It all starts in our toddler/preschool classrooms when a three-year-old first gets brave enough to stand up at circle time and “share.” Could be a beautiful coin that a beloved grandparent brought back from a recent trip, could be a flower in a pot just planted, could be a baby bird recently discovered on the ground being carefully taken care of by family. Whatever it is, TED-talking ability starts here.

TED Talks is a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas. These talks are concise. Because their times are short (generally, 5-18 minutes), TED speakers have generally done the hard work of cutting out any extraneous ideas. Ideally, every word of a TED Talk counts. Most TED Talks involve people trying to make a difference in a world that needs “waking up.”

In today’s world there are lots of people talking. And talking. And talking. So what makes the difference in how many people listen to that talking? The most words are not the answer. The loudest words are not the answer. The best delivery in the world is not the whole answer. The answer lies somewhere down in preschool … when a child discovers a passion and wishes to share that passion with his/her peers and begins to get comfortable in his own skin with his “own voice.”

Passion for a topic and understanding of how to share it concisely, clearly, and confidently enables the listener to step into the speaker’s shoes – for just a minute – and live through his eyes and heart.

Please reduce speed while traveling onto MSA school property and ONLY enter school grounds at the entrance near the Administration building. For everyone's safety, please DO NOT enter at one of the exits. Due to the increased amount of traffic on our campus, we respectfully request that you remain with your children at all times while on the MSA campus. Pedestrians (especially small ones) are difficult to see and we want to address this safety issue to protect the lives of our MSA students. It is essential that all visitors and students use the sidewalks and remain in control of your children at all times. Please refrain from parking in front of classrooms, the flagpole or on sidewalks and use designated parking spaces when picking up and dropping off students outside of carpool times. Too often, drivers are in large vehicles, become distracted and may not see a child who has gotten away from their caregiver.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

With safest regards,

Susanna Merriman, RN

I spent a lot of time in the principal’s office at MSA. I can laugh about it now--and I hope Ms. Holt can too—but it wasn’t funny at the time. Where I came by the defiance I showed in 1992, that year I was in 4th grade, I don’t know, but I guess I’m still no great follower of rules. I work now as a community integration specialist in a day program for adults with disabilities, where my untamed exuberance and shameless goofery are an asset and have made me a favorite among many of the disabled folks I work with. (I also still go by my old MSA nickname, May Hay.) I goof, they grin, and then I grin even bigger. It’s the most joyful job I’ve ever done in my life, if not the strangest—and I’ve had a few pretty strange ones. During my time at Smith College (2001-2005) I helped digitize its art department’s slide collections, and after graduation I was a nurse recruiter working mostly with Kenyan nurses for a law firm. My least favorite gig was teaching surly undergraduates from 2009-2012 as I got my Master of Fine Arts in Writing at the University of Iowa. I guess I couldn’t take what I had dished out ten years earlier!

Troublesome though I was, clearly MSA set me on a solid path academically. (Though I also have to credit T.L. Hanna High School—which I attended in 1997 after graduating 8th grade, the last grade then offered by MSA—and the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, where I finished high school.) My defiance and intractable lack of cooperation, reserved usually for the poor music teacher, had bled into my academic performance by the second half of the 4th grade. I just wasn’t doing my work. MSA upper el teacher Ms. Duart—Anna as she would let me call her when we corresponded in high school—took me aside and asked what I planned to do with my life. I answered, “Win Publisher’s Clearinghouse, of course!” This wasn’t all smart-aleckry: the airwaves were teeming with their advertisements in the ‘90s. It seemed easy to win! Or my grandparents would win and I could just live off their money, I explained. They got mail from PC constantly and were no doubt on the verge of a windfall. Ms. Duart talked to me about personal responsibility, my potential, my purpose, my place in the world. I didn’t like that too much. Nor did I like her, Yankee lady with the weird accent.

But pretty soon I came to love her instead. She gave me special assignments to keep me busy and out of the office: a research paper on Vikings, another on the ancient Egyptians. She helped me design a costume for my presentation of the paper: I traced and she cut an ankh from a sheet of copper, then hammered it out with a mallet from among her art supplies. I rolled and painted beads that she helped me string onto a bodice. Finally, I felt like a bride carrying my ankh to the podium, and when Ms. Duart hugged me hard in front of my parents, she joined me for good to the life of the mind.

Of all the wonderful ways of seeing the world that MSA gave me—I’m already teaching my daughter, age 2, to do chores and not to pinch the leaves from plants that are as alive as she and I—what I’d tell parents of current students is to be very mindful and intentional about preparing your child for and witnessing the communal coming of age rituals MSA observes, which can be so lacking in the cult of individuality that informs modern American life. The more close communities we have to remind our children of who they are and who they want to be, the better. And MSA is unique is creating unity among us which has a much deeper spiritual basis than the dopaminergic mob-mentality of pep rallies I encountered at Hanna. From the yearly birthday trip around the sun to being lifted in a chair in a hail of flowers at the end of 8th grade, these are moments of becoming which, when we enter into them with reverence, reflection, and joy, carry us forward into challenges we’ll face as people who are sturdy, confident, and blessed.