Fr om t he Head
Great Teachers in a Time of Change It’s the middle of March 2020 and COVID19 is very much on the upswing in the United States. As a school, we have just made the heartbreaking decision to go virtual for the entire spring term. As I write this, students are on break, but when they “return to school” on March 26, it will be through a virtual online platform. We made this decision in light of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations and following in the footsteps of a number of our peer schools. This massive adoption of online education will be one of the biggest nationwide experiments in education anywhere at any time. None of us knows quite how this will work or how successful it will be. What I do know is that Loomis Chaffee has always put a high value on the bond between faculty and students and that we will need to think creatively to transfer that model effectively to an online environment. Our success will very much depend upon our faculty—and there we are fortunate indeed. Our talented and caring teachers have always been at the heart of the Loomis experience, and I know that they will find innovative and creative ways to make our distance learning experiment successful. This coming term is also Fred Seebeck’s last spring term at the school after a stellar career as an English teacher; swimming, diving, and track coach; dormitory faculty member; and advisor and mentor extraordinaire! Fred is one of those quintessential boarding school faculty members who, over the years, has had a significant impact on his students. He has made a positive difference in his students’ lives. He is the sort of teacher for whom we are celebrated—dedicated, professional, extremely erudite, and always caring. He is, quite simply, the model.
Don Joffray, another legendary faculty member, died earlier this year. Unfortunately, I never got to know him—but I have heard plenty and I have an idea about what I missed. My first encounter with Joff was through Steve Strogatz’s ’76 book, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Student Learned About Life While Corresponding about Math. A passage toward the end of the book seems particularly relevant today. Steve writes: “Now I also see that I did learn something profoundly mathematical, about how to live. From his hobbies to the way he faces the ups and downs in his life, Joff is brave about change. He rolls with it and tries to make peace with it…. The changes that calculus can tame, and the ones it cannot. He confronts them all, and not, like Zeno, with his mind alone but also with his heart.” Read the book, but you can also listen to a Radiolab podcast with Steve about his friendship with Don. A link to the podcast is available at www.loomischaffee.org/magazine. Fred and Don were great school people— Fred still is! Great classroom teachers for sure, but also great in the dormitories and in athletics and in all those in between spaces where faculty-student interactions take place at a boarding school. Connecting with students on a deep level, Don served the school for 49 years, Fred for 38. Between them they taught and influenced thousands of Loomis alumni. I am often struck when I talk with alumni and current students and they tell me about the faculty who have made a difference in their lives, the list of faculty whom they mention is never just the same small handful of people. Fred and Don, for sure, but scores of different names come up. Great teachers care about learning, and they know what learning looks like. Great Continued on page 16
4
Loomis Chaffee Magazine Spring 2020
