#Patelfie

Eight months ago, during our New Student Orientation week, a few students taught me how to take a “selfie”. One of them said that this may become “a thing” this year. She was right. Since that momentous day of narcism, #selfiewithpatel shook the Twitter-sphere. The open mouth, multiple-angled look became Instragram-worthy and the rest is history. It became so insidious that Mr. Ganley renamed it #Patelfie – see definition below. Patelfie: noun: a selfie taken with Mr. Patel. Both a neologism and a portmanteau. I’ve been interviewed. I’ve received numerous selfie-sticks. Some even made a trophy that is awarded weekly at our assemblies –the  #selfiewithpatel Trophy! What started out as good fun has ramped up to a level that even the paparazzi would admire. Board meetings have taken a back seat to this tsunami of affection to a point where I now have to say…stop! At the end of this academic year, the #Patelfie will come to end.  Mrs. Patel will be most pleased. In all seriousness, all of our staff and faculty engage so positively with our students. We have fun with our students. We laugh and cry with our students. What Mr. Lawrence shared with me a few years ago continue to reverberate in my medial temporal lobe (the place where we process memory) - “At Brentwood, we don’t do things TO students, we do things WITH students”. While the #Patelfie will soon be a distant memory, merrily trending in the social media ether, doing things WITH our students will not change. That’s the Brentwood way.