Letter From the President

I hope this message finds you enjoying a new day and a new year with excited students, or at least students that are mostly awake as they recover from weeks of sleeping in until noon.  

I wanted to take this moment to share a rough summary of what my team decided our goal should be for the year. We want to build the classroom experiences that make students tell their family, “Guess what I did today!”

When I talk to people about what their favorite lesson was during their time in school, they typically mention an activity, a time they wrote, saw, or built. The fortunate ones also describe how that activity taught them something about themself, something so profound that it set the stage for who they became later in life.

These are the events we are trying to create, meaningful moments. We are capitalizing on the fact that our gifted learners can learn at a rapid pace to create additional space for them to have time to take ownership of that learning, to use it in a way that they will remember. It is these moments that students cherish. It is also these moments that they tell their parents about when they get home. Put together enough of the moments, and you have a community that hears about how our programs are the things that their students value the most about school and are the things they cannot live without. 

My hope for you this year is that you are the reason kids are excited about coming to school. I hope you get to see their faces scrunch up with concentration only to open back up with enlightenment. You are part of an organization that recognizes that these learning opportunities happen less often for some of our brightest students. TAGT exists to help support you in making these moments possible whether it be through advocacy, collaboration, or education. We wish you the best for the new school year. May it be the best one yet.  

Best,

Luke Hurst
TAGT President