A culture of balance, success

The human body is a complex organism with countless systems to sustain life and maintain healthy function.

The cardiovascular system helps supply blood and oxygen to all the cells. The liver helps clean and purify toxins. The bones keep the body strong, and the sensory system allows us to perceive all of life. The human body is a culture of balance.

Metabolism is a set of chemical reactions in the body to sustain life. While the catabolic system breaks down matter to harvest energy, the anabolic system uses energy to construct and build up. For example, when the body is hot, sweat glands release the heat through perspiration, which cools down the body. When one is cold, special muscles on the skin contract, creating heat, causing what we know as “goose bumps.” When bones break, both breaking down and building up happen simultaneously in order to heal the injury.

Like the body uses energy to build up cells, the Mat-Su Borough school system builds healthy communities. Within Wasilla Middle School, there are complex systems to teach the same type of balance and flow of life — personally, socially and educationally. We are “Braves with Integrity,” learning to “Be Respectful, Be Responsible and Be Relentless.”

Students respond well to expectations. They naturally want to please. By walking students through the process of what, when, where, why and how, they begin to understand the complexities of a balanced system. This year, students have a passport in which they go through processes to learn and understand the expectations, and then receive approval of those accomplishments. It is a system to teach students that what occurs here in school also occurs in the community, country and world.

At the open house and spaghetti feed, one sixth-grade student summed up the school’s goals by stating, “The passports are trying to teach us to have responsibility for our own education.”

This 11- or 12-year-old student could not have said it better. Walk on the right side of the hall teaches order and safety. Have a hall pass wherever you go teaches accountability. Bringing to class a pencil and books teaches preparedness. Being kind and helpful to peers and teachers is a reflection of values of acceptance and respect.

Through teaching expectations of behavior and patterns of success, we become a culture of success. Teachers teach. Students learn. Students teach teachers, and teachers learn. It is a beautiful, real and — although quite complex — quite simple as well. Welcome back to school.

Wendy DeGraffenried is a tai chi and qigong instructor, owner of Alaska Transplant Clothing Co. and The Chocolate Rx, and the nurse at Wasilla Middle School.