American School of the Hague

The early days of our second semester sees one of our busiest times of the year.

Between our Delegation and Administration Teams over one hundred ASH High School students participated in the week-long Model United Nations simulation in The Hague. Our thespians are beginning to rehearse for our spring play while our basketballers and swimmers spend long hours on the court, in the pools and on buses to compete against other schools. You will be hearing soon from our Student Senate/Ms. Ghosh about the parental support we will request for the upcoming Winter Prom. During the weekend of 10-12 February we shall be hosting over 200 Mathletes during the International Schools Math Teachers Foundation (ISMTF) Senior Math Tournament. Our thanks go out to Lorna Faber and all the High School math teachers for planning for this great math fiesta! Additionally, finding beds for 200 guest Mathletes required the herculean organizational and logistical skills of Ms. Gonzalez and Ms. Rider. Many thanks to the large numbers of people making such a celebration of high school math possible. Forty of our students will be heading off over the February break for Service trips to India and Tanzania. Many thanks to the teachers who have organized these trips and will be chaperoning. A Night To Remember was exactly that: student talent on stage, student organization and student sponsored charities the beneficiaries of an appreciative and sold-out theater. Thanks for all your support for this event! There are many other clubs and activities that are active and contributing right now, but I shall save mention of them to another time. Suffice it to say, ASH High School has a wonderfully positive buzz!

I hope by now you have all received an email with your son’s/daughter’s first semester report card. Please spend some time discussing both the comments and the grades with your child(ren). In the opening assembly after the Winter Break I reminded the students about goal setting. It would be timely to have such a discussion with your children about their academic goals but also about study skills, time management, career thoughts and social goals. We are fast approaching the Course Selection season when important decisions will be made, especially for tenth graders. Connecting their performance on the first semester with the choices they shall be making in early spring could be a most fruitful basis for discussion.

Regular readers will have read of our plans to introduce the 1:1 laptop program to all our upperclassmen during the course of 2011-12, to complement the 1:1 program we have running for all our underclassmen. Unfortunately, our infrastructure remains insufficiently robust and reliable to add further pressure at this time. Therefore, I wish to inform you that given the limited remaining time our seniors have in the High School, we have chosen to forgo issuing laptops to them. However, we remain hopeful that our juniors may receive their laptops for the final fourth of the school year. Thank you for your patience as we strive to modernize and repair our network.

I have met with many High School parents over the years. Many become more hesitant in their parenting style as their children grow older. Often, I have been asked, “How can I best support my child academically when they are now a High School age student?” I want to share an article I recently discovered. The article, "High School Students Need Their Parents Too", runs through the areas of parenting that are still essential if the student is to benefit from parental involvement in their academic world.