The Brunswick Trust

Character & Leadership continued from page 1

“What better time to do this than over Thanksgiving break,” she said. “Challenge your family to do one, too.”

Seniors in the Upper School Connections program led a Brotherhood/Force for Good assembly at the Lower School in early December.

“It was so powerful,” said Leslie Anderson, coordinator of Connections. “There was rapt attention. The Upper School boys are like heroes to them.”

Key to the Upper Schoolers’ message was the concept of being an “Upstander” — a person who intervenes and pushes back against bullying.

“How to be a force for good is to be an ‘Upstander,’” Anderson said.

Lower Schoolers broke into small groups to “build” their very own Upstanders. Using ink and paper and all the tools of the trade of elementary school, students gave each Upstander a brain to think with, ears for listening, eyes to see, a mouth to smile with, and, especially, a heart to care.

Seniors who spoke at the assembly included Teddy Danforth, Will MacGillivray, Jackson Fels, Tomas Delgado, Miles Barakett, Trip Williams, Luke Michalik, Jesse Schutzman, Holden Fraser, and Collin Eschricht.

Fourth grade ambassadors kicked off their visits to Lower School classrooms in January by taking inspiration from Japanese soccer fans who were seen cleaning up stadiums after the 2022 World Cup matches.

The practice is a deeply ingrained part of Japanese culture — even young children are taught to clean up their classrooms and school facilities as a sign of respect.

“Even their sports teams — they leave the locker rooms immaculate,” said Brett Martell, Lower School science teacher and coordinator of the ambassador program. “They do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Taking their cue from the Japanese fans, ambassadors used their very first classroom visits of 2023 to highlight the Japanese practice that was so plainly on display in Qatar — and to challenge their younger classmates to come up with ideas on how to emulate it at the Lower School.

“It’s a mindset,” Martell said. “And hey, we can do that, too. It’s a model we want to match up with.” continued on page 3

In all, 22 fourth graders are serving as ambassadors this year, visiting the classrooms of their younger schoolmates to deliver news, run activities, and speak the language of The Brunswick Trust.

Upper Schoolers went to the movies in November for a good old-fashioned shared experience, gathering together in Baker Theater to watch Greyhound.

The movie stars Tom Hanks as a World War II U.S. Navy commander tasked with protecting ship traffic in the Atlantic from German U-boats — the convoy must pass through what was known as the “Black Pit,” a multi-day stretch in which ships were out of range of protective air cover.

Students gathered in advisories to discuss the film, including how its story relates to two recent Brunswick Trust books about World War II, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and All the Frequent Trouble of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner. Donner spoke to Upper Schoolers in Baker Theater in late September.

Eighth graders are once again conducting an “inventory of strengths” that will inform their understanding of midpoint progress reports and their upcoming, seminal Capstone Projects.

Kate Duennebier introduced the VIA Institute on Character last year — the Institute arose in the early 2000s after a big shift in scientific thinking, one that moved decidedly away from diagnosing what’s wrong with a person in favor of looking more closely at human goodness and what’s right.

“The shift here is that we started to look at what works, rather than what’s broken,” Duennebier said. “That’s the foundation on which this VIA institute was built.