This article appeared as "In Real Life" in the Spring 2023 issue of Independent School.Text message abbreviations fascinate me. By now, we’re all familiar with old favorites like BTW, LOL, or BFF. Perhaps you’ve written 2G2BT (too good to be true) or BYTM (better you than me). Or maybe TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), which is what I expect some colleagues have written, or at least thought, in response to my emails.
But coming out of the pandemic, as we grapple with what it truly means to be connected, there’s one example of textspeak that my colleagues and I made a point of emphasizing at Falmouth Academy (MA): IRL (In Real Life).
More than 1.21 billion of us have Instagram accounts where we collectively spend more than 34 trillion minutes per day. There are a billion TikTok users, and although everyone says no one uses Facebook anymore, an astonishing 2.9 billion of us have active accounts. Indeed, by some counts, the average person spends two hours and 32 minutes per day on social media, which at that rate would eventually add up to six years and eight months of their lives. You could argue that thanks to social media and cellphones, we are the most connected generation in human history. Or are we?
Independent schools, and certainly Falmouth Academy, are about making meaningful connections IRL, which exceed by a wide margin any connection we might make through our phones or social media accounts. In our schools, we are connected by a shared set of values and a common history, our love of learning and pursuit of scholarly excellence, our pledge to treat others as we wish to be treated, our belief that learning and working in a diverse environment stimulates creative and critical thinking, and so much more.
So many independent schools were lauded for how they managed to educate during the pandemic because they are good at connection. We’ve always recognized the importance of our here-and-now social networks; we know they are delicate organisms that must be tended to with care and concern. We know that in communities this tight, the actions or sense of well-being of just one of us has far-reaching implications, positive and negative, for the actions and sense of well-being of the rest of us. And these connections serve as a sort of socio-emotional vaccine, a layer of protection from the fragmentation and anxiety that afflicted so many communities over the past few years.
I once told our students that, someday, someone may say of them—with some degree of cynicism, I suspect—that they got this or that because they “have connections,” or they’ll say derisively, “It’s all about who you know.” But when you invest in a school community and in each other in real life, your connections will nourish you, and rightfully so, for the rest of your life. This I wish for my students and for all school communities … FTBOMH (from the bottom of my heart).
This article was adapted from a recent post on Green’s Head of School Blog and back-to-school remarks.