Bears Repeating: Hope

 

“We can’t just hope for a brighter day, we have to work for a brighter day.”
Dolly Parton

Happy new year! That is the greeting you will hear throughout many schools at the beginning of a new school year. The slate is clean, the gradebook is empty, and new resolutions are made by teachers, students, and even parents.

Teachers pledge to stay on top of their grading and employ fresh strategies for teaching a familiar, yet challenging topic. Students recommit to working and planning ahead and getting more sleep. Parents flood meet-the-teachers nights and experience the promise of a new school year for their children. 

The hopefulness in schools is unmistakable. Even the somewhat curmudgeonly among us can’t escape it. 

This kind of hope isn’t as saccharine as it may sound. It goes well beyond a stranger hoping we have a nice day. It takes work to employ hope in a useful and powerful way. It takes work to move beyond cynicism and tap into our deepest inspiration as educators — the persistent hope that we can help the next generation do it better than we did. Taking part in education gives all of us a second chance. 

It is important to take a moment to distinguish optimism from hope. Chan Hellman, the director of The Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, said, “While optimism is the belief that the future will be better, hope is the belief that we have the power to make it so.”

Dr. Jamil Zaki, the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, knows we must “cultivate hope” to combat cynical thoughts. “People need to believe that another future is possible,” and they need to “visualize a better future.” He reminds us that we also need to have the “willpower to move toward that future.” Finally, we must be able to “chart a path from where we are to where we want to be.”

The founders of our school visualized a better future in 1865 and charted a path in girls education. The handrail on that path is our strategic design that guides us in our goals and progress as a school. We teach our girls to look forward, and we provide the skills and cultivate the confidence they need to chart their own path. And in the 75 years on Harpeth Hall's campus, we have laid out a plan for how to evolve with the times while never changing what we believe in and stand for. 

No path is without its challenges. Having hope doesn’t smooth out all of the bumps along the way. At the same time, guarding against the temptation to label everything as hard or harrowing before we have begun is the first step in making room for hope. Zaki posits that we should “replace cynicism with skepticism.” Skepticism allows that some bad things will happen, but cynicism expects everything to have a negative outcome. Skepticism moves over to share space with hope. 

Remaining active in our quest for hope is worth the effort. Helping our girls maintain the hopefulness found in the first weeks of school throughout the year will be our assignment. When a 5th grader ran to me after our opening convocation to say that she thought the speeches were “inspiring,” I was inspired again to cultivate hope whenever and wherever I can. 

Happy new year to us all.