• building back
     
    Principal's Corner
     
    Tangewood Middle School is a safe learning environment for your child where they will be challenged daily. A quality education includes preparing students for life. These life skills include: resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity. Resiliency can only be accomplished by taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes. This is what middle school is about — testing life and your place in it. The transition from elementary to a middle school is difficult due to the increased amount of responsibilities given to students as well as the increased amount of life challenges for this age group.
     
    Learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting,
    exhausting and sometimes discouraging.... Our students need someone taking them seriously,
    believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves. We need to teach our
    children grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism.
    — Paul Tough
     
    Life in the 21st century places many changing demands on students making the transition through adolescence. They are at a crucial period of personal, social, physical and intellectual development, of uncertainty and of questioning. The International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) is designed to help them find a sense of belonging in the ever-changing and increasingly interrelated world around them, and to foster a positive attitude towards learning. The MYP for students aged 11 to 16 provides a framework of academic challenge and life skills that encourages students to embrace and understand the connections between traditional subjects and the real world, and become critical and reflective thinkers.
     
    As an adult team, it is important that parents and teachers work together to support the growth of each child. While it is hard to allow mistakes and failures to happen, rescuing students does not give them the resiliency they must learn to be successful. Please pay close attention to the information in the planner and support your child as they learn to adapt and grow. Parental involvement is an integral part of the Tanglewood program. We are not just a school — we are a community. Parents are encouraged to work with their children at home, assist in after-school activities, and to volunteer. Getting involved with our PTO is a fantastic way to stay informed and make a lasting contribution to our campus.
     
    Respectfully,
    GKH sig
    Gretchen Kasper-Hoffman
    Principal / Head of School