I grew up in a small fishing town on the coast of Connecticut, long before it became a destination for people carrying canvas totes and seeking "authenticity" in the form of $38 artisanal candles. Back then, the authenticity was gritty. The town smelled of diesel fuel, gutted flounder, and the low tide.
The Portuguese had anchored the place for four centuries—the DaGamas, the Silvas, the Ribeiros—men and women who made a living pulling from the gray Atlantic with hands that looked like eroded cliffsides. I went to elementary school with their children in a brick building that held the particular sensory qualities of mid-century public education: damp wool coats in winter, the dust of eraser shavings, the faint smell of chalk and milk cartons. On Sundays, I saw these children again at St. Mary's, where Father Loftus's voice boomed off the stone, and we fidgeted through catechism in the basement.
In a town that has no edges, where the school, church, and docks all bled into one another, Tiago was somewhere in every frame. He had a mind like a steel trap. He could calculate the weight of a catch or the trajectory of a foul ball faster than Mrs. O'Malley could write the equation on the chalkboard. I remember watching him once during a math lesson, his eyes tracking her chalk marks with something like hunger, his lips moving silently through the proof before she'd finished writing it.
But when called upon, Tiago would shrink. He would mutter. His shoulders would round toward his desk as if he were trying to fold himself into something smaller—something that wouldn't be noticed. I didn't understand it then. I was eight, maybe nine. I only knew that there was something strange in watching a boy who could outthink everyone in the room convince himself that he couldn't.
Years later, I would learn the phrase for what Tiago carried: belonging uncertainty. The phrase is tidy in a way his experience never was. It sounds like something you might encounter on a slide deck or in the margins of a professional reading. But what it names is deeply human and anything but abstract. It is the particular weight of walking into a room and wondering—not consciously, not always, but somewhere below language—whether you have a right to be there.
The human brain is an exquisite instrument of self-protection. When it senses danger—social or otherwise—it does what it has always done: It diverts energy toward survival. You cannot do calculus in this state. You cannot write a sonnet. You cannot raise your hand and risk being wrong when some part of you is busy keeping watch, scanning the room for evidence that you are not wanted.
Tiago's ancestors had navigated oceans by the stars. And here was Tiago, in a classroom 30 miles from where his great-great-grandfather had first made landfall, convincing himself he couldn't navigate a sentence diagram.
I have been thinking about Tiago a great deal lately. I think about him whenever the alphabet soup of contemporary education—DEI, SEL, the acronyms we use to label what should be elemental—gets stirred into controversy. The debates are loud; the positions are entrenched. Many of the people in these debates care deeply about children and about excellence, even when they disagree sharply about means. But when I strip away the op-eds and the cable news shouting, I realize my attention keeps drifting somewhere else entirely.
I'm thinking about geography.
In independent schools, these debates arrive with particular intensity. Our families have chosen us; they are invested in every sense. That investment can make conversations about belonging feel fraught—or it can make them feel necessary. In my experience, it is usually both. And I have come to believe that avoiding those conversations carries its own cost.
Every classroom has a geography. There are students who occupy the center—whose presence feels assumed, whose voices carry weight before they've spoken a word. And there are students at the margins; students whose bodies are in the room but whose full presence has not yet been invited. The work of education, as I have come to understand it, is the work of redrawing that map. Not by displacing anyone, but by expanding the territory of belonging until it holds everyone.
Inviting Students’ Full Presence
The theologian Henri Nouwen once defined hospitality not as social entertaining, but as the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. I first encountered that definition years ago, and it has stayed with me—not because it was eloquent, but because it felt accurate. It is what I am trying to build in my own school's hallways—what I suspect many of you are trying to build in yours. Not a set of policies, but a geography. A place where a student does not have to do the math before speaking. A place where a student doesn't have to wonder.
My own family lives in the complexity of this question. My husband is Chinese; our children are mixed-race; my daughter moves through the world as a young queer woman. I watch them in different spaces, and I notice the micro-calculations they make—the small adjustments, the scanning.
One evening, my daughter, 16 at the time, asked me whether it was safe to post something online—a small acknowledgment of her identity, nothing dramatic. She wasn't asking about etiquette. She was asking about violence. She was asking whether putting her name to her own truth would make her a target.
I did not have to ask that question at 16. I did not even know it was a question someone might have to ask. That is not a political observation. It is simply a fact about the different geographies we inhabit.
My son carries a different weight. He is a high-achieving student, ambitious and bright, and he has absorbed a fear I wish I could extract from him: the fear that his identity makes him a statistic. That in the calculus of competitive environments, he is a remainder—that his merits will be discounted by the color of his skin. He doesn't articulate this as complaint. He offers it quietly, almost analytically. He articulates it as exhaustion.
These are not the concerns of children who feel they matter. These are the concerns of children negotiating their right to be fully present in the room.
Giving Children the Freedom to Take Space
I often wonder what Tiago would have become if someone had seen him. Not just noticed him—teachers noticed him, I'm sure—but seen him. If someone had looked past the muttering and the hunched shoulders and said, simply: I see what you can do, and I need you to do it. This room is less than it should be without your mind fully here.
Perhaps he would have been a captain, like his father and his grandfather. Perhaps an engineer or an oceanographer. Or a teacher. Or perhaps just a man who walked through the world without apologizing for his own footprint. I suspect the details matter less than the posture. That would have been enough. That would have been everything.
The opposite of belonging uncertainty is not confidence. It is freedom. The freedom to stop scanning the room and start thinking. The freedom to risk being wrong because you know that your wrongness will be met with correction, not confirmation of your suspicion that you don't belong. The freedom to take up space without apology.
This is not a promise that school will be easy, or that effort will be optional. It is a claim about what becomes possible when effort is not diverted toward self-protection. This is what we're building—those of us who do this work. Not a political project, but a geographical one. An expansion of the center until every student occupies it.
When I sit with a family whose child is struggling, I often find myself asking: What is this child expending energy on that we haven't noticed? What invisible weight are they carrying through our doors? I have started asking teachers to wonder the same thing—not as a diagnostic exercise, but as a habit of imagination.
And then: What would it look like to set that weight down? What could this child do, who could this child become, if they walked into our classrooms knowing—truly knowing, in the gut and not just the mind—that they belonged here?
The answer, I believe, is more than we can imagine.
And that is what drives me. Not policy. Not debate. Greed. An almost unreasonable hunger for our students' brilliance. I want their full bandwidth. I want to know what they can do when they aren't spending precious energy questioning if they have a right to be in the room.
They do. That is the geography I am trying to build. I suspect you are too.