Multi-faceted Refractions

One year ago, yesterday, began the the most challenging year in my life. My daughter was hospitalized for the third time in nine weeks, but we began to unravel the problems that she was having.

Fast forward to this year. She is off on a school trip to the UK with a group of her classmates. The stresses we face are typical junior year stresses, not ones caused by medical issues. She is happy, completed a successful junior varsity volleyball season, and her academic acheivement is as high as it is ever been. We have had a number of opportunities to share, especially around music, where she loves going to and finding the smaller bands that “just may make it big.”

As I start the second year full year of blogging on this space, I am hopeful that the positive energy she has is will translate into a positive energy on this space. I am really excited about the projects at school and the direction that we are taking.

As an independent school educator, we occasionally get invited to participate to help other schools evaluate themselves. For a school, this process occurs every seven years. Six weeks ago, I accepted an assignment from the Whitfield School in St. Louis to be a part of their visiting team.

Each team has a leader, who organizes the efforts of the group of educators who evaluate the school. When I got my first email from the leader our team, I saw the name of the leader and knew there was something that about this person which seemed familiar, but I could not put my figure it out.

The head of school in charge is Peter Fayorian, the head of school at the Greenhills School in Ann Arbor. Not a common name. I liked the tone of his email and knew that I would love the style in which he would lead the team. But I still couldn’t figure out what was bugging me about him.

Last night, it hit me, maybe this was the same person who I had gone to Middle School and High School with, even did a few science projects in his basement in the 9th Grade. We were in the same classes, but ran in different groups. In a large public high school, with a graduating class of 750+, it might have been. I thought the name was the same. But since I moved the day after graduation, I have lost track of most of my high school classmates.

I got my old yearbook out, and yes, the name was spelled the same. Upon Googling him, I couldn’t quite connect the dots. When I did a Google image search, found a picture which led to an article that confirmed that in fact he is the same person I went to school with for six years.

We will have some catching up to do. I wonder if he is aware of the connection?