A Letter From the President

Dear Kappans,

It was a real pleasure to see so many of you at our October Dinner Meeting at the Country Club of Fairfax. It was a wonderful time to reconnect, to visit, and to make new friends especially while we were being serenaded with music from several student trios! This was so appropriate because later in the evening we listened to a talk from Michael Ehrlich, Director of the WT Woodson Chorus. Michael was engaging, humorous, and very thoughtful in his remarks. Afterwards, we raffled off some great coffee gift certificates, welcomed new members, ate cake, and still managed to keep our promise of ending at 7:00 p.m.!

This December 7th our dinner meeting promises to be even better. The room for our dinner meeting will be decorated generously and beautifully in the holiday spirit. We are planning again to have some student entertainment. We are eagerly looking forward to hearing from our speaker for the evening, former superintendent Alan Leis. We are going to bring (and we encourage you to join us in doing so as well) new winter coats for our Community Chest donation this year to Annandale Terrace Elementary School. Andrea Garris, principal, will be on hand to receive our donation. We will have a raffle (your dentist will be pleased) and we will eat cake! All this and we plan to be going home at 7:00 p.m.!

I hope you can appreciate the energy and delight that the members of PDK 1144 have for our chapter. We have many who care deeply about the ideals for our organization and work fervently to bring these beliefs to fruition. We continue to believe that it is our responsibility to provide a rich and challenging interdisciplinary educational experience for all students that will stimulate deep creative inquiry, critical thinking, intellectual rigor, and moral responsibility in a world increasingly dependent on understanding and collaborating with others.

For the ideals and beliefs above, I give thanks.  It is appropriate to talk about giving thanks as we just celebrated a wonderful national holiday. I want to express my thanks to each of you for all that you do daily to teach and support our students and one another. This is appropriate whether or not you work in a school-based setting. Because life is complex, many of us have had illness in our families and workplaces. Many of you have had to give extra support to colleagues and friends who are grappling with the impact of illness. But, we hear few complaints. You carry the extra burden quietly. For your generosity and strength, I give thanks.

There are so many moments of inspiration, joy, love, and patience which you give to our students and to each other that I will never know about. Yet, I am confident that they are happening regularly in our hallways, classrooms, and offices. So for the many known and unknown acts of kindness, I give thanks. It continues to be a privilege for me to serve you, PDK, and to work alongside you as we nurture the most precious resource of our nation---its children.

May your holidays be full of happiness with friends and family (and some well deserved rest).

Douglas A. Tyson
President, PDK 1144

December, 2011