Senior Dinner Address

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Tessa Johnson

Upper School biology teacher Tessa Johnson was chosen by the Senior Class as this year’s Rice Award recipient. She delivered the Senior Dinner Address on June 6, in which she shared the three key phrases that impact her life.

It is an honor and a privilege to be standing here . This evening, there are many welldeserved thanks to extend, so I will begin by thanking the Rice brothers, Tony, Don, Bill, and John who have endowed this award . Thank you to the members of the parent committee who organized this celebratory event, especially Carolyn Carr-Spencer and Jayne Lee . Thank you also to the many, many faculty who have helped to get this class to the finish line . Many thanks to the Dean of the Class of 2022, Melissa Stanek, who has led students and advisors through challenging times and who always leads with her heart—we are so fortunate to have you in our community . Thank you, also, to all you wonderful students for this opportunity to speak with you .

I am both a teacher and a mom. I have realized over the years if you want kids to remember something, short phrases repeated often are key. In my family, I have three phrases that I repeat to my own kids frequently— always ask, “How Can I Help?”; Be Brave. Be Kind; and give yourself the I’m Happy With My Life Award.

Some of you should already be familiar with “the four most important words,” but you might not know the story behind why I constantly repeat it.

I once completed a program called Sea Semester where I spent six weeks in Woods Hole taking classes and six weeks on a 135-foot sailboat learning to sail and doing oceanography research; It was pretty incredible and lifechanging. When we were on the boat, we were split up into watches of about eight students. We were assigned two teachers—one sailing and one oceanography. My oceanography teacher was a recent college graduate by the name of Jeff Dorman. He was like the pied piper— we absolutely worshiped the ground he walked on. Jeff Dorman had a way of teaching that made you not only want to learn, but to be a better person. In fact, he was one of the teachers that inspired me to teach. Well, it was three in the morning one day on the boat, and we were grumbling about some clean up we had to do. Jeff didn’t really like our attitude and had us gather around for a story, and then asked if we knew the four most important words. We had no idea. Finally, after much guessing, he said, “How Can I Help?”

At first, we wondered what he meant. How can those words be life-changing? But he was right. In the workplace, it is good to be helpful. Half the time, people don’t really even need you to do anything, but the fact that you noticed they might need help can lighten a load. In relationships, it is important to be helpful and ask the question—with my daughter I will say it and

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she often replies, “This is not a helping thing. This is a listening, non-judging thing where you tell me everything will be ok.” That is good information to have and makes it much more likely that she will talk to me. So, Phrase 1—How Can I Help?

The next phrase I actually stole from the Lily James Cinderella: “Be Brave. Be Kind.” Actually, a graduation speaker used it a few years ago and I said to a coworker, “That’s from Cinderella,” to which they replied, “There is no way that man is quoting Cinderella,” but it turns out he was. The actual quote is from Cinderella’s mother — “I have to tell you a secret that will see you through all the trials that life can offer. Have courage and be kind.” Saying the words ‘Be Brave. Be Kind’ is how I send my daughter out the door. I definitely get an eye roll, but those two qualities are two of the most important to have every day.

Bravery. You might think I mean the kind of bravery where you run into a burning building to save people or the kind where you defend your family from a saber tooth tiger or even trying something new, but I actually mean the kind of bravery where you have tough conversations—like the ones you have with your friends where you admit that your relationship is not healthy or you are not making choices that are good for you. Friends that have those conversations with you are friends you want to keep because they care enough about you to speak up for you. These brave conversations also feed over into the workplace. You’ll need to ask for things—like pay raises or promotions. You might have to ask more than once. The orchard, for example, wasn’t just given to me to build—I had to ask for it several times in several different ways before it happened. You also have to be brave enough to say, “I don't understand or know what you want.” My husband has a hard time with young employees because instead of asking for help they will just keep doing something incorrectly. So be brave and have those tough conversations.

Be Kind. That seems easy—you all illustrate kindness all the time. I know there are many different groups in your class, but I always see you working together and being kind in so many ways. You are super supportive of each other which is amazing, and the kind of kindness I want to emphasize is being kind to yourself. You may be graduating, but you are still quite young. Do you remember when your brain finally finishes growing (age 24)? And the part that is growing now is the part that controls logical thinking and rational decision-making. This means you are going to make mistakes and now that you are older those mistakes might have consequences. That is ok—it is normal and expected. You need to forgive yourself and move forward, and of course, try not to make the same mistake over and over again.

You should also be kind to your parents or guardians. Some of you are ready to be done with Hackley, some are scared to leave, and some of you are somewhere in the middle. No matter where you are, Hackley has helped shape you into the wonderful person you are today and you would not have been able to attend the School without the support from your family. So when your parent or guardian is bugging you about filling out a form, getting your work in, or even just maybe letting them know what your plans are so they can make their own plans, instead of getting annoyed, say “I see you—I love you—and thank you.” We love you more than you could ever imagine and all we want is for you to be happy, healthy, and safe. So tonight—take a minute to thank those who have helped you get here— Be kind.

So, ask “How Can I Help?” and remember Phrase 2: Be Brave and Be Kind.

Now, the third phrase also comes with a story or two. My son went to the Croton Sailing School for many summers. It is a nice program where you are outside and follows a step-by-step program until you can sail a boat—you start out as shark bait and slowly progress up to Salty Dog. He loved it when he was little. But, every week, they had an award for the best sailor and best sportsmanship. He told me that he knew he would never win the best sportsmanship, but he could win the best sailor, and every week he wouldn’t win it—it was taking away the joy of the camp. We had a long conversation about it and I thought, “Dude you are at Hackley—everyone is ridiculously amazing here— it’s not a place to go to win awards because everyone is award-winning in their own way. The only award you really need to win is the I’m Happy With My Life Award.” It is a great award because you can give it to yourself every day or you can make changes so that

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you can win it. You completely control this award. Since then, I have repeated Phrase 3 to my kids—“Give yourself the I’m Happy With My Life Award.”

This year during a class, my students asked if I could win this ‘happy with life’ award, and while my answer was yes, that wasn’t always the case. Let me explain.

My last year of graduate school was challenging. At that point, my lab had 13 students which is quite large. Socially, I was not really in a group in the lab anymore as most of my good friends had graduated. With the groups that were left, I either wasn’t ‘crunchy enough’ because I used paper towels or I wasn’t ‘studious enough’ because I ‘laughed too much and was too cheerful to be taken seriously.’ The only really good friend I had in the lab was Jeff Dorman who randomly started in the lab the year after me—it is a small world sometimes. Tricky social dynamics in the lab was my first problem. The next problem was that I was banned from fieldwork. I was on a 3-year grant and my professor wanted me to finish—because of the grant I was basically a free student and he didn’t want to have to pay me.

But I loved fieldwork. I got to spend a month during summer on a research vessel in the Pacific Ocean. I spent hundreds of hours on a research boat in the San Francisco Bay. And I was asked to do a lot of lab work by default—In my lab of 13, ten of us were girls, and most were incredibly petite. I was one of the stronger girls and could carry around 50 to 100 pounds of equipment easily. In addition, the winch on our boat was tricky and I had a lot of practice getting it to work, so I was often called upon to work wench. (I think my favorite award ever received was from the captain and first mate of the boat. When I graduated they gave me an engraved timer that said “Number 1 winch wench.”)

Instead of doing something I absolutely loved, I was stuck in the lab picking through my samples and doing gut content analysis of larval herring and larval anchovies about 12 mm in length. Let me assure you that my lab work is 1000 times more boring than it sounds. And to make matters worse, the answer to my thesis question—Do larval fish feed better in tidal fronts?—was turning out to be “who knows.” While sometimes no difference can be good, in this case, it was probably due to my sampling design. There is a reason most do not study tidal fronts—it is hard.

So right now, you must be thinking, “She doesn’t have any friends in her lab and her research is terrible— that is not the end of the world.” And if it had been just that, I would have been okay and might have gone down a different path, but my professor was also a problem. In my first year, I was in the field so much and in classes that it didn’t matter. In my second year he was away so I didn’t see him, but he would call every day at 5:00 p.m. to check in on us. One of the boys in my lab would surf all day—he had a ridiculously easy master’s project, but he made sure he was in the lab and answered the phone at 5:00 p.m. when my professor called. My professor then started telling us that we needed to be more like Darren because he was always working so hard in the lab.

The lesson here is that while at Hackley we celebrate unreserved effort, in the working world appearances also matter so make sure your effort is noticed. I never answered the phone, so I got in trouble and was told to work harder even though I was always there and Darren was not.

My professor was also verbally abusive to the female graduate students. By the end of my third year, I was a disaster. I have always been a worrier and a peoplepleaser, but after a year of belittling and put-downs by my professor who had complete control over my life then (I graduated or not based on his signature), I had developed a full-blown anxiety disorder and panic attacks. It was so bad that I couldn’t retain any nutrients in my food, and I lost a lot of weight my last few months of school.

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In fact, because of me, the director of my research center took note and started an investigation into my professor who was later asked to resign after it was discovered that other young female scientists were struggling—two girls left our lab and restarted graduate school elsewhere and two others started counseling. It was not good.

At this point in time, I was not winning the I’m Happy With My Life Award. I wanted to move back to Virginia to be with my family. I had, however, met my future husband—Mike. He told me that he was not quite ready to move back east and I should probably stay one more year to recover, and that if I could wait a year we could move back to New York and get married.

This meant I needed to find a job. I had no idea what to do—the only thing I knew for sure is that I wanted nothing to do with research or a lab. I received two different offers—a consulting job right outside of San Francisco and a teaching position at the Athenian school an hour away. The consulting job paid $130 and the teaching job paid $38. Both of those salaries sounded great to me. The Athenian School is a rather remarkable school right next to Mt. Diablo State Park and I was to be a sabbatical leave replacement for one year. They wanted to train me and also offered to pay for me to go to New York to find a teaching job in the spring. They loved me and I loved them, but there was a huge difference in salary and commute time, and many of my friends were graduating from medical school and law school, and being a teacher didn’t sound quite as cool as being a lawyer or doctor.

In fact, my father was furious at first and told me I was wasting my education. To give him credit, he was a Top Gun fighter pilot instructor for the Navy and then became a lawyer who went and worked for the FBI doing Chinese espionage and polygraph—he was pretty intense. Twenty years later, both of his daughters are teachers and he is super supportive of teachers and very proud of us and denies ever making that comment. Lesson for those of you who have parents that rate high on the intensity scale, wait another 15 years and throw in a couple of grandbabies and you will see a very laid back version of the parent in front of you today—it just takes a while. So, back to the story—I didn’t know what to do. Mike said, “You should do that teaching position—you loved it there. I haven’t seen you that happy working in a while. If it doesn’t work, you can always try something else.” So I did, and that choice led me to this moment today and I can say with 100% certainty that I can now give myself the I’m Happy With My Life Award every day. It doesn’t mean I’m completely happy every day, but I am happy with where I am.

This year, a large part of that happiness is due to you all sitting here.

Thank you for being your unique indescribable selves. The program says that you are extraordinary and it is true—you are for so many reasons. It is not just that you are all intelligent, beautiful, and talented. It is also that your curiosity knows no bounds. For example, one of you came to AP Bio for at least ⅓ of the classes and you were not even in AP Bio. Another one of you came to both AP Bio classes because you love to learn. Your enthusiasm is contagious. I asked a group of you if you wanted to go eeling with Teatown as a joke, and yet you all came and had so much fun and it brought such joy into my life watching you.

You are incredibly resilient. It has been three long and challenging pandemic years, but they have made you good at picking yourselves up and moving forward. My AFER class walked in the grass by the back entrance this year and got covered in ticks—and I mean hundreds of ticks. Six of them had to go home and shower. It was one of the worst moments of my teaching career. I wondered, “How am I ever going to get them back outside?” but the next day the entire class showed up and were ready to go—amazing! I have loved debating everything with you all. From all of the free response questions in AP Bio—Yes Mac Wyman you must say ‘five carbon sugar’ not just ‘sugar’— to the wonderful complicated discussions I had in my advisory about current events. To my advisory: I have loved watching you grow and I have no idea how I am going to start over again next year—I am sure I will love my new crew, but I will miss you all dreadfully.

To conclude, always remember: Ask, “how can I help?”; be brave and kind; and give yourself the I’m Happy With My Life Award every day. Thank you for all the wonderful memories.