Bringing Middle-earth—and Potential—to Life

Dear Assets Families,

"There is a lot more in Bilbo than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself." — Gandalf, The Hobbit

I have been lucky enough to witness every K-8 stage production we've produced. And I'll be honest with you - I still wasn't fully prepared for the emotions I had watching The Hobbit on opening night.

I think many people unfamiliar with Assets were expecting a stereotypical classroom play where kids get on stage, look cute, and charm us with their endearing nervousness, whispered prompts from the wings, and the sweet chaos of the whole thing. Those moments are fun, but that was not this.

I've seen our students do remarkable things over the years, so you'd think I'd know what to expect. But I was caught off guard by how genuinely moved I became watching 59 students (and so many parent volunteers) bring the adventure of Middle-earth to life. I think it's because the play was Assets at its fullest, everything we believe about our children on display at once.

We witnessed third graders commanding a stage. We witnessed students with dyslexia, who often struggle with printed text, delivering rich dialogue with precision and presence. We witnessed children who could barely sit still for five minutes in a traditional classroom holding an audience completely captive for two hours. How does this happen?

When families first hear about Assets, they often hear about our expertise in identifying and addressing underachieving academic skills. That reputation is real, and we're proud of it. But there's a flip side to that expertise that I don't think gets nearly enough attention. When you truly understand how a child learns, when you fully see them, you also develop an unshakeable belief in what they're capable of. Our expertise in giftedness and learning differences isn't only about intervention and differentiation. It's equally about the lifting of expectations and potential.

You simply cannot stage The Hobbit with six-year-olds and pre-teens who may have spent years being told, in subtle ways, that certain activities aren't for them, unless you have genuine conviction about who those individuals really are. Our teachers didn't scale down the vision to temper doubts. They had no doubts. They built this production around their belief in the students, and the students rose to meet it.

What we witnessed on that stage didn't come from a curriculum. It came from culture and belief. I often refer to Assets as a progressive school, even though that word doesn't appear in our mission statement. We don't have to claim the word to embody it though. My favorite articulation of this comes from the progressive educator David Hawkins, who wrote that "the more basic gift is not love but respect, respect for others as ends in themselves, as actual and potential artisans of their own learnings and doings, of their own lives; and as thus uniquely contributing, in turn, to the learnings and doings of others.” That has always been my north star in education. It is also the reason our K-8 students choose their enrichment classes, our high school students select their mentorship sites, our drama students are given creative responsibility, and our high schoolers in robotics and self-directed study pursue work that is genuinely their own. None of this is accidental. It reflects a deliberate belief about where the center of gravity in a child's education belongs.

I also want to say something about belonging, because I think it is a greatly underestimated factor in a child's growth. We know that learning is a vulnerable process. You only allow yourself to be vulnerable on a stage, in a classroom, on a field, when you trust that the people around you truly have your back. When the environment was built with you in mind. When your peers understand you in ways that peers at other schools simply may not. I've heard from so many of you over the years describing the moment your child finally raised their hand, joined the team, or walked out onto a stage. These moments matter enormously. They are often when a child quietly decides who they are allowed to be.

That sense of belonging is not incidental to a child's growth. It is the condition for it. When a child flourishes here, I occasionally see something interesting happen next. Sometimes families read that success as a sign to move on. I understand the impulse, and I'd offer a different consideration. That growth isn't happening in spite of this community. It is happening because of it. True self-advocacy doesn't appear out of nowhere, and we don't treat it as such. It is built slowly, through exactly these kinds of experiences, in exactly this kind of community. You cannot shortcut that process, and it is very hard to replicate it in an environment that wasn't designed around your child in the first place. We must always remember that a child only advocates for themselves once they fully understand, accept, and care enough about themselves to do so. That is what our Assets community is built to nourish. What happens here is not a rehearsal. The performance has already begun, and we all saw the results on opening night! And our older students know it. You can see it in the way they invite the younger ones in, support them, actively building their capacity. As Mary Church Terrell said, we are lifting as we rise.

Last year, our high school robotics team won the state championship. Whenever someone asked me to comment, I said the same thing: we were proud of the hard work, but the reason we celebrated it wasn't to boast about the medals or banners. It was because a competition happened to externally validate something we already knew about our students. We see that brilliance every single day. The Hobbit is the same story, and I’m glad three sold out audiences were there to see it with their own eyes. 

So when people ask me why Assets, this is my answer. It isn't only what we know about learning differences, though that expertise matters deeply. It's the belief system that expertise produces. The sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, but always clear conviction that your child contains more than even they know yet.

As Thorin says: "There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure."

That's how our teachers see your children. Every single day.

Aloha,
Ryan