The Westridge campus came alive as students, families, and employees gathered during Convocation to celebrate the start of the 2025-2026 school year on August 27. Convocation, held on Herrick Quad, included remarks from ASB President Micaela R. '26 and Ms. Kassar and introductions of new faculty and staff joining our community this fall. 

Convocation Remarks, Andrea L. Kassar, Head of School
August 27, 2025

Hello and welcome everyone! Happy New School Year! A special welcome to all of our new students, to new families, to our new 4^th graders, and to our SENIORS—Class of 2026! We are so excited for your senior year! I know that you will be wonderful leaders of our school this year.

4^th and 5^th graders, I have a question for you. Do you have a work of art, maybe a painting or a poem or a song or anything else, that makes you feel happy or makes you feel some other strong emotion? Would anyone like to share an example? I have another question—have you ever seen your parents really happy or excited listening to a particular song or experiencing any other art? 

Yes, this happens often when we experience art, right? It can make us feel happy or sad or any other emotion. This is the point of art in the most fundamental way probably: to connect us with our feelings, our humanity, and our sense of aliveness.

I don’t think your teachers would mind if I let you know that in our opening meetings this year, our assistant head of school, Ms. Jallo, asked all of us to send in any song that makes us feel happy or “good vibes” that you can listen to even if you are feeling a little down, and it will pick up your spirits. We have made a faculty/staff playlist of songs like this so that we can play them at our meetings throughout the year. Pretty fun idea, right?

Sometimes when you are feeling maybe a little overwhelmed, which happens to all of us from time to time, or especially in times when it feels like the world has a lot of challenging things going on, it feels particularly important to be able to turn to art forms in this way—to encourage us to feel our feelings (whether happy or sad or angry or whatever), to connect us to the senses in our body. Sometimes, when I am having a stressful day or just sitting a lot and spending a lot of time up in my thoughts, I like to stand up for even two minutes, put on a song that is really hard NOT to dance to, and just dance around. That helps change or unlock my emotions, get out of my head and into my senses and my body. I even have a playlist for this— it’s called my “dance break” playlist. Seniors, do some of you have one of those too maybe? 

Some of you know that poetry also does this for me—it brings out feelings and connects me to my senses. Sometimes I read a poem and all of a sudden tears come to my eyes, or I laugh, or I feel goosebumps—all physical reactions. I especially love the Romantic poets—that’s Romantic with a big R—because that movement was about moving away from only rationality and really centering the emotional experience of being alive. In fact, my favorite poet from this era, William Wordsworth, has a famous poem called “The World Is Too Much With Us” that explores the idea that when we spend too much time and effort only on the busyness of the world, we separate from nature and from our senses, and that can lead us to being pretty numb. He says: 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours…;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.”

When we focus only on the busyness of the day to day, the “getting and spending”, we give our hearts away, we are out of tune, we are not moved. We do not really experience our feelings or our bodily senses. And I have to admit that the world can often feel too much with me, with us, these days. From many world unknowns and often-dizzying change that is impacting us both very globally and very locally, to polarization and lack of nuance or context, to a world of 24/7 connected technology. It can seem that we are out of tune. 

I have always felt that encouraging feeling is particularly counter-cultural and therefore vital in highly academic settings like ours, and in particular in girls’ school settings. Sir Ken Robinson, a speaker and international advisor on education, joked that academics (professors) live so much in their heads that they think of their bodies as simple transportation devices for their heads—to bring their heads to meetings. And as many of us know, there have existed sexist tropes in the Western world for nearly all of time that reason/rationality is attached to masculinity, whereas feeling is somehow lesser than and attached to femininity. Sometimes as an understandable and needed response to that problematic dichotomy, academic girls’ spaces have, in decades past, tried to overemphasize rationality and analysis to maybe compensate for this unfair characterization—almost as if to practice or to prove that women can, of course, be just as rational and analytical. And yet, it seems essential to me that girls and women continually reclaim feelings and senses and connection to the body as a needed, powerful, and significant part of our humanity—so that we can trust our feelings, trust our bodies, trust our guts, trust ourselves in the fullest sense—so that we aren’t numb or unmoved or out of tune with our full aliveness.

“What are our Westridge students if not optimism and hope—for themselves, for each other, for women, for our future world? Westridge is a local community that gives so many of us the feeling, the sensation, the physical experience of hope and optimism—a community that is full of aliveness—the antidote to being out of tune, the antidote to being moved not.”

These are all related to ideas and themes that your teachers and administrators and all our staff have been thinking about during our opening meetings over the last few weeks here on campus. I’ve shared with families in my parent letter and with teachers and staff in a meeting last week that this summer I read an excellent memoir by Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, called A Different Kind of Power. Ardern discusses leading the country through her own pregnancy and new motherhood, through Covid and more; she explores the importance of empathy and optimism, particularly in leadership. She says that often people say that leaders shouldn’t have thin skin—but she realized “really early on” that “thicker skin might mean losing empathy” … she says, “I’d rather have empathy because I think it’s something as policy makers and decision makers that makes us better at our job…And don’t we want (the ones who care most deeply) in leadership?” For those of you who study Greek/Latin, you know the word “empathy” has the “pathos” in it which means what? Feeling. And so does a similar word that is in our school mission statement: compassion (to feel or suffer with or together). At Westridge, part of our core mission is to develop courageous and compassionate leaders. This is the opposite of numbness. Feeling, the senses, connection to the inner parts of our physical experiences are all essential parts of that.

And, as we’ve discussed especially last year when professor of neuroscience, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang came to speak to teachers and parents, research is showing us more and more that academic learning is itself emotional. That when emotions are attached to the learning process, the learning is deeper, the retention is longer, the lesson is more meaningful and connected to our core sense of self. Part of our Westridge mission statement is also to develop intellectually adventurous thinkers—yes, that thinking is intellectual, but adventure is certainly full of emotion and the senses—it has risk, it has fun, it has emotional investment. Adventure makes us feel things: excitement, some fright, a more rapid heartbeat, a connection to the body.

And in fact, as I also mentioned in my letter recently, according to an article in the Gothamist, Gen Z students applied to art schools in NYC this year in record numbers. Perhaps in a world that is too much with us, in a world that has the potential to numb or to move us not, in a world of so much digital communication and non-human intelligence, the craving to turn towards the arts (to making things, to the tangible, to the generative, to the emotional and sensual) is a way of getting back in tune.

And as we welcome our awesome new athletics director, Alice Lee, to Westridge, I am also reminded of how vital and empowering and countercultural to patriarchal forces championing strong athletics for girls and women is. The power and strength and sense of self that comes from embodiment and all the senses and feelings and intellectual adventure that comes with that. Go Tigers!

In another excellent book that I read this summer, Chris Hayes’s The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (and his subsequent interviews about the book) he says that the antidote to doom is community. Like art, community at its best is full of feeling—a sense of compassion, a sense of collective moral courage, a sense of shared purpose. Feelings are deepened in community—that’s why experiencing art together with another person can be such a bonding experience.

In times when the world is too much with us, it is local community that can ground and inspire us. That can, as Jacinda Ardern argues, be a source of hope and optimism, not grounded in naivety but in its opposite—in something that is “required in different and trying circumstances in order to succeed.” Hope and optimism are moral courage, are experienced as feelings or bodily senses too. You feel lighter when you feel hopeful, you stand taller with optimism, you look up and out in the most open ways, you look inwards in the most reflective and self-compassionate ways. With optimism, we feel moved. What are our Westridge students if not optimism and hope—for themselves, for each other, for women, for our future world? Westridge is a local community that gives so many of us the feeling, the sensation, the physical experience of hope and optimism—a community that is full of aliveness—the antidote to being out of tune, the antidote to being moved not.

When I sat last week with our Associated Student Body and other student leaders, I asked them what their hopes were for Westridge and for their leadership this year. What tone do they want to set? What culture do they want to foster? They said things like open-mindedness, a whole connected community, hearing each other out, a sense of pride and spirit and a culture of participation, kindness and lack of quick judgement, embracing collaboration, a sense that you don’t have to do it alone. Here were two answers that really stood out in my mind:

1. YOU are the school, own it.

The idea is, if you want it to exist here, don’t just point outward, point inward too—what a good lesson for all of us—we can all collectively own the change that we want to see.

2. Live life like a Lower Schooler!

Lower Schoolers, this will be easy for you! The rest of us, I think, know what this means. Embrace play and optimism and feeling and the freedom that comes with that deepest connection to our human youth and aliveness.

I mean, is this great advice, or what?

4^th graders, I can’t wait to get to know you this year and to hear more about your favorite works of art and all that you feel. I could not be more honored and excited to begin the school year with all of you. Here’s to a school year of moving art, of powerful feelings and senses, of intellectual adventure, of compassion and empathy, of engagement in our Westridge community, of the strength that comes from collective optimism. I love leading this wonderful school.

One more special shout out to our SENIORS! One more special welcome to all our new students! Let’s have an amazing school year!