Meridian’s 2020-21 Program
-Fall 2020-
Juniors and Seniors getting ready to head out into the neighborhood for data collection as part of their Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project in their urban planning course.
This fall, the Meridian community has been doing what it always does: learning together, problem-solving, celebrating silly traditions, and looking after each other. Meridian is working with a hybrid model that has about 75% of the students in Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Most students have in-person learning 3 or 4 days each week. Everyone is home on Wednesdays for activities that require mixed-age groups (such as our Community Groups, All-school Meetings, Committees, some extracurricular activities, and more). Both our in-person and online school days are full days of learning. Students are continuing to work collaboratively and independently on projects for their courses as they prepare for our second online Exhibition Evening. Students have PE for 90 minutes twice a week whether at school or home — staying active is important! Our extracurricular programs such as theater, model United Nations, and music are all going strong with appropriate safety measures. For example, students who sing in the band are using special MIT-approved singing masks and maintaining extra distance.
Meridian has implemented a four-part health system:
Every family takes their student’s temperature and submits a symptom survey before they leave their home. If any symptom is present, Covid-testing is required. Meridian currently has a 0% positivity rate for several dozen tests.
At school, everyone wears masks and physically distances. There are mask breaks outdoors. Students can eat lunch outdoors or in a large hall 10’ apart.
All spaces are heavily ventilated based on studies conducted by an MIT professor.
Surfaces are disinfected throughout the day by custodians using the safest and fastest disinfectants available.
Although these measures are complicated, the community has completely embraced the steps needed to care for each other and have shown that, while intrusive, they are not insurmountable. We have all been grateful for, and delighted with, our time together and are working to make sure that it continues throughout the year.
Meridian during the initial Covid-19 outbreak
-Spring 2020-
Meridian closed its physical doors on March 16. Three days later, on March 19, MAVVERIC (Meridian Academy – Virtual Version – Educating Remotely Investigating Collaboratively) went live. Much like when we’re on our campus, it’s Meridian’s motto, Curiosity – Creativity – Community, that guides our learning together while apart.
MAVVERIC and Community
Community at Meridian has many important qualities: our school is informal and loves being silly together, our students support each other in their growth as learners and young-adults-in-the-making, and our teachers and students cherish their time together. Meridian has a number of community-building traditions including school-specific lingo with an emphasis on acronyms. Even our online environment has become an acronym. During MAVVERIC, we have made sure that our traditions are preserved, while taking advantage of our new setting. Our annual Spirit Week and Field Day celebrations involve dress-up days and team competitions. This year, one of our dress-up themes was Found Objects Day and for Field Day, one of our Community Group sports was an all-team, timed, coordinated Zoom drawing (a fine sandcastle effort with each student contributing one panel is seen here). Each week, students meet with teachers to share updates on their lives. In numerous ways, Meridian continues to attend to the social needs of its students.
MAVVERIC and Creativity
Creativity comes in many forms and in response to many needs. Staying close to home has required a great deal of creative problem solving on the part of our amazing faculty and students. We began with the need for a new schedule that recognized that a full day of staring at a computer was not ideal for anyone. So, during Meridian’s brief three-day pause between in-person classes and MAVVERIC, we completed our new model schedule and shared our news with the community with this email about our design and reasoning. The next set of creative challenges included exploring ways to best engage students in Humanities discussions, science labs, art classes, PE, and more. We had singing classes planned for third trimester, but, if you have yet tried a group singing of Happy Birthday to You for a distant family member, you know that Zoom is not as truly synchronous as we would wish. So, our music teacher, Laura, had us ship singing-quality USB microphones to each student, and they learned how to lay down individual tracks and bring them all together in one song. We have been sending all of our students the technology, school supplies, art materials, lab equipment, novels, and more that they need to continue real minds-on and hands-on learning. Our science teacher Alex designed an outdoor physics lab that uses the sensors in phones to collect data. It was a complex set of tasks that was best shared visually. Students would not be near Wi-Fi when carrying out their experiments, so Alex created a detailed and playful video demonstration that she shared with the class that they could rewind as often as needed for each step. Our students have also had their fair share of inspired reinventions. Each spring, Meridian seniors direct our theater program. This year, Clary ’20 and Nadia ‘20 were directing groups of schoolmates every day after school. When in-person rehearsals abruptly ended, they had to rethink how to continue these creative efforts. Clary turned her cast’s performance into a radio-style production, and Nadia’s group made a documentary about their rehearsals and thoughts about the play. You can see all these videos at right and read the directors notes here.
MAVVERIC and Curiosity
Our curiosity drives everything. Meridian’s teachers are special for many reasons, not the least of which is their enthusiasm as learners. All of us have felt humbled at times figuring out which of our skills transfer to teaching from afar and which need retooling. However, we all embrace the opportunity to learn new skills and to make online learning not a reduced version of in-person schooling, but a different setting with its own opportunities. Our students still come to class with the same enthusiasm and the expectation that they will be learning and collaborating with equally committed classmates.
The newspapers and Internet have been rife with articles about parents fed up with being asked to take over their child’s education. Thanks to Meridian’s MAVVERIC model and the mentoring and small classes made possible by a 5:1 student-teacher ratio, we have been able to serve as a model of creative, full-featured, online, progressive schooling. Rather than our model causing additional strain on families during this time, Meridian parents and students are gushing.
Our community traditions have continued to serve as a major pillar of support during this time.
We reinvented our schedule to make it so students and teachers were meeting daily in classes and had time to work together.
Faculty and students have embraced new ways of digitally interacting with each other and the broader community.
Parents and students have been grateful for it all.
One of the key features that has allowed our community to accomplish all that it has been able to do is also the feature that we often receive the most questions about: our size. For her year-long research project, Meridian junior Juanzi studied consumer decision-making and marketing. After completing her research paper, she chose to apply her learning to Meridian. One piece of her project speaks to our smallness: a minute-and-a-half exploration of why students value being at a school our size. The fact that all of our juniors have successfully completed their projects on time, despite the potential hurdles of sheltering at home, is a testament to their passion for their learning and the robustness of Meridian’s MAVVERIC efforts.
None of us know which versions of schooling will be needed in the coming school year, but we are confident that Meridian is ready to roll at home, in school, and out in the world. We look forward to your joining with us for the many events that highlight the work of our students throughout the year, such as our first-ever, online Exhibition Evening. Please let us know, if you would like to receive invitations to these special occasions.
Best wishes and good health to all,
Joshua Abrams
Head of School