PACE Grade 10: Mind Body Connections

 
This week, Director of Community Health and Counseling Jen Quest-Stern, the lead coordinator for next year’s Grade 10 “Promoting Awareness” PACE morning programming, talks about our exciting new “Mind Body Connections” curriculum.

From Jen Quest-Stern, Director of Community Health and Counseling

Over the past five years, one of the things I’ve noticed as significant and new for students is that many have shared a desire to have been born in another time period. Students have mentioned wishing for a life in a different era: being nostalgic for lifestyles from 2000 years ago to the 1980s and 90s. Through further exploration regarding why they are drawn to those different time periods, at the heart of the matter is that the pace of their current lives seems repellant in some ways. While students value their lives now, they perceive those previous time periods as “slower” or “more pastoral.” Simply put from the student perspective...these past times seem hypothetically more manageable.

Students speculate that they would have preferred when music was listened to one album at a time on a record player or when electricity wasn’t even invented. Of course, these wishes don’t mean that students don’t also value the technology that they have at their fingertips right now, but it points to the yearning for a more measured pace of life and a simplicity that is often difficult for students, in current times, to feel.

By offering the Mind Body Connections course as part of our PACE curriculum at CSW, we aim to explore issues that the students themselves have expressed as important to them. The decision to offer this course in the 10th grade year is an intentional one, as this timing offers students the opportunity to establish their high school patterns of academic achievement, along with (not in competition with) self-care and relational health. 10th grade students who are returning to CSW for their second year have a sense of familiarity with the academic program and the expectations and students who are coming in from a different high school are making adjustments and figuring out how to apply what they’ve learned from the 9th grade at another school. This course will offer all sophomores the opportunity to explore and practice their own preferences and capacities for awareness/engagement in their lives.

CSW has always valued health, identity and equity education. The 10th grade Mind Body Connections curriculum will be taught by a trained CSW teaching team who will balance information-based learning with experiential/hands-on & reflective practices. This course sets time aside to help students to understand, practice and personalize these concepts and ideas.


The Cambridge School of Weston is a progressive high school for day and boarding students in grades 9–12 and PG. CSW's mission is to provide a progressive education that emphasizes deep learning, meaningful relationships, and a dynamic program that inspires students to discover who they are and what their contribution is to their school, their community and the world.