Head of School's Blogs

A Student's Perspective

by Dr. G 17 November, 2011

Given the floods impact on the ISB community, I wanted to use this as a blog topic. Then this morning I received a letter from an ex-ISB student, Sierra Chandler. She is now a student at Pace University in the United States. Frankly, her words communicate the message I wished to send far better than I ever could.  She viewed a video about the ISB flood relief efforts and then she wrote the following:

“The video made me so unbelievably proud of my young classmates and I just had to share that joy with anyone who would listen/watch.

ISB was a pretty great place to go to school. My classmates were intelligent, well-rounded and pretty darned compassionate. At ISB, we were high achievers. We all subscribed to the “Asian Grading System” (wherein an A is acceptable and B is shameful) and you were crazy if you weren’t involved in some school organization, both community service and for leisure.

When I went to live in Cincinnati for my senior year I met some cool people but they didn’t come close. I didn’t really realize how ISB had shaped me as a person until I had a taste of something else. For a year I attended SCPA, a charter school that everyone wanted to attend. But as nice as the students were they didn’t care about school or their community. They were a completely different kind of teenager having a completely different High School experience: Not paying attention in class, skipping school, having no ambition beyond that weekend plan… It was a difficult culture shock to deal with.

I am aware that the participation and academic excellence was ingrained in us from an early age at ISB with the goal of being the most appealing college candidate possible. By total accident, somewhere along the way we ISB students genuinely began to care about all that. We wanted to get straight As in school. We wanted to make positive changes to our community. We wanted to spend our Friday’s doing community service and staying late at school every day to be in a play,  practice for a band concert or be on a team. It was an understanding that anyone who didn’t care about these things, who would go straight home after school, wasn’t a person worth knowing. At least, I certainly didn’t know anyone who did that.

ISB kids are ambitious. They are future doctors and lawyers and world leaders. Even the ones who had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives knew that, whatever it was, they would be the best at it.What I mean to say in all of this is that I am grateful for ISB. It is responsible for cultivating so many of the things my friends and I love about each other and ourselves”

Sierra Chandler

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