Our Most Popular Stories from 2021!
The Stone Blog serves a lot of different purposes for us — we use it to spotlight our students, to consider the ways that education is changing, to share our thoughts on the challenges facing our world, and sometimes just to have fun. Last year, we shared close to 60 different “Stone Stories” here on the blog and today we’re excited to look back at our five most popular stories of the year!
Our fifth most read post of the year was a deeply challenging and personal one from Stone Humanities Instructor Andrew Dyrli Hermeling. In “We Are The Stories We Choose To Tell”, Mr. H reflects on the meaning of Indigenous People’s Day when contextualized historically, and writes to our students, “The place where you are actively sitting at this very moment was populated by Iroquian-speaking people before the arrival of Europeans. Today, we generally know these people as Susquehannocks, although many English settlers called them Conestogas, which was in fact the name of their largest and last settlement. We don’t actually know what the Susquehannocks called themselves, a part of their story that has been forgotten. Sadly, today we know much more about the end of their story than the beginning.”
Coming in at number four? “We Did #Big" — our ‘look back"‘ at the process and the challenges inherent to completing “The Big Do”. “Within two months, Maxwell built a governing board for the project comprised of entrepreneurs and educators and philanthropists and Live Event professionals; he worked with Manheim Township supervisors and talent agents in California and porta-potty delivery companies and venture capitalists and security specialists and insurance agents; he assembled teams of students and parents and collaborators in charge of tree wrangling and volunteer wrangling and even ‘talent wrangling’. How’s that for a Senior Project?”
Number three — “Notes On Gratitude For the Class of 2021” — comes from our “Pioneer Graduation” this past Spring. In his moving address to the Class of 2021, senior class president Alex Barney writes, “Every once and a while, I take a step back and remark about the fact that I, as a teenager, am discussing with another teenager systemic racism and how poverty is the most important social justice issue we need to address in this country, because it's fundamental to all the rest. Stone is not a building, it is a group of the most intelligent and thoughtful people I ever have been blessed to meet. Stone is the school where I felt not only safe, but normal. Stone is what I am most grateful for.”
Our second most read post of the year, “Sometimes The End is A Parking Lot” tells the story of the biggest trip of the 2020-2021 school year. Our Introduction To the Beat Generation class at Stone begins with a question — “What Is Exploration” — and ends with a 7500 mile journey in a school van, which takes Stone students from Lancaster to San Francisco and back in 13 days.
And coming in at number one is our favorite kind of story — a story about a student with a big idea and a big plan to pull it off. “The 54.5 Hour Commute” drew local eyeballs, a social-media-nod from Patagonia, and even a spot on Jason Kottke’s amazing website, and tells the story of senior Gralyn K’s two-and-a-half day attempt to “commute” from his house to Stone via kayak. “Throughout the trip, Gralyn was offered help from friends and family -- everything from transportation to Clif bars -- but he accepted none of it. ‘That would be cheating,’ Gralyn says, it would have completely changed the experience. He wanted to experience the full challenge, he wanted to be self-sufficient, and he wanted to know if it was even possible. ‘Water used to be so common for traveling everywhere and now we never use it. It’s the road less traveled now.’”
We say it all the time here, but it’s true: we believe great school years are great stories. Ready to learn how you can be part of the Stone story? Reach out to right here today!