NMH Spring 2015

NMH Magazine

15 spring

volume 17 • number 1

Northfield Mount Hermon

Their films premiere at festivals around the world.

Their philosophy began at NMH.

THE

TRIBE

NMH Magazine SPRING 2015 Volume 17, Number 1 Editor Jennifer Sutton P ’14 Contributors Sharon LaBella-Lindale Susan Pasternack Harry van Baaren Hannah Wareham Design Lilly Pereira Class Notes Editor Kris Halpin Class Notes Design HvB Imaging Director of Communications Cheri Cross Head of School Peter B. Fayroian Chief Advancement Officer Allyson L. Goodwin ’83, P ’12, P ’14 Archivist Peter H. Weis ’78, P ’13 Northfield Mount Hermon publishes NMH Magazine (USPS074-860) two times a year in fall and spring. Printed by Lane Press, Burlington, VT 05402 NMH Magazine Northfield Mount Hermon One Lamplighter Way Mount Hermon, MA 01354 413-498-3247 Fax 413-498-3021 nmhmagazine@nmhschool.org Class Notes nmhnotes@nmhschool.org Address Changes Northfield Mount Hermon Advancement Services Norton House One Lamplighter Way Mount Hermon, MA 01354 413-498-3300 addressupdates@nmhschool.org

NMH Magazine

15 spring

volume 17 • number 1

features

20 The Tribe

Their films premiere at festivals around the world. Their work philosophy began at NMH.

26 Talking About Ferguson The shooting death of Michael Brown opened up important conversations.

34 Learn, Build, Act.

NMH forges ahead with a new strategic plan.

38 Dear Seniors

Ninth graders need advice.

Seniors give it. Empathy happens.

departments

3 Leading Lines 5 Tribute 8 NMH Journal 14 Movers & Makers 16 In the Classroom 18 Past Present 44 Alumni Hall 46 Class Notes 96 Parting Words

< < AT BL UE L AKE NMH students take a break while hiking the Tongariro Crossing on New Zealand’s North Island.

The group spent five weeks in February and March traveling through the country with faculty.

ON THE COVE R Filmmakers (l–r) Ethan Palmer ’96, Andrew Neel ’97, Luke Meyer ’97, and Tom Davis.

C O V E R PH O TO : D E N N I S B U R N E TT TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S : G L E N N M I N S H A L L

LETTERS

NMH showed us the way forward.

Now we give back.

NMH taught us to live in the world with purpose and make it a better place. Now we are making a difference in professions and communities everywhere. As we look ahead with conviction, we also need to give back to NMH. Only with our support can NMH inspire the students of today and tomorrow. Every single gift matters.

You can direct your gift to the area of NMH that means the most to you. Find your giving options at www.nmhschool.org/nmhfund.

2 I NMH Magazine

LEADING LINES

Big Plans

Join us in shaping the future of NMH.

by PETER B. FAYROIAN, Head of School

When spring came at last to NMH, the days got longer and brighter, the ground finally began to yield, and there was an indefinable but unmistakable buoyancy in the air.

The words “strategic plan” don’t exactly fit that feeling. They aren’t in anyone’s top 10. If you ask students about their favorite words, as one of our English teachers did recently, they say “lugubrious” or “alchemy,” “romp” or “glisten.” They say “festival.” Not “strategic plan.”

That’s because strategic plans are known to be dull, obligatory documents that schools produce at regular intervals, which then molder away on a shelf, on an abandoned hard drive, or (these days) in the muffled layers of the Cloud. Often, they are outdated before they are printed, or enable only a few good changes before sputtering out.

In 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower declared that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This spring, as we prepare to roll out our strategic plan — our vision for what an NMH education should be, our direction for the future, and our priorities for the next three to five years — we are aware of the need to have more than just a plan. We have tried to create a way to keep our planning in the present tense. We’ve set priorities, yes; we’ve shared our common goals and vision, yes. But we do this knowing that we will need to constantly critique and measure ourselves to make sure what we’re doing is the right thing for students.

During this past year of visioning, students have been at the heart of every conversation. Associate Head of School Sharon Howell smartly shepherded us through the process, which led to the trustees’ endorsement of the plan last winter. I’m deeply appreciative of Dr. Howell’s work, and that of our trustees — especially the outgoing chair, Bill Shea — and our Alumni Council, parents of our students, and the entire faculty and staff.

You will read in the pages of this magazine about a few of the big priorities we have identified, and which will determine our work in the coming years: educational and academic innovation, reinvention of our science and math curriculum, and robust investment in financial aid.

These priorities provide powerful directives for us as a school: to continue building a strong, diverse faculty; to make sure our facilities support our

P H O T O : K AT H L E E N D O O H E R

programs; and to keep NMH on course to be financially and in every way sustainable. We’ve developed initiatives that will improve the school and bring new coherence and energy to existing programs.

A Center for Learning Through Action will provide an experientialeducation hub, bringing together our international education, service learning, workjob, and farm programs while also creating an incubation space for initiatives such as a new social entrepreneurship course.

We will re-examine our advising and student life programs to better support and engage our incredibly diverse community.

And we will renew our commitment to sustainable practices in the classroom and on this beautiful campus, teaching students the habits of resilience and stewardship.

So, that buoyancy in the air is not only spring; it is a new sense of possibility and direction. Our planning has spanned many months, and the result is the product of hundreds of conversations with everyone from faculty to parents to students past and present. In the words of one alumnus, the plan “does a fantastic job of honoring NMH’s mission and past, while at the same time moving it forward”; and a current faculty member says, “I feel proud to work for a school that is moving in this direction.”

We are thrilled to be able to share our plan with you (p. 34), and hope that you will take part in making it a reality in the months and years to come. [NMH]

spring 2015 I 3

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November 20, 1965 Do you remember this day? The Silliman Science Laboratory caught fire during an NMH– Deerfield football game, the teams played on as the building burned, and spectator Robert Van Fleet captured what would become an iconic image. NMH Magazine will recognize the 50th anniversary of the making of this photograph in the Fall 2015 issue, and we need your help. Share your recollections of this day by contacting us at nmhmagazine@nmhschool.org.

The NMH bookstore can outfit you and your family.

Visit the NEW and IMPROVED online store for great gift ideas.

www.nmhbookstore.com 4 I NMH Magazine

TRIBUTE

Mary Duffie Seymour 1958–2015

In the eyes of Mary Seymour, the former editor of this magazine, peanut M&M’s qualified as a major food group.

She liked to keep a glass jar of them on her desk, which guaranteed her a steady stream of afternoon visitors. When she was working on deadline, you could hear that glass jar clink open and closed more frequently than usual. “They have protein,” she insisted.

Mary died in January at the age of 56.

She was a graceful, soulful writer and a funny, compassionate colleague who anchored the communications work of Northfield Mount Hermon from 1996 to 2008 and guided the magazine to multiple national awards.

One of the final stories she created in these pages was about alumni who changed careers in midlife. Mary did the same thing, leaving NMH to earn a master’s degree in counseling and become a therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was a transformation that grew out of her own struggle with mental illness, which she kept sufficiently quiet that most people had no idea of the torment that lay beneath her confident, stylish surface.

Mary took her own life after battling bipolar disorder for more than two decades. A few of her former NMH colleagues understood that her life was a roller coaster, so the news of her death, though heartbreaking, began to feel like less of a surprise. Those colleagues also reminded us how incredibly hard Mary worked to manage her disease and do the things she loved: raising her son, Gabe Milici ’07; riding and taking care

PHOTO: MICHAEL DW YER

Mary Seymour frequently rode and cared for the horses on the NMH Farm.

of horses; honing her skills as a mosaic artist; writing.

We knew Mary as a smart, talented storyteller who dressed up for work, eschewing sturdy western Massachusetts footwear for high heels. She was a natural at talking to all kinds of people and finding out what motivated them, then translating those conversations into smooth, lyrical prose. She was a generous writer, and wasn’t above the occasional gushing phrase — because she saw the good in everyone. Behind the scenes, she had a dry, acerbic sense of humor — because she saw the absurdities in everyone, too.

In 2002, Mary described her experience with mental illness in an essay published in Newsweek magazine. Titled “Call Me Crazy, but I Have to Be Myself,” the essay was anthologized in several collections and used as a teaching tool for college writing courses. It hints at Mary’s future as a counselor. “What I

yearn for most is to integrate both sides of myself,” she wrote. “I want to be part of the normal world but I also want to own my identity as bipolar. I want people to know what I’ve been through so I can help those traveling a similar path.”

For the past several years, she did just that, as the director of recovery initiatives at the Mental Health Association in Greensboro and as a therapist at Tree of Life Counseling. She also led workshops in using mosaic art as a metaphor for recovery. She wrote about her colorful mosaics, which were made with pieces of broken plates: “Something whole and supposedly perfect can be shattered and re-formed, and the result is beautifully complex, perfect in its imperfection.”

Besides her son, Mary is survived by her parents, Polly and Thaddeus; two sisters, including Abigail Seymour ’85; two brothers; 16 nieces and nephews; Rey Milici, Gabe’s father; and her horse, Mystic. [NMH]

spring 2015 I 5

NMH POSTCARD

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NMH JOURNAL

COMO SE LLAMA? Actually, it’s an alpaca, making an appearance at NMH’s annual Farmer’s Market Teach-In Day. P H O T O : D AV I D WA R R E N

spring 2013 I 7

NMH JOURNAL

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and the authors of Half the Sky and A Path Appears, brought their message of compassionate activism to campus in March.

Finding a Path Get off the couch and do something, no matter how small, to change the world. That was the invitation that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offered students when they visited campus in early spring to talk about their latest book, A Path Appears, which also is a documentary film that aired on PBS earlier this year.

8 I NMH Magazine

“Find ways to get out of your comfort zone, whether that’s in Kenya or Massachusetts,” Kristof urged. “If you open your heart and open your mind, you can transform a life,” WuDunn added.

Cliché? Yes, but underlying Kristof and WuDunn’s platitudes are decades of hardcore international data-gathering.

Kristof, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, and WuDunn, a banker and former journalist, earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their reporting during the pro-democracy student movement in China and the Tiananmen Square protests. Their first book and documentary film, Half the Sky, called attention to the oppression of women and girls around the world and has been compared to Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring for its potential as a catalyst for change. A Path Appears tells stories of regular people developing solutions to pressing social problems and offers guidance on how readers can do the same.

“Kristof and WuDunn don’t only show us the violence and the darkness of our world, but also the glimpses of hope and light that we can create,” said Farah Omer ’15 as she introduced the husband-wife team in Memorial Chapel. The talk was part of NMH’s Jacqueline Smethurst Speaker Series.

WuDunn’s advice to students: “Take your skills and apply them.” Develop your empathy; share your money. For

PH O TO : J O S H U A B E N N E TT/ S H O W O F FO R CE

Two $1 Million Gifts Boost NMH’s Future Plans

“!Kristof and WuDunn’s

first book, Half the Sky, has been compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a potential catalyst for change.”

example, there are 60 million elementary-school-age children in the world who aren’t in school, but “it’s pretty cheap to get a bunch of people together and keep a kid in school in Nairobi,” Kristof said. “It may feel like a drop in the bucket, but that’s how you fill the bucket.” To older students, he and WuDunn suggested taking a gap year between high school and college to learn about the world and how they, as individuals, could best contribute to society.

They also advised students to talk, loudly, about what they discover. That’s why Kristof and WuDunn frequently enlist celebrities like Jennifer Garner and Mia Farrow to accompany them on their research trips around the world.

Improving early childhood education in poor communities, reducing rates of teen pregnancy and violence against women — “These kinds of issues only get resources when we shine the light on them,” Kristof said. “You all have your own spotlight, whether it’s Facebook, dinner-table conversations, classes.

Where the media drops the ball, you can pick it up.”

Before the NMH Board of Trustees even got a chance to approve the school’s new strategic plan earlier this year, two alumni proclaimed their approval with separate $1 million gifts for the school’s academic and financial-aid programs.

William R. Rhodes ’53, chairman emeritus of the NMH Board of Trustees, donated his cash gift to endow a new course in social entrepreneurship. Current trustee Betsy Compton ’72 has created an endowed scholarship fund in honor of her father, former faculty member and dean Bill Compton ’44, who worked at NMH from 1957 to 1992.

The Rhodes Fellowship Course in Social Entrepreneurship will begin as a pilot program this fall, training students to create actual businesses aimed at finding innovative solutions to social, environmental, economic, or educational problems. The course will initially be offered to six juniors — with enrollment expanding in subsequent semesters — who will collaborate with NMH faculty and staff and also with mentors at New England colleges and universities.

The course will enable NMH to be a leader among other independent schools in “teaching students to take a creative business approach to doing social good,” according to Associate Head of School Sharon Howell. “The goal is that our students will gain an understanding that what is in their own interest is also in the interest of others and of the planet.”

Besides chairing the board of trustees for 12 years, Rhodes led the funding for the 63,000-square-foot Rhodes Arts Center, constructed in 2007.

Compton, a former “fac brat” on campus, has served on the board of trustees for 11 years and has a long history backing NMH. She has Top: William Rhodes ’53 Bottom: Betsy ’72 and devoted multiple gifts to the school’s athletic Bill Compton ’44 programs, including one of the lower soccer fields, which is named in honor of her family. Her most recent gift funded a new faculty home in memory of her mother, longtime librarian Mary L. Compton ’44.

“We are grateful for these two timely and transformative gifts,” says Head of School Peter Fayroian. “The new entrepreneurship course can offer students an experience that will start preparing them to be the kind of leaders we all want to see in the world. And Betsy has a deep appreciation for providing opportunities to all students, regardless of their families’ financial resources. She learned this from her parents and from living, working, and learning on the NMH campus.”

P H O TO S : C L A I R E B A R C L AY, S TU A R T C A H I L L

spring 2015 I 9

NMH JOURNAL

THE SHOT

OVER THE T O P I Joseph Gottfried ’15 was one of several NMH wrestlers who cleaned up during post-season competition.

Shown here wrestling in James Gym, Gottfried, along with teammates Aidan Conroy ’15, Marcus Cross ’15, Jake Wilson ’15, Justin Kim ’15, and Colby Boudreau ’16, was named to NEPSAC’s All New England team; Conroy and Gottfried were New England champions in their respective weight classes. At the National Prep Championships at Lehigh University, three NMH wrestlers were named All Americans, with Gottfried placing 4th in the country in his weight class, Cross placing 6th, and Conroy placing 8th.

HEAVY HITTE R S

Alpine skiers Nick Bertrand ’16 and Camila Goclowski ’17 took the No. 1 places on the Mount Institute Ski League’s All-League male and female teams. They were also named to NEPSAC’s All-New England team, along with Elisabeth Grondin ’16, Zach Leeds ’16, and Pablo Borra Paley ’16.

Goclowski, Bertrand, Leeds, and Alex Brooke ’18 were named to U16 and U18 post-season teams by the U.S. Ski Association.

Nordic skiers Estevan Velez ’16, Loulou Tanski ’15, Eva Laubach ’15, and Nevada Powers ’16 were

10 I NMH Magazine

named to the All-NEPSAC team; Velez, Tanski, Powers, and Toby Weed ’17 were named to the AllLakes Region team.

Sullivan ’15, Jackson Donahue ’15, Collin McManus ’15, and Daquon Ervin ’15 were named McDonald’s All-American nominees.

Girls’ varsity basketball players Tayler White ’15, Vanessa Udoji ’16, and Angie Marazzi ’16 were named NEPSAC Class A All Stars.

The boys’ varsity basketball team made its third consecutive trip to the National Championship Final Four.

Basketball forward Aaron Falzon ’15 was named NEPSAC AAA Player of the Year — the first time a member of the NMH boys’ basketball team has achieved that honor. Falzon also set a single-game NMH scoring record with 45 points in a win against Bridgton Academy.

Boys’ varsity basketball players Jahshanti Allen ’15, Chris

Udoji, Ervin, and Falzon each scored their 1,000th point this season.

PH O TO : R I S L E Y S PO R TS PH O TO G R A PH Y

NMH JOURNAL

WE ASKED ON FACEBOOK :

What skills did you learn during “workjob” that you still use today?

KYLER CH AVE Z ’05

“Started as a dishwasher in West Hall. Now I run restaurants for a living.

Workjob was the start of my career.”

FOR THE RECORD

“!For anyone engaged in science, or in any creative, innovative endeavor, march away from the sounds of the drums. There you’ll find the room to discover things, and you’ll make your own sounds.”

ED WARD O. WI LS ON , professor emeritus at Harvard University, spoke on campus in April as part of the school’s Science for the 21st Century Speaker Series. Wilson, a renowned biologist and author, is considered the world’s leading expert in myrmecology, the study of ants, and the originator of the concepts of biodiversity and sociobiology.

He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

MEGAN SC H E C K ’93

“I got very good at mucking stalls. I’m a high school English teacher, so shoveling manure is a skill that can come in handy.”

LY N T R A N F I E L D B E N N E T T ’ 7 4

“Peeling potatoes and unjamming a copier.

Also, the importance of everyone pitching in.”

KAREN HOFF MC M AH O N ’69

“It added to my patience — made me a better mom of three boys and a better social worker for the past 38 years.”

WIL EVERH AR T ’66

“I can still make meatloaf for 600 without checking a recipe.”

FOLLOW NMH ON FACEBOOK.

PHOTO: JIM HARRISON

spring 2015 I 11

NMH JOURNAL

WHO•WHAT •W H Y

Beyond Unisex

A new kind of bathroom makes a subtle debut on campus.

by MEGAN TADY

The signs don’t say “male.” Or “female.” Or simply “restroom.”

Twenty-nine bathrooms in 19 buildings on campus now have new signs on the doors that say “All Gender Restroom.”

It’s a subtle change with a significant impact. It means that gender-nonconforming people at NMH — those who don’t identify as either male or female — now have bathroom options that reflect their identities.

The change, says Dean of Students Nicole Hager, is “a powerful manifestation of NMH’s mission to act with humanity and purpose.” The school added gender identity to its nondiscrimination policy in 2012, and the new bathroom signs allow administrators “to send a message that we recognize there’s more than just a male gender and a female gender,” Hager says.

Khalil Power ’14 helped spark the change. Female at birth, Power came out as transgender last year, but had neither the need nor desire to live as a male. Power identifies as “genderqueer” — a third gender — and uses the neutral pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she.” “I started thinking about how people like myself, who aren’t on the gender binary, could feel more accepted on campus,” Power says.

Adding all-gender bathrooms seemed like a good step. “I decided

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“!We wanted something

more than just a sign that said, ‘restroom.’

We wanted a statement that said, ‘You’re welcome here.’”

to focus on bathrooms because it’s such a biological necessity,” Power says. “Gender-inclusive bathrooms have a sense of privacy that is really great. It’s easy to slip in and not have people notice.”

Power wrote to Hager and other school administrators outlining the proposal. Hager says she saw the bathrooms as an opportunity to better support the school’s LGBTQ community. Together, Power and Hager toured the campus and inventoried

bathrooms on campus to determine which ones could be designated as allgender — single stalls with a lock.

Gretchen Licata, NMH’s general service manager, took the next step of acquiring the new signs. She says the wording — “All Gender Restroom” — was deliberate.

“We wanted something more than just a sign that said ‘restroom,’” Licata says. “We wanted a statement that said, ‘You’re welcome here.’”

Hager agrees. “It’s important to convey to a traditionally marginalized group of people that they’re in a safe space.”

The bathroom signs follow other steps NMH has taken to make the school more inclusive to the broader LGBTQ community. Twelve years ago, NMH hired Hager, who is openly gay.

The school recognizes annual events such as National Coming Out Day and the anti-bullying Day of Silence; there’s also a strong Gay Straight Alliance on campus.

Now a student at Clark University, Power is both grateful that current students can benefit from the new bathroom signs, and hopeful that NMH will continue to make the campus friendly to all students.

“Learning how to accept a variety of people is difficult because there are so many different needs,” Power says.

“I urge NMH to continue to push its mindset on inclusivity.”

READING LIST

Carolina Israelite

By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett ’75 The University of North Carolina Press May 2015

In Search of Lost G

By Kyung Hyun Kim ’88 Seoul Selection September 2014 (In Korean)

Tapping the Wisdom That Surrounds You

By Elizabeth Ghaffari ’64 Praeger September 2014

The Art Rules: Wisdom and Guidance from Art World Experts Edited by Paul Klein ’65 Intellect Ltd. February 2015

Before Custer: Surveying the Yellowstone, 1872 Edited by M. John Lubetkin ’56 University of Oklahoma Press, 2015

“Teame,” by Olivia Cleary ’16, won a Gold Key Award in the mixed media category of the Boston Globe Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, presented annually by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cleary won three additional Gold Key Awards as well as an Honorable Mention for other pieces she produced during the Fall 2014 semester.

AWA R D W I N N E R

The Last Generation

By Ben Robertson ’86 Menadena Publishing September 2014

spring 2015 I 13

MOVERS & MAKERS

Seamus Mullen ’92

Food Journey

Seamus Mullen learns how to cook and eat.

by LORI FERGUSON

Award-winning chef Seamus Mullen ’92 is riding high these days. In the past four years, his creative approach to modern Spanish cuisine has birthed Tertulia in New York’s West Village, hailed by The New York Times as one of the top 10 new restaurants of 2011; then El Comado, a Hell’s Kitchen tapas and wine bar that recently spun off into a butcher shop; and now Sea Containers on the Thames River in London, which uses ingredients supplied by organic farmers and fair-trade cooperatives across the United Kingdom and Europe.

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“I love to cook anything that is fresh, and I make sure my food is healthy and balanced,” Mullen says.

“I focus on excellent protein — local meat, poultry, and fish — and lots of seasonal vegetables.”

Mullen’s commitment to clean, innovative food is not just for show; he cooks this way because his life depends upon it. In 2007, following several years of increasingly debilitating symptoms — excruciating joint pain, blood clots that landed him in the hospital on life support — Mullen was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. The more he learned about the disease, the more he thought there had to be a correlation between what he ate and how he felt.

Mullen’s self-guided efforts to alter his diet, combined with conventional painkillers and steroids, brought some relief. Then, following the advice of his doctor, he stopped eating processed foods, sugar, and gluten, stuck to a strict eating schedule, and practiced intermittent fasting. The results were profound.

Today Mullen is free of disease, dozens of pounds lighter, and eager to share his discoveries. His first cookbook, Seamus Mullen’s Hero Food: How Cooking with Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better, was published in 2012, and he recently added his voice to the debate over food and health in a New York Times op-ed piece.

“As a nation, we’re struggling with tough issues that relate to an unhealthy relationship with food,” Mullen says.

“As someone who has fought and overcome a terrifically challenging battle with a chronic disease that I believe has both its roots and its positive pathways in food, I feel obliged to try to help others ditch their antagonistic relationship with food and embrace a healthy one.”

Mullen’s awareness of quality ingredients reaches back to when he was

PH O TO : C H R I S TI N E H A N PH O TO G R A PH Y

BRIGHT LIGHT

growing up on a farm in rural Vermont. “We got milk from our cows, vegetables from our garden, and most of our meat from our own animals,” he recalls. He and his brother were involved in the kitchen, but cooking was just another responsibility, no different from other farm chores. Mullen describes his childhood as “lovely, but very homogeneous.

I longed to identify with a culture, and I didn’t find it in Vermont,” he says.

“!I feel obliged to help others ditch

their antagonistic relationship with food and embrace a healthy one.”

Mullen’s turning point came when he was a student at NMH and traveled to Spain on a school trip. “The food was very exotic — prawns, squid — and my Spanish host family was absolutely food-obsessed. The deep sense of history and culture was inspiring, and I discovered that cooking could be a really festive experience. I spent many long weekends at paella parties, socializing with adults. It was a heady experience for a 17-year-old.”

After two years in college in the U.S., Mullen returned to Spain to finish school. He spent the next decade working as a line cook in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York, and apprenticing in kitchens in Spain. In 2006, he opened the New York tapas restaurant Boqueria, and, after a near win on the Food Network’s “Next Iron Chef,” he opened Tertulia, a rustic gastropub where the sharing of food is a theme, from small tapas dishes to large platters of paella. “Eating is, and should be, a social event,” Mullen says. “It’s not just about nourishing the body; it’s also about being with family and friends.”

Mullen finds the American obsession with food less than productive — especially “when the word ‘diet’ is used as a verb,” he says. “If you embrace that attitude, you’re setting yourself up to fail. It’s much more sustainable to think about food and eating as a long-term relationship.”

Mullen points to himself as an example. “It’s taken a lot of discipline and experimentation for me to get to the point where I’m healthy, but I’ve learned that it’s not the quantity of the calories that matters, it’s the quality — where your ingredients are coming from and what you’re doing with them.” [NMH]

BRINGING THE NEIGHBORHOOD TOGETHER In February, on one of her first days as the new president and CEO of the nonprofit United South End Settlements (USES) in Boston, Maicharia Weir Lytle ’92 met a 5-year-old boy who had just made a new friend in the USES preschool. His teacher told Weir Lytle that he wanted to learn to speak French, so he started chatting with a French-speaking classmate.

“I felt like I was seeing humanity at its best,” Weir Lytle says. “They were kids from diverse backgrounds learning from each other.”

Weir Lytle has spent more than a decade building up nonprofits in the Greater Boston area, including the anti-poverty organization LIFT-Boston, the civil rights-focused Organization for a New Equality, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Bentley College.

At USES, she’ll serve more than 3,000 residents in the South End/Lower Roxbury neighborhood through programs that include a child-care center, a preschool, after-school and summer camp programs for older children, adult education classes and job training, and senior-citizen health, wellness, and home-repair services.

“USES is like the living room of this community,” Weir Lytle says. “Our roots here run deep, and we work to ensure that all feel welcome when they walk through our doors.”

Weir Lytle was born in Chicago, grew up in Connecticut, and in many ways, her commitment to nonprofits springs from her time at NMH. “NMH exposed me to diversity at an important developmental period in my life,” she says. “That experience ignited my passion for unifying diverse populations, and it made me keenly aware of the need to give a voice to people who’ve had fewer opportunities.”

Weir Lytle is on a mission to expand USES, steer the organization to the forefront of community development work, and build connections within the neighborhood.

“While the South End has changed, and there are more wealthy residents, there are still needs in this neighborhood that USES must focus on,” she says. “We can play a vital role in bridging the gaps between communities and enabling them to have shared experiences and shared values.”

Maicharia Weir Lytle ’92

PH O TO : E VA N G R AY

spring 2015 I 15

IN THE CLASSROOM

War and Peace

The complicated evolution of modern U.S. foreign policy

by MEGAN TADY

It’s early in the semester in Charlie Malcolm’s foreign policy class. He writes one word on the whiteboard and circles it: ISIS. “Help me out,” he says, pointing his marker at the word, referring to the jihadist rebel group in the Middle East. “What are the common threads?

Who and what are the major players that impacted the origins of ISIS?” The nine seniors and postgrads in the class begin listing answers, which Malcolm writes on the board: U.S. policy in Iraq, Egypt, the Syrian civil war, Saudi Arabia, Iran.

“But why did ISIS start?” Malcolm persists. “What is it a byproduct of?” The students aren’t sure, so Malcolm points to the first Gulf War. The United States had liberated Kuwait from Iraq and the Iraqi army was on the run. President Bush Sr.’s advisers, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, debated whether they should push forward and take out Saddam Hussein. Knowing the country could fracture into sectarian conflict, Powell was cautious: You break it, you own it, he warned.

“Now let’s jump forward to 9/11,” Malcolm says. Thirteen years after the first Gulf War, President George W. Bush invades Iraq and does what his father didn’t: He removes Hussein from power. And Iraq, as Powell predicted, breaks out into civil war.

The class is confused. “So why did U.S. policy change from not taking out Saddam to taking out Saddam?” one student asks.

“Aha,” says Malcolm, pointing his marker at the student with excitement.

“OK, let’s go back to the Reagan years and the rise of neoconservatism.”

After the Cold War, he explains, many in the United States wanted to see democracy spread in the Middle East, ensuring that Iraq’s oil wells — and American energy security — were in friendly, stable hands. But instead of stabilizing Iraq, Hussein’s capture and the subsequent civil war helped feed the chaos that led to the emergence of ISIS. There’s an air of electricity in the room, and Eli Wise ’15 says later that it’s because Malcolm makes sure class discussions are flexible. Talking about Reagan and the rise of neoconservatism? “That probably wasn’t in his lesson plan,” Wise says. “Just by letting the class take a natural course, he lets us ignite this flame of curiosity.”

Malcolm has taught NMH’s foreign policy class for 13 years. This year, rather than covering events in chronological order, exploring the ’40s, then the ’50s, and so on, he started with current events and then jumped back into history.

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History teacher Charlie Malcolm helps students make connections between events and people such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ronald Reagan, and jihadist rebels in the Middle East.

“!This class has shattered our naiveté. We’re starting to become really critical about what’s happening in the world.”

“Relevancy is so important if you want to get students’ attention,” Malcolm says. “I decided, let’s cover what’s important to them in their lifetime.”

The class first examined the roots of modern terrorist groups, reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright.

They went on to the books Rise to Globalism by Stephen Ambrose and Confront and Conceal by David Sanger,

researching and debating policy issues such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and President Obama’s decision to pull troops from Afghanistan.

Harper Baldwin ’15 says she took the class to become more informed.

“It’s really opened my eyes to what the U.S. is doing in the world,” she says. “It shattered the naiveté we have, being young students. We’re moving into being really critical about what’s happening in the world.”

That critical eye, says Malcolm, is key for young people as they gain political power.

“The content of this course isn’t as important as developing intellectual curiosity and the ability to harvest information and write and think about it,” Malcolm says. The debates

P HOTO: SHAR O N LA B ELLA - L IN D AL E

that the students engage in in class are an extension of that philosophy, because understanding how to debate effectively is a “life skill,” Malcolm says. “Students have to adjust on the fly as counterarguments are made. It forces them to identify strengths and weaknesses in their logic.”

“It’s such an interesting time for this generation of students,” Malcolm says. “Take the issue of climate change. The adults have failed the kids and the repercussions are going to be in their lifetimes.

We need to motivate students to take ownership, and quick.”

Baldwin, who plans to study environmental science in college, seems ready.

“We can’t move forward and stop global climate change unless we work together on it,” she says. “And that requires helpful foreign policies and good relationships with other countries that we’ll need in the future.”

Back in the classroom, Malcolm wraps up the discussion by asking the students what they want to focus on the following week. The consensus: They’d like a better grasp of the difference between Sunni and Shiite tribes.

“Charlie never tries to simplify it for us,” Baldwin says. “He never says, ‘This is the solution.’ I like coming away from class every day feeling like I’ve learned so much. And I come away knowing that it’s much more complicated than I thought.” [NMH]

spring 2015 I 17

PAST PRESENT

Carnal Knowledge A young girl, a strong-willed grandmother, and life lessons

by PETER WEIS â&#x20AC;&#x2122;78, Pâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;13

If there were awards given out for intriguing book titles, Grandma Called It Carnal would surely be a contender. The 1938 New York Times best-selling memoir was written by Bertha Clark Damon, who graduated from the Northfield Seminary in 1901, and whose colorful adult life belies her rather grim beginnings.

Orphaned at the age of 5 and raised by a strict, indomitable grandmother in rural Connecticut, Damon became an intellectual, a connoisseur of architecture and gardening, and an inadvertent feminist. Over her lifetime, she attracted a circle of well-known friends that included the choreographer Ted Shawn, the photographer Ansel Adams, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (for whom she

18 I NMH Magazine

designed a house), and the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn.

But in 1897, 16-year-old Bertha Louise Clark arrived at Northfield feeling nervous about her academic deficiencies and envious of the advantages she was sure the other girls possessed. Her father had been an itinerant stonecutter, traveling wherever

I M A G E S : C O U R TE S Y O F N M H A R C H I V E S

there was work. When her mother died, she and her older sister, Alice, went to live with their Grandmother Griswold, who was fiercely independent and had a deep disdain for 19thcentury innovation. “Grandma” considered wood stoves needlessly modern and refused to use a sewing machine or an eggbeater, yet despite her frugality, she grew extensive flower gardens that aroused disbelief among her neighbors. She was also a reader and a revolutionary, quoting Thoreau and Rousseau and participating in local struggles for emancipation and women’s voting rights.

Damon, in her application to Northfield in 1896, wrote that her object in life was “to be a somebody, variety not determined.” She wasted no time pursuing that goal. At Northfield, she became vice-president of her class and served two years on the board of The Hermonite. She delivered the class oration at Commencement and wrote “O Northfield Beautiful,” which became the school song. When her sister Alice graduated from Northfield a year after she did, the Commencement issue of The Hermonite stated that “she is known only as ‘Bertha Clark’s sister.’”

Poor Alice!

Damon went on to Pembroke College in Brown University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and language, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and starred in several theater productions. She moved to Berkeley, California, with her first husband, who had secured a teaching post at the university; then watched the marriage dissolve when he had an affair with one of his students. Damon had begun cultivating her interests in gardening and

architecture, and she supported herself by building and remodeling homes in the Bay Area, despite never having had formal training.

Possessing a “great wit” and “having a real talent for gathering people around her,” according to Benjamin Lehman, an English professor at Berkeley, Damon built friendships with local artists and writers; she took

At the age of 15, Bertha Clark Damon wrote in her application to Northfield that her object in life was “to be a somebody, variety not determined.”

a road trip with Ansel Adams through the Southwest in 1927. She married again, and she and her second husband became pioneers in bicoastal living, going back and forth between a 250acre estate in Alton, New Hampshire, and Berkeley.

The grounds of her New Hampshire home provided an ideal laboratory for Damon’s experiments in gardening and landscape design. She also turned to writing, and what emerged in 1938 was Grandma Called It Carnal, the story of a childhood in which “carnal” meant “grasping for more and more things and missing more and more values.” Suddenly Damon was famous.

So was Grandma, who died in 1925 at the age of 96. As The Saturday Review put it, “Grandma is more than amusing or odd or even striking; she is a figure of significance in the pattern of American life.”

The book launched Damon on the lecture circuit, and in 1940 she became the first woman to be invited to speak at the Harvard Club of Boston. She insisted on entering through the front door, even though female guests were expected to use a separate entrance.

Damon’s second best-seller, A Sense of Humus, appeared in 1943. It was a rumination on her gardening life in New Hampshire. “To consider humus,” she wrote, “is to get a hint of the oneness of the universe.”

At the end of Grandma Called It Carnal, Damon describes how the doctor wrote on her grandmother’s death certificate: “Cause of death: Just stopped living.” The same might be said of Damon herself. As she grew older, she spent more time in Berkeley, her life setting somewhere in the west.

She died in 1975. [NMH]

spring 2015 I 19

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BY GEOFFREY GRAY ’97

Their films premiere at festivals around the world.

Their artistic and professional philosophy began at NMH.

THE

TRIBE

From left: SeeThink Films’s Luke Meyer ’97, Ethan Palmer ’96, Andrew Neel ’97, and Tom Davis, the lone non-NMHer.

PH O TO: DENN IS B U R N E T T

At the office of SeeThink Films, hanging along the ceiling like a shrine among the rafters, is a set of armor and a sword, symbols of Darkon, the documentary film that brought Andrew Neel ’97, Ethan Palmer ’96, and Luke Meyer ’97 together again. Before they started production, they were headed in different directions. Neel had started writing film scripts. Palmer worked as a studio photographer for Condé Nast and several magazines. And Meyer knew he didn’t want to write short fiction anymore.

WHAT WOULD BE NEXT?

spring 2015 I 21

Darkon re-routed them all. Set near Baltimore, the film revolves around a clique of suburbanites devoted to liveaction role playing — the Darkon Wargaming Club. Instead of becoming warriors and wizards on computer screens, the members pledge allegiance to teams or countries like “Laconia” or “Nurgle” or “Elidor,” and set off to state parks and don armor to fight and test their magic spells against one another. The documentary is a romp, a fun yet dark and biting exploration of an American micro-subculture and its functions, belief systems, and homespun religion.

Earning the trust of the Darkon Club devotees wasn’t easy. They were prickly about how they are perceived by outsiders (especially filmmakers from New York). To prove their commitment to portraying their subjects fairly, Neel, Palmer, and Meyer negotiated with the Darkon “noble council,” and then joined the Darkon world themselves after the film was completed. On weekends, they trekked down to Baltimore and put on the armor.

Neel took the name Olsef. Meyer was Monahar. Palmer was Renza, and the documentary they made became a kind of cult classic. In 2006, the film premiered at the influential South by Southwest Film Festival, and received the coveted Audience Choice Award. Along the way, Neel, Palmer, and Meyer discovered that they shared a similar take on the world that allowed them to work seamlessly together. They formed SeeThink Films, a production company based in Brooklyn.

Since then, the SeeThinkers have completed and released a blizzard of work.

While Darkon was in production, they created Alice Neel, a documentary about Neel’s grandmother, the legendary painter, and New World Order, about conspiracy theorists, namely Alex Jones, the popular Internet radio celebrity.

Between those projects, the SeeThink crew, which includes producer Tom Davis (the token non-NMHer), also made The Feature, a fictionalized documentary about the life of video artist Michel Auder, and King Kelly, a satire about a teenage Internet striptease star. They also co-produced films with likeminded directors and producers: Bluebird, a small-town drama set in northern Maine, featuring John Slattery of Mad Men fame, and Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, about an autistic boy from the Rockaways who goes missing during a hurricane. This body of work is unusually large for a company so young. And despite the variety of eccentric characters and esoteric plotlines, there are strong threads that tie the SeeThink projects together.

“In all of our films, there is an overriding anti-establishment overtone — we’re embracing people who are in a state of friction with main-line values,” Neel says. “We’re also talking about tribalism, an appreciation for how tribes work, how they function, and how they don’t.” The characters in the films are all outsiders, yet they long for a connection to a greater group. This individualversus-group tension is an ever-present and talked-about dynamic that the SeeThinkers lived firsthand at NMH, which bred its own tribes.

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SEETHINK FILMS:

I knew the SeeThinkers well on campus nearly 20 years ago, and still do.

What’s remarkable about their story is that, coming from such different groups at NMH, they managed to find each other after graduation and form their own. Neel spent four years on the Mount Hermon campus, considered the land of the jocks. A student leader in C1, member of the disciplinary committee, and recipient of the C1 jacket (that obnoxious yellow paisley blazer passed down within the dorm and worn to campus events), Neel was known, then and now, to bear a playful grudge against “those snobby Northfielders.”

“

We’re embracing people and characters who are in a state of friction with main-line values.”

“There was a prevailing sentiment that Northfield was the more accepting campus, and yet there was more cliquiness and judgmental behavior there,” Neel says. “Hermon maybe had people who were more ‘bland,’ but they also weren’t exacting judgments on the world.”

Ethan Palmer, who was a student leader in East Hall, rowed on the crew team, and claims to have narrowly missed the senior-year yearbook title of “God’s Gift to Women,” scoffs

at Neel’s assessment of Northfield’s tribes. Palmer lived happily among an eclectic mix of students, which was crucial, he says, in teaching him how to be both an effective member of a group and a strong individual. While NMH’s diversity became almost a cliché, so belabored was it by school leaders, “having to figure things out with a group of people teaches you a ton about how to navigate yourself,” Palmer says. “Like where you are strong and weak. How to apply yourself.”

Meyer was a day student, stationed in Gould. He ran an unofficial offcampus residence at his family’s home amid the cow pastures and apple orchards of Conway, Massachusetts.

On most weekends, the beds and couches and floors of Meyer’s home were filled with students who spent the mornings drinking coffee and breaking down life’s complexities with Chuck Meyer, Luke’s father, a pilot and opera buff, and horsing around with Luke’s brother Nick ’00 and sister Anna ’06.

On campus, Meyer worked in the darkroom, displaying a gift for photography. “It’s a form where you can take the world around you and show others, in a very direct way, how you see it,” he says now. “There’s less room for interpretation, and I think that appeals to teenagers, who want to be understood as autonomous people.”

Looking back, the memories inflated with nostalgia, the SeeThinkers and I see our NMH moment dominated by camaraderie, learning from others what we didn’t know, in roving conversations that continued from dorm rooms to diner booths. Until then, we’d all been

SeeThink scenes, clockwise from top: Ethan Palmer shooting footage for Breaking a Monster, the company’s most recent completed film; still images from Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Breaking a Monster, Darkon, and King Kelly.

PHOTOS: CO U R TESY O F S E E T H IN K F IL MS

spring 2015 I 23

“

As filmmakers, we’re at a crossroads. We’re facing interaction with a more mainstream element of Hollywood.”

Left: The SeeThink crew at the Stateside Theater in Austin, Texas, where Breaking a Monster premiered at SXSW in March.

Above: Luke Meyer confers with musician and Monster star Malcolm Brickhouse. Opposite: a sampling of SeeThink film posters.

locked in to the customs and ideas of our nuclear families — our childhood tribes. NMH forced us to adapt to other ways and to each other. From all the new information we were absorbing, we became (or thought we did) better versions of ourselves, whether we were Hermon football players or Northfield Frisbee chuckers. The result was a deep and timeless bond.

“There was an inherent trust,” Neel says. And that trust that began 20 years ago has created an almost utopian

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environment at SeeThink Films.

“Everyone has equal say, with an almost familial devotion to one another’s needs,” Neel says. “No one’s working for anybody else.”

SeeThink began at Ethan Palmer’s bachelor party, where he and Neel and Meyer traded notes on their future plans. Neel had graduated film school at Columbia, and was working on a script about roleplaying games. A video-game enthusiast,

he imagined the movie as a blunt social commentary, a dark reveal of loneliness and the search for meaning and connectedness in a modern America.

Neel’s script was based in fiction, but when he discovered the real-life version in Maryland, he decided to make a documentary. Meanwhile, Meyer had graduated from Eugene Lang College at the New School, worked on a documentary in St. Louis with Branch Rothschild ’98, and was looking for another film project. He signed on to direct Darkon with Neel, and moved back to New York.

After graduating from New York University, Palmer had tired of studio photography and was looking to shoot film. The Darkon project was appealing, not only because Palmer was interested in a new art form, but because he found the Darkon role players intriguing characters to explore.

PH O TO S : D E N N I S B U R N E TT ; C O U R TE S Y O F S E E TH I N K FI LMS

A story becomes more interesting if you “go through the eyes of an outsider,” Palmer says. “You get more perspective. There is no better way to critique the culture you live in than by looking at it through the eyes of people who don’t live by the rules.”

The SeeThink projects that followed Darkon were equally well received: New World Order and King Kelly premiered at SXSW; The Feature appeared at film festivals in Berlin and Copenhagen; and Alice Neel was designated a Critics Pick

by The New York Times.

Jarod Neece, a producer and senior programmer at SXSW, says Darkon “was one of the biggest stories to come out of the festival in a long time, and it just keeps going,” because the film has such a loyal following. In general, SeeThink’s films are “pure and honest, not snarky,” Neece says. “They have an immediacy. They’re just very personal documents.”

The company’s most recent completed film is not only its most commercially viable, but also arguably its most ambitious. In 2013, Meyer directed Unlocking the Truth, a short eponymous film about a heavy-metal rock band.

Unlike so many other slasher-style bands born in suburban basements, the three members of Unlocking the Truth were raised in rough Brooklyn neighborhoods; also unusual, the band members were 12 years old.

Inspired by the music of “World Wide Wrestling,” which they watched on TV from their apartments in Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Bed-Stuy, the kid band developed their own sound.

Three months after the short film was released on YouTube, it had more than 1.5 million views — a viral sensation.

SPIN magazine wrote about the metal boy band, a manager got involved, and the trio signed with Sony. Meyer and SeeThink started to shoot footage, collaborating with another production company, and the feature-length Breaking a Monster premiered at SXSW last March. Neece calls the film “the best thing SeeThink has ever made.”

Three teenage heavy-metal musicians from Brooklyn. Role players in Maryland. An eccentric portrait artist. A teenage sex star. “To us, it’s a quilt,” Palmer says. “We’re stitching together a patchwork quilt of contemporary American life, these avenues into America.”

The SeeThinkers are currently working on documentary and feature films based on psychotherapy cults, fraternity hazing, and Japanese anime; Academy Award-nominated director Darren Aronofsky, actor and director James Franco, and independent producer Christin Vachon have signed on to produce their upcoming projects. These NMH-bred filmmakers who pride themselves on giving voice to antiestablishment, outside-the-norm characters and personalities are now “facing interaction with a more mainstream element of Hollywood,” Neel says. “As filmmakers, we’re at a crossroads.”

In a way, the conversations happening at SeeThink today are similar to those we all had 20 years ago at NMH. “Our open-minded approach to filmmaking is in sync with values NMH tries to instill in kids,” Neel says. “NMH prepares kids for the big leagues, but with a free-thinking, interdisciplinary approach. It encourages flexible minds.”

At NMH, Neel and Meyer shared one class together: J.C. Beall’s class on world religions, which dissected tribalism, identity, and belief. Neel loved the class, and today, remembering his fondness for cavorting with various tribes on campus as well as the tribes SeeThink has captured on film over the last decade, he wonders for a moment about a career change. “Maybe I should go back and teach at NMH,” he says.

The subject he thinks he now knows most about? “Religion,” he says. [NMH]

Geoffrey Gray ’97 is a New York Times best-selling author, documentary producer, founder of the interactive magazine True.Ink, and a writer and contributing editor at New York magazine.

spring 2015 I 25

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TALKING ABOUT

FERGUSON THE SHOOTING DEATH OF MICHAEL BROWN IN MISSOURI BROKE OPEN A SOUL-SEARCHING CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY. NMH WAS NO EXCEPTION.

year ago, most students at Northfield Mount Hermon had never heard of Ferguson, Missouri. That changed late last year, after a St. Louis County grand jury voted not to indict one of the city’s white police officers for fatally shooting a black teenager.

Michael Brown, Darren Wilson; 10 days later, Eric Garner in Staten Island. The names quickly became indelible, and the questions multiplied: How should an institution like NMH respond to such events? With outrage and protest? With neutral, fact-based discussions? Or — because the end of the semester and final exams were looming — by simply soldiering on?

BY JENNIFER SUTTON / ILLUSTRATION BY PETER STRAIN / PHOTOS BY JEFF WOODWARD

spring 2015 I 27

TALKING ABOUT FERGUSON

n a campus of 650 students and more than 300 teaching and working adults, there was no simple answer.

Many students and faculty were impatient to discuss the two cases and how they represented pervasive racial profiling that exists across the country. Others viewed the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner as tragic, but saw little connection between what had happened to the two men and life at NMH; they wanted to stay focused on classes, activities, college applications.

The news from Ferguson came during NMH’s Thanksgiving break, when the campus was quiet, but administrators and faculty gathered and agreed that NMH’s mission — to engage students’ intellect and compassion and empower them to act with humanity and purpose — called for the entire school to take on the conversation, even though many institutions across the country were choosing not to address it at all.

“We often talk about NMH as a bubble, but we’re not immune to what happens in the rest of the world, nor should we be,” says James Greenwood, associate dean of multicultural education. “When people felt so deeply about was going on, it would have been irresponsible not to provide the community with an opportunity for dialogue about something that generated such a response nationally.”

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THE CONVERSATION

BEGINS Some teachers, like Sally Komarek, had already brought the topic of Ferguson into their classrooms. “We have to press ‘pause’ and look at what’s happening right now, because this is going to be one of the stories we read in textbooks 30 years from now,” Komarek told her U.S. history class that week.

Talking about race is hard, but it’s even harder in a time of crisis, when people’s opinions get stronger and they become less open to other perspectives. That’s how it unfolded in some of the dorms, with “a lot of heated arguments” among students, according to Luis Locsin ’15. “There was always a split — whether Darren Wilson should have been indicted or not, whether it was a race issue or not. We were going hard on each other. But we didn’t get a whole lot out of those discussions until people calmed down and started listening a little more.”

At an all-school meeting that focused on the Ferguson announcement, Head of School Peter Fayroian urged students to think critically about how different media outlets covered the Ferguson and Staten Island cases, and how their own conversations developed. “Don’t just listen to other people — politicians,

FE RGUSON LE SSON PLANS In the weeks after the grand jury decision in Ferguson, many faculty members tackled discussions of Ferguson, Staten Island, and social justice any way they could.

activists, or even your parents, friends, and teachers,” he said. “Go to the primary sources, get the facts, and build your arguments. Be the kind of scholarly people in the world who affect change.”

Meanwhile, the faculty was adopting myriad approaches as they talked with students. Many found that looking at the Ferguson case through the lens of specific academic topics (see sidebar) was helpful not just because students see the classroom as a “safe place,” said psychology teacher Kara Walker, “but because if students can apply the knowledge and skills they’re learning to a real-life tragedy, they’ll be able to do it with other situations in the future.”

History teacher Jim Shea said he tried to keep his own opinions private, to avoid influencing his students’ thinking, as he talked in his Government and Civil Liberties class about how grand juries work within the U.S. legal system.

“I also tried to keep emotion, mine and theirs, out of this particular discussion,” he said. “Not that there isn’t a place for emotion in discussions of politics and current events, but I wanted to come at this from a different perspective.”

Other teachers, like Bea Garcia, who teaches NMH’s Diversity and Social Justice course, and advanced Spanish, and is assistant dean of the faculty, did not hold back. “We focused on the human aspect of Ferguson, putting it in context with other American stories that have so many similarities, and I was clear — this was racism; this was power and oppression. Had Michael Brown robbed the store? I don’t know.

But you don’t kill a person for that. You don’t leave a person’s body lying in the street for four hours.”

The reaction to these classroom conversations was mixed, which wasn’t surprising, given the diversity of the student body. “I thought there was too much debate,” Kevin Ouyang ’15 said.

HUMANITIES: For English teacher Janae Peters, it wasn’t a question of whether to talk about Ferguson with her ninthgrade Humanities students. “It was just a matter of how,” she said. The class had just read Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and at first Peters wasn’t sure how to connect the 16th-century comedy with the shooting of Michael Brown. She settled on a discussion about the power of language — first, how Shakespeare uses words to describe things and people, and then, the language “we use to talk about blackness,” Peters said. “So much of the language that surrounds black males in our society cultivates fear. We need to be thinking about that.”

PRECALCULUS: For the final weeks of the semester, Jim Vollinger instituted a practice he called “social justice minute.”

Students took turns bringing in news stories about social justice issues and leading brief discussions at the beginning of each class.

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY: Kara Walker and her students discussed images of the protests in Ferguson posted on the Internet by CNN, and applied psychology concepts such as obedience, aggression, and group conformity.

THE CONCERT CHOIR, led by Sheila Heffernon, studied protest music from slavery through the present for a Fall Family Days performance, and prepared narrative explanations to accompany each song.

AP STATISTICS: Kate Hoff asked her students to graph data from studies of the racial breakdown of traffic stops in different cities. They analyzed if drivers were given more tickets depending on their race.

GOVERNMENT AND CIVIL LIBERTIES: Jim Shea compared how grand juries typically operate in the U.S. judicial system with how the St. Louis County grand jury proceeded in the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case.

FORENSIC SCIENCE: Chemistry teacher Michelle Hurley asked students to review evidence reports released by the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office regarding DNA on the police car and the gun and crime scene management, and to interpret the data.

U.S. HISTORY: Chris Edler’s students had been studying the McCarthy era; they compared the denial of justice to those deemed “unAmerican” in the 1950s to the perceived lack of justice in the Ferguson incident.

NINTH-GRADE WRITING: Nicole Hager, dean of students, asked her students to write and present to the class a six-word memoir that captured their thoughts and experiences in the weeks following the Ferguson protests.

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TALKING ABOUT FERGUSON

“HAD MICHAEL BROWN ROBBED THE STORE I DON’T KNOW. BUT YOU DON’T KILL A PERSON FOR THAT. YOU DON’T LEAVE A PERSON’S BODY LYING IN THE STREET FOR FOUR HOURS. ” BEA GARCIA, Spanish Teacher and Assistant Dean of the Faculty

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“BEING A WHITE MALE ALMOST GIVES ME MORE RESPONSIBILITY, BECAUSE AS A GROUP, WE’RE THE ONES IN POWER. A LOT OF KIDS DISAGREE, THOUGH.” WILL HASLETT ’16

“THERE WAS TOO MUCH DEBATE. WE WERE TALKING ABOUT THE HUMANITY OF AN ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE, SO WHY WAS ANYTHING UP FOR DEBATE ”

“ I WANT STUDENTS TO UNDERSTAND WHY AND HOW PEOPLE CAN FEEL SO DIFFERENTLY, AND THAT YOU CAN’T DISMISS PEOPLE AND THEIR CONCERNS.” JAMES GREENWOOD, Associate Dean of Multicultural Education

KEVIN OUYANG ’15

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TALKING ABOUT FERGUSON

“It was frustrating to go over the same details again and again and not get anywhere. We were talking about the humanity of an entire group of people, so why was anything up for debate?”

“When the discussions stayed with the facts and didn’t get to the heart of the matter — that people had died — that was discouraging and isolating,” said Monique Roberts ’15.

But in Roberts’s AP Environmental Science class, teacher Becca Malloy asked the students to observe a moment of silence, then showed images from the protests, discussed resources where students could find more information, and invited the students to speak if they wished. “We just said what we were feeling. We didn’t comment on what others said,” Roberts reported. “There was a moment when everyone understood that people are dying because of systematic racism, and that we, as a student body, as a school, still have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do. That gave me hope.”

Yet after a week of discussion in classes and advising groups, some students grew restless, asking their teachers, “Can we stop talking about Ferguson?” The topic was getting old and repetitive, they said; NMH was overdoing it. That kind of “diversity fatigue” — a phrase coined nearly a decade ago — is risky, according to Greenwood.

“Sometimes people think that talking about race and diversity only perpetuates those issues, that if we ignore it, it’ll go away,” he said.

“That doesn’t work for most things in life. It tends to make things worse. Tensions build up until they surface and explode in unproductive ways.”

Garcia doesn’t use the term “diversity fatigue”; she calls it “privilege.” A white person in the United States, she said, can choose to think about race or not think about it, but students of color don’t have that option. “They can’t shut it down. It is their life.” Many of NMH’s students of color live in neighborhoods where what happened to Michael Brown could easily happen to them, Garcia said.

When Eric Gooden ’15 heard students say they were tired of talking about Ferguson, he bristled. “Hearing about Michael Brown and Eric Garner felt like I was reading something from a history book from the civil rights era,” he said. “This should be important to everybody living in this country, thinking about how it feels to be pushed back 60 years.”

Will Haslett ’16 agreed, even though, in conversations in and out of class, he found himself in what he calls “the awkward position” of being a white male. “That almost gives me more responsibility to talk about it, because as a group, we’re the ones in power. We’re the ones who inflicted racism from the beginning,” he said. “A lot of kids disagree, though. They’re totally offended by that idea.”

As people learn about cases like Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s, it is impossible to reach consensus on how to respond, whether it’s on the NMH campus or anywhere in the country. “Some felt our approach was too aggressive; others felt it was not aggressive enough,” Greenwood said. “One thing I hope students gain is an increased awareness of the various viewpoints people hold in our society, and how those various viewpoints emerge. I want students to understand why and how people can feel so differently, and that you can’t dismiss people and their concerns.” [NMH]

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LET US

NOT BE SILENT

BY NAOMI CHRISTIANSEN ’18 Christiansen is a freshman from Bronx, New York. This is a slightly edited version of a reflection she delivered at an all-school meeting on Dec. 8, 2014.

I have a 10-year-old cousin with curly brown hair. He likes to sing, he loves to dance, and he’s learning to play flag football. He goes to a public school in uptown Manhattan. He is the kindest and most stubborn kid I know, and I’ve been watching him grow up from the moment his mother brought him home.

But because he’s got skin the color of milk chocolate, because he’s a male, and because he wears hearing aids in school, he’s got a 1-in-4 chance of being suspended from school at least once. From the time he turns 14, he might get stopped by the police a couple times because he looks “suspicious.” When he gets older, we’ll have to tell him to be careful when he goes out on the street. Don’t pull your hoodie up, don’t sag your pants, and don’t draw too much attention to yourself. Because the truth is if you’re a black male in the United States, whatever you do is going to be looked at differently.

If you are an adult and you go to an office party, people will assume you can dance. When you go to buy something at a drugstore, they will be afraid that you’ll steal something. That’s just how it is.

That’s a reality where I’m from; it’s a reality for black males all over America. It’s a reality for minorities in Northfield Mount Hermon.

Nobody means to hurt anyone, but it happens. And I’m mad. I’m mad that race has to affect my cousin, I’m mad that people are dying because of ignorance, and I’m mad that no one seems to have anything to say about it. So I’m saying something.

The reason why Ferguson and Michael Brown matter is not only because he was yet another unarmed black male targeted by a police officer, not only because he was shot at least six times, but because a life was lost.

You’re changing the channel; you don’t want to listen to me anymore. He’s just another person who got shot. Things like this happen all the time. Besides, it’s too sad. Who wants to hear about the endless struggles of strangers, when nothing’s going to change.

You think what happened in Ferguson doesn’t affect us in this tiny school community.

But these things don’t just happen outside of our community. So I’m saying something.

In the past week I’ve heard people make a joke about black people and fried chicken. Someone said something about how girls are considered inferior in some countries and then just laughed about it.

No matter how these words are twisted into sentences, no matter who says them, they are meant to hurt. They’re meant to make people feel less than who they are. I just want it to stop.

We see pain and we laugh and make it funny because that’s just who we are. We like to bring something bright out of the dark.

But it’s not funny when someone is killed because of who they love or what they look like. It’s not funny when someone is not allowed to learn the multiplication tables because they were born a girl. It’s not funny when your friend is hurt by a joke but has to sit and listen to it because she doesn’t want to be the only one saying something.

“FIFTY YEARS A GO, THINGS WERE A LOT WORSE. THE REASON WE HAVE MORE EQUALITY AND UNDERSTANDING TODAY IS BECAUSE PEOPLE KEPT TALKING. ”

Stop turning a blind eye. Stop making jokes out of things that aren’t funny. You’re someone who can actually help, just by turning on the radio and listening.

Just by talking. Just by learning information and spreading it. If anything is going to change it’s all about you, right?

I don’t think the jokes are going to stop tomorrow, but there’s a reason to keep talking.

Fifty years ago, things were a lot worse. The reason we have more equality and understanding today is because people kept talking.

So in contrast to our usual closing for these reflections: Let us NOT be silent.

spring 2015 I 33

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We will prepare students to thrive in a world that requires them to be brave and creative.â&#x20AC;?

Learn, Build, Act.

NMH forges ahead with a new strategic plan.

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NOR T HF IE LD MO UN T HER M O N 2 0 2 0

01

T H E PL A N

The Plan

Let’s be honest: The phrase “strategic plan,” as Head of School Peter Fayroian points out in his “Leading Lines” essay on page 5, tends to make people’s eyes glaze over. It’s right up there with “Roth IRA,” “Congressional subcommittee,” or “content management.” But creating a strategic plan is crucial for a place like Northfield Mount Hermon. Faculty, staff, and students have a mission they work to uphold every day, and they also must consider how that mission will manifest itself a few years down the road. How should NMH’s curriculum, facilities, and goals evolve to keep the school competitive and financially sustainable, and to support students as they prepare to enter a world in a constant state of flux?

Over the past 18 months, Northfield Mount Hermon asked that question of alumni, parents, faculty, trustees, and members of the Alumni Council. What emerged is not so much a road map — go here, then there; do this, then that — as it is a field guide, with rich descriptions of NMH’s priorities and visions, both tangible and intangible, accompanying the numerous directives.

And even though the words “strategic plan” might be boring, the stuff that’s in the plan is not. Fortifying the school’s financial aid reserves to bring a more diverse group of smart, determined students to campus? Not boring. Renovating the health center and building a new fitness center, an on-campus day care facility, and a new boathouse? Not boring. Revamping NMH’s science and math curriculum and building a new cutting-edge facility to house it? Definitely not boring.

While the strategic plan introduces new ideas and projects, it also more clearly defines what NMH already does well and where there is room for improvement.

And although it was created with the next five years in mind, the plan is firmly grounded in achievements of the past, going all the way back to school founder D.L. Moody, who didn’t just want his students to become smarter; he wanted them to become better people who would go into the world and act on their convictions.

spring 2015 I 35

N O R T HF IE LD M O U N T HER M O N 2 0 2 0

T H E PR I OR ITIES

02

The Priorities Educational Action and Innovation: NMH

Advising Individuals in a Diverse Community:

Resilience and Sustainability: NMH

will create innovative new programs and facilities; ethical, collaborative, and crossdisciplinary academic curricula; and opportunities for students to have real-world experience.

NMH will refine its mentorship of students as individuals and as members of a community, and will remain committed to its financial-aid program to sustain a diverse community.

will forge a sustainable future by teaching students — the next generation of leaders — to care for themselves, their planet, and their society.

THE MAKEOVER

Imagine a typical NMH classroom: one teacher, about 15 students, and one academic focus. Now think bigger: an expanded classroom in which 40 students and three teachers are studying science and math at the same time, weaving the two subjects into one cohesive exploration. That’s the future at Northfield Mount Hermon.

NMH’s new strategic plan calls for sweeping changes in the school’s science and math program over the next several years. It’s part STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), the national educational approach that combines science and math to give students a holistic, analytical, quantitative look at the world, and emphasizes group work so students hone their collaborative problem-solving skills. And it’s part “mastery learning,” an instructional method in which students progress through an academic subject at their own pace, with more control over their work and more time to develop the knowledge and skills they’ll need in college.

“If we pair these two approaches, that’s a powerful way to teach math and science that few other institutions are doing,” says science department chair David Reeder.

“We have academic programs that we’re proud of, but with this new curriculum, we’ll be pushing ourselves to innovate in a more intentional way than we are right now.”

In 2013, former NMH trustee Richard Gilder ’50 gave NMH $10 million in cash toward a much-needed replacement for the 50-year-old Cutler Science Center. Head of School Peter Fayroian asked faculty to envision what could happen inside the building first, before thinking about the building itself.

36 I NMH Magazine

So a group of teachers and administrators began visiting other high school science and math facilities and consulting with experts in academia and technological fields from places like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, United Technologies Aerospace Systems, and Sandia National Laboratories. The takeaway: NMH needs to prepare students for what Associate Head of School Sharon Howell calls “the trans-disciplinary, collaborative, and self-initiated work that awaits them in college and life.”

To that end, science and math teachers will work in teams, leading students through a core curriculum — physics, biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry, trigonometry — as well as a series of collaborative interdisciplinary projects.

In the new facility, there will be larger classrooms, with space for teachers to introduce or review concepts and for students to work independently, either on their own or in groups. There will be technology-rich lab stations and “maker” spaces, along with supplies and equipment, for building projects.

Science and math teachers will phase in the new curriculum over the next several years. They’ll start with the mastery-learning element, developing math-science modules — contained units — that they’ll try out within regular core courses next year. The introduction of more interdisciplinary work into advanced science and math courses has already begun. The expanded classroom scenario, with teams of teachers and students, is expected to launch as a pilot program for ninth graders in the fall of 2016. Eventually, science and math teachers hope to team up with humanities and arts faculty to take interdisciplinary work even further — in other words, STEAM.

NOR T HF IE LD MO UN T HER M O N 2 0 2 0

THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT

Maurice Coleman ’87 is a banker, so he sees financial aid not only as an act of generosity but also as a strategic business investment. Award financial aid to students who are passionate about education and determined to succeed, and watch the positive ripples they make in society and for the school.

In economics terms, it’s called the “multiplier effect”: investing capital in someone or something that ends up producing more value than you initially put in. Coleman, a senior vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, points to himself as evidence. He’s a market leader in financing community development projects for Bank of America’s commercial real-estate division; last year alone, he subsidized 800 new housing units in New York and New Jersey, providing more than 2,000 people with homes. He also sits on the boards of several nonprofits that finance small businesses and affordable housing and teach people without many resources how to thrive in their communities.

But 30 years ago, before Coleman was awarded financial aid to attend NMH, his future didn’t look so promising. He grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, during the crack cocaine epidemic, and graduated from Trenton Central High School at the “top of the heap,” he says; he got good grades, was a talented basketball player, and led the student council. But he floundered on standardized tests, and didn’t get accepted to any of the colleges to which he’d applied. An adviser in his high school happened to be an NMH summer school teacher, and she pointed him toward NMH’s Transition Year Program, which sponsors high-achieving students from low-income families.

“That decision was the turning point of my whole life,” Coleman says.

Besides excelling in classes, Coleman played basketball, ran a community service program, and hosted a radio show at NMH, and won a Headmaster’s Award from former head of school Richard Unsworth. He went on to Columbia, earning a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees; he also was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. After a few years on Wall Street, he taught at Noble and Greenough school in Massachusetts, served as a dean, and directed the

T H E TA N G I B L ES

03

The Tangibles Build a new science and math facility in 2016–18; re-imagine curriculum to incorporate more technology, engineering, design, coding, statistics, ethics, and applied sciences; create opportunities for interdisciplinary project-based learning between all disciplines.

Invest in financial aid to ensure that diversity continues to be one of the pillars of an NMH education.

Create a Center for Learning Through Action for NMH’s experiential-education programs: international study/travel, the Hayward Farm, workjob, service learning, and social entrepreneurship.

Devote resources to sustainability projects in and out of the classroom, and uphold sustainable standards in the construction and maintenance of all campus building projects.

Develop a new skill-building curriculum that integrates and enhances existing courses in health education, diversity and social justice, and college counseling.

school’s Upward Bound math and science program.

In 1999, it was back to Wall Street, and today, in his day job at Bank of America, Coleman manages and lends millions of dollars in markets where access to affordable housing is limited, if not nonexistent. “People in civic jobs, education jobs, service jobs — I want to make sure they have a safe, affordable place to live,” he says. “When your home is safe, everything flows from there.”

That’s how Coleman felt at NMH.

“One thing NMH gave me was a safe place to study,” he recalls. “It was an environment where you weren’t ridiculed for doing your homework. I got the opportunity to be a scholar.”

Compassion begetting excellence is Coleman’s story, and it’s the very spirit with which D.L. Moody founded Northfield and Mount Hermon, Coleman believes. “Moody wanted us to compete, he wanted us to achieve, and he knew there had to be a school committed to leveling the playing field. That’s NMH.” [NMH]

YOU CAN FIND THE F U L L S T R AT EG IC PL A N AT N M H S C H OOL .ORG / A B OU T- N MH / S T R AT EG I C - PL A N

spring 2015 I 37

38 I NMH Magazine

DEAR SENIORS...

NINT H GRADE R S NE E D A D V IC E. OL DE R ST U DE N TS GI V E I T. EM PAT H Y H A PPE NS.

The

author Cheryl Strayed is best known for her memoir Wild, which traces her 1,100-mile solo trek on the Pacific Crest Trail through California and Oregon. But preceding that book was Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of advice columns she had written anonymously for a website called The Rumpus. “Dear Sugar” was the name of the column.

Last fall, the seniors in the English department’s creative nonfiction class read Tiny Beautiful Things and latched onto Sugar’s philosophy of “radical empathy”: comforting and advising others by telling your own story. Offering more than sympathy, it shows the advice seekers that there’s a way out, or unrecognized benefits hidden in their problems. When a man wrote to Sugar mourning the death of his son, she wrote back, “The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young.”

The seniors knew that their teacher, Meg Donnelly, taught ninth graders, too. “Do your freshmen need advice?” they asked her. Donnelly thought that yes, they probably did. Some of her ninth-grade students hesitated at first, but after she assured them they could remain anonymous, they agreed to write to the seniors.

The letters came with the salutation “Dear Senior” — “Dear Wise Senior,” in one case. The seniors fought over who got to answer which letters. “They really worked together to figure out how to respond, and there were a lot of varying opinions,” Donnelly says. “Some students were a little tough love. But they said that if they were the ones getting advice, that’s the kind of advice they would have wanted.”

The two groups of students never met in person, but that wasn’t the point. “The freshmen just wanted to be heard,” Donnelly says. “They felt their experience was so unique, so lonely, and yet all the seniors had felt the same things. To tell your story and to hear someone say, ‘Not only do I feel sorry for you, but I also understand’ — it really helps.”

PHOTOS BY JEFF WOODWARD

The advice givers, clockwise from top left: Lizzie Roswig ’15, Zeke Smith ’15, Nicolò Frisiani ’15, Fiona O’Brien ’15, and Aryaditya Khatau ’15. Not shown: Santi Cordero Fuentes ’15.

spring 2015 I 39

DEAR… Senior, Everyone around me seems to know what they are

doing. Dancers who spent their childhood perfecting their moves, freshman varsity athletes who can complete the Pie Race without any problem, singers who’ve received college-level training. The problem is, I am not one of those people. I am pretty good at many things, but not really good at any one thing. I get good grades, but not stellar. I love to play my musical instrument, but I’m not the best. I’m like one of those bridesmaids who are there to make the bride shine — the perfect degree of average. How do I solve this problem? — An Average Freshman

Dear Freshman,

I am standing onstage as the lights go up. I take a deep breath and recite my first line.

I know the production from front to back, inside and out. Taking a play from script to stage is what I find fun and exciting. From the smell of a freshly constructed set to wearing a period costume to interactions with fellow actors — I love it all and I figured that out at NMH. The point of high school is to discover what you are passionate about. What’s wrong with being average? Nothing. You just haven’t found what you are passionate about yet. Stop comparing yourself to others, because average is not relevant.

During my first term at NMH, I realized I hate sports. I was on the thirds soccer team, and I didn’t like most of the people on the team. I felt uncomfortable talking to them outside practice.

The next term, I auditioned for the musical and I loved every moment of it. I realized that I want to do theater professionally. I had done a few shows in middle school, but after that first play at NMH, I became serious about continuing it beyond high school.

What I love about NMH is that it offers so many opportunities to explore. For now, you may feel average, but over the next few years, you will find what you are passionate about.

Just keep searching. Put yourself out there, because the more you try different clubs or sports, the better you will discover yourself.

— Lizzie

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Dear Senior,

I feel as though my grades are getting worse and worse. I love it at NMH, but sometimes I have trouble finding time to study. It seems like everyone has their life together, and even though they might not be getting A’s, they aren’t having trouble. I know that I didn’t sign up for four easy years, but I’m starting to question if I’m good enough to be here.

— Freshman

Dear Freshman, Judging whether

you are good enough for NMH already happened when the admission office accepted you. Now you have to prove them right. But be honest with yourself. You don’t “have trouble finding time to study.” You just get easily distracted. It’s normal.

I had the same problem a couple years ago.

For my entire academic life, I surfed along with easy A’s given by easy teachers. Then, in my sophomore year, I had an amazing, super-strict history teacher — and my grade started dropping.

My parents told me to work more, and I was a bit worried, but not enough to change anything. By the midterm, I had a C+. At that point, it wasn’t about my parents anymore; it was about me. It was a matter of pride and self-esteem. I started studying history more than any other subject. I read all the chapters twice, learned the important dates by heart, did research online. I ended up with an A+ in the class. I had to reach the bottom of the pool to find out I was sinking, and then push as hard as I could to swim up before I used up my oxygen.

Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t sink all the way to the bottom. The will to achieve will come as you mature, and right now you are in transition, but one thing you can do is to pick up that backpack lying on the floor of your room, walk to the library, and study. Nothing is stopping you. You just have to want it. You don’t know how deep your pool is; you don’t know how much oxygen you have. So don’t risk it. Swim. — Nicolò

Dear Senior,

Freshman here. I have a small problem with athletics. I play baseball, and it is my main sport. Sadly, baseball isn’t the most popular sport at NMH, and lacrosse players and hockey players often make fun of it.

I have played baseball for 10 years, so this drives me crazy. It makes me want to quit. I need advice, or at least some witty comebacks.

— Freshman

Dear Freshman, Don’t

quit baseball, bud. It sucks being on a team that doesn’t get support. I was on the football team last year, and we lost pretty much every game. Then our team got scrapped at the end of the season. We got crap from so many people, and I absolutely hated it.

What you have to do is stop caring about idiots’ opinions. You should be proud of the sport you love. More people follow baseball than hockey, not only in the U.S. but also in the rest of the world.

Baseball has a far richer history, and is a far more universal sport.

I’m from India, and we don’t have baseball or hockey, but growing up, I always knew who Babe Ruth was. If you had asked me to name a hockey player — hell, if you had asked me to name a hockey team — I wouldn’t have known what to say. Now that I’ve been living in the States, I can, but my point is that baseball is a more globally recognized sport.

Don’t hang out with people who make you feel small. If they are your friends, just tell them to shut up about it. They should respect that.

— Aryaditya

spring 2015 I 41

DEAR… Senior, I’m struggling with boy problems. Previously, guys

never liked me, but now all these guys are coming out with strong feelings. There is a friend of mine who likes me, but I consider him like a brother figure. I don’t know how to act. I know I should tell him the truth, but I’m afraid of the reaction I’ll get.

Why is high school so full of hormonally charged guys and girls?

We’re here for a damn education, not to be falling in love. How do I preserve my friendships and still have a “game plan” about what to say when a guy wants our relationship to go a different way? I’m hoping you can help. — Save Me!

Dear Save Me,

Ugh, that is incredibly frustrating. But first of all, be flattered. This is obviously the universe telling you that you are super-rad and people love you.

Second, I agree with you about being here for an education. But isn’t there an education in learning how to have healthy platonic and romantic relationships? Unfortunately, there is no “game plan.”

If there is, I sure as hell haven’t found it.

Sophomore year, one of my closest friends and I used to spend every study hall together. He told me about his family and what it was like growing up in a dangerous part of a city. I would listen, amazed by what he had to share, and I would offer stories of my own.

One night after study hall, he told me he loved me. I didn’t know what to say. I certainly didn’t feel about him the way he felt about me. But I didn’t say anything. Not then, at least. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I had a boyfriend from home at the time, and I used that as my excuse.

I was so afraid I would lose him as a friend if I admitted that I didn’t reciprocate his romantic feelings. It took a long time for me to get past that and tell him. But this is what you have to do. You need to tell your friend.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. The last thing you want to do is make a big deal, in which case he would walk away feeling embarrassed and discouraged. Keep it casual; slip it into a conversation.

Telling my friend I didn’t love him was a two-year process. There was fighting, name-calling, tears, and pain. This can be avoided if you are as upfront as possible. You never know how your friend is going to respond. He might be relieved that you are bringing it up, or he might burst into tears and delete your number, your Facebook friendship, and every text message that you and he have ever exchanged. But it is easier to sleep at night, knowing that you have been completely open with those you hold close, even if it comes at a cost. — Fiona

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Dear Wise Senior,

When my fall-term sport ended, I was left with hours of time in the afternoon. Originally, that sounded fantastic. I thought I would get all of my homework done in that time, but so far that has yet to happen. I might start on an essay, but it won’t get finished. There are so many things to distract me. I am a day student so I don’t have my own space on campus. Once I get home at night and realize how much work I have, I feel stupid for not doing it in school. I tell myself that tomorrow will be different. I will get work done. It doesn’t happen. What should I do? — Freshman

Dear Freshman, I cer-

tainly understand your issue. It has struck me once or twice, maybe more, in my NMH career. It’s common, especially for students who are adapting to the new workload and figuring out time management.

However, I have great news. This challenge will only make you a better student. So be thankful it’s happening in your freshman year and not in your senior year. Don’t worry, you can solve this.

Last winter term, I didn’t do a sport or extracurriculars, so I was free from 1 PM until the next morning. I thought, as you did, that I was going to be very productive, that I would go to bed early every night.

However, that wasn’t the case. That term was the least productive in my NMH career. Experience has shown me that if you don’t keep busy, you tend to be less productive.

So, freshman, explore some extracurriculars, clubs, or a sport. Don’t just sit around and do nothing, because that is exactly what you will do: nothing! Procrastination is like a credit card; it’s fun until you get the bill. Get a debit card instead.

— Santi

Dear Senior,

Almost every night, I have trouble falling asleep. I cannot pinpoint the reason. It’s not like my roommate is up late, or I can’t stop worrying about my grades. It’s like my body has some instinctive fear of sleep. I do all the necessary things: minimize light and sound, make sure the temperature is comfortable; I’m even taking medicine I got from the infirmary. What do you think is causing this problem and how can I stop it?

— A Tired Student

Dear Tired Student,

My freshman fall, I also had insomnia.

I would have sleepless nights followed by weary days, and I never understood why.

My bed was near a window that faced the chapel, and I would lie awake for a long time, listening as the chapel bell rang 11 times, then 12 times. As the minutes ticked by, I would become distressed because I knew that the less sleep I got, the more tired I would be the next day or the day after.

An important lesson I learned is that the night is your friend. Sometimes staying up late is a treasure to be discovered. Chances are you have a lot of commitments and responsibilities during the day, but after you go to bed, you have nothing to do and nowhere to be. Embrace that nothingness. Let it be a breather for your mind and body. You will begin to enjoy your time awake, being completely relaxed.

Don’t worry about the next day until it comes.

Once I learned how to enjoy the night, I started falling asleep much faster. It was almost as if some force took away my time awake as soon as I started finding happiness in it. But I never complained because I was getting more sleep.

One final suggestion: As you are falling asleep each night, recount three to five moments during your day that made you happy. This will help you focus your thoughts, which will help you fall asleep. Also, it will ensure that you fall asleep thinking positive things. — Zeke [NMH]

spring 2015 I 43

ALUMNI HALL

Board Gets New Chair Economist and college professor Stephen Fuller ’58, P ’98 will become chairman of the NMH Board of Trustees this month, just as NMH launches a new strategic plan designed to guide the school through the next five years.

“We have a lot of work to do, and the challenges are enormous,” Fuller says. “The school is strong, with an excellent reputation, but we can’t sit back and rest on that reputation. We need to move forward.”

Fuller has served on the board since 2012. His predecessor, William Shea ’72, served one three-year term as chair and 10 years on the board.

Fuller lists among the board’s priorities an upcoming campaign that will support the school’s strategic plan; increase financial aid; and fund new buildings, improvements to existing buildings, and higher faculty salaries.

He also is determined to broaden the network of NMH graduates who remain connected to the school. “These are all things that will position NMH for the next century,” he says.

Calling himself a “quiet leader,” Fuller brings to the board chairmanship decades of experience as a scholar and consultant in the fields of economic development, public policy, and urban planning.

He taught at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for 25 years, including nine years as chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development and one year as director of doctoral programs in the School of Business and Public Management. He joined the faculty at George Mason University in 1994 as a professor of public policy and regional development and served as director of the Ph.D. Program in Public Policy and director of the Center for Regional Analysis. He has authored more than 800 articles, papers, and reports in the field of urban and regional economic development, with a focus on the Washington, D.C., economy.

Fuller spent two years at NMH, where he played soccer and ran track, worked in the laundry — “I could iron 32 shirts in an hour,” he says — and was so influenced by his teachers that when NMH built six new faculty homes last year, he funded the Baldwin-Baxter House in honor of two of them, Alice Baldwin and E. Mary Baxter. “Teachers are what make NMH special,” Fuller says. “They’re the ones who made the difference for me.” Fuller passed along his allegiance to NMH to his daughter, Elizabeth, who graduated in 1998.

Although Fuller recognizes that his economic expertise will play a major part of his board leadership, he considers network building his responsibility as well. “NMH is so important to so many alumni in terms of who and what they have become, how they’ve realized their potential in their careers and lives,” he says. “It’s time for us to recapture that sense of commitment.”

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A L U MN I C O U N C I L P R O F I L E

K AT E H AY E S ’ 0 6 Home: New York, NY Work: Senior Associate at Echoing Green, a global nonprofit that provides seed funding to early-stage social entrepreneurs who are working to solve the world’s biggest problems.

Alumni Council position: Chair of the 16-member Young Alumni Committee What you do: I focus our team on engaging and re-engaging young alums through social media, in-person events, and peerto-peer outreach.

Why you do it: NMH provided me with a foundation for what already has become an amazing career. It allowed me not only to have a robust academic experience, but also to learn about the world and how I wanted to live in it. The lessons I learned at NMH were so central to who I am as a person, and this is an opportunity to give back to an institution I am thankful for every day.

Most satisfying moment on the Alumni Council: When the Young Alumni Facebook page hit 1,000 “likes.” The Young Alumni Committee thought about how to re-engage alumni who were less involved with NMH, and we knew that social media was the best way to do it.

Our social media task force worked hard to provide content specifically targeted toward this group, and it worked.

2014–15 ALUMNI COUNCIL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Secure your future ... and the future of NMH

www.nmhschool.org/alumni-get-involved Caroline N. Niederman ’78 President thedoc@txequine dentist.com Dorrie Krakower Susser ’56 Secretary dksusser@gmail.com Carolyn “Ty” Bair Fox ’59 Molly Talbot ’93 Nominating committee co-chairs

Stuart Papp ’93 Strategic advisory chair J. Peter Donald ’05 NMH Fund chair Dave Hickernell ’68 Awards committee chair Wendy Alderman Cohen ’67 Reunion advisory chair

Heather Richard ’91 Donnie Smith ’07 Diversity committee co-chairs Kate Hayes ’06 Young alumni committee chair Marggie Slichter ’84, P ’10, P ’11, P ’12 Ex-officio, staff liaison

A charitable gift annuity gives you: • • • • •

Fixed lifelong payments Favorable annuity rates A secure investment Tax benefits A gratifying legacy

Sample rates based on a single life CGA* Age 65 75 85 Rate 4.7% 5.8% 7.8%

Visit nmhschool.plannedgiving.org or contact:

Jeff Leyden ’80, P’14 Director of Capital and Planned Giving 413-498-3299 jleyden@nmhschool.org

Sue Clough P’06, P’08 ALUMNI DANCE RECITAL I Yvonne-Marie Sain ’02, a dance teacher in New York City and Connecticut, per forms during NMH’s annual alumni dance weekend in Januar y. Alumni who graduated between 1987 and 2014 returned to campus and taught workshops in commercial dance, writing and dance, composition, theater jazz, modern, Bhangra, and yoga.

Senior Associate Director of Planned Giving 413-498-3084 sclough@nmhschool.org *Rates displayed are for illustrative purposes only.

PHOTO: GLENN MINSHALL

spring 2015 I 45

PARTING WORDS

Learning to Hope A girl in Somaliland finds her voice.

by FARAH OMER ’15

When I was 11 years old, I received the highest grades in the fifth grade in my school in Somaliland. At the end of the school year, there was a ceremony in which people with the biggest accomplishments were acknowledged, and I was called up to the stage by an official from the ministry of education. I was proud and eager to receive my prize.

The official handed me a package, and in front of my family, friends, and a thousand strangers clapping, I opened it and saw that the prize was a boy’s soccer uniform and a boy’s watch. I felt humiliated, but what hurt more was knowing that my school principal and the ministry officials had assumed a boy would be the best student in the grade.

There is a Somali proverb that says a woman’s place is either her home or her grave, and those are the values with which I was taught. I didn’t understand why I had to work 10 times as hard as my male counterparts to be seen as capable. Or why there were no women in Parliament. Or why, because I was a girl, my voice was considered a sin and I was considered half a person with half a brain.

I forced myself to blend in, convinced that I didn’t have the power to change my world. When your

ambitions are crushed, it’s easy and safe to be cynical and apathetic about the injustices you encounter at school or at the market. No matter how much you want to take action, there is that voice in your head reminding you how many times you were called stupid or bossy because you said your opinions out loud. You come to the inevitable conclusion that change is impossible. That is what I did for a long time.

Then I met Nimo, a 14-year-old girl who lives in my country’s largest orphanage center. My friends and I used to go there three times a week to tutor kids in math and basic English and to show them some love in their difficult lives. Nimo had almost been a victim of human organ trafficking; her parents had died in the war in Somalia, and the rest of her family abandoned her. She came to my class with a beautiful smile and a desire to learn. Here she was, 14 years old, willing to sit in classes with 5-year-olds because she valued learning how to add double digits and how to write her name more than she cared about being cool.

One day Nimo did not come to class, so I went looking for her. I found her in the kitchen cutting vegetables.

I asked her why she hadn’t come to class, and she said, “Teacher, today I can’t escape, but maybe next week.”

She wasn’t just saying that to get me off her back. She genuinely believed that tomorrow she would be able to convince her supervisors to let her come to class.

That was the day I started to believe in change. I thought that if Nimo can hope — a girl who had faced some of the most horrifying experiences known to humanity — then so could I. It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Being a believer in hope and change is a lifetime commitment, a choice you make every day. It means you give up the comfort of conforming to societal norms for the greatness of standing by your convictions.

I don’t have it down yet. I am thousands of miles away from my family and friends, and many afternoons when I am tired, busy, and homesick, I wish I were home drinking excellent Ethiopian coffee. Some mornings I wake up terrified that today will be the day I prove to be not good enough, or smart enough, or strong enough to sit in these remarkable NMH classrooms. I am scared that I will not be a good role model for girls like Nimo. I am scared I will disappoint everyone who puts their faith in me. I am scared that I won’t be able to escape the box that society has put me in.

But I also refuse to give up. I cannot afford to. My education is greater than me; it has a bigger purpose. It will help prove that women in my country can succeed outside of the household. It can help begin to end gender discrimination. It is a symbol of hope for Nimo and for many girls just like her around the globe. [NMH]

Postgraduate and TYP student Farah Omer shared a longer version of this essay at an all-school meeting in October 2014.

Read the original at http://tinyurl.com/learningtohope.

96 I NMH Magazine

PHOTOS: JEFF WOODWARD, GALE ZUCKER

GIVING BACK

Across Generations Dorothy Osborn ’45 and Roberta Taggart ’07 It’s been 70 years since Dorothy “Dee” Osborn ’45 attended the Northfield School for Girls, but time hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm. “I grew up in a tiny town with no high school, so going to Northfield was incredibly exciting for me — it represented a window to a larger world and the daydream of bigger things to come.”

One of the first things Osborn did at Northfield was change her nickname — “Dotty” — which she hated. “I was 5' 8" at age 12,” she says. “‘Dotty’ sounded diminutive and that wasn’t me.” As “Dee,” she threw herself into her classes, and field hockey and choir. “The school was so invigorating — the students, the sports, the camaraderie — and the education was terrific.”

Osborn went on to Wellesley and a career in finance. When the time came for her granddaughter Roberta to choose a high school, she waited, and hoped. “I didn’t push Northfield. She chose it all by herself.

But I was thrilled.”

Taggart agrees that her grandmother didn’t make a hard sell for NMH; she simply pointed out the opportunities the school had given her. “I knew attending Northfield had been a pivotal experience in my grandmother’s life, so I thought it would be good for me,” Taggart says. At NMH, Taggart rowed, played ice hockey, and sang in the Concert Choir. She graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and now works for RBC Capital Markets in New York.

Both granddaughter and grandmother support NMH enthusiastically, Taggart through the Alumni Council’s Young Alumni Committee and the school’s New York area club, and Osborn through regular contributions. “In my mind, it’s a form of tithing — honoring the education I received,” Osborn says. Taggart echoes this sentiment. “I think many people underestimate the benefits they derived from attending NMH. I gained so much from my time there, and remaining active as an alumna is my way of providing opportunities for the next generation of students.”

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