Excellence

"It's a funny thing about life:  if you refuse to accept anything but the very best you will very often get it."
- W. Somerset Maugham

At David Cameron we have very high expectations for ourselves, our students and for our larger community.  We think that we can contribute to excellence by setting the bar high and helping our students reach for it.  The idea of excellence is one, that for many students, is not in their vocabulary, however, it is very much within their reach if they choose it to be.  The month of February has us focusing on excellence in our school.  While excellence is a core area of our work throughout the year, it is important to pause and reflect on the importance of excellence in our lives at this time so that we can re-focus our efforts.

Each day at school I am fortunate to see examples of excellence all around me.  It may be in the student who stops me to let me hear the song they have learned on the recorder and how they have added to it to make it their own, it might be in the teacher who comes to tell me about the unbelievable math lesson that they just had and how the kids were completely engaged, or it might be in the Family Olympic Night that our PAC hosted last Friday that saw a great turnout of our school family.  Excellence is all around us, everyday, and in every way.

Excellence becomes a frame of mind, a way of seeing the world.  If we can instill the notion in our students that they are capable of excellence, there is no knowing what they can accomplish in their lives.  So, it is for these reasons (and many others), that we turn our attention to excellence in this, the month of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the final month of term two academics, and our mid-point in the school year.  Keep working with us to help our students believe in themselves and to not settle for something short of excellence.  We all have the capacity to do so much, so well.