A Letter from Aaron Stern: Learnings for 2021

Academy Founder and President Aaron Stern thanks you for sharing your 2020 reflections with us. We’ve gathered your reflections and insights to create a collection of learnings for 2021.

Dear Friends,

At the Academy for the Love of Learning, we ended 2020 by reflecting on the year and considering what we could learn from our experiences. From these times of significant disorientation, we began to identify those things that are vital to us – those things that have moved into the foregrounds of our own hearts and minds, that we intend to carry forward with us into 2021 and beyond, as we move towards a “new normal” in a post-2020 world.

In this spirit, I invited staff, faculty, and board of the Academy to reflect upon what has touched them most in 2020, what they want to use as the foundation of a “new normal.” Before the holiday, I shared with you their reflections, in the hopes that you might recognize some of your own experiences in their stories and draw strength from that solidarity.

I also offered you the same prompts and invited you to share your own reflections and learnings from 2020. Many of you responded, and we are grateful for the touching and thoughtful reflections that you shared with us. We offer those reflections to you now, in the hopes that the recognition of our shared experiences, our shared struggles, and our shared insights will provide some measure of fortitude and inspiration as we, individually and collectively, learn our way into the next stage of our lives.

Imagine… a “new normal” with what has become most precious and essential to us in 2020, in the foreground – that which we take forward from these times of this Great Disorientation. What have become the Hidden Gifts…

Here are the learnings you have shared with us.

With gratitude and blessings from Aaron and the Academy team,

Aaron Stern
Founder and President
Academy for the Love of Learning