2024 Beach Day
Beach Day
~ a note from Sam
For many educators, there’s nothing that stokes anxiety more than six straight hours of unstructured time with children in a public place strewn with real hazards: a scalding sun! a busy parking lot! an unforgiving ocean! a gaggle of nudists! (Not to mention, the fake, but very real-feeling hazard of kid boredom!) Every year, I wonder if Beach Day is still necessary, if it should be half as long, if we need to add this or that to jazz it up - and then as soon as I show up to our unwieldy morning circle on the sand, my cynicism melts away and I see Beach Day for what it is: the purest celebration of togetherness, the first official gleam of summer, and the most sublime second-to-last line in the epic poem of our school year.
One of the things I dearly love about Beach Day is that it gives me the unhurried space to have sweet closing moments with so many people big and small. This year, that looked like sharing my snacks and sunscreen, signing yearbooks, sitting and laughing on a big log with my friends, swapping travel plans, and etching pictures in the sand with Wilder and Tatsuo before the waves came to wash them away. For other people, it was all about digging holes as high as their head, showing off a new summer fit, curling up and napping like a cat, chucking frisbees, scouting for crabs during low tide, and staging the final LARP battle of the year atop the Baker Beach batteries. For many LARPers, this was not only the last brawl before summer, but the end of their campaigns at Brightworks as they journey to other schools. Even in the final hours, Asher, Sylvester, and Christian were testing out a new game mode based on the Hunger Games and furiously co-conspiring the encounter while building new duct tape items from scratch. It’s a wild sight to behold — a dozen-and-a-half kids, clutching foam swords, scaling a 120-year-old military structure, with the majestic ocean vista in the background — and one that could only really happen at Brightworks.
Thanks to Aidan the long day ended with a tug-of-war match between Collaborators and students that the students won so definitively that many of us oldsters face-planted onto the beach. Then, we all packed up our kits, swept the sand for trash, and went home, a little woozy and pink, to settle into one of the most decadent sleeps of the year.
If you've been lucky enough to witness Gever deliver one of his talks, you may have heard him attribute elements of his educational philosophy to the many hours he spent building driftwood structures on his childhood beach in Ft. Bragg. He asks, what really is it about a beach that can transform the most tedious manual labor into something magical and adventurous?
He suspects three things: Time. Story. Autonomy. Kids rarely work harder and are more willing to lose themselves in mystical flow when they’re given those three elements in abundance. It’s only appropriate then that we end together at a beach. I hope we keep this tradition, as imperfect as it is, alive for years to come — and you and your family create plenty of little beach days of your own this summer.