearly a master at learning what can be explained by others, but can she create?

With the educational emphasis on speed and arbitrary time goals, students do not get many chances to try to generate their own concepts and algorithms. Nor do they get enough opportunities to grapple with truly difficult problems that might require some sideways thinking. Worse, students get the impression that mathematics is something that needs to be finished.

Happily, here at Pegasus, shielded by a tradition of academic freedom, we are not so much caught up in the frenzy for speed. Our two-year Algebra program is evidence of our commitment to depth over breadth. Yet even here the pressure exists, and it has certainly increased over the last few years. In spite of this pressure, I try to give students the chance to wrestle with extremely challenging problems, or to attempt to solve problems involving concepts they have never seen before. Much of my job then becomes convincing the students to take risks and getting them to understand that an interesting, though perhaps flawed, plan of attack is exactly the goal of the exercise.

Though time-consuming for all and frightening for many, these challenges are just as important as getting through large volumes of content.

I would like to conclude with a disclaimer and a hope. The disclaimer is that no psychological studies have been consulted for this article, just my own experience. Feel free, therefore, to take these ramblings with a few thousand grains of salt. The hope is that parents and students can learn to relax and enjoy the ride. Math placement is simply not as important as it appears, and what seems to be the end of the course is actually an asymptote. Go ahead, Google it.

Devin Seifer has guided some 1,300 Pegasus middle school students through the perils of algebra and pre-algebra over the last 17.5 years.

Contact: dseifer@thepegasusschool.org

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Going Long For the Win Portfolio Projects Provide an Alternative to Final Exams Pooneh Khazei At Pegasus, teachers build skills one layer, one project, one presentation at a time over the course of years. The myriad of middle school assignments prepare students for success in academics and beyond. In today’s world of high-stakes testing and the pressure from school exams, what is the role of longterm thinking? What value do cumulative projects have?

Cumulative projects have two significant benefits to students—cohesion and longevity. When students begin Ms. Polizzi’s seventh-grade English class in September, they are given a writing project that will be their constant companion throughout the year. Eighth-grade students in Mrs. Wilder’s class file formal writing pieces in their in-class portfolios. With each essay, poem, in-class writing assignment, research project, and book review, the portfolio accumulates. Meaningful feedback is given and students grow as writers. In May, students present a culmination of their work. One subject, two years, very distinctive skill sets and stressors with a single goal: excellence in writing.

In seventh grade, the portfolio project teaches students to revise to a higher standard. It requires them to reflect upon, and articulate, their own growth. Students revise all writing starting with the summer reading book review.

They’re required to keep all the relevant work across the whole school year organized, and to learn the craft of revision without revulsion. Devin Lavacuda-Cola, eighth grader, says, “Some pieces are easier to revise than others, depending on how hard I worked on it the first time.

The portfolio gave me a chance to see how much I’ve grown in my writing. That was important to me.”

But the portfolio is more than just revision. “My favorite part is seeing which assignment the students pick as the one that shows the most growth. It’s usually one of their last few pieces, but sometimes they surprise me,” says Ms. Polizzi.

In Pegasus style, the eighth-grade portfolio builds on organizational and revision skills, but culminates in

PROGRAM

“Reflective writing requires deep soul-searching.

Students learn to recognize their own motivations.” reflective writing. Reflective writing requires deep soul-searching. Students learn to recognize their own motivations or, as Mrs. Wilder says, “to develop metacognitive thinking.” As students complete each assignment, they reflect on the challenges and strengths of the project.

Meanwhile, in the “decomposition journal,” named for its 100% recycled pages, reflection, poetry and journaling deepen the metacognitive practice in preparation for the final portfolio. Students combine their original journal writing with their reflections on the class and the processes they’ve learned to produce a final essay. This project captures the unique kismet of the final month of their last school year. The Pegasus experience culminates here: the last school dance, the last mile, the last set of finals, the last days of being together in the haven that, for many students, is the only school they’ve ever known.

If developing deep thinking while their world shifts isn’t enough, the Spanish Day Project turns the focus outward to broaden both students’ language skills and their worldview. Learning a language is inherently cumulative. Many eighth graders began their training in kindergarten. This project springboards off the research skills accumulated across the years. It pulls elements from the second-grade heritage day and the fourth-grade expert fair, and incorporates the experiences of the sixth- and seventh-grade Spanish Cultural Participatory Research (CPR) projects. Pegasus alumnus Jackson Bryant ’16 says, “We had to work very hard, but it was interesting.”

The passion of the students make the Spanish Day Project a capstone. The students draw across disciplines to write a five-paragraph research essay and create an oral and visual presentation entirely in Spanish. They field questions from their peers, teachers and parents to demonstrate fluency and comprehension. “For many students,” says Mrs. Harelson, eighth-grade Spanish teacher, “this project makes the first semester of high school Spanish easier, giving them an ‘easy A’ while getting used to high school.”

But is that enough? While many schools rely on highstakes testing to ensure accountability, do these portfolio projects provide a better solution to enhance learning over the assessment of final exams? “Last year it was much harder to study for the first semester finals than the end of year ones because I didn’t know how to study for a final,” says Owen Hammontree, eighth grader. “At the end of the year, I knew how much, and how to study, even though the tests were harder. I think this year’s finals will be easier.”

Which is more valuable—being good at testing or being an excellent writer? Being comfortable presenting and conversing in a second language, or conjugating verbs out of context? Perhaps there lies a balance between preparing for high-stakes testing and developing projects that promote critical thinking skills and creativity. Any school can teach how to take tests, but these types of projects are the essence of the difference between a Pegasus graduate and their peers.

The difference is cumulative.

Pooneh Khazei is a mom to two Pegasus students and a huge fan of their teachers. Contact: pooneh@earthlink.net

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Remedy for Stress David Andrade Last season, the Pegasus boys’ football team took the Thunder to victory. In one notable play, a Pegasus seventh grader caught the ball and scored an easy touchdown. So easy, in fact, he didn’t even need to run the last five yards. Instead, he casually trotted it across the goal line. It was a moment when many coaches might say, “Good job!” or “Way to go!”

Not Coach BJ Crabtree. He sized up the situation and saw it as a teachable moment. “Hey,” he said. “I want you to hustle every time. Okay?”

Crabtree congratulated the player, but his initial and instinctive reaction is significant. It reflects his values and coaching priorities. He emphasized to the player the importance of sportsmanship and hustle over the touchdown.

This example is a microcosm of what a Pegasus education embodies: an understanding that life success rests not upon achievements, but on the building of habits, processes, and frameworks for learning that will serve students throughout their academic and professional careers.

There are times when results matter. It’s critical for children to experience pressure, to place pressure on them by upholding standards and expectations, and to foster internalized self-pressure.

When a child doesn’t meet her goal, point out all the ways she showed a willingness to take risks.

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Pressure versus Stress Pressure isn’t always negative. A little can go a long way. Too much can lead to stress. But feelings of pressure are a natural result of importance. Pressure indicates, and is felt with, endeavors that are meaningful or valued. In contrast to stress, the goal isn’t to extinguish it. As famed Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz says, “It’s not the load that breaks you down; it’s the way you carry it.”

The aim should always be to have the right amount of pressure targeting the right goals. The “right amount” requires just enough to match the level of importance (whether externally or internally applied). Of course, the “right goals” are subjective. They depend on an individual’s beliefs, values, and prioritizations.

Stress, in contrast, can be defined as “the intellectual, emotional, or physical strain caused by change or demands.”

It’s both mentally and physically experienced. While it’s normal and often unavoidable, the goal is to minimize its presence.

The Case for Prioritizing a Stress-Free Childhood Some believe subjecting children to a little stress in the younger years will set them up for later success. After all, the stakes are lower when they’re young. How much of an effect can the stress experienced actually have on them? The answer is more than you think.

Research shows neurons in the brain of chronically stressed individuals may have fewer and shorter dendrites (pathways for sending information). This deficiency impairs communication with other dendrites, reducing the brain’s ability to effectively process information. Additionally, chronically high cortisol levels released during stress can lead to the death of brain cells in the hippocampus (located in the limbic system), which is critical to forming long-term memories.

INSIGHT

Beyond the neuroscience, there’s substantial sobering data to consider.

Eight percent of youth nationwide meet the clinical criteria for an anxiety disorder diagnosis. Last year, the American Psychological Association found teenagers’ stress rates were far higher than adults’—31% reported feeling overwhelmed, and 23% reported skipping meals because of it. In the extreme, stress can lead to lifelong problems.

When we emphasize results (grades, test scores, athletic victories) instead of process (strong work habits, effort, ethics), children internalize the idea that accomplishments mean success. When grades and victories are the goal, other people (teachers, referees) control our success. The success of a process-orientated goal isn’t other-dependent. Students derive satisfaction from themselves.

Emphasizing process also lessens the likelihood of maladaptive behaviors like cheating and poor sportsmanship, which can lead to more stress.

Proactive versus Reactive Measures The best way to address any problem is before it’s a problem. By explicitly teaching skills such as time-management,

organization, and planning, as well as healthy behavioral responses to pressure and stress, problems can be intercepted before they escalate.

According to positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman, a sense of accomplishment and success (achievement) is an important building block of well-being and happiness.

However, this is only one of five building blocks. The four remaining are: positive emotions (feeling good); engagement (being completely absorbed in activities); relationships (being authentically connected to others); and meaning (purposeful existence). Evaluate whether an unhealthy emphasis is being placed on achievement, in lieu of a balance among all of the building blocks.

We can all take a page from Coach Crabtree’s playbook. When a child doesn’t meet her goal, point out all the ways she showed a willingness to take risks. Celebrate her successful perseverance through the rough stages.

When she succeeds, find teachable moments in the process. Each situation is a chance for growth. As Kobe Bryant says, “Everything negative—pressure, challenges—is all an opportunity for me to rise.”

If stress has taken hold, there are a number of reactive measures that can be employed. Consider the following: Learn and practice mindfulness exercises De-stress through altruism.

Being kind to others feels good, and altruistic acts light up the brain’s pleasure centers.

Take a break from the sources of pressure that are resulting in stress: • Reduce the frequency or amount of the activity • Enlist the help of the support team (teachers, staff or outside professionals)

David Andrade is in his second year as a school psychologist at Pegasus. Contact: dandrade@thepegasusschool.org.

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The Parent Trap How Much Pressure Is Too Much?

Atoshi Shorey ‘Parenting’ may be one of the most active verbs in the English language. The role evolves along with the child. It adapts to a child’s personality and circumstances. It reflects parents’ goals and values. Once children enter school, a new set of mentors enter their lives. A parent’s role shifts again.

And again. Some parents see themselves as co-educators, teaming up with teachers to instruct their child. Others are cheerleaders, applauding from the sidelines. Some coach when needed, some not at all. Parenting approaches lie across the board. What happens when a parent’s desires don’t match a child’s motivation? What happens when parents push too hard, or in the wrong direction? This is where stress is born.

This fall, I launched an ongoing conversation with families and some staff members at The Pegasus School. Specifically, I wanted to know where they fit into their children’s education. We talked about parenting in general, the demands of academic and extracurricular pressure, and how they feel Pegasus prepares children for the stresses of college and career. Not surprisingly, opinions varied.

It Takes a Village “A parent’s role evolves as the child grows,” says Shveta Goel. “We start with being everything to our children, but as they mature our role changes.” Parents rely heavily on the external world to educate, train and coach their children. In today’s fast-paced world, there’s a need for several influencers to shape our children. “We look to teachers and coaches to educate our daughter in the traditional sense,” Alyson Rowden says. “But also to help her manage and navigate the world of adolescence while at school.”

“The key is to get each child to be her own internal motivator,” says Leslie Seidner. “To feel good when she does well, and be excited to do better next time when she does poorly.” As a result, reinforcements from coaches and teachers have a huge impact on forming the children’s internal motivation systems.

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FAMILY PROFILE

“The Pegasus community fosters an environment to develop the whole child.”

Parents as Guides and Facilitators “There’s a fine line between helping and doing,” says Kristin Brown. In some countries, cultural mores hold parents responsible for directing children toward high academic performance to achieve financial success and social status.

“Overparenting can undermine children’s developing sense of self-confidence and decision-making,” says Jen Pettis.

“Academically, Pegasus students may be performing above their grade level, but they’re still developing emotionally.”

Other parents are involved enough to understand their children’s responsibilities, struggles and successes, but they won’t push them to be something they’re not. “We will offer our daughter every opportunity to achieve her goals,” says Rowden. “But they are her goals, not our goals for her.”

Ultimately, parents want to ensure their children are selfreliant, independent thinkers. Pegasus provides a foundation and curriculum to enable this.

The Role of Enrichment Programs Most parents seek outside activities to provide children with enriching experiences in the arts or sports. “We believe the combination of school and enrichment will make our children more competitive for any college they choose,” says Krystian Cieplucha. “Better to give them extra enrichment than risk being too late in one area or another.”

Other parents aren’t willing to overschedule. “Asking our children to leave school, go to an academic enrichment class, compete in sports, and then come home to do homework is not the right balance for us,” says Brown.

Academic enrichment classes bring a spectrum of opinions. Some children enjoy subjects such as math, and ask for more in-depth instruction.

These programs, though, may lead to boredom in the classroom if the class isn’t at the same advanced level. A few families felt their child needed extra academic instruction and provided the support required.

However, in many cases, teachers advised parents that supplementary instruction made it difficult to assess the child’s progress and support them. Some parents felt, during summer months, math and reading programs maintained momentum and provided fun activities to keep children stimulated.

Preparing Children for their Futures Parents of students and alumni emphasized they chose Pegasus because it prepared children well for the future.

Parents of Pegasus adult alumni shared that the school instilled a love of learning. Their children were well prepared for their journey beyond Pegasus. The school instills invaluable skills such as public speaking, responsibility and organization, which are critical for success.

Children experience pressure very differently, and Pegasus teachers are adept at adjusting to suit the child’s needs. Teachers want each student to succeed. If a child isn’t working to her potential, they may apply additional pressure. Many children already experience plenty of pressure, either from parents or from within. Pegasus teachers respond to that, as well, and temper it.

Let Your Child Lead Ultimately parents want to ensure their child’s happiness, and provide them every opportunity to thrive to their full potential.

“Sometimes parents are so focused on the end result, they forget they just want their child to be happy,” says Shellie Ngyuen.

The Pegasus community fosters an environment to develop the whole child. Teachers are working to find that “sweet spot,” challenging the students enough to inspire them to “discover and develop their unique gifts” but not to the point where is dampens “intellectual curiosity and compassion.”

Atoshi Shorey is strategic partner lead at Google. She is the proud Pegasus parent of Anika (’23) and one-year old Siara.

Contact: atoshi.shorey@gmail.com.

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The Pegasus Learning Lounges are welcoming, non-restrictive learning spaces that provide more opportunities for collaborative work.

Turning Students Into Scholars 16

THE PEGASUS SCHOOL

Changing Our Program Changes a Child’s Mindset Kyra Sandstrom

“We are at our very best, and we are happiest, when we are fully engaged in work we enjoy on the journey toward the goal we’ve established for ourselves. It gives meaning to our time off and comfort to our sleep. It makes everything else in life so wonderful, so worthwhile.” ­—Earl Nightingale

PROGRAM

This insight embodies all that is good about teaching at Pegasus. Faculty and students are fully engaged, the work is enjoyable, and the goals are admirable. We seek to prepare our students to be productive thinkers beyond the classroom—to be not just students, but scholars. Teaching is a journey. It’s not providing a stack of facts to memorize. It’s engaging and involved. It means asking hard questions, digging deeply for answers. Learning is a messy, difficult business. That’s what makes it meaningful. That’s how the lessons endure.

As we create a rich educational environment for all students to be fully engaged and to enjoy their fifth-grade journey, we’re consistently assessing and reevaluating our curriculum, our technologies, and our learning spaces. We’d love to share a few exciting and recent changes with you.

Thinking Like a Scholar In fifth grade we’ve implemented a new history curriculum (Holt McDougal United States History). United States history has not changed, of course. The Revolutionary War remains the Revolutionary War. President George Washington was still the first president. History has not rewritten itself, so what demanded our attention?

As teachers, the approach to how we impart history to this iGeneration needed to change. Within each unit, we examine a critical guiding question. This question digs deeper than just the facts. We study not just the what, but the why and how.

How did American, African, and European cultures differ from one another before 1500?

How did Europeans change life in the Americas?

These become our facilitating classroom questions. Students read excerpts from the Popol Vuh, examine documents such as the Mayflower Compact and The Constitution, and observe the Mona Lisa through primary source examinations. Delving deep, asking hard questions, and applying this knowledge to their own lives makes them realize they’re not just students— they’re scholars. This insight allows them to create meaningful connections to their own lives through a world lens.

Researching Like a Scholar Pegasus gives faculty the powerful gift to take full advantage of technology. After all, we teach students who have never known a world without the iPhone. Every fifth-grade student has the opportunity to work on a MacBook Air. Through this 1:1 technology program, not only can students collaborate with Google Docs, create PowerPoint and Google Slide presentations, read, research, and organize formal reports, but they can also grapple with difficult academic concepts. The perfect question can send us off on a learning adventure.

Do people really cliff dive with winged suits?

How did Lucille Ball positively impact society?

Why is there a thunderbird at the top of many totem poles?

These are just a few of the questions that have ignited our students’ curiosity this year. Realizing technology goes beyond games, apps, and social media allows students to use the tools responsibly.

Working Like a Scholar Curriculum changes and technology additions do not equate to fully engaged students. So, what does? The learning environment plays a vital role in creating a dynamic and positive classroom experience. Traditional classrooms require children to sit in rows, facing forward, with the teacher lecturing to them. As Pegasus students discover and develop their unique gifts, a traditional setting doesn’t always make sense. They need to engage in a positive learning environment to enhance their interactions. This shift away from tradition became an area of research for our teaching team. Out of this research, we created our fifth-grade Learning Lounges.

The Pegasus Learning Lounges are welcoming, nonrestrictive learning spaces that provide more opportunities for collaborative work. Each fifth-grade classroom offers a variety of seating options that allow for student choice—standing desks or soft seating, whiteboard tables or traditional desks, rolling chairs or high stools. Options for a positive work environment are plentiful.

Flexible classroom seating gives students the power of choice, which allows them to discover their most productive working environment. This creative setting has increased student productivity, engagement, and collaborative discussions.

Students are happy and proud to walk into their classrooms.

As one student said, “I feel I work better in this kind of environment. I work better when I’m comfortable. I have less homework because I get so much done during the day.”

Nightingale’s observation that we’re at our best—our happiest—when we’re fully engaged in enjoyable work resonates throughout the hallways and classrooms of Pegasus. Teaching evolves. The classrooms reflect the everchanging outside world—its insights and technologies, its understanding of learning. The faculty works to incorporate those ideas, bringing fresh perspectives to young minds. That makes everything wonderful, and so worthwhile.

Kyra Sandstrom teaches fifth grade at The Pegasus School.

Contact: ksandstrom@thepegasusschool.org

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THRIVING UNDER PRESSURE The weight of expectations lies heavily on the young. The smallest hands juggle the most balls—academics, athletics, the arts. But children brim with energy and enthusiasm. Every challenge is a new game, every obstacle a new puzzle to solve. Our job is to ensure children rise to their potential without being crushed by stress. Pegasus, with its experienced faculty and nurturing staff, is prepared to do just that.

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Too Small to Fail

How Pressure is Crushing Our Kids

Marrie Stone

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Ours is an uncertain world. We’re preparing students to enter a job market that’s more globally competitive and financially unstable than ever before. This new environment leaves many of us feeling anxious about our children and their future. And that fear is trickling down onto our youth.

If only we can get students ahead, give them every advantage, push them to their potential, they’ll have the best chance. And why wouldn’t we? What’s to be lost by getting ahead? If we have the time, money and resources, why not use them to our child’s advantage? What’s the harm?

As Tiger Mother Amy Chua seems to suggest, maybe it’s possible to push our children to Harvard through relentless preparation and determination.

But every decision comes with consequences. Psychologists, Pegasus students and teachers have stepped forward to talk about some of them.

What’s Changed In the 1950s, kids could be kids. Now kids need to perform like adults—highly successful ones. What happened over the past several decades that caused us to put so much pressure on students to achieve? It may have started with Sputnik. When we lost that race against the Russians, America got scared.

The National Association for Gifted Children reports that in 1957, as a result of Sputnik, “substantial amounts of money were poured into identifying the brightest and [most] talented students who would best profit from advanced math, science, and technology programming.” Thus began the California Mentally Gifted Minor programs (MGM), and gifted and talented programs like GATE. Technological advances have also given parents constant access to specific information about their child’s day-to-day performance. While online gradebooks are useful tools, they’re making some parents more paranoid than ever. Instead of receiving report cards at the end of the semester, mothers might receive several emails every day, reporting each homework assignment and participation point.

There’s also the matter of parental performance and pride. Speaking for myself, at 45, I represent one of the first generations of women who could have “had it all.” Instead, I left a lucrative law career to stay home when my daughter was born. Parenting became my primary focus—my new career.

My child was, in some sense, my product. Her performance reflected my performance. Her mistakes, I reasoned, were my mistakes. If only I could do better, she would do better.

Once trained on the hamster wheel of higher education, I had difficulty separating business principles from parenting principles. Apply pressure to yield results. As one parent put it, “To be blunt, what is my return on investment?”

Fear Factor The proliferation of outside educational programs— Kumon, Avid Academy, the Russian School of Mathematics, Mathnasium, to name just a few—can fuel fear in parents.

How do you fight a good advertiser that convinces people their child will fall behind without them? Much of it is marketing and propaganda. But propaganda often works.

The media ignites fear, as well. Who hasn’t heard of the sad state of the U.S. educational system; or the outsourcing of domestic jobs to foreign countries; or the increased competition for college admissions? Even if true, plenty of companies are capitalizing on the fears these statistics ignite, making dubious promises about success.

Madeline Levine, psychologist, co-founder of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education’s Challenge Success Program, and author of The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, says, “Our whole culture has become more competitive. More than anything, there’s a bifurcation of wealth. Parents are anxious that if life is a zero sum game, we’re raising either winners or losers. That’s a big cultural shift that plays into the problems.”

Childhood and adolescence are the only times in people’s lives they’re expected to achieve in every subject, across the

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board AND be an athlete, an artist, and a musical prodigy.

“This just isn’t how human beings work,” Levine says.

The Myth of Getting Ahead Remember when your child learned to walk? She stood up, she fell down. She repeated the process a hundred times. Each time, you clapped and cheered, urged her to try again. She did— persevering through failure, delighting in success. She walked, and then she ran.

But that wisdom gets lost when kids start school. Some of those same parents, says Levine, tell their children if they get another B on a test, they’re going to end up flipping burgers the rest of their lives. The cost for making mistakes gets too high, too fast. And, as we all know, mistakes are critical. They facilitate learning.

There is no correlation between achievements in math, reading, or other academic programs during the primary grades and success in high school or college. Period. There are certain social skills and behavioral predictors in elementary education (K-3) that correlate with future academic achievement, but nothing based on curriculum. (See The American Institutes for Research College & Career Readiness & Success Center).

Keri Gorsage, fifth-grade teacher, provides an excellent example of the dangers of artificially pushing children ahead.

She knows about parental fear because she was once a Pegasus parent herself. Her daughter has a visual processing problem known as Irlen Syndrome that makes reading difficult. In 22

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second grade, she was placed in a developmental group. “Some call it the low reading group. I’ve even heard it called the ‘dumb group.’ That breaks my heart,” Gorsage says. There, in Mrs. Lessenger’s class, her daughter’s learning style was assessed, and she was given the time, attention, and tools necessary to navigate her world. “Once she figured out that she has this brain issue—that she’s not dumb—and learned how to cope with it, she took off.” By fifth grade, Pegasus teachers recommended moving her up a level, but Gorsage disagreed. “I wanted her in a group that was sized and paced to her advantage.” Now Gorsage’s daughter is thriving at Marine View Middle School, taking all the advanced sections they offer and finding success. “She learned strategies she never would have learned in a higher reading group,” Gorsage says. “It made all the difference.”

Psychologists call this scaffolding—giving children challenges that are difficult, but still within reach—and say it’s critical to early education. Pegasus teachers are practiced experts on getting this balance just right. “You take a child who is doing the right amount of math, at the right pace, making good progress,” says Victoria Olivadoti, third-grade teacher. “Maybe this child doesn’t love math, but now he has to do an hour more of it after school with a tutor? It sets him way back.”

Some parents say enrichment programs are fun, that they prevent boredom, and are better than screen-time. “In fact, these programs create boredom,” says Olivadoti. “Children thrive on novelty. When they get to their Pegasus class, they’ve already decided they know it all, even when they don’t.”

The other issue is burnout, Olivadoti says. She sees this all the time in a child’s sophomore year of high school, both in academics and in athletics. “That’s when it dawns on students they will have to keep this intensity up another seven to eleven years. They just give up.”

Hidden Messages in Parenting Children are internalizing their parents’ subconscious messages that they’re not good enough if they don’t score 100%. Many children feel they’re only as good as their last achievement. “My mom doesn’t like it when I make mistakes,” one third-grade

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What can be done outside the classroom, and at home?

student confided, after being asked how it made him feel when he didn’t think he’d do well on an activity. “She always tells me I could have done better.” Several students shared similar statements during an in-class writing assignment targeting performance anxiety and pressure.

“Approval from parents often comes from how kids perform, not from who they are,” says Levine. How often, when your child comes home, do you ask how she did on a test? Do you raise your eyebrow, or give a smile, hug, or high-five? If they struggle, do you rush to intervene? “We’re communicating our values to our kids whether we realize it or not,” says Levine. “The giveaways are so unbelievably clear.”

All the Pegasus teachers I interviewed report heartbreaking stories of students coming to them, begging to retake an assessment test. “My mom wants me moved.” “My parents are really upset.”

Gorsage says for some of her students, the fallout at home after assessments is catastrophic.

Karen Hurst, school nurse, agrees. “So many of our students’ issues are anxiety based. They’re under so much pressure to excel academically, athletically, artistically, and personally. Our students are plenty bright. They just need to manage their time and learn how to relax.”

“We need to always deal with the

child in front of us, not the child of our fantasies,” says Levine. “Our children cannot be assumed to follow in our footsteps, assuage our losses, or compensate for our inadequacies.”

Healthy Approaches to Pressure The good news is Pegasus faculty have found the canary in the coalmine and are actively working to address it. Many teachers are incorporating mindfulness training, and engaging with students around these topics, finding specific and individual ways to alleviate feelings of stress. “I want children to get over feeling that if something is hard, it’s an indicator they aren’t as smart as everyone thinks they are,” says Olivadoti. “I also offer language they can use to communicate what they’ve learned. This reduces stress dramatically.”

As David Andrade, Pegasus school psychologist, tells us in his article “Remedy For Stress,” pressure isn’t a bad thing. Applied appropriately, pressure can maximize performance and is a good indicator of things that are meaningful and important. It’s only an issue when it slips into undue stress. Pegasus provides the perfect training ground for learning these coping mechanisms. It’s a school that focuses on the whole child, and their wellbeing. Our students are receiving a gift that will pay dividends for a lifetime.

Trust the Teachers You Chose. Parents choose Pegasus to prepare and educate their children.

Trusting that those teachers are well-qualified and attentive to students’ needs is critical. Michelle Carr, reading specialist, says, “We want students to be appropriately challenged and not unproductively stressed. Adding pressures of outside tutoring and activities threatens the essence of who we are and why you chose Pegasus.”

Connect to Your Kid. Levine reminds parents that driving children to activities does not inherently count as quality time together.

Children crave intimate connections with their parents. Asking them how they are, instead of how they did, makes a difference.

“Create an inviting, listening presence,” she says.

Let your Child Have Successful Failures. As Bill Gates says, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it’s more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Model Healthy Behavior.

Your children watch you.

If you’re perpetually busy and stressed, they notice.

And, more than likely, they won’t want to follow in your footsteps. Modeling balance and healthy approaches to stress and pressure will help them do the same.

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Glint of

Gold High-Aspirational Children Exist

Karla Joyce

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FEATURE

Four Pegasus Families Make the Case for a Little Healthy Stress For adolescents, academic, athletic, and peer-group challenges were once considered domains of “good stress” and optimal learning environments designed to promote positive development. But the past decade has ushered in a proliferation of studies citing appalling spikes in chronic stress among teenagers at elite private high schools. In 2009, acclaimed documentary “Race to Nowhere” showcased students across the country who have been pushed to the brink. Julie Lythcott-Haims, former dean of freshman at Stanford University, chronicled the fallout of this trend in her 2015 bestseller, How to Raise an Adult. “Brilliant, accomplished students would sit on my couch holding their fragile parts together, resigned to the fact that this outwardly successful situation was their miserable life.”

Contributing to the stress for today’s high-aspirational teens are cold, hard realities. In 2007, 21,000 high school seniors applied to Harvard; 2,056, or 9.8% of them, were accepted.

This fall, 2,037 freshmen moved into Harvard Yard; 39,000 had applied. Do the math. And the Ivy League isn’t even an outlier. The population of California grew by 13 million between 1985 and 2015, but only one new campus was added to the UC system. This demographic equation becomes A.P. algebraic when globalism is considered. The international face of campuses today may encourage creative thinking, but it also leads to academic departments stacked with single ethnicities. When the subject of Asian academic prowess and culturally-encouraged pressure reaches the Wall Street Journal and warrants Time magazine covers, it is officially entrenched.

There is something about prevailing narratives, however, that I instinctively resist. This scary story disregards parental judgement, our wildly-diverse gifts, and personality itself… especially when ambitious. I can cultivate a grade-neutral house and extol the virtue of mistakes, but my twins still aim high, worry about achievement and, sometimes, they stress. It’s their nature, shared, yet uniquely expressed. One writes goals, in lip gloss, on her bathroom mirror. The other keeps quiet, all but hiding her effort. Some level of pressure is necessary to propel them, presumably, toward a happy adulthood. But the amount of that pressure — external or internal — is vastly different for each of them. I push, in that I ask for maximum effort. Depending on perspective, I’m either a good parent or a whipcracking zealot.

Absolutes axiomatically have holes. How can

we be both over-coddling children and crushing them with expectation? Without a saber-tooth tiger lurking around the corner or unceasing economic burdens, is this real stress or simply pressure? Why do we celebrate cultural differences yet criticize culturally-distinct parenting techniques?

Full confession. My twins did Kumon. With late summer birthdays delaying entry into Kindergarten, they started at age five as a way to play school.

My parent circle wasn’t large enough at the time to realize this made me “a bad mom.” (Years later, they admitted with giggles that they’d stashed empty pages under their mattresses.)

We also required sports in our family, and those same giggles graced soccer fields and

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FEATURE

frustrated basketball coaches for years. The only “talents” to emerge from those early adventures was gumption, the ability to nail each other with a rock-hard ball, with precision, and infectious delight.

That, as it turns out, is a winning combination for volleyball.

Excellence is a Process Anthropologists, looking back, will easily unearth the petri dish from our current culture where pressure, expectation and tyrannical-parenting proliferate; it’s called club sports. Molly and Emma, my Pegasus eighth graders, tried out for their first club volleyball team in fifth grade and remarkably, openly, overnight, they changed. They absorbed hours of practice and tournament-play into their weekly schedules without protest, braved coach criticism and peer judgement, and faced the palpable stress of stepping up to a service line at match point before white-knuckled parents, missing it, and surviving… at eleven. By twelve, they were charting a plan to make the varsity team in high school. A beloved beach-summer was sacrificed to train consistently and weigh top-tier clubs. By thirteen, they had better coaching and conditioning and tougher competition to refine their skills.

Now they’re saying, “It’s time to get serious.”

Improvement in volleyball is credited to volume of touches. In other words, training pays. Watching that concept manifest organically in my preteens, without lecture, was exhilarating.

How does a parent respond to canI-work-harder?

Answer: “Thank you, Pegasus.” I took seriously the third-grade program of empowering the child by stepping back. So this display of planning and progress and personal management is all them.

On paper, they could be characters in our modern story of stressed-out over-scheduled kids.

But in real life they’re, well, still giggling.

The Pegasus School was founded as a safe haven Photo: Dave Cruz davecruz.com

for high learners. Inherent in that calling is the understanding that a little stress and discovery go hand-in-hand, and that readiness, effort, and reasonable expectation are, together, the ticket to progress. From test-taking to public speaking, Pegasus builds stress-management skills into age-appropriate bytes that, ideally, translate. When demand and expectation exceed readiness, excessive stress may happen. But, sometimes, readiness is just plain outsized.

“Not stressed,” insists Ann Malzahn, referring to her Pegasus eighth grader, Victor, and his full-tilt commitment to hockey.

“It is part of his life, it’s routine, it’s in his fiber.” It is possible that Victor Malzahn, like a puppy, dreamed of chasing pucks in utero. At age three, he asked to play. By six, his parents acquiesced to skate lessons but the stick quickly followed.

By seven, two years short of the typical three-year trajectory, he was invited to play hockey with the Junior Ducks. Today, it looks like this: during the September to February season, ten practice hours per week, 12 league games throughout Southern California, and five cross-country tournaments.

Post-season, ironically, ramps up.

Victor is working methodically toward his goal to get drafted to the U.S. Hockey League in high school; 96% of those kids receive college offers. For years, Ann bowed to the quicksand of doubt: “What if this doesn’t work?” “What if he gets hurt?” “What if his performance in school is compromised?”

When it wasn’t, she shifted her mental debate. “Why am I so concerned about the outcome?” she wondered. “Look at the process. Setting goals, then getting out of your comfort zone trying to achieve them, is the same skill we need to work at a math problem over and over again before solving it.” At this rate, Victor will be primed to tackle some serious equations.

“Granted,” she continues, “it’s pushing the envelope. But we can’t know if a young person is at the floor or ceiling of his potential unless we give him the support to explore that.”

If that kind of talk gives you goosebumps, you’re a normal Pegasus parent. But potential, like ambition, like talent, like energy, is as unique to an individual as DNA; parental aspiration doesn’t transfer. When a passion does present itself a parent, like a good coach, has a choice: push hard for fleeting accolades, or enable development. They will stress.

The key, according to Ann, is to “recognize that we all have different tolerance for stressors.”

When Work Is Play Lythcott-Haims, the former Stanford dean who studied the over-parented, overscheduled kids of privileged families and found them lacking resilience, offered solutions. The gist of it was classic Pegasus: nurture kids’ unique gifts rather than mold them like “little bonsai trees,” and help them develop life skills like doing chores, critical thinking, and public speaking. Unfortunately, at the same time, super achievement

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“How can we be both overcoddling children and crushing them with expectations?” is the story of the day. Tell a child whose eyes grow wide at the stunning teen-feats we all extol, to chill, to just be a kid; it doesn’t connect. It’s not that the achievements are bad; it’s that they’re touted so highly, puffed up out of proportion to what is treasurable in the everyday.

Monica Suh, mother to Pegasus eighth grader Hannah Kim, unwittingly demonstrated this current phenomenon, that we celebrate laurels more than character, when she replied to my email-request for an interview. Hannah came to Pegasus in seventh grade; her disposition was uniquely interpreted in two assumed-contradictory characterizations, by a peer: “She is really, really happy and she practices violin before school.” Preempting my questions on personal motivation and stress management, Monica forwarded to me a summary of Hannah’s triumphs: merit scholarship recipient from the Colburn School, Young Musicians Foundation, and Junior Chamber Music; frequent soloist; and named PBS LAaRT “exceptional young musician” in 2015.

But is she stressed?

The violinist herself puts that worry to rest. “I love it,” she says with almost whispered sincerity. Her typical week includes three to four hours of practice daily with five to six on the weekends, more or less depending on performances and mood. “Some days, I’m just not motivated.” The move to Pegasus added a new twist to her practice schedule: homework. Her previous schools had never assigned any, so her musical progress was unfettered. “Now, it’s tough.”

When asked why so many hours at practice are necessary, she responds like a harried CEO... or a dogged toddler: “Because there is so much to do!” For Hannah, it’s not a long term target that keeps her going. It is the incremental progress and pride of accomplishment that motivates her voluminous time commitment today. That, and, “I just love playing.”

Pegasus fourth grader, Evelyn Devir, can relate. Evelyn wasn’t an obvious candidate for gigantic undertakings.

“She was always an introvert,” says her mother, Tina. “Smaller than everyone.” In first grade, when she asked for gymnastics lessons with her friends, her parents obliged. Together, the girlfriends worked their way through a developmental team to the official start of competitive gymnastics, Level 2. But when it came time to commit in writing to one year of heavy-duty participation, Evelyn alone signed. According to Tina, the other parents echoed that sad refrain that so often keeps kids from trying: “They said that their kids were never going to be

Olympic gymnasts, so it wasn’t worth it. It was too much.”

Today, Tina and her husband are thrilled they didn’t listen.

These days, Evelyn practices nearly 16 hours a week. “She would go more,” Tina says, “if she could. She wears a leotard under her clothes to get there faster.” If there is pressure it’s woven seamlessly with successes, team camaraderie, and the thrill of performing. “There are definitely kids on her team whose parents see gold medals or tickets to college,” Tina points out. But they’re missing the point. “When Evelyn found gymnastics she came out of her shell. She feels bigger, stronger, more confident... and that spills into the rest of her life.”

There are two tales of stress. One happens when parental expectation eclipses the joy of developmentally-appropriate achievement. The other happens when what we want is simply two steps out of reach. In the case of the latter, I say: stretch for it. Because, sometimes, finding yourself takes a little extra effort.

Karla Joyce is a Pegasus parent, PTO president and contributing writer for the Pegasus Magazine.

Contact: kjoyce@cox.net

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Mission Accomplished The How and Why Behind Our New Mission Statement Kristen Brady

The story of Pegasus begins with intellectual curiosity and compassion. We are a vibrant academic community that inspires bright, motivated students to discover and develop their unique gifts. Teachers and students build trusting relationships that foster self-reliance, confidence, and innovative thinking. A Pegasus education equips students to achieve future academic success and make a positive impact on society.

We are all part of the story of The Pegasus School. We’re the characters: the protagonists, the antagonists, the heroes.

Students, parents, faculty and staff—we’re all necessary actors in the school’s tale. We are the ones who make Pegasus. Our new mission statement was born by reflecting on all the stories of what makes Pegasus unique.

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Our Team The committee was comprised of individuals representing the Pegasus community. Board members, parents, and faculty all convened to construct the perfect mission statement. We were wearing many hats, and the final product needed to echo the voices of the representative groups.

The committee included the following members: Mike Mulroy, Board member Pegasus parent, writer/lawyer Karla Joyce, Board member Pegasus parent, writer, PTO president Marrie Stone, Alumni Parent Alumni parent, writer Jessica Chaapel, Fourth-grade teacher 1 year at Pegasus Shalini Mattina, Director of Communications Alumni parent, 12 years at Pegasus Carin Meister, Librarian Pegasus parent, 10 years at Pegasus Nancy Wilder, Middle School English teacher 10 years at Pegasus Kristen Brady, Learning Support Specialist 17 years at Pegasus The group had varying backgrounds, but the experience and skill-set necessary to take on this “mission.” We wanted not only to express the special place Pegasus is today, but also inspire growth for tomorrow. We dedicated ourselves to ensure that the mission authentically represented Pegasus.

Our Story

Our Process

The committee began to share stories of current and former students, our leading and supporting characters.

We told the stories that are shared by existing teachers with new teachers. Stories that provide perspective, motivation and satisfaction.

At Pegasus, there is rarely a damsel or don in distress that can’t be rescued. Somehow, knowing that the tumultuous journey can be a part of the happily ever after ending brings a sense of calm. At this point, people began sharing their own place in the story of Pegasus.

We discussed everything from the admission process to teachers’ conferences, from lessons in Shakespeare to lessons in physics. The shift from listing words and phrases to telling stories is when something special began to happen.

As members of this community, we all have these stories. Sometimes the stories happen in a moment, and sometimes we hear a story years later that allows us to catch a glimpse of the fruit of our hard work. As we told stories—and, yes, we cried a bit—we wanted to write a mission statement that reflected them. Actually, the mission statement began to sound like a story.

If Pegasus is a unique place, why would our mission statement not be equally unique? We are out-of-thebox thinkers, and our mission statement reflects that thinking. It doesn’t fit neatly into a text box.

We felt compelled to honor the past, acknowledging what kind of school Dr. Hathaway started and her motivations. We needed to recognize the present, and how our students’ lives are better because of the educational environment we provide. And we wanted to incorporate evolutions in education and how they will affect our students.

Our mission statement honors the past and celebrates the present. More importantly, it embraces the future, as it inspires upcoming generations of students to continue to write the story of Pegasus.

Our team reviewed a myriad of primary source materials from the school’s history. The documents reflected Pegasus’s past traditions and philosophies and gave us a unique look at the tremendous growth that has occurred in the past 32 years. We read everything from the original mission statement written in 1991 to various self-studies to vision and strategic plans to accreditation reports. By the time we met, we each had our own unique perspectives, notes, questions, and beliefs about where we were headed.

We wanted to avoid clichés and buzzwords. The statements we liked best were longer because they attempted to explain the character and aspirations of the individual schools. And, as a result of our accreditation self-study, we knew our current mission statement was too generic and didn’t reflect the heart of our school.

We contributed our unique perspectives—my own understanding of the importance of our history and traditions; Karla’s view as a writer, parent and PTO President; and Jessica’s perspective as a newcomer.

We jotted down words and phrases. And then, we hit a wall. We realized none of our attempts were aspirational or unique. We didn’t want phrases that could be applied to any school.

Dr. Hathaway described a place for giftedness without using the word gifted. In fact, that word never appeared in any iteration of the mission statements over the years.

We reflected on Laura’s philosophies, her core beliefs, and started talking about the story of Pegasus.

Kristen Brady is the learning specialist in the Pegasus Middle School. She has been teaching at Pegasus for 17 years, of which 12 were spent as a fifth-grade teacher and the past five as a member of the Learning and Support Team. Contact: kbrady@thepegasusschool.org

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Filling the Gap Year Ryan Cain & Emma Robertson Beth Hallett

From Japanese ceramic art to Paris Fashion Week, Pegasus graduates Ryan Cain ’12 and Emma Robertson ’12 explore their interests prior to commencing Ivy League educations For Ryan Cain, it was love at first sight, but the object of his affection caused him a dilemma. In a ceramics class during his freshman year at Cate School in Carpinteria, California, Cain became captivated by Japanese ceramic art. He was so smitten by the process and the pottery that he yearned for a postgraduation apprenticeship with a ceramics master in Japan; however, Yale University had accepted him to matriculate in the fall. He was forced to make a difficult decision: Should he stay on the academic treadmill and graduate with his friends, or should he defer his admission and fly to a country where he did not speak the language so he could immerse himself in the art of ceramics?

Cain had “quite a long list” of concerns about his gap year decision: losing his academic momentum, living in a foreign country, and obtaining an apprenticeship. He shared those worries with adults he respected, and they encouraged him to pursue his artistic interests. They believed he would benefit from the experience. On the last possible day to decide, Cain informed Yale of his decision to take a gap year. He concluded that time away from school would allow him to recharge his academic energy and, he reasoned, “If it goes horribly wrong, I still have another plan to fall back on.” As backup plans go, attending Yale is a good one.

Cain had made his choice, but he did not yet have an apprenticeship, and those jobs were not easily obtained. He enlisted his former Cate School ceramics teacher to write a letter of recommendation for him, and Cain sent the letter to numerous masters. Eventually, the mayor of Mashiko, a small village in Japan known worldwide for its pottery, invited Cain to meet a local artist who might be willing to host him. To show proper respect to the artist, Cain flew to Japan for the

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Pottery by Ryan Cain ‘12

luncheon meeting, and, despite their language barriers, the master offered him the job.

Recently, Cain packed his bags and headed to Mashiko, where, for six to eight months, he will be a master’s apprentice. No doubt, he will return home far more accomplished in his ability to work with clay. Even if his art does not become his career, Cain believes it will at least become a lifetime avocation. His gap year decision was difficult, but, to him, the potential reward is definitely worth the risk. (His beautiful ceramics, created before he left, can be found at www.ryanjcain.com.)

After years of excelling in rigorous academic pursuits, Emma Robertson was rewarded with an invitation from Harvard College to matriculate at the prestigious school in the fall.

Robertson happily accepted, but not this fall. Instead of returning to the classroom after high school, she plans to use her time off to enjoy herself, explore and re-energize.

Obtaining consent from Harvard to take a gap year was not difficult, and Robertson suffered little trepidation about her decision to defer enrollment. She reasoned, “Harvard actually sent all the admits a letter discussing the benefits of taking a gap year, so if they encourage it, it can’t be a bad thing.” In fact, according to the Emma Robertson ‘12

THOSE WHO SOAR

Time away from school would allow him [Cain] to recharge his academic energy…

Center: Ryan Cain ‘12

Harvard website, every year “between 80 and 110 students defer matriculation to the College.” Robertson submitted an email to Harvard to explain the reasons for her request, along with an outline of her plans. The administrators granted her request, and she was ready for adventure.

Approval in hand, Robertson rembarked on her summer plans. She traveled to Europe (France, Spain and Italy) and then to New Jersey and New York. Because she had already been away from home during so much of high school (at The Thacher School in Ojai, California), she decided to stay in Newport Beach the second half of the summer, reading, going to the beach, and sightseeing. As summer turned to fall, Robertson “shadowed a prominent defense attorney and was able to watch her in court and even visit the judge’s chambers.”

Robertson is considering a career in law, so this exposure to the legal system was particularly interesting to her.

Robertson is now back in France, and her gap year plans

continue to unfold. She has never wanted to choose just one gap year activity; instead, she wants exposure to a variety of experiences. So far, she has assisted women working in Paris Fashion Week and she has volunteered at a bookstore. After more travel, she hopes to have an internship in London for two or three months in law, politics, or publishing. Following that, she plans to work in San Francisco at a nonprofit entity in one or more of the causes near to her heart: educating children, supporting battered women’s shelters, and working toward destigmatizing mental illness. Wherever her path takes her, Robertson knows she will benefit from her gap year. Her advice: “If you are considering it, or if it’s in the back of your mind, it’s definitely an idea worth pondering.”

Beth Hallett is a real estate broker in Newport Beach, attorney, and the mother of Eric Hallett (’07).

Contact: bethhallett@gmail.com

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Alumni Connections Benjamin Jenkins

Brandon ’99 and Tracy ’01 visiting Shanghai China.

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Stewart Hagestad won the

U.S. Mid-Amateur golf tournament in September. This amazing victory earned him an invitation to play in the Masters at Augusta in April. This is the first of four major professional tournaments to be played each year.

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Lindsay Chambers

graduated from Northwestern University with a major in Theater, a major in International Studies, and a minor in Film and Media Studies. Since then, she has been busy doing the things she loves: acting, improv, and screenwriting.

Lindsay Chambers ’06 plays a small part on the MTV series Sweet Vicious.

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She is currently playing the part of Fiona Price on the MTV series Sweet Vicious. This is an exciting new series, which premiered on MTV. Chambers has a small part, but you will be able to see her in every episode of the first season. ¶ Monica Schnapp attends graduate school at University of San Diego. She is in the final year of her Master of Arts in Higher Education Leadership. She also works on campus as a graduate assistant for Student Leadership, Involvement and Changemaking working specifically with Fraternity and Sorority Life as the panhellenic advisor. Schnapp will graduate in May and is hoping to start a job at a college or university on the West Coast. ¶ Ryan Hueston graduated from Orange County High School of the Arts in 2010 and Dartmouth College in 2014. While at Dartmouth, Hueston sang with “Sing Dynasty” an acapella group at the college. After graduating, Hueston worked as a studio art intern at Dartmouth. He is now at California College of the Arts as a Master of Fine Arts candidate. He recently won an “IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Award” and was presented with a $10,000 grant for his project. Named The Navajo Nation Boarding School Project, “the initiative proposes to renovate and reopen a currently abandoned historical boarding school structured in the Navajo Mountain area of Utah. Run by students and young adults from the surrounding community, the program will allow for arts education and expression currently absent from the current public school systems on the reservation.” This project was very close to Hueston as

Ellen Emerson ’09

his grandmother taught there and his mother attended school there with her siblings before it was shut down.

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Steve Michaelsen graduated from Wake Forest University in 2016. While in college, he competed on the Men’s Track and Field team as a Shot Put and Discus thrower, scoring at multiple ACC conference finals. Michaelsen has been working as a Brand Digital .com Specialist for Running at Nike’s World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.

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Ellen Emerson graduated University High School in 2013. Emerson now attends University of Southern California on an academic scholarship with a double major of computer science and physics, which she will complete in May. Emerson is also a member of the USC Women’s Ice Hockey team and was president of the organization last year. After graduation, she will be working with International Movie DataBase, a subsidiary of Amazon, located in

ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

Jessica Harris ’12

Santa Monica. ¶ Creagan Lydon is a senior at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, where he is studying philosophy. He is excited to be attend a semester abroad in Dublin in January.

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Jessica Harris was featured

in the Daily Pilot for taking part in the Dave Mohs Memorial Orange County High School Volleyball All-Star festivities at Newport Harbor. She and the rest of the All-Stars weren’t only competing for their schools. They were playing to raise money for Lucy Fisher, a two-year-old who has to undergo open heart surgery because she was

Creagan Lydon ’09

diagnosed recently with a soft heart murmur. Currently, Harris is a starting freshman on the Princeton volleyball team which is undefeated in the Ivy League at time of publication.

Harris received Ivy League Rookie of the Week during a week of stellar performance. ¶ Cameron Lydon graduated in June from Sage Hill School where he served as the school vice president in addition to several other leadership roles. Lydon recently achieved Eagle Scout rank as part of Pegasus Troop 911. Lydon is a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and plans to major in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Elizabeth Abbott Schreiber ’03 graduated from Mater Dei in 2007. She then attended Marymount College in Palos Verdes for two years before she was offered an academic scholarship to USC which she accepted. Schreiber attended and graduated in 2012 with a BA in Political Science.

She was on the dean’s list for her academic standing while also working full time at Mastro’s Steakhouse.

She married in 2014 and in March 2016 Schreiber gave birth to her son, Ace Thomas Schreiber. “He is the light of my life.” Ace’s godparent is is a Pegasus alumna Liz Weber ’03. Schreiber reflected on her Pegasus experiences, “In addition to a phenomenal education, I made friends for life. Liz Weber (Zadro) and I met in third grade, and she is still my best friend. She threw my baby shower and she and her husband are Ace’s godparents. I plan to parent my child based on the integrity, morals, and academic curiosity that were embedded into me at Pegasus. I feel very lucky to have attended a school that forever shaped the scholar, mom, and wife I am today!”

Chris Barkhordar ’09 visiting Pegasus on the last day of the 2015-16 school year.

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ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

Kinsale Hueston ’14 (center) pictured with Pegasus classmates Amanda Miskell ’14, Juila Qualls ’14, Juilana Brandt ’14, and Mary Sojian ’14

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Carly Perri, a senior at

Fountain Valley High School, participates in ASB (Associated Student Body/School Government), where she is now the current Student Body President. Perri is also on the board for a club called Friday Night Live that promotes a drug and alcohol free lifestyle for students in high school. “Being involved in high school has created incredible amounts of opportunity for myself. I also truly appreciate what knowledge and skills Pegasus helped me develop in elementary and middle school to prepare me to succeed at FVHS. High

Cameron Lydon ’12

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school is an amazing experience and it is important to take it moment by moment because before you know it, it will be senior year and those moments will become some of the most special memories of your youth.”

In addition to these extracurriculars, Perri swims for FVHS and recently committed to Duke University on a competitive swimming scholarship and will be attending the school next fall. “In swimming, I had actually acquired a rough injury my junior year, a fractured rib, that held me from performing for about 8 months. I was extremely scared it would reduce my chances of getting into a university with Division 1 swimming. Thankfully my efforts inside and outside the pool leading to my junior year were strong enough to still be recruited by college coaches. Even though injuries can be extremely disheartening, they are truly struggles worth succeeding through. I am extremely excited and proud to sign to Duke University and cannot wait to attend the school in the fall of 2017.”

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Kinsale Hueston is a junior

at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. Hueston made the varsity

Carly Perri ’13

soccer team as a freshman and now plays varsity lacrosse. She is a straight A student, president of the Native American Club that raises money for Native American Charities, and volunteers with Los Angeles Native American programs. Hueston is also an actress. Last spring, Hueston performed with the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles in a play called “Urban Rez.” In March she will be acting in the Native Voices at the Autry’s “Fairly Traceable,” in the Wells Fargo Theater at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park. Hueston continues working on her Gold Award project with her Girl Scout troop which began when they were Brownie troop members at Pegasus. Kinsale won four scholastic awards for photography and writing last year. She writes fiction, poetry, and songs and sings and plays several instruments. She has fun singing in a band at the School of Rock in Rancho Santa Margarita.

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Anya Lydon and her mother

recently moved to Amsterdam so she can further pursue her ballet dreams. Lydon attended freshman year at Sage Hill School, but with professional ballet aspirations, made the decision to enroll in a collegeprep online school for sophomore year. Rather unexpectedly, during the summer at a Dutch National Ballet program she was offered a trainee position in their academy, at age 15, their youngest ever. Dutch National is one of the world’s leading ballet companies. Lydon’s days are rigorous as she trains all day and handles college-prep academics late into the evenings and on weekends. She is very happy living her dream! ¶ Jamie Cataldo is involved in the music program at Mater Dei. She plays several instruments including guitar, ukulele, piano, bass, and slapstick.

Cataldo’s favorite subject is Spanish.

ALUMNI CONNECTIONS

Anya Lydon ’15

Jack Makler ’16 (left)

Her enjoyment of the language was inspired at Pegasus. In addition, Cataldo is a volunteer at the Aquarium of the Pacific where she teaches and presents about aquarium life and marine biology. ¶ Kathy Nguyen-Ly is a member of the Mater Dei choir.

With this group, she travelled to Rome and sang in the Sistine Chapel.

Nguyen-Ly also plays violin and piano.

She placed in the top ten percent when she took the highly regarded National Piano Playing Auditions.

Academically, Nguyen-Ly was one of the first to take AP Seminar, a new class at Mater Dei which is a research based capstone. They are given broad topics to focus their research on and draw conclusions. Recently, Nguyen-Ly studied the validation of generational categorizations. Another favorite has been the effect of language on population. Nguyen-Ly enjoys the class because she is taught to look at subjects with multiple perspectives.

is coming out and was featured at a sold out event this fall in Los Angeles.

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Jack Makler started a

clothing company called NOAP. Spelling it similar to “soap” gives the brand a basis of staying clean and saying no to drugs. New clothing

Previous Students

Shea Hueston is a freshman at St. Margaret’s. She made the varsity cross country team with three other freshmen, and they make a formidable team. St. Margaret’s Cross Country team placed first, with varsity womens’ and mens’ teams placing first in each of their races. Hueston also plays varsity lacrosse with her sister, Kinsale. She also helps her sister with the Native American club. Hueston and her fellow former Pegasus classmates are still together as a scout troop working towards their Gold Award projects. Hueston sings and plays the drums in the School of Rock band in Rancho Santa Margarita. ¶ Kyle Glaser, former Pegasus student, was hired by the Baseball America magazine. This is “truly a dream come true for me.” Glaser is a national writer covering all things baseball and working with some of the brightest minds in sports media to help produce one of the country’s premier magazine headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. Glaser is

ready for the big move and looking forward to this important career move. Glaser “thanks all at Pegasus who have supported and helped make this possible.” ¶ Cameron Lee, former Pegasus student, attends Loma Linda University School of Medicine. He will be moving to Albert Einstein Hospital in New York for his internship in family practice and ophthalmology.

Cameron Lee

Pegasus Magazine Winter 2016

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