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Giving Tree
Deirdre Harriet-Welsh, FIS Parent
concern over the well-being of the sequoia; the building permits were obtained only after the sequoia’s root system was safe and secure for both the tree and the
Primary School’s future.
Well-grounded and growing, our sequoia gives us lessons in friendship, play and learning. Students have used the monumental evergreen as an extension of the classroom. Linking hand in hand,
students have made a chain around its circumference, attempting to calculate the tree’s radius; others have estimated the tree’s
height and pondered whether it doubled the Primary School’s building.
Parents have shared their children’s enthusiasm for the tree. This “giant is a friend” to my boys, a mother
explains. Children harvest pine cones for the season’s decorations, ride an imaginary elephant as they
stroke the low hanging branch before climbing it, poke the tree’s cinnamon red bark as one would nudge a buddy to call their attention. The Primary
School’s current Principal Caroline Joslin-Callahan adds, “Our children love the tree, play around it, on
it and with it.”
Families share memories of happy afternoons sitting on colorful blankets under the generous sequoia’s shade, where they gather in friendship
to cheer their little athletes in Sports Day.
Our giving tree offers itself as a symbol, a beacon for good, virtuous qualities that resonate with FIS’s
education. Like our tree, FIS’s international mindedness gives lessons on the importance of caring
about our roots, knowing who we are so as to ground oneself, on adapting and becoming at ease in, and
accepting our new environment, on growing and aiming high, and day by day creating a world that is more
beautiful, more generous, more stable.
FIS’s education makes us aware that the choices we make today have an impact
in the world of tomorrow and in the lives of generations to come. The teachings our magnificent sequoia gifts FIS, the various positive externalities inherent in such a large
tree and the life cycle of 3,000 years contribute to permanence, making this
gentle giant FIS’s partner in fostering a better world for all to
enjoy.
February 2016 FIS World 13