“Attention” is a word we hear constantly these days. During our recent Open House, English teacher Monica Hough spoke about how students develop strong habits of attention in their writing and reading. Head of School David Perry described the individual attention each student receives at Falmouth Academy. And if you’ve been paying attention to the news—there it is again—you’ve likely encountered conversations about the “attention economy,” a world in which a child’s interest, curiosity, and even their gaze can be quantified and commodified. Suddenly, “paying attention” feels less like a metaphor and more like a form of currency.

Of course, educators have always cared about attention. The familiar image of a teacher pleading for a classroom’s focus is almost cliché. Adults often look back and say they wish they had “paid better attention in school.” But that dynamic isn’t what defines life at Falmouth Academy. Here, students are deeply engaged in meaningful work. Their attention isn’t something to be pulled from them—it’s something they offer willingly when learning feels purposeful.

But now, I’d like us to consider attention in a different way—not how students attend to their studies, but how they attend to one another.

For a moment, imagine one of the first times a peer truly paid attention to you. Not just looking at you, but seeing you. Seeing something real in you, acknowledging it without judgment or agenda. Think about what that felt like—being known, understood, and recognized. That feeling matters.

I have been wandering these hallways in some capacity since I was seven years old, when my older brother enrolled here. But I’ve only been Dean of Students for about fifteen months. I expected challenges—young people make mistakes, and that’s part of growing up. What I didn’t expect was how consistently, and how often, students would come to me or to our school counselor with concerns about a peer.

These aren’t disciplinary reports. They are expressions of care:

“Something seems off.”

“My friend made a comment that worried me.”

“I think someone might need help.”

These moments—happening a few times every week—give me enormous hope. They show how deeply our students see one another, how sincerely they look out for their peers, and how naturally they respond when someone needs support. I often find myself sitting with a student who is struggling, but who is also profoundly moved by the simple fact that someone noticed. Someone cared. Someone paid attention.

In my senior composition class, we read Mary Oliver’s essay Upstream. In it, she describes wandering away from her parents during a hike, following a stream and losing herself in childhood wonder. It becomes a metaphor for growing into adulthood, and it ends with this beautiful charge:

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

If you choose to stand your child in the stream of this school—this community—we will strive to teach them far more than how to write a strong sentence, conjugate a French verb, or unravel the mysteries of calculus. We will teach them that attentiveness is a lifelong practice: to the world around them, to the people they encounter, and to the shifting currents of their own inner lives.

Because here at Falmouth Academy, attention isn’t just a skill.

It's a way of being.

A beginning.