Last week the Admissions Office asked me to talk to the Upper School students who lead admissions tours, The Red Door Girls. The purpose of my time with them was to explore how a personal narrative can be powerful in the description of our School. In other words, what makes a good story? There were over 50 students there, and as we sat in a circle in the Lecture Hall and charted the benchmarks of good storytelling, I was struck, yet again, by the strength of their own voices. In remarkable ways these young women know not only themselves, but also, in increasing measures, the responsibility they own in sharing their voices for the common good of both scholarship and community.

None of this, of course, is accidental, and the deeply complicated and layered sense of self and voice remains a trademark of what I call the compounded interest of Spence: year after year of building that all-important marriage of engagement and inquiry. I think about this when the Kindergarten class learns to speak from the “I” point of view when working things out with a fellow classmate in the “talk it out corner.” I think of this when I hear members of the Middle School Poetry Club read their own words at assembly. I think of it in every class I teach in which the juniors and seniors come prepared with their own ideas, ready to have them deepened by the ideas of fellow classmates. This, in turn, makes me remember the Director of Admissions from Stanford speak once about the absolutely brilliant students she did not admit because of their failure to demonstrate a “scholastic generosity.” And the “want-to-be” poet in me makes me think about Whitman’s celebration of voice in Leaves of Grass when he says to “loose the stop from your throat.”

Having a sense of self in voice comes with a rich partnership: having a sense of the voice within others. This is using the “I” to understand the “we.” Our revised Mission Statement centers itself on three words: “passion, purpose and perspective.” That last powerful word, perspective, allows each of us to recognize that the “other” is you, too, no matter who you are, where you come from or even what you can offer. Perspective is the recognition of you in the larger community or the world, and with this in mind I think about how the Kindergarten class learns to sign—thumb and pinky extended, moving back and forth, chest-height, between the sign-giver and the last speaker—to illustrate a common understanding and a spontaneous sharing of an idea. I think about our diversity assemblies in the Upper School offering a multitude of perspectives on all sorts of topics, all different and all coming from that “I” point of view. And I think about the assemblies hosted by the Middle School Justice Club offering national and global issues for debate and understanding. And let’s not forget Whitman here either; the last word of Leaves of Grass is “you” not “I.”

As an all-girls school we have the wonderful opportunity to focus deeply, too, on what it means to be a woman, and this, too, is critical to both that “I” and that “we.” As our students journey from little girls to young women, the inventory of change can be legion and we all know that the world out there is not always at its most just or best when it comes to women. With our educational focus on self-agency, celebrating and understanding what it means to be a woman then remains constant. As our young charges change, so do the questions, and the subject matter deepens. But throughout, our efforts, as parents and as teachers, are to guide them into an authentic sense of self and with an appetite to share it with others. And that takes a combination of practice and belief.

A strong “I” in our young girls and women makes all the difference. It really does. The enormous, personal authority coming from a strong self is at the heart of the self-confidence we hold dear here at Spence. As many of you know, I love sharing the first-person writing I ask seniors to do for me at the senior retreat. I also love seeing how well they can write almost at a moment’s notice and with a voice so wonderfully their own. This year they wrote in response to a statement from Rebecca Mead in My Life in Middlemarch: “Character, too, is a process and an unfolding.” With a remarkable “I” in her voice and in her words, this is what one senior had to say about Spence and her own unfolding, giving proof to what poet Stanley Plumly calls the personal transformation in “letting the deep voice climb on its own:”

I’m uncertain about what lies in my path. In the past, I found it soothing to pretend to know what was ahead of me. Other times, I used the certainty of the past to soothe my fear of the future. During my time at Spence I have become increasingly comfortable with uncertainty...Not because everything always turns out “OK,” or because we need to live in the present. To me, feeling uncertain is an indicator that I still care, that I still want to move forward. The day that uncertainty doesn’t make my stomach turn with both fear and excitement is the day that I will start to worry. Here’s to a senior year full of uncertainty.