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Outgoing Lincoln-Thomson Elementary Principal Helen Mihos.
The pictures tell the story.
Displayed in pairs and tacked to the back wall of the Lincoln-Thomson Elementary School stage, they show how young minds sharpen and bloom over the duration of a school year.
Outgoing Principal Helen Mihos asked her students to draw a self portrait at the start of the school year and sketch a second drawing this month at the close of the school year. The results are startling: children who drew a pencil circles for heads and dots for eyes followed up their initial creations with portraits complete with multi-colored faces, hair, eyebrows and smiles.
Those who spent a few seconds depicting their self image subsequently spent minutes, maybe longer, composing portraits injected with excitement and enthusiasm.
The portraits are proof that something not completely definable takes place in a school as seasons give way to one another and one year ends and another begins. Modern education measures student performance with batteries of tests and all kinds of scholastic measuring sticks. Teachers walk into classrooms with advanced degrees and then taken periodic courses to bolster their knowledge of education. Phalanxes of administrators and specialized learning experts reinforce classroom teachers and stand ready to tackle problems ranging from language barriers to psychological difficulties.
In the middle of this complicated academic machine sits the student, a person who barely knows the world beyond family and home before entering the classroom. Simplistic discussions about learning compare children to sponges and blank slates. But all of them, to varying degrees, bring a pure enthusiasm and fearlessness to learning that tests can’t always measure.
The student who daydreams through arithmetic excels on the ballfield. The kid who can’t speak English speaks through painting. The one who is always in trouble or frowning is the sensitive, potentially gifted writer.
There is no predicting which lesson, which book, which teacher will ignite a student’s mind and set a flame burning that refuses to be quenched. Top-flight high school graduates from Lynn and surrounding communities who are on paths to become doctors and engineers talked before graduation this year about shadowing parents and grandparents at work and remembered teachers who told them to never give up.
Lincoln-Thomson students attend a school that was built 103 years ago. Its polished wood floors and ornamental tile walls are mute witnesses to generation after generation of students who were inspired within those walls.
