Milton Magazine Fall 2010 issue

Milton Magazine

Fall 2010

What are those 21st-century skills?

The speed of change is more than a concept or fuel for debate.

It’s wraparound experience that feels like fear for some, fun for others, and certainly a condition of work. How can we acquire the skills that we need to survive and thrive as the terrain shifts so markedly?

Milton Academy Board of Trustees, 2010–2011 David Abrams Brookline, Massachusetts George Alex Cohasset, Massachusetts Robert Azeke ’87 New York, New York Julia W. Bennett ’79 Norwell, Massachusetts Bradley Bloom President Wellesley, Massachusetts Bob Cunha ’83 Milton, Massachusetts Mark Denneen ’84 Boston, Massachusetts Elisabeth Donohue ’83 New York, New York

James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 Emeritus New York, New York

John B. Fitzgibbons ’87 Bronxville, New York

Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts

Catherine Gordan New York, New York Victoria Hall Graham ’81 Vice President New York, New York Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 New York, New York Kerry Murphy Healey Beverly, Massachusetts

Caroline Hyman New York, New York Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire Lisa A. Jones ’84 Newton, Massachusetts F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Vice President Belmont, Massachusetts Chris McKown Milton, Massachusetts

Erika Mobley ’86 Brisbane, California John P. Reardon ’56 Cohasset, Massachusetts H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Karan Sheldon ’73 Blue Hills Falls, Maine Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Secretary Rye, New York V-Nee Yeh ’77 Hong Kong Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York

Contents

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Features: What are those 21st-century skills?

4 Writing Is the Glue Matt Pottinger’s career straddles the front lines of journalism and war, blurring the traditional distinctions.

With the prospect of a new career evolution ahead of him, Matt shares how lessons learned at Milton prepared him for an unorthodox life.

John Avlon ’91

7 International Rescue Committee In her first four months as an emergency responder working for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Sarah Spencer ’96 worked in Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and eastern Congo. That was just the beginning.

Rebecca Onion ’96

8 Businessman, Scientist, Yoga Practitioner and Permaculturalist Josh Tosteson ’90 designed an environmental science and public policy major at Harvard. After interdisciplinary environmental studies at Columbia, he started and consulted on multiple business ventures promoting sustainability. Josh seems to make things grow wherever he goes.

Rebecca Onion ’96

11 Building Slate Online The deputy editor of Slate magazine, Julia Turner ’96 helps run a “new media” entity that’s (in new media terms) an elder statesman.

The 14-year-old magazine was built online mostly to cut out the overhead of print. Initially, its goals weren’t far from those of traditional magazines.

Today, Julia’s work requires a fascinating mix of skills.

Peter Smith ’oo

13 Brilliantly Audacious Erick Tseng ’97 works on the newest of new, new things. Right now he is chief of mobile products for Facebook.

Only months after joining this social networking juggernaut, he is telling the world about a “new technology revolution—one that will take place on our phones.” This revolution will deliver experiences that merge the latest advances in mobile, social and location.

Cathleen D. Everett

16 A Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts For Clark Freifeld ’96, the emerging field of health informatics is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of his professional career: It combines computer programming and health care to assist developing countries, which Clark is as passionate about as chocolate and peanut butter.

Cynthia Powell ’83

18 Are You a Good Teammate?

Milton faculty want to fire up the curiosity, imagination, and exciting thinking that drive science. They want to turn everyone into a scientist. Inquiry-based teaching relies on plenty of open-ended questions, and it requires teenagers to develop capabilities quite apart from science.

Cathleen D. Everett

23 Workshop Is an Active Verb at Milton “Who would like to lead today?” Jim Connolly asks his creative writing students. Peer workshopping is the defining element of creative writing at Milton. Students—as writers, collaborators and critics—take their roles seriously.

Erin E. Hoodlet

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26 Challenged to Be Flexible and Resourceful Students in Milton’s Exchange Programs—paired with counterparts from Spain, France, China—grow significantly in a short time, both in humility and self-confidence.

Erin E. Hoodlet

28 A Lesson in Collaboration from American Pioneers Every year during the Lewis and Clark unit, third graders become explorers, journalists, mapmakers, peacemakers. Teachers Jane McGuinness and Susan Wheelwright traveled this summer along Lewis and Clark’s trail to bring new and interesting perspectives to their students.

Erin E. Hoodlet

35 Commencement and Prizes, 2010 40 Graduates’ Weekend, 2010

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Departments 30 Classroom On Monogamy, Mystery, and Teaching the Short-Short Story Lisa Baker English Department

32 Faculty Perspective Resisting the Impulse to Predict David Ball ’88

33 Head of School On Immersive Learning Experiences: The Blands in Spain Todd B. Bland

34 Post Script Is It Better to Be Lucky, or To Be Good?

A Remembrance of John Collins ’94 Jonathan Emerson Kohler ’94

46 Sports Spring Sports Scenes: Indulge in Nostalgia

48 In•Sight 50 On Centre News and notes from the campus and beyond

62 Class Notes

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Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editor Erin Hoodlet Photography Aya Brackett, Michael Dwyer, John Gillooly, Erin Hoodlet, Nicki Pardo, J.D. Sloan, Greg White Design Moore & Associates Milton Magazine is published twice a year

by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-of-address notifications should be sent.

As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the oppor­t unity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school-administered activities.

Printed on Recycled Paper

What are those 21st-century skills?

The speed of change is more than a concept or fuel for debate. It’s wraparound experience that feels like fear for some, fun for others, and certainly a condition of work. How can we acquire the skills that we need to survive and thrive as the terrain shifts so markedly?

Tony Wagner of Harvard, a prominent guru in the education world, claims a massive disconnect between skills required for success in today’s economy, and the skills taught in typical schools.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Mr. Wagner identifies these core “survival skills” that teenagers should be learning, after “scores of interviews with business leaders”: • critical thinking and problem solving • collaboration across networks and leading by influence • agility and adaptability • initiative and entrepreneurialism • effective oral and written communication • accessing and analyzing information • curiosity and imagination Why do these skills feel so familiar? Perhaps because they are fundamental. At Milton, they’re alive in the cultural and intellectual environment.

As new Upper School Principal David Ball ’88 recently wrote, “Those of us who teach Milton students must still distinguish the fundamentals from the fads, the transcendent from the trendy. Making those decisions seems simple at times, daunting at others.

Students must leave this place able to explore enthusiastically, reason critically, and communicate clearly.”

We talked with alumni, whose jobs could be considered “21st-century jobs.” That is, their jobs previously didn’t exist; or they didn’t exist in their present form; or their work is changing even as they pursue it. We asked them what they’re doing and what skills they rely upon—intellectual and personal. In this issue, Milton alumni who are online writers by trade, report on those conversations.

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Matthew Pottinger ’91

Matt Pottinger was the 2009 winner of the Lieutenant Colonel Michael D. Kuszewski Award for Marine Corps Intelligence Officer of the Year.

Writing Is the Glue It’s rare when a friend becomes a role model. But in a time when many people put personal comfort ahead of physical courage, Matt Pottinger sets an example for us all.

My friendship with Matt began at Milton, where we essentially majored in laughter and playing in a campus band called Blind Dog Whiskey. After college, we both became writers. He started at a newswire service and graduated to being a lead reporter at the Wall Street Journal in China. I worked as chief speechwriter for the mayor of New York City. After the

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attacks of September 11—and covering the United States’ largely unheralded relief efforts in the wake of the 2004 Christmas Day Tsunami in the South Pacific—Matty decided to join the Marines at age 32. He graduated first in his platoon at officer candidate school at Quantico and went into Marine intelligence, serving three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With his military service nearly over, I spoke to Matt via phone from Okinawa, Japan, as he prepared to take some welldeserved R&R, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and then relocate to New York City to assume the Edward R. Murrow Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Matty’s career straddles the front lines of journalism and war, blurring traditional distinctions while retaining a deeper continuity, a commitment to civilization. Now edging toward our 20th Milton Reunion, with the prospect of a new career evolution ahead of him, Matt talked about the lessons he learned at Milton and how they prepared him for an unorthodox life.

“Having multiple careers is sort of the thing of the future. It’s the multidisciplinary, multiple careers with different skills that you kind of pull together,” Matt says. “For example, Chinese language and writing—both were things I started

“The dirty little secret that I learned coming out of Milton was that writing is one of the most important skills, and one of the most portable skills, that you can have. It’s something that opens doors even in places where you wouldn’t expect it to—including in the military.”

to learn at Milton. I turned that into a decade-long career as a foreign correspondent in China. Then I decided to shift gears radically and do something quite different—join the military. That’s sort of indicative of the importance of flexibility.”

Writing provided unexpected glue between his career shifts: “The dirty little secret that I learned coming out of Milton was that writing is one of the most important skills, and one of the most portable skills, that you can have.

It’s something that opens doors even in places where you wouldn’t expect it to— including in the military. As a Marine intelligence officer, first doing human intelligence with an infantry battalion in Iraq, I was doing a lot of writing. I was actually applying skills similar to those that I had learned as a writer and as a journalist to military intelligence. On my second Afghan deployment, I ended up researching on behalf of the commanders of the war, into the problems of intelligence gathering and analysis, and the dissemination of intelligence. I was using, again, the same investigative skills I’d learned doing investigative reports for the Wall Street Journal in China. I wrote them up into a paper that I published together with the top Intel officer in Afghanistan, to try to fix a lot of those problems.”

It’s not the technology but the fundamentals that make the difference between success and failure in any field.

“Even what we imagine to be futuristic jobs, using futuristic technologies, are ultimately based on timeless skills. On the military side it’s people on the ground, carrying rifles that haven’t changed very much technologically in decades. In intelligence, the same thing: You’ve got all of

this tremendous capacity for disseminating information through networks and databases, but ultimately it’s easy for those things to fail you, if you fail at the basics, which are still good human contact with people on the ground, developing personal relationships with Afghans and with Americans who are in the field—talking to them at length and writing down in detail. It boils down not to technology but to basic interpersonal skills, talking to local people, winning the confidence of people, and gleaning information from them through the old-fashioned art of sitting down and listening, and then writing like crazy. So these skills are timeless, and we’ve gotten weaker at some of them.

I look back at some of the intelligence reports that were being filed back before World War II when the Marines were fighting what we called ‘small wars,’ diplomatic wars to parts of the Caribbean on behalf of the State Department, and found that some of the reporting they were doing then was more thorough and meaningful than a lot of the reports that we’re seeing now. We’re getting weaker at some of the basics. The tendency is for people to fall in love with technology, and it comes back to bite us.”

In the end, the lesson of Matty’s life to date is the power of example. What you do with your education is what matters most, and taking the easiest or most shortterm profitable path can be a dereliction of duty. We all have an obligation to our opportunities.

the military would benefit from having more people from elite schools doing service. Even more than that, the country as a whole benefits when its civilian leaders have had some military experience. If you look at the wars that we’ve been in over the last decade, some of the most consequential decisions that were made—both to get involved in those wars and also how to fight those wars—were made by men who, with very few exceptions, never had experience in carrying a rifle or serving in the Army or the Marine Corps. One of the things I’ve learned from being a Marine is a much greater appreciation for the limits of military power. From three combat deployments, I have a far greater appreciation for what we cannot do, as much as I have for the incredible things that we can do.”

John Avlon ’91

John Avlon is a CNN contributor and senior political columnist for TheDailyBeast.com. His newest book is Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, which Bill Clinton described as “a clear and compelling review of the forces on the outer edges of the political spectrum.”

“I don’t want to sound preachy, but of our class at Milton, I’m only aware of a couple of people who’ve served in the military. Military service kind of faded away for a whole generation as something that people coming from elite schools in America would not have considered. But Milton Magazine

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“I do anything from liaising with members of Parliament, or members of Congress in Washington, to talking to media and think tanks— trying to convince and persuade with rational and logical arguments, why we should increase funding, or why there should be a stronger UN intervention in country X.…

I need to gather the evidence for an argument and express it in a structured and convincing way.

I built those skills at Milton.”

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Sarah Spencer ’96

International Rescue Committee

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n her first four months as an emergency responder working for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Sarah Spencer ’96 visited Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and eastern Congo. That was two years ago, and it was just the beginning. On short notice, Sarah and her team flew to natural disasters, new wars, or newly resurgent wars that put civilians at risk. Alone among the other members of the IRC’s team, Sarah’s particular job was to look out for the needs of women displaced or threatened by conflict or upheaval. “Reproductive health programming wasn’t on the agenda of the average humanitarian worker until the late ’90s,” she says. “Women’s health has never been a priority.” But women in conflict zones need access to a gamut of services, from the serious (post-rape health care that could prevent AIDS, STDs, or pregnancy) to the simple (sanitary napkins and clean underwear). Sarah’s mission was to provide those services.

Once she hit the ground, Sarah’s job was to find out what resources were available for women, and then coordinate with other humanitarian groups and security forces to make sure women’s needs were being met. “In an emergency,” she says, “we need to go in and say, ‘What can we do, with the resources we have, to provide services immediately to these people?’”

In Haiti, after the earthquake in January 2010, for example, Sarah talked to women to find out their biggest health care and security needs. The huge demand for medical care for victims of the earthquake

meant that doctors working with other humanitarian agencies were unable to provide post-rape services. Sarah helped set up a partnership between IRC and a local reproductive health services clinic.

The IRC provided funding, training, and U.S. Army tents, while the clinic lent personnel, so that tent clinics could be set up where women could access care.

Sarah, who received a B.A. in history and political science from Northwestern, a masters’ in public policy from Harvard, and a certificate in forced migration from Oxford, has worked with people living in conflict zones for the past ten years. She has worked with a range of humanitarian NGOs including UNICEF, Save the Children, and the Women’s Refugee Commission. Sarah describes work that requires the ability to assess and respond to circumstances, empathy, leadership, and independence—not to mention the flexibility and self-confidence to embody all of these abilities in a variety of settings that most would qualify as “challenging.”

Sarah believes that she learned many of these skills during her high school years, especially the ones that depend on effective communication. The ability to communicate with and persuade others, which she developed in English and Current Events/Public Speaking classes with Mr. Zilliax, Mr. McCloskey, and Mr. DeLetis, has been crucial in her work, as she needs to be able to talk with a wide range of people to make progress. Besides the communication with women and other aid workers on the ground, she says, “I do anything from liaising with members of

Parliament, or members of Congress in Washington, to talking to media and think tanks—trying to convince and persuade with rational and logical arguments, why we should increase funding, or why there should be a stronger UN intervention in country X.” To do that, she says, “I need to gather the evidence for an argument and express it in a structured and convincing way. I built those skills at Milton.”

Rebecca Onion ’96

Rebecca Onion ’96 is a freelance writer and a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Pursuing interests in youth, literature, science, technology, and the environment, she has written for a range of publications as various as Slate.com, ELLEgirl, AMC Outdoors and Austinist. com. In recent years, most of her time has been devoted to her dissertation, which looks at the promotion of science activities for American children in the years 1880–1960. A 2000 graduate of Yale University, she has received a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship and a William S. Livingston Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin to support her graduate study. For more information, visit www.rebeccaonion.com.

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Joshua Tosteson ’90

Businessman, Scientist, Yoga Practitioner and Permaculturalist J

oshua Tosteson ’90 spoke with me from his Brooklyn home, where he has a deck garden featuring fig trees, grape vines, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and a cherry tree. Josh designed his own environmental science and public policy major at Harvard. He signed on as the first student in a new graduate program in interdisciplinary environmental studies at Columbia’s Earth Institute. He left Columbia to start and consult on multiple business ventures promoting sustainability. Josh seems to make things grow wherever he goes.

After receiving a master’s degree from Columbia, where he studied the effects of El Niño–related weather events on communities in places like Ethiopia and Brazil, Josh evaluated the academic’s life.

Research and teaching, he determined, would not help him take what he calls “transformative action” to enhance sustainability. Josh’s thoughts turned to entrepreneurship. One of his first jobs after leaving academia was as a development manager overseeing the transformation of an Army ammunition plant in Louisiana, into an eco-industrial park

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housing businesses that transformed waste into profit. From this job, Josh cofounded a company called FullCircle, which consulted on similar projects in the United States and other countries. Finally, for seven years, he served as president and director of HydroGen Corporation, a company that developed and marketed a stationary fuel-cell technology. Explaining the philosophy behind his business activities, Josh says, “I realized that a very effective way to transform our environment is to replace polluting, unsustainably produced energy, food, and other goods with alternative products that meet the market’s requirements.”

Josh’s latest venture is Project Nouvelle Vie (http://nouvelleviehaiti.org), a program for youth in Haiti for which he serves as a volunteer co-director. Nouvelle Vie’s mission is to educate and train youth in leadership, permaculture and entrepreneurship. To that end, Josh created a course in environmental entrepreneurship for Haitian students. They learned business practices and ethics and wrote business plans for “green” companies that might provide solutions to benefit the Haitian economy and environment. After the earthquake in January 2010, Josh

helped Project Nouvelle Vie’s young members in Haiti reorganize into a national service corps focused on rebuilding and reconstruction.

Accounting for his career path, Josh says his choices are part of a larger vision of service. “Each job choice has been an expression of my views at the time, about how I can make an effective contribution to the issues on which a peaceful and sustainable planet depend,” he says. “The compass that guides me in my vocational choices points less toward something tangible like a career milestone or position, [and] more toward a sense of what ‘effective’ means.” Self-reflection and assessment are key tools in this process: “I think it’s easy to allow the inertia of a previous career decision to carry you along and mute the questions you may be asking underneath. From the start, I’ve been pretty attuned to those questions and am in the constant practice of reflecting on why I am doing what I’m doing, and whether it is still the right vehicle for living out my intentions.”

Josh credits his time at Milton with alerting him to the importance of selfexamination. “For me, the most important

“The compass that guides me in my vocational choices points less toward something tangible like a career milestone or position, [and] more toward a sense of what ‘effective’ means.”

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Joshua and Nouvelle Vie Youth Corps members

aspects of my Milton education were all about sorting through the kind of person I want to be. ‘Dare to Be True’ is a motto that played a pretty regular role in the dayto-day classroom life at Milton. It’s a practice that leads one down the correct path without fail.

“It sounds pretty cheesy,” he admits, “but the School motto, and the way that it meaningfully pervaded classroom life, has been the most valuable aspect of my Milton education for helping me sort through career choices.”

The fruit trees in Brooklyn are just part of this larger picture. For Josh, “daring to be true” means that his decisions—what to eat, how to dispose of waste—need to express the set of principles that he also follows in his business career. Or, as he puts it, “It’s been important to me in my life to make sure that we’re carrying out best practices, living in the right way.”

Rebecca Onion ’96

“For me, the most important aspects of my Milton education were all about sorting through the kind of person I want to be. ‘Dare to Be True’ is a motto that played a pretty regular role in the day-to-day classroom life at Milton. It’s a practice that leads one down the correct path without fail.”

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Julia Turner ’96

Building Slate Online A

s the deputy editor of Slate magazine, Julia Turner ’96 helps run a “new media” entity that’s (in new media terms) an elder statesman. The 14-year-old magazine was built online mostly to cut out the overhead of print; its goals weren’t far from those of traditional magazines like The New Republic. But for Julia (who arrived at Slate via Brown University and a post-college job at Time Inc), work requires a fascinating mix of skills: the old-fashioned reporting her father practiced as a columnist and editor for the Boston Globe, joined to the adaptability demanded by media’s changing landscape.

“As we’re hiring younger people to staff,” she explains, “the more that they know a little bit about coding or video production or radio, and are able to work in multiple media, the more valuable they are as possible hires. It’s become about the best way to tell a story, and using whatever tools serve your narrative.”

For her part, hosting a weekly podcast—

Slate’s Culture Gabfest—has taught Julia skills that traditional magazines would never have required. “Obviously, at a print magazine, you wouldn’t also have been producing a weekly radio show on the spot,” she says. “Learning how to have a recorded conversation has been really fun.

It wouldn’t have been an opportunity I’d have had if I’d worked at a magazine 20 years ago. I would actually have had to switch careers and go to NPR and try to become a radio producer. But instead we just get to tack on those skills.” (A possible result of her newfound podcasting experience: I notice on the phone that Julia speaks not just in complete sentences, but complete paragraphs; no interview should be this easy.)

As work at Slate requires new skills, it also offers new opportunities. “Just having infinite space to make a point is totally different. An architecture column in The New Yorker has one or two images, but our architecture critic can get into a Milton Magazine

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“As we’re hiring younger people to staff, the more that they know a little bit about coding or video production or radio, and are able to work in multiple media, the more valuable they are as possible hires. It’s become about the best way to tell a story, and using whatever tools serve your narrative.” building and show you 14 images, down to the choice of a railing detail.” Some of the work she’s most proud of from Slate could never have been published in print outlets. “I did this series about directional signage. It was an attempt to take this sort of invisible aspect of the world and shine some light on it—figure out who makes those signs and how you can tell when a sign is good and when it’s bad. If I’d gone to an editor at a traditional print magazine and said, ‘I’d like 15 pages for my series on signage,’ they’d have said, ‘You’re crazy.’

But because signage is visual, and because the Internet is a medium with infinite space, I was able to tell a story about this totally essential but invisible thing that affects all our lives, in a way that would be hard to do in any other medium.”

Confirming her point, her long series on this relatively obscure topic ended up getting more than three million page views.

Podcast aside, Julia’s striking verbal facility could also have come from Milton, where she spent her senior year as editorin-chief of the Milton Paper. “Literally every day that I do this job, I am grateful for the writing education that I got at Milton,” she says, mirroring my own feelings on the subject. “I still have yet to have a teacher better than Mr. Zilliax, and I think that grounding in the fundamentals of constructing a sentence—and that ability to critically analyze whether a particular argument is worth making—was crucial and still something that I’m working with people on every day.”

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Peter Smith ’oo is an editor at Nerve.com, a Web site about love, sex and culture. He also sings in a New York–based rock band called The AyeAyes; his bassist is Nate Bliss ’01, replacing Jim Bisbee ’01, who wandered off. Their debut album, Bravado, is available on iTunes and at theayeayes. com. It comprises 12 tracks, seven guitar solos, and a number of jokes. They recently shot their first music video, but will be reshooting later in the year because the girl they cast as the love interest looked “disoriented and confused.”

Erick Tseng ’97

Brilliantly Audacious: The revolution to deliver completely new, innovative experiences that merge the latest advances in mobile, social and location

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rilliantly audacious” is how Erick Tseng ’97 described the plan for Google’s Android platform. That phrase may better describe Erick himself. Eyes straight ahead, smile on his face, sketching out big-picture views of the world, Erick works on the newest of new, new things.

Right now he is chief of mobile products for Facebook. Only months after joining this social networking juggernaut, he is telling the world about a “new technology revolution—one that will take place on our phones.” This revolution will deliver completely new, innovative experiences that merge the latest advances in mobile, social and location.

Erick’s “old” job was lead product manager for the Android platform, the operating system behind phones like the Droid, Nexus One, and T-Mobile MyTouch. Andy Rubin, Android’s co-founder, asked Erick to build a product management organization for the platform. Ultimately, Erick was responsible for the overall product design and user experience of this operating system and its entire collection of applications.

One consistent priority for Erick is making sure he has enough time for selfreflection. Touching base with what he’s doing with his life, and why, keeps him going. He constantly checks against the three things that particularly motivate

him. “First, I always want to be learning.” Erick says, “Second, I love building stuff—products, organizations, whatever; and third, whatever I build, I want it to make an impact, both at an individual and a macro level.”

So the Android project was exciting not only because it was audacious, but because it was totally in line with Erick’s personal goals. Over three years, he helped build the product management team, as well as the Android platform itself. The Nexus One phone was Erick’s most recent labor of love.

“Seeing the impact that Android, and its open design, have had on the industry at large is truly rewarding,” Erick says.

“Openness benefits the entire industry ‘ecosystem.’ It benefits application developers, because they now have unbridled freedom to build the most innovative apps they can dream of. It benefits carriers and phone manufacturers, because they can customize and ship phones more cheaply. And openness benefits consumers, because they have more choice in handsets and services, and choice is a very good thing.

“If you go back in time just three or four years, the average person probably couldn’t name a single mobile app. Now, that same person could probably name at least 10 or 20. What’s perhaps most gratifying for me, though, is seeing Android phones in the hands of real people on the streets of New York, Taipei, London, wherever. At

the end of the day, that’s real proof that you’ve had an impact. It’s heartening for me to be part of something that big, and to have helped contribute to that movement.”

Erick contends that Milton self-selects people who are creative, take initiative, chase challenges and love to learn. The Milton culture then amplifies those same qualities. For instance, he recalls his interest at Milton in making people more aware of the Asian-American cultural richness that is part of American life. His route was to restart a School magazine called The Asian. He wanted to stand old stereotypes on their heads, and he began with a first issue that was absolutely distinct. The front cover of this magazine had no text, just a giant, beautiful graphic of a Chinese scroll painting, and the copy inside was printed right to left (modeled after Asian text). He got everyone’s attention. “Few schools would provide that kind of opportunity, let alone support it,” Erick says.

At Google, during his three years on Android, Erick helped grow the team from less than 50 people to four times that number. His leadership role stretched him in numerous ways that may seem familiar on the face of things, but take on a different cast when your industry moves at lightning speed.

With so many new reports, at least half of them older than he was, thinking clearly about leadership style was crucial. Leading

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Earlier this year, he also presented at the TED Conference, in front of an audience that included Al Gore, Bill Gates, Will Smith and Meg Ryan.

The key challenge, for leadership and success, Erick asserts, is adapting: consistently executing the intellectual analyses that trigger changes in course. As Android grew, Erick too evolved. He began with a singular focus on making individual contributions toward product development.

As his team grew, Erick became more of a team leader and mentor. Then, last year, Android began expanding from being just software to helping to design hardware as well. The Android team began getting more involved in the design of the physical phones themselves. So Erick transformed once again. “I evolved, and learned about telephony hardware on the job—like how you lay out circuits on a motherboard to optimize antenna performance.”

From Erick’s point of view, the traditional liberal arts education, in the form it’s experienced at Milton, “truly excels as preparation for today’s world. I’m talking about what goes on both within and outside the classroom.

Erick Tseng ’97 describes the plan for Google’s Android platform.

by influence and example was the only model that would predict success in this situation, Erick thought. “My primary focus was to prove my value through what I contributed to the team. That would be the fastest way to build credibility, trust and authenticity.”

At the beginning, Android was a start-up within a much bigger company, and had the luxury of operating very nimbly within Google. “But as we grew,” Erick says, “we

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had to spend more time making sure we were plugged in to the rest of the company. We had to start communicating our strategy more frequently both within the company, such as to the Google founders, as well as externally. And so, an important aspect of my role was that of team spokesperson. I needed to ‘spread the gospel of Android to the world,’” Erick laughs.

During his time at Google, Erick met with visiting VIPs such as Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, and even Jimmy Buffett.

“Milton’s emphasis on critical thinking in subjects like literature and social studies, but also in math and science, trains students in one of the most important life skills. The kind of critical thinking and discussion I did while getting my M.B.A. at Stanford was really no different from the thoughtful interactions I had in my Modern Comparative Literature class at Milton. Even when I was working at McKinsey & Company, I found myself drawing from this ability that was first seeded at Milton. When smart people ask good questions, you can’t know all

“Milton’s emphasis on critical thinking in subjects like literature and social studies, but also in math and science, trains students in one of the most important life skills. The kind of critical thinking and discussion I did while getting my M.B.A. at Stanford was really no different from the thoughtful interactions I had in my Modern Comparative Literature class at Milton.” the answers. You need to think quickly, on your feet, take what you do know, and extrapolate that to a thoughtful answer.

“Beyond what happened in the classroom, the other Milton activity that really prepared me for this quick thinking was Speech Team. I was very involved in theater and public speaking. Working with Debbie Simon, Dale DeLetis, Randy Cox, and Peter Parisi, I trained most intensively on extemporaneous speaking. It’s admittedly a high-stress event, but the masochist in me relished the intensity. I loved it so much, I created a competitive speech team at MIT to replicate the experience. More importantly, though, I firmly believe in the power of effective communication. In my last two years at MIT, I served as the student member of the MIT Faculty Committee on the Undergraduate Program. In that role, I helped push through a new communications requirement for the school, making it mandatory for all students to pass a communications course to graduate.”

For Erick, today’s adaptation is from Google to Facebook. For an entrepreneurial spirit, someone needing an “exponential opportunity, and new mountains to climb,” the Facebook opportunity seems perfect. Facebook needed a leader for its mobile products. The task at hand is to define the company’s mobile product vision, and to build an organization to help achieve that goal: the best of two worlds, from Erick’s point of view. With any luck, we will soon be living in this “new mobile revolution” that Erick is espousing. Perhaps that day isn’t too far away. After all, Erick is starting with over 150 million mobile users on Facebook today.

Cathleen D. Everett

Erika Mobley ’86 Erika leads business development and licensing for Apple’s App Store, the online location for new applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. She works closely with major brands in the consumer, media and entertainment segments, as well as with content providers across all categories that develop compelling software applications for the App store worldwide.

Erika has been a member of the board of trustees since October 2008. She was the graduation speaker for the Class of 2009. Her words of advice, then, speak directly to relevant skills for today’s world of work.

Use the skill sets you have; figure out what is transferable and use those skills to turn barriers into opportunities: “I had always felt slightly intimidated [by] engineers because I didn’t ‘speak the language,’ yet I was always good at learning new languages in school. That was an interest of mine. If I could just shift my mindset to the idea that their discussion was, in essence, a new foreign language, I would excel in understanding any concept or terminology that surfaced in this new industry. It worked.”

Don’t buy into formulas: “For most of my professional life I’ve worked in hightech start-ups like Palm, RealNetworks, and Amazon.com. They’re all different companies that have one shared standard: no rulebook. No handbook or reference manual tells how to invent what we’re doing tomorrow, and how any of what we’re doing today may play out ten years from now.”

Identify and set your own goals, regardless of your area of study or interest.

Find an unconventional application of your specialty, if that meets your goals: “I researched options for someone who wanted to apply law to something unique. Timing, luck, and a great deal of hard work led me to a part-time job at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) while in law school, seeding an interest in international anti-piracy law and digital technology.

It was a fairly new area at the time, but that’s partly why I gravitated toward it. It defied definition.”

Erika Mobley ’86

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Clark Freifeld ’96

A whole greater than the sum of its parts Applying computer skills to advance public health in developing countries

W

ho can imagine a world without Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? I remember those vintage 1980s ads where snacking people would collide and discover the delicious combination of flavors—“Two great tastes that taste great together.”

Clark was elated in 2005 when he stumbled onto this unique and satisfying melding of two fields at Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), where investigators work at the intersection of information science, health care and biomedical discovery.

For Clark Freifeld, Class of 1996, the emerging field of health informatics is the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of his professional career: It combines computer programming and health care, which Clark is as passionate about as chocolate and peanut butter.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this was the job I had been wanting all the time, and I didn’t even know it existed.’ I jumped on it.”

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For as long as he can remember, Clark wanted to be a doctor, he says. But just as the World Wide Web was emerging in the mid-1990s, when Clark was at Milton, he was diverted by his love of computers. He even joined forces with a classmate to convince Mr. (Edward) Siegfried to offer a half course in computer programming.

All of Clark’s passions are channeled into one project: leveraging the power of technology to assist developing countries with public health needs.

“That’s when I really got the bug,” Clark recalls.

He went on to major in computer science and math at Yale University. But even there, the doctor dream didn’t die out.

In fact, he took a course in public health senior year, which was a mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment for him.

“I had no idea there was this field called public health, which takes a population-based approach to health and focuses on preventing disease rather than treating disease one by one,” Clark says. “These concepts appealed to me much more than a clinical approach to health.”

After working in France for a software development company and then helping Congolese refugees in South Africa start a computer services company, Clark started at CHIP. Now, he is working alongside epidemiologist John Brownstein to develop and refine a real-time, global, infectious disease–outbreak tracking program.

And finally, all of Clark’s passions are channeled into one project: leveraging the power of technology to assist developing countries with public health needs. Bingo.

The project started as an “extracurricular” activity, outside of Clark’s daytime focus on developing electronic personal health records. Clark worked nights and weekends to develop a Web crawler that culls news articles 24/7 from online news media and public health sources. These articles are then filtered by a series of artificial intelligence algorithms, which classify the incidences by disease and location.

of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, Clark says.

And the feedback has been very positive.

Media coverage snowballed after a Wired magazine story hit the stands in fall 2006. Today, Clark’s nighttime pet project has evolved into a full-scale research effort at CHIP. What’s next for Clark? After finishing his master’s degree at MIT Media Lab last spring, he has just enrolled in Boston University’s biomedical engineering program, working toward a Ph.D. He hopes to deepen his knowledge of cutting-edge technologies such as natural language processing—which involves building a computer system that will analyze, understand, and generate natural languages. He then will apply such new software systems to address public health challenges.

“These are really exciting areas,” Clark says. “I’m at the intersection of fields that historically were very separate and now are coming together in new ways.”

Cynthia Powell ’83

Cynthia Powell ’83, a Washington, D.C.-based communications consultant, has been telling stories for a living for 20-plus years. She plans and leads issue-oriented positioning campaigns that get the word out in ink, create blogger buzz, and put spokespeople on radio and TV. She has a master’s in print journalism from Boston University and a bachelor’s from Brown University. For more, visit www.CPknowhow.com

The end result? HealthMap.org displays a global map of infectious disease incidences which users can sort by different criteria—by geography or by disease, for example.

Users include everyone from a casual international traveler to high-level government officials at the U.S. Department

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At Milton

Are you a good teammate? “ Choose a variable and define its impact on photosynthesis or respiration.”

M

ichael Edgar has just named their next project. His Honors Biology students, sitting around the Harkness table, consider how to approach this lab assignment. In some senses they are “pros,” having taken three science courses prior to “honors bio.”

Those classes built students’ experience in inquiry-based science learning, Milton’s science brand.

Milton faculty want to fire up the curiosity, imagination, and exciting thinking that drive science. They want to turn everyone

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into a scientist. Inquiry-based teaching in science relies on plenty of open-ended questions that trigger exploration. The exploration involves testing, debate, design, analysis and expression. The power of this teaching technique to draw students into science has been proven.

“We engage them in ‘doing’ science right from the beginning,” says Michael Edgar, department chair. “So often, that inspires them to go on to more advanced science.”

Inquiry-based teaching asks teenagers to develop capabilities quite apart from science. In every science course, students work in teams. Labs are collaborative.

Together, pairs or teams figure out a question, develop a design, do the testing, collect the results, determine their meaning, and report the whole process.

Teamwork certainly brings frustrations along with rewards. Serious work in science has always been collaborative, however. More and more, even outside of science, we count on teamwork to achieve a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Learning how to advance collaborative work, as an individual contributor, is a valuable life skill.

“You need preparation to be a good collaborator,” Michael says. “Even after a couple years of practice, it still doesn’t come naturally for some people; I continue to be surprised at the challenges it represents for some, and also at the benefits of it, in the end.”

Building in the competence that unleashes creativity Over the first days of class, Michael prepares students by involving them in a three-part lab that is more directed than those that will follow. These three parts are geared toward teaching them concepts they will need for honors bio: serial dilution, control groups, statistical analysis.

The guided labs introduce the concepts very purposefully and give students good

examples. So, for instance, students know definitively what a good control group is.

Later, when lab partners design their own procedures, if they don’t have a good control group, Michael might not interrupt their process. Rather, he’ll see if they identify and discuss that problem in the discussion/conclusion section of their report.

Each of the guided labs begins with a question. They’ve read about bioassays for homework. When they come to class, they

brainstorm, “How should we do a bioassay?” For this first lab, they’re given what they will need to conduct a bioassay. In later labs they will need to determine for themselves what they need. At the end of the three guided labs, students have not only learned crucial concepts, but also proceeded through all the steps of a complete lab.

“Over the course of the year,” Marco Barber Grossi ’11 remarks, “there are fewer

Beyond Lab Reports: The Experience of Jointly Writing Scientific Papers Some advanced science electives take teamwork and lab skills to a different level. Matt Bingham of the science department guides a group of eager and experienced Milton scientists in studying Advanced Environmental Science.

Venturing into the Blue Hills near campus with his class, Matt begins the course with interesting studies in mind.

However, by the end of his reconnaissance mission, the passengers in his van fire off their own researchable questions.

Matt models this class around the way working scientists produce research. No scientific paper has a single author. He wants to get students beyond lab reports to the experience of writing scientific papers.

During first semester the group of 12 divides into three groups, which develop three questions and research designs to ferret out answers. “They come up with good ideas and I help them with the tools; I get to collaborate with them, and participate in research modeled after my

own best learning experiences with my research advisor in college.

“Second semester, we all work on a single question about salt runoff,” he explains: “Does the amount of impervious substratum material in Pine Tree Brook watershed affect the amount of salt in Pine Tree Brook?”

Martin Weiss ’10 calls the reading, discussion and research in the course “a very comprehensive overview. This course taught us how to have one long, good conversation about a significant scientific issue.”

You could depend on everyone in the class, all the students agreed, to be highly invested in reaching the best outcome. That “takes the pressure off and motivates everyone to help everyone else,” claims Jessica Serventi-Gleason and Celestine Warren, both Class of 2010. It allows students to dive into the work itself, without stress. After “lots of communication about ideas and asking

ourselves how we would measure this or that,” according to Sophie Bechek ’10, the group came up with the design, and an effective way to delegate all the work. They collaborated with a Wheaton College environmental science professor, which gave them access to far more sophisticated analytical tools than would normally be available to high school researchers.

After they took data, equivalently long conversations probed what the data meant, and how they would present it.

Ultimately, they decided on using the poster technique, a familiar communications tool for presenting research at scientific or medical conferences. “We hadn’t used it in other classes, but it shows well what you did and how you did it,” Sophie says.

Jessie and Celestine spoke for the class when they called this course, and this project, “immensely rewarding and the best outcome ever, in terms of working together as a class.”

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and fewer guidelines. Each lab requires more and more creativity. Here’s what you’re told: ‘This is your objective:…’. Mr. Edgar states the objective verbally. It’s not written.”

Honors bio involves three big labs each semester. The second-semester labs close with the famous “DYO” or “do your own.”

The DYO is an anomaly in that you do everything as an individual, from coming up with the question to explore, through discussing the results.

“There’s so much going on at once in this course,” Lucas Gaffney ’10 says. The big labs happen outside of class, on your own time. In those experiments, the changes you’re looking for take time, sometimes several weeks. Most nights, our reading prepares us for class discussions. During the class discussions we do the ‘mini-labs’ and then write a paragraph about each of them for homework. Mr. Edgar keeps all this in balance and going forward, though.”

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“Mini-labs happen within the class periods,” Michael explains. “We do them in teams, collect the data quickly, and talk about it. Mini-labs explicate the reading and discussion. I often frame them so that the results are a surprise.”

“Each one of these mini-labs reveals another side of a puzzle,” says Sam Karlinski ’11. “Eventually you put the puzzle together and find out why the original thing was happening. So a series of small revelations leads to a final understanding. You’re constantly talking with others about what’s happening. Sometimes Mr. Edgar misleads us with a comment, just to test our observation or argument.”

Michael wants each team’s response to the question at hand to be completely independent. To counter the natural inclination to look around at how your classmates are setting up their little labs, Michael coined a term that has won wide acceptance.

“No sheeping,” he says, sometimes with accompanying sheep noises. The independence of teams’ approaches becomes a point of pride, over time. “Don’t sheep,” someone will say, in good humor.

The bigger, longer labs are the real crucibles for important learning about a shared process and shared product—in science, in group dynamics, in self-awareness.

“You can select your partners,” Michael says, “but you’re not allowed to work with the same team twice. Initially, students work with people they’re comfortable with, but by the end of the year they have all worked with each other, in groups of two or three. They work together, and write the lab report together: it’s one piece of work.”

Learning how the whole can be bigger than the sum of the parts What are the ups and downs of collaborating this way? “In science, working with others is all positive, as far as I’m concerned,” says Marco. “I bring two or three ideas or questions. My teammates bring three or four more. The more creative the topic, the more important the number of ideas, when you’re in the design phase.”

Science Lab Boot Camp After 22 years of introducing them to physics, Tom Sando still aims to subvert ninth graders. They begin class programmed to do exactly what they’re told, believe what they read, agree with what they hear. To the extent he can, he reprograms the 14-year-old brain to push back.

He wants them to stop taking things for granted. He insists that they question, that they reach deep and think critically.

Lab work in Tom’s class figures into his grand scheme. Students must leave Physics with a critical mass of important content, and also foundational lab and teamwork skills. Along the way, if they didn’t know already, they should discover that science is exciting and compelling.

Students work in groups of two or four.

Pairs typically work on a discovery exercise, known in science department vernacular as “mess around with this”; foursomes work on more complicated tasks.

Tom’s caveats about collaboration, in his own words, betray his keen sense of how the minds and hearts of young teenagers work: • There’s no surfeit of executive thinking skills at this age, so two heads, or four heads, are more likely to spell success than one.

• To promote challenging an assumption or a preconception, a lower-stakes game is better. It’s easier to do that with your peers than with an adult.

• A pair of peers can check off against one another (the better to remember things), and test ideas in relative safety.

• You can use all kinds of strategies to compose the groups, but never let them settle into cliques.

• I want the team to take charge and sort themselves into who’s good at what, and who’s doing what; that’s a critical step to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

• Ten minutes into the operation (in the discovery exercises), they can see what’s happening and decide whether they should shuffle the deck.

• I’m likely to check in with them at that point and ask them to explain their approach; that helps them evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy.

• I don’t tell them what to do, or answer questions they need to answer for themselves. They then problem solve with peers.

• Working in a pair or foursome helps them build confidence; the comfort of being in a group when you’re on new terrain is helpful.

• Their deliverables are a “stripped down empirical report for the discovery exercises,” or a full-blown lab report for the multistage processes.

• They work together as a team through the various processes, but then diverge to write individual responses. I need to see what each person has learned.

It’s no wonder that several decades of Milton students remember Tom Sando’s class.

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“This is an upper-level science course and everyone in it cares about it,” Lucas contends. “Everyone wants to do the work.

If you’re not prepared on a given day, you get mad at yourself. I’d come with my own ideas and my partner would have others I didn’t have. The composite is so much stronger. Then you come up with a clever design; that’s the creativity piece. It’s a lot harder to design a lab than you would think. When you have to control variables, isolate elements, and use correct amounts, coming up with an effective design requires lots of pre-testing.”

“Sometimes lab reports include bits and pieces of several people’s writing, which did bother me. But when there’s a really good editing process, the product is everyone’s product,” says Sophie. “You end up adding clarity, including things you may have forgotten, cutting out wordiness.”

Sophie raises another challenge: differences in working style. “I work early and want things done before they’re due. My teammates might work late, and want things done just in time. We have to accommodate each other.”

Lucas adds that Milton students are busy, and coordinating schedules can be hard. “One of you may need to crack the whip a little bit, or you need to negotiate a schedule compromise—‘later than I like; earlier than you like’—for instance.”

Because of these schedule conflicts, Lucas and his teammate were behind in one lab, and decided to catch up by working from

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7 to 9 p.m. for a couple of nights. “The camaraderie was great. We had the feeling that we could get this done if we worked together. It would have been grueling to do it myself.”

“I learned firsthand,” says Caroline Owens ’11, “that learning how to work with any group is an important skill. In groups of more than three, someone needs to step up to be an informal leader. Now I know that, and I’m going to be on the lookout for situations where that doesn’t seem to be happening. I learned that being a good person to work with is valuable, and that it’s important to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses.”

How do you evaluate students’ open-ended inquiry?

The projects Michael proposes to his class are open-ended. “Choose a variable and define its impact on photosynthesis or respiration” is an example. Evaluating students’ responses necessarily focuses on the investigative work itself. What kind of study would find an answer for you?

How good was your experimental design?

What results did you ascertain? What do your results mean? These are benchmark issues on which a grade depends.

Further, as Marco notes, “we have to write about our ‘sources of uncertainty’ in our lab report. That is, we write about what we could have done better in our process, and what resulted from our mistakes.” Coming up with flawed results does not itself

result in a bad grade, Michael explains. If the team gets the fact that their procedure was incorrect, and can discuss that, they do reasonably well. If a team’s design was not great, and they don’t realize it, that’s more of a problem.

Writing the report together is a more complex prospect than meets the eye.

“Writing lab reports with other people is hard,” Sam says. “Lots of scientists don’t have good writing or editing standards, after all,” he says. “You have to think about writing a lab report accessible to those who are completely outside this process.”

In the end, young Milton scientists net solid results from these adventures. They take away concrete skills, like how to ask a good scientific question, set up a good experimental design, use proper procedure, and analyze data. Transforming the problem to a team process and result teaches even more. New to teenagers might be the importance of help (pulling together the widest funnel of ideas); of pre-testing (rather than jumping right to procedure); of listening to the full discussion (pre-judge at your own peril); and of group editing (several writers to review and reflect).

They’re further along as scientists. They appreciate rather than fear an open-ended opportunity. They can work with others to shape a product that is more than the sum of the parts. They’re ready for more.

Cathleen D. Everett

At Milton

Workshop is an active verb at Milton

“W

ho would like to lead today?” asks Jim Connolly as his creative writing students settle around the Harkness table.

Poems—hundreds of them—written by Jim’s students over all of his Milton years proudly crowd the classroom walls. Those poets have earned coveted space.

A girl at the end of the table says, “I’ll lead this poem.” She asks the writer to read his work aloud. Once they have heard it, students around the table ask a few clarifying questions and find their answers together: “What does this word mean?” “Who is the person you mention—is she famous?”

One student may consult the colossal dictionary that lives at the center of the table; one may turn to Jim for verification of a dated fact. Once they’re satisfied with this contextual information, they dive in together.

Peer workshopping is a technique widely used in master’s degree writing programs, not typically in high schools. This intense collaboration is the defining element of the course, according to Lisa Baker, English faculty member and creative writing teacher. “Milton students take to this exercise so quickly—they are able to talk about a piece of work in such a sophisticated way. They’re not shy, but they’re respectful, and they offer mature insights that their peer writers take to heart and then use to better their writing. Each of them understands that they all benefit from that experience.”

Milton’s creative writing students consistently earn top prizes in national competitions for their poetry and short stories. They attribute that success to the reviewing, rethinking, and rewriting that they do, in response to workshopping by their classmates. The students take their role seriously and approach each other’s work as if it’s professional writing. “Mr. Connolly tells us to be ambitious in our Milton Magazine

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writing,” says one of Jim’s students. “He’s never condescending in his instruction; he never says to us, ‘Oh, just write about what you know.’ He pushes us to go outside of ourselves.”

Follow the patterns of their commentary in the following three poems that students workshopped in class last spring. Make your own judgment about the commentary, praise, analysis and critiquing they shared.

Newbie

by Melissa Santos ’10 Walking into Rocky VII— Everlast wraps, Everlast gloves, the real deal.

Jeff “Legs” Leggett gives an intro— shelf life: five years, requirement: two arms.

Now, he swings his left half his right, a mystery— teaching you the one, two, one, two, two, three, five

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five’s a left hook.

Next day, not too bad sore here, sore there, not too bad.

You can wrap this time, have tight wrists.

No punching this time, just abs and arms— thighs up in flames, arms well done.

Next day, sore here, sore there, sore there too— it hurts when you sneeze sore.

It’s pain, but it’s De La Hoya pain.

It’s complain with secret love affair pain.

Next day, more everlasting love.

“What do we think about the length of the poem? And do we like the repetitive syntax?”

“I like the repetition, but it feels like the poem could be split into two parts, maybe after the thirteenth line.”

“I like the rhythm of the poem. It reminded me of a boxing match—one, two, one, two.”

“I like the contradiction of ‘everlast’ versus ‘shelf life.’ And that Everlast is the brand of boxing gear that he’s using works really well.”

“What would we recommend to Melissa to help her? Is there anything we’d change?”

“The top of the poem was more rhythmdriven, and the end feels a little more colloquial—not as consistent with the rest of the poem’s rhythm. Was there a reason for that?”

“I don’t think you need that last line. This is essentially a love poem about the sport of boxing, and it tells the story without that line.”

“The poem feels like it’s from the perspective of the boxer, and when you start introducing the governing characteristics of the boxer, I think you lose that perspective.”

“I think that part’s fine. When you start writing a poem with a certain goal in mind, and the piece starts to take on a different direction as you write, let it take that direction. Perhaps don’t try to force it back into what your initial goal was.”

Every Parent’s Lullaby

by Jaclyn Porfilio ’11

“What do you think about a title? It’s going to mean everything, isn’t it?”

Here’s to the braids strung too tight and the nails scratched too dull and the movie watched too mute.

Here’s to the babies their feet and their fingers that dissolved our hearts.

Here’s to the breath the trees rejected, the wind scrambled, the dirt swallowed.

Here’s to the home that stacked windows.

Here’s to the picture that killed color.

Here’s to the life we knew we’d hate.

“What about using the word ‘Untitled’?

That keeps the poem more open-ended— in case the guy in the poem keeps having this repeated problem with relationships.

‘Untitled’ allows room for the unending cycle without naming it.”

“I agree—you have to be careful not to be too restrictive with the title.”

“I like the emphasis on time—the poem opens with the word ‘now’ and closes with the word ‘then’—but the reader still isn’t sure whether the woman is the same woman he’s been with for years, or whether she’s just another woman in the lineup of relationships.”

“I think the choice of the word ‘film’ is interesting—it almost hints at the idea of a film of the past being played again.”

“What do we think of the tone?”

“This is the antithesis of what one would expect in a lullaby. It’s very cynical.”

A poem

by Charlotte Reed ’11

“The repeated ‘Here’s to’ is like a toast—as if it’s something worth celebrating—but the tone contradicts that, purposefully. I like that.”

Now she, she will leave and you’ll expect her to slam the screen door, but she won’t.

She’ll close it quietly and the night will be darkest and her face will be painted silver by streetlamps, and she will be wondering where she went wrong.

But you, you will be drunk in the basement, your year-old Budweisers leaving a film on your lips and it will be ’73 for the rest of your life but it won’t matter because you’ll feel like just as much of a man as you did then.

“If you could change something structurally to make the poem better, what would it be?”

“I would take out all the ‘and’ and ‘the’ at the beginning—let the other words stand on their own.”

“I don’t understand the ‘home that stacked windows’—perhaps use an obvious rather than an abstract image there? I feel like I’m missing something.”

“What about changing the word ‘that’ to ‘of’—the ‘home of stacked windows’? That makes the image more clear.”

“The tense change at the very end is interesting—does it stand for regret?

Expecting something and having it fall short?”

“I like that the ‘Here’s to’ lines become closer together as the poem progresses.

Are the kids getting older? Is the situation getting worse? The increased repetition feels as if we’re leading up to something.”

“I also like the choice of Budweiser beer— ‘Bud’ for short could also refer to ‘buddy,’ as in the beer is the friend that he keeps turning back to.”

“What about the word ‘painted’ in the third stanza? Is that too obvious? Too easy?”

“I don’t think so, because it can be her face painted with makeup or with light—a direct contrast to the ‘night will be darkest.’ Maybe she’s lit up—painted—by realization that the relationship is beyond repair.”

Erin E. Hoodlet

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At Milton

Challenged to be flexible and resourceful, Milton’s Exchange students grow in humility and self-confidence

student very different from him or herself.

While in Spain, students are constantly in situations that challenge them to be flexible, resourceful, and to figure things out.

They grow significantly in a short time, both in humility and in self-confidence.

“The beauty of learning a language is that once you start to open your mind to different ways of saying things, you open your mind to different ways of thinking about things.

Language is not just some sort of code; it’s about living another culture, acceptance and tolerance.”

“We all have different cultural filters,” Tracy says. “This experience opens the students’ eyes to the fact that everything in the U.S.—that we consider so normal— could be seen by someone else as bizarre.

And vice versa. That Spaniards keep milk in a box in the cupboard, or that American teenagers wear sweatpants in public, are patterns that are both normal and strange, depending upon your roots.

— Tracy Crews, Modern Languages Department

M

odern language learning at Milton is cultural immersion, approximated as realistically as possible from the second floor of Ware Hall. Several groups of Upper School students spend weeks abroad, living the cultures they are studying—in France, China and Spain. As is typical for these programs, Milton pairs students on the Spanish Exchange with Madrid students and their families for intense cultural exploration as well as daily classes. The number of students applying for these programs has increased every year. Showing a passionate interest in the language is not enough for a student to be chosen; faculty carefully evaluate a student’s flexibility, openness, and willingness to embrace another culture.

Launched in 1979, the Spanish Exchange pairs about 14 rising Class I and Class II students with counterparts from Colegio el Pilar, a private school in Madrid. Tracy Crews has been a driving force behind Milton’s Spanish Exchange program since she came to Milton in 2005. “Our

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students come back from the Exchange trip as different people, having established lifelong friendships, having had experiences that open their eyes and challenge them. Their language skills get a boost, but the experience is transformative in a larger way. I tell them that the objective is not for them to pass through Spain, but for Spain to pass through them.”

From what students say, the richest lessons take place in the homes, with the families. The program’s itinerary includes many “must see” venues—Toledo, Segovia, El Escorial, the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Royal Palace—and building language skills is a central goal. The major factor in students’ personal growth, however, comes from being matched with a

“As the students adapt to a new place and new way of life, they go through four stages: the euphoric state, where everything is new and wonderful; the rejection phase, where they miss the things they’re used to; then they get to acceptance, where things are different, but okay. Finally, they become so assimilated that everything feels their own.

“When students travel, they realize that what we’ve been doing in the classroom is not just a game we’re playing. They discover that the language and the culture are living things. That quality, that outlook—the ability to see things with different eyes, appreciate different cultures, be inspired by other ways of doing things, are attitudes the world needs. We send our students out into the world to share the reality that there’s more than one way to think about things.”

Erin E. Hoodlet

“My favorite moments with my Spanish family all occurred around the dinner table. We ate dinner every night at around 9:30, and the meals lasted at least an hour. They were relaxed, and wandering, and everyone could talk about his or her day and tell jokes. One of my favorite moments of the trip was one night when I ended up at the table after dinner with my Spanish parents after all the kids had left to study, and we just stayed there talking, about President Obama, religious conflicts in Spain, India, the language barrier. Constantly speaking in Spanish was pretty tough, but one night I told a joke entirely in Spanish, and when everyone genuinely laughed, I was amazed! It was my moment of Spanish triumph.”

—Rachel Black ’11

Milton students and their El Pilar counterparts: “The major factor in students’ personal growth comes from being matched with a student very different from him or herself.” —Tracy Crews Milton Magazine

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At Milton

A Lesson in Collaboration from American Pioneers Third graders bring alive a 200-year-old adventure

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very year, during the favorite Lewis and Clark unit, third graders become explorers, journalists, mapmakers, peacemakers. Teachers Jane McGuinness and Susan Wheelwright developed this interdisciplinary unit from a 2003 summer reading book that tells the story of Lewis and Clark’s journey from the viewpoint of the group’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman. “Lewis and Clark’s expedition might be the greatest tale of collaboration in American history,” says Jane. “The story is positive from the get-go, and hearing it from Seaman’s point of view is an effective entry point for children.”

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As the students learn, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark each brought different strengths to the expedition—Lewis, adept with natural sciences and at home in the wilderness; Clark, a gregarious leader and skilled cartographer. “In class we discuss how these leaders assembled a corps of 30 men who contributed very different skills—boatmen, rivermen, hunters, even a violinist,” Susan says. Ultimately, Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman, joined the expedition as interpreter and guide. “The tale illustrates success stemming from collaboration and teamwork,” says Jane. “We then have the students explore their own strengths and share what they could contribute to the corps.”

In units throughout the year, Grade 3 students revisit and reflect on the questions, What makes a good partner or teammate?

How can we combine these skills to solve this problem?

In class, students read the letter that Lewis wrote to Clark asking him to join the voyage; they then write their own responses, as if they were being asked to join the corps. Students also keep journals throughout the year. “We emphasize the importance of Lewis and Clark’s journals in our learning about their expedition,” Susan says. “We discuss how keeping journals is an important way for people in the future to understand past experiences.”

Jane McGuinness, Susan Wheelwright and “Seaman” on the Lewis and Clark trail

The students undertake a group challenge that mimics the portage the corps members endured, relying on one another and using problem-solving skills. Mapmaking, geography, measuring distances and estimation are lessons in this unit, as are natural sciences—the students study plant and animal life native to the northwestern United States. “Using Seaman as a jumping point, we also learn about different canine traits, examining why a Newfoundland would be better suited for this journey than dogs of other breeds,” says Jane. Finally, the third graders study

Native American life: the people, crafts, culture and food of the many different tribes—all important elements of the expedition.

On the bicentennial of the expedition, the Grade 3 class took a trip to the Harvard Museum of Natural History for the Lewis and Clark exhibit. This past winter, students spent a day trekking through the Blue Hills, experiencing a taste of what the corps faced in cold winter conditions.

that Lewis and Clark’s team traveled, from Great Falls, Montana, across the Continental Divide and into Salmon, Idaho. “We’re now able to talk in firsthand detail about the very sites that Lewis and Clark passed through,” says Jane.

“We’ve seen the rivers they crossed, the trails they forged, the hills they climbed.

That helps us bring the lessons to life for our students.”

Erin E. Hoodlet

Jane and Susan, supported by a generous grant from the K–8 Parents’ Association, spent a week this summer on the Stephen Ambrose Historical “Corps of Discovery” Tour, which follows a portion of the trail

Milton Magazine

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Classroom On Monogamy, Mystery, and Teaching the Short-Short Story

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he best argument I know for sticking out a marriage I heard nearly 15 years ago on the way home from my wedding-dress fitting. I drove an old, dented Honda that I had purchased from my parents with a summer’s waitressing money. The radio program was PRI’s This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass with his halting, nasal, overly familiar voice that I would have followed into any dark alley. The theme of the program was monogamy.

In one short personal segment, a man recalled a night when he and his wife lay together in bed. He had been contemplating infidelity, and he admitted this to her.

“Don’t you think,” he ventured, “that infidelity is a human experience we shouldn’t miss?”

His wife was quiet beside him for a long time. He heard her breathe. He heard the cars pass on the street below, the noises of people going home for the night. Finally, she responded. “But if you experience infidelity,” she said, “you will never know monogamy.”

It was his turn to be quiet. He thought about what she had said, beyond the end of their conversation into the next days and weeks. Ultimately, he came to this: that while infidelity has a clearly demarcated beginning and end that render its experience knowable, monogamy—by nature of its open-endedness—remains perpetually

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a mystery. Two people in love who enter a monogamous relationship commit themselves to the process of their relationship rather than its destination. They commit themselves to work toward something forever unknowable, something known only when it no longer exists.

At the time, on the eve of my own marriage, the image of the betrothed marching toward a mystery seemed quite revelatory. Also at the time, I was finishing a graduate degree in fiction writing and completing a collection of short-short stories—stories each typically 1,500 words or less. I was struck at how much this simple radio piece, in form and content, achieved what I had come to believe a short-short could. The short-short frequently examines such small moments. It avoids the clutter of exposition. It distills larger life dramas into a few paragraphs, into compact instants. And then from this small space, the short-short attempts to convey much larger, lasting impressions about our human experience—impressions more complex and, well, mysterious.

Our fast-paced culture, for better or for worse, sets the perfect stage for the shortshort. We live suddenly, often breathlessly.

We seek extreme effects and immediate gratification. Our lives are a series of electronic messages and shortcuts and headlines that often leave us feeling processed and packaged. In one frame we wear a business suit and carry a briefcase; in another, we rock a baby; in yet another,

we play lover and confidante. The best we can manage is to pay attention to our performance in each moment, hope that the performance matters, that it yields even a brief sense of constancy.

In spatial terms, the short-short story fits our culture—steals energy from it and simultaneously exposes it. But the short-short also dramatizes the way we find ourselves living in between lives. As a form, the genre exists in between the poem and the prose story; it crosses and conflates genre boundaries. (This, too, is a current cultural truth: constantly, our cultural forms are coalescing—the public and the private, the lewd and the palatable.) In content, short-shorts so often examine the places in between movement and paralysis, between the remembered and the actual, between the real world and the necessarily imagined one, between the specific and the scripted lives we juggle.

So many writers use the short-short to test the very limits of form—to experiment with how we can articulate, in new length, our common stories of loss, of inheritance, of achievement, of our heart’s reasons.

Many years later, here at Milton Academy, I introduce my own creative writing students to the short-short in between a three-month study of poetry writing and a unit on short story writing. After poetry, the short-short looks vaguely familiar: It pays close attention to syntax and sound and rhythm as they know poetry must.

Lisa Baker, English Department

Yet, too, it is seductively unfamiliar. The short-short is simultaneously dependent on plot and resistant to it; the short-short wants little to do with explanation, yet it relies on narrative to brace its own meaning.

Imagine a woman shoplifting in a grocery store. A short story would shift to her backstory, would take us to her apartment where she struggles to pay the bills. Her baby cries in the next room. Her husband has been unemployed for six months, laid off in a bad economy, and though they were childhood sweethearts, their relationship is strained in a way they couldn’t have predicted. In the store, the woman has clear need, and she acts in the service of that need, though it leaves her feeling defeated, dirtied. In contrast, a short-short story focuses instead on the moment of shoplifting. It creates instant motivation.

The woman is drawn to the sheen of the plastic wraps, to the cylindrical shape of the cans, to the brilliance of the lettering on the diaper packaging. She delights in the feel of products in her pockets, under her clothes, against her body, something akin to intimate touch. In these aisles, the woman discovers beauty where we might typically see shoddy packaging and consumerist gluttony. But she is not crazy, not easy to dismiss. In fact, the closer we look, the more we recognize her—we who also live lives hoping to find beauty and companionship in unpredictable places.

Almost invariably, I find my students take to the short-short as if the genre speaks to the very way they live their lives. They’ve been weaned on fast-moving images that pack a physical experience. They like relationships, but they don’t work to maintain them. They’ll cheer on an extreme fight, but they don’t want to get bloody. From a teaching perspective, the genre is a perfect training ground for longer narrative writing: Here, they can cut their teeth on careful, intentional story writing without committing to multiple characters engaged in sustained conflicts. Like a good sucker punch, the short-short story teaches them what a story can do before they have a chance to defend themselves against it.

Students quickly learn that the art of successful short-short writing is about balance, and to balance a short-short well is not easy. A short-short with too much narrative feels underdeveloped and, with too little, feels moralistic. A short-short carelessly compressed loses its sense of tight unity. Yet one which ties too neatly doesn’t move anywhere beyond itself; it feels over when it actually is.

When they do balance them well, students’ short-shorts are luminescent. This year, one student wrote a story that takes place in an orchard. A migrant worker picks apples, aside other workers. We learn that on his day off, when he walks to the post office to mail a letter, he is selfconscious, aware that this place is not his

home. This day, at the end of his shift, he realizes he has forgotten a ladder at the other end of the field. He walks to retrieve it and when he arrives, spies a young girl crouched up in the tree. She whimpers when she sees him and retreats farther into the branches. He stabilizes the ladder and backs away, then “softly, he beg[ins] to hum, not the songs of sorrow he usually sang while picking but a joyful song the women sang at home after dinner.” She climbs down, now the hint of a smile on her face. She moves away, but he calls after her, plucks an apple and holds it out to her. Cautiously, she comes back to accept it, “darting her eyes to meet his gaze for a moment,” then runs down the row into the dusk. The story ends here: “Singing, he turn[s] to walk back to the barracks to sleep next to the men he didn’t know.”

A short-short balanced perfectly lifts off the page. In its reader, it can inspire sudden euphoria and simultaneously trigger a queasy, unsettled feeling. Way back then, on the eve of standing in that small moment and space of a wedding ceremony overlooking what seemed an enormous vista, I remember a similar collision of emotions. Like monogamy, the shortshort’s physical end must be an opening.

Mysteries located in such small stories keep us reading, as the mysteries of intimacy move us to know another person as well as we know ourselves.

Lisa Baker English Department Milton Magazine

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Faculty Perspective Resisting the impulse to predict

Approaching year-end grades, Upper School Principal David Ball ’88 gives parents “interpretive possibilities.” Mr. Ball writes at the close of the 2009–2010 school year; he was then academic dean.

Dear Parents, A week ago, the Class of 2010 led us in an exuberant celebration of their years at Milton. Hours later, as students made their way home, the campus fell strangely quiet.

Now, at that rare moment when the academic year is not hurtling along at a breakneck pace, we are sending along year-end grades, the only grades that appear on a Milton Academy transcript, and final thoughts from your child’s teachers. As always, I urge calm and patience as you contemplate this information. This year’s graduation speaker, Peter Scoblic ’92, reminded us to retain such perspective.

Peter served as an editor at The New Republic for several years, and during that time, he became quite familiar with the form of argument-driven articles. As he noted, most of those articles begin with a scene. If well-conceived, that scene opens up a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities.

Perhaps the scene illustrates essential themes. Perhaps its lively language whets our appetite for juicier details.

Perhaps, unbeknownst to us, the scene sets up a stunning twist in the article’s final sentence. The reader, though engrossed, cannot predict the article’s end. Like readers of those articles, we envision a scene and predict an outcome as we study these comments. Yet we must be wary interpreters. Students, surprisingly cunning writers at times, can craft scenes that dupe us. We may see nothing but trouble, and they may be on the path to great success; we may see the signs of a brilliant medical career, and they may be pondering, in these early summer days, the call of poetry. Students can’t, and we can’t, forecast a particular path with perfect accuracy. Yet we can predict that students who embrace challenge, rebound from defeat, read passionately, explore fervently, and work tirelessly will find their way, somehow, somewhere. Teachers and parents can panic in the face of any uncertainty, trying desperately to assert rigid control over organic, chaotic growth. We should resist such impulses. Try as we might, we cannot control the time or terms of a student’s intellectual flowering. Instead, we should provide steady, patient, and insistent support, encouraging the habits of heart and mind that will sustain students no matter the path, even the now unimaginable path, that they may choose.

David Ball ’88

David Ball, Milton Academy Class of 1988, began his new role as Upper School principal on July 1, 2010. David had served as Milton’s academic dean since 2005. He began his teaching career in 1992 at Montgomery Academy in Montgomery, Alabama, as a member of the history department. In 1996, David became the head of the

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department and held that position for three years. David returned to Milton in 1999, joining the history department, serving as the debate team coach, and participating in various committees during his tenure as both teacher and administrator.

David holds an A.B. in history from Princeton University and an A.M. in history from Duke University.

Head of School On Immersive Learning Experiences The Blands in Spain

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wise, veteran head of school told me that headmasters should leave their schools for at least a week as soon as the academic year concludes. His theory? A separation guarantees a respite and triggers a summer rhythm. Without it, each year’s work simply blends into the next. I’ve heeded this advice for the last several years and been glad for it. After our first year at Milton—a year that could not have been better or busier from the Blands’ perspective—we all needed time away from 127 Centre Street.

So on June 20, about ten hours after my last commitment at Graduates Weekend (a spectacular occasion, by the way), Nancy, Nick, Maggie, Emily and I boarded a plane for Madrid and a ten-day adventure in Spain. Nancy and I have dreamed about this trip since our children were born. Our trip to España folded in other goals, as well. Among them were connecting with Milton’s 22 students studying in Spain (coordinated quite ably by Tracy Crews of the modern language department); and meeting the director and teachers of El Pilar, our host school. We wanted to show our children where Nancy and I lived and studied in 1988; and to reconnect, in the city of Cádiz, with some of our dearest friends.

To say that our friends at El Pilar rolled out the red carpet would be an understatement. Over two days we connected with Milton students; toured El Pilar; spoke with Pilar students of all ages; banqueted at the school; and shared an amazing evening of Flamenco dance at one of Spain’s premier Flamenco theaters, El Corral de la Morería. Milton is fortunate to partner with our fine sister school in Spain. Even our hotel concierge called El Pilar “the best in the country.” Our visit, though, was defined by the children’s experiences at El Pilar—Milton students, their hosts,

chatting with her online, in Spanish and in English, certainly helps them stay in touch.

Todd, Nick Bland ’13 and young friend Augustín Romero dressed for World Cup fandom

and our own children. I was moved, hearing the enthusiasm, excitement, and joy in their tales of life in Spain. As head of our school, I was so proud of Milton, and of all our efforts to immerse students in a transformative learning experience.

In the course of our short visit, we witnessed frequent yet extraordinary learning moments. Skills learned through lived experience last a lifetime, and learning in this organic way is addictive.

We went on to the beautiful Costa Brava to stay with Belén and Augustín Romero and their four children. Nancy and I can thank Belén, more than any other person, for our love of Spanish culture and language.

In 1981, Belén (then 15) stayed with Nancy (who was 13) and her family in Worcester, Massachusetts. The seeds were planted for Nancy’s passion for all things Spanish— and no doubt for her teaching career in Spanish as well. Our connection, after 22 years, was as though we had never been apart. Even more unexpected, our children seemed as if they had always known each other. Their instant bond made the later visit of the Romeros’ daughter, Ana, with us in Milton, truly amazing. A tradition of rich and memorable exchange has begun in a whole new generation. Our children miss Ana very much these days;

When I returned, I was reminded of the day that I stepped off the plane in 1988, having spent five months studying in another country. You realize clearly that nothing will be the same again. I had expected that learning another language and culture would change my reality; I had not anticipated how differently I would see my own culture. The value of bringing the broadest possible perspective, and energetic critical thinking, to the issues that surround us, as Americans and citizens of the world, was permanently fixed in my experience. As an educator, I believe that immersive experiences outside of your own culture are critical to growth and development. Milton’s exchange programs in France and Spain, our travel programs in South Africa, China, Italy, as well as life on our own campus, vibrant with the personalities of students from more than 20 countries, cultivate fertile ground for our students, already actors at their young ages, on the world stage.

Todd Bland Head of School

Enrique Torres (Head of the Marianista Community of El Pilar), Todd Bland and Fernando Lopez Aranguren (Head of the Upper School at El Pilar) Milton Magazine

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Post Script Is it better to be lucky, or to be good?

John Collins ’94 “was truly great at being good.”

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performing onstage, on the tech crew backstage, or visiting the girls’ dorms to install and program their VCRs (always with hard hats, overalls, and safety goggles), we became inseparable.

ohn Collins’s life ended as he sat at his desk on a Wednesday in December.

His death was pure bad luck. Just months after a comprehensive cardiac exam, and after spending an hour on the treadmill that same morning, his heart failed without warning. The official expla­nation was a silent viral infection weakening and stretching the muscle—a condition known as dilated cardiomyopathy. I prefer the simple summary offered at his funeral by John’s father, Richard Collins: John died of a big heart.

Is it better to be lucky or good? I’ve sorted through 20 years of memories of our friendship, through two decades of emails and Christmas cards. I can’t find proof that we ever had that conversation. So I can’t say for sure what John would have answered. But I can tell you this: John Collins was truly great at being good.

In the months since John’s death, many of his Milton friends have shared their memories of him. Some remember his distinctive fashion sense: He was the only member of our class to greet each day ready for a corporate golf outing. Others remember his affection for the Wall Street Journal and his articulate (and sometimes contrarian) defense of conservative politics. And certainly, that was John. But as I discovered at Milton, and came to appreciate even more in the years since we graduated, John’s most memorable quality was his principled dedication to being true to himself, and to his friends.

John and I met in Class II, and came to know one another backstage at the theater and in the AV Club. Early on, we were more friendly rivals than true friends.

John was always a little more dedicated, a little more disciplined, and a little bit

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John Collins ’94 and his wife, Laura

better than I was in everything we tried together. But when he won the AV Club presidential election late in our junior year, I offered to be his go-to guy for publicizing the weekend movies. I would need some help, though. There weren’t any volunteers. So, of course, being John, he offered to pitch in.

For a year, John and I met every Thursday afternoon in the Ruth King Theatre to plan our weekly promotional skit. He proved to be a genius as a straight man.

Whether in drag to promote The Crying Game, or soloing “I’m a Little Teapot” dressed as a kettle for Beauty and the Beast, John approached sketch comedy with the same focus, attention, and innate skill that he showed in every other aspect of life.

We lived our dreams on a public stage that year, together. Individually, we were angst-ridden high school boys with strong geek tendencies. Together, we were fighter pilots, presidents, Secret Service agents, even boys capable of talking to girls. It seemed as though there was nothing we couldn’t accomplish as a team. Whether

It was no shock that John met his wife, Laura Hardman, almost immediately after arriving at Princeton—he was as prepared for love at first sight as for anything else in life. They were married shortly after graduation. While most of us were still trying to feed ourselves in studio apartments, he and Laura had an immaculate house, a picket fence, a dog, and soon enough, two beautiful children. He was a successful attorney, a loving father, and a terrible singer. He was a philosopher and an EMT. He was talented at skeet shooting and looked good in heels. He was a son, a brother, and a brother-in-arms. He was a perfect friend. He dared to be true, and he helped me do the same.

Is it better to be lucky, or to be good? For a long time, John Richard Collins was both.

Last December, his luck ran out. But the effects of his goodness remain with all of us lucky enough to have known him, and to have been changed by his wit and wisdom. That’s answer enough for me.

Jonathan Emerson Kohler ’94 Founder of RxCreative.com Post Script is a department that opens windows into the lives and experiences of your fellow Milton alumni. Graduates may author the pieces, or they may react to our interview questions. Opinions, memories, explorations, reactions to political or educational issues are all fair game. We believe you will find your Milton peers informative, provocative and entertaining. Please email us with your reactions and your ideas at cathy_everett@ milton.edu.

Commencement 2010 “ Be brave. Be bold. Go to class. Dare to be true.”

—J. Peter Scoblic ’92

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n June 11, Peter Scoblic ’92 addressed the Class of 2010 as their commencement speaker.

Peter is a senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he is currently working on ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. Prior to joining the committee, he was the executive editor of The New Republic, where he served in various capacities for seven years. He has written and spoken widely on national security issues, and in 2008 Viking published his book, U.S. Vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror, which the New York Times called “an incisive intellectual history.” Before joining The New Republic, he was the editor of Arms Control Today, a journal covering efforts to prevent the spread and use of weapons of mass destruction. He graduated from Brown University, where he was editor-in-chief of the Brown Journal of World Affairs.

Peter’s address to the graduating class, excerpted below, offers his own meaningful advice: I’d like to be able to stand here and tell you that you should embrace your failures because you learn more from them than from successes. But, let’s be honest, failure is lousy.

When I submitted my first book proposal, my agent told me that it was the perfect book at the perfect moment and we were looking at a six-figure deal. So I quit my job, wrote the proposal, and started looking at houses I could buy. That proposal was rejected 20 times inside of two weeks. I don’t know if you’ve been rejected 20 times for anything, but it’s brutal. What did I learn from this? I learned that my agent was a huckster whom I needed to fire right away.

So here in quick conclusion are a few pieces of concrete advice that I wish someone had given me: First, ask for help, particularly in lifting heavy objects. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I’m totally serious. The cliché is true— you do have your whole lives ahead of you.

Don’t spend most of it in physical therapy.

Second, next year, start looking for something—a class, a club, whatever—that makes you want to get up in the morning.

Even better, look for something that makes you want to stay in the night before so that you actually can get up in the morning.

J. Peter Scoblic ’92

I’m not going to tell you that every bad thing happens for a reason, because people who say that drive me nuts. But I will say that failures for me have often contained the seeds of future success. In the fall of 2002, I was rejected for a job at The New Republic, but the next spring—just as I was unemployed and firing my book agent—they called back and offered me a better job. And with a few years at TNR under my belt, I ultimately found a publisher for a different book that was far better than the one I would have written earlier. That success is out there permanently. The failure is only out there because I just mentioned it—and because Milton has insisted on posting this speech on the Internet.

But you have a few years before you need to worry about professional success and failure; and I thought seriously about the pieces of advice that my 18-year-old self most needed.

A corollary to that: Go to class. You are about to have less supervision than you have ever had in your life. That freedom is both a blessing and a curse, and college is one of the greatest opportunities ever. If you’re not ready for it, that’s fine. Take a year off. You’ll never regret missing a few hours of sleep, but if you skip classes, trust me, you will regret it.

Finally, while I’m on regret, one last piece of advice: Go with your gut. There have been times in my life where my heart has said, do this, and my head has said another thing, and I’ve usually gone with my head, which is a mistake. Sometimes it makes sense to do things that don’t make sense, just because you have to. If you don’t, that’s where regret comes in, and regret is one of the great plagues of adult life. Fortunately, there’s a vaccine, which is called courage. So don’t overthink things. Don’t edit yourself.

Certainly don’t listen to other people—except me. I am very wise.

So to conclude: Be brave. Be bold. Go to class. Lift with your legs. And, if I may, dare to be true.

Milton Magazine

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Milton Academy 2010 Awards and Prizes Cum Laude Class I Michael Andrew Abrams *Timothy James Barry-Heffernan Sophia Catherine Bechek Yilin Chen Joshua Barry Cohen Erielle Rebecca Davidson Elizabeth Poor Dingle Eric John Paul Fishman Lukas Kames Gaffney Lilleth Rose Glimcher Stephanie Lynn Sanford Harris Grant Milton Jones Eunkyul Kim Anna Barbara Lau Andrew Mose Lebovitz Kristina S. Lee Ross Lewis Lerner Jessica Elizabeth McHugh Aneesha Mehta Katherine Meadows Murray Luke Jen O’Connor Amanda Jingtong O’Malley Cameron Scott Parsons Alexandra Berlow Perold Zachary Michael Perzan Brennan Nicholas Robbins Nicholas Anthony Santangelo Ethan Nicholas Kelley Schneider Laura Perez Soriano Celestine Eliza Warren Hannah Starr Whitehead Dylan Rhys Williams Lynn Zhong Class II Samantha Hanae Noh Daniel Aaron Schwartz *elected to Cum Laude in 2009

The Head of School Award The Head of School Award is presented each year to honor and celebrate certain members of Class I for their demonstrated spirit of self-sacrifice, community concern, leadership, integrity, fairness, kindliness, and respect for others.

Kevin Bernard Collins Kevin Zachary Huang Beverly Deborah Leon Ross Lewis Lerner Erin Kathleen McDaniel Corina Ferrera Ramirez 36

Milton Magazine

Elected by their classmates to be the Class of 2010 valedictorian speakers, Erin McDaniel and Brennan Robbins

The James S. Willis Memorial Award To the Headmonitors Nicholas Bricout Jacob Assel Maxotovna Tuleubayeva

William Bacon Lovering Award

The Leo Maza Award Awarded to a student or students in Classes I窶的V who, in working within one of the culture or identity groups at the School, has made an outstanding contribution to the community by promoting the appreciation of that group throughout the rest of the School.

To a boy and a girl, chosen by their classmates, who have helped most by their sense of duty to perpetuate the memory of a gallant gentleman and officer.

Olamide Valerie Olatunji Gabriella Maria Sharpe

Kevin Bernard Collins Assel Maxotovna Tuleubayeva

Awarded to the student or students who, in their years at Milton, have shown a dedication to the pursuit of outdoor skills, demonstrated strong leadership, and reached high levels of personal achievement in one or more outdoor activities.

The Louis Andrews Memorial Scholarship Award To a student in Class II who has best fulfilled his or her potential in the areas of intelligence, selfdiscipline, physical ability, concern for others and integrity.

Jovonna Mara Jones

The Frank D. Millet Scholarship Award To a student who demonstrates moral integrity, supports classmates, and has established meaningful relationships with peers and faculty. The Millet scholar, by virtue of character and deeds, is an integral member of his or her class and shows great promise as a leader.

The H. Adams Carter Prize

Sophia Catherine Bechek Zachary Michael Perzan

The A. Howard Abell Prize Established by Dr. and Mrs. Eric Oldberg for students deemed exceptionally proficient or talented in instrumental or vocal music or in composition.

Ethan Nicholas Kelley Schneider Dylan Rhys Williams

Yuleissy Ramirez

Milton Magazine

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Harrison Otis Apthorp Music Prize

The Markham and Pierpont Stackpole Prize

Awarded in recognition of helpful activity in furthering in the School an interest and joy in music.

Awarded in honor of two English teachers, father and son, to authors of unusual talent in creative writing.

Laurence Alexander Conway Jr. Kevin Zachary Huang Corina Ferrera Ramirez

The George Sloan Oldberg Memorial Prize Awarded in memory of George Oldberg ’54 to members of the School who have been a unique influence in the field of music.

Michael Andrew Abrams Eric John Paul Fishman

Charlotte Stryker Reed

The Dorothy J. Sullivan Award To senior girls who have demonstrated good sportsmanship, leadership, dedication and commitment to athletics at Milton.

Through their spirit, selflessness and concern for the team, they served as an incentive and a model for others.

The Science Prize

Grace Anne McDonough

Awarded to students who have demonstrated genuine enthusiasm, as well as outstanding scientific ability, in physics, chemistry and biology.

The Donald Cameron Duncan Prize for Mathematics

Kevin Zachary Huang Luke Jen O’Connor Quinn Squires Solfisburg Celestine Eliza Warren Hannah Starr Whitehead

The Wales Prize Awarded in honor of Donald Wales, who taught Class IV science for more than 36 years. It recognizes students in Class IV who have consistently demonstrated interest and excitement in science.

Julia Anne Cowen Colin John Kohli Jiao Lan Philip Kristoffer Powers Elizaveta Reznichenko Ellen Sukharevsky

The Robert Saltonstall Medal For pre-eminence in physical efficiency and observance of the code of the true sportsman.

Michael Stephen Megnia

The A.O. Smith Prize Awarded by the English department to students who display unusual talent in expository writing.

Monica Kiran Das John Robert Gonneville Madeline Marie Thayer 38

Milton Magazine

Awarded to students in Class I who have achieved excellence in the study of mathematics while demonstrating the kind of love of the subject and joy in promoting its understanding that will be the lasting legacy of Donald Duncan’s extraordinary contributions to the teaching of mathematics at Milton.

Timothy James Barry-Heffernan Joshua Barry Cohen Luke Jen O’Connor

The Performing Arts Award Presented by the performing arts department for outstanding contributions in production work, acting, speech, audiovisuals, and dance throughout his or her Milton career.

Heyna Cho Alexis Mollye Copithorne Manuel Armando Delgado Lilleth Rose Glimcher Nicholas Bricout Jacob William Andrew Oliver Catherine Evelyn O’Sullivan Brennan Nicholas Robbins Leonardo Tanenbaum-Diaz Katerina Chrisoula Vradelis

The Kiki Rice-Gray Prize Awarded for outstanding contributions to Milton performing arts throughout his or her career in both performance and production.

Vanya Desma Stokes Katerina Chrisoula Vradelis

The Priscilla Bailey Award To a senior girl who has been a most valuable asset to Milton Academy athletics and to the Milton Academy community— an athlete who has demonstrated exceptional individual skills and teamwork, as well as true sportsmanship.

The Gorham Palfrey Faucon Prize Established in 1911 and awarded to members of Class I for demonstrated interest and outstanding achievement in history and social science.

Sabrina Rose Katz Ross Lewis Lerner Brennan Nicholas Robbins Katerina Chrisoula Vradelis Jasper Zee Williams

The Benjamin Fosdick Harding Latin Prizes Awarded on the basis of a separate test at each prize level.

Beverly Deborah Leon

Level 5: Elias Ibrahim Dagher

The Henry Warder Carey Prize

Level 4: Catharine Passavant Parker

To members of Class I who, in public speaking and oral interpretation, have shown consistent effort, thoroughness of preparation, and concern for others.

Level 3: Javon Micah Ryan

Cameron Scott Parsons Amelia McIntosh Whalen Dylan Rhys Williams

Awarded to those students who, in the opinion of the department, most exhibit the qualities of academic excellence, enthusiastic participation, and support of fellow students, both in and out of class.

The Robert L. Daley Prize Created by his students of 1984 in his memory and honor, this prize in Classics is awarded to the student from Latin 4 or beyond who best exemplifies Mr. Daley’s love of languages.

William Andrew Oliver

The Richard Lawrence Derby Memorial Award To an outstanding student of Class II in mathematics, astronomy, or physics.

Brian Kong Samantha Hanae Noh Satto Tonegawa Farzan Vafa

The Alfred Elliott Memorial Trophy

The Modern Languages Prizes

Kristina S. Lee Katherine Meadows Murray Emily Reed Perkins Zachary Michael Perzan Rebecca Jiang Fen Pearce-Probst

The Milton Academy Art Prizes Awarded for imagination and technical excellence in his or her art and for independent and creative spirit of endeavor.

Alexis Mollye Copithorne Ciara Patricia Crocker Mary Elizabeth King Lopez Aneesha Mehta Lennie Alicia Newman Amanda Jingtong O’Malley

For self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of his teams, regardless of skill.

Nash Kofi Simpson

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Graduates’ Weekend 2010 40

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1. Mark Hilgendorf, history faculty, Dorado Kinney ’90 and Ralphy Bead ’90

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2. Nick Littlefield ’60 3. “Look at us, way back when.”

4. College Counselor Rachel KleinAsh with her husband, James, their daughter, Elly, and newest addition, Bennett 5. “Fore!”

6. Hart Fessenden ’45

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1. Natalia Solano ’00 2. Chas Lyman ’60

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3. Stephen Gifford ’70, Nina Hunnewell, Ogden Hunnewell ’70, Nat Weeks ’70, Silence Weeks 4. Clint Loftman ’75 5. Class of 2000 Day vs. Boarder softball game

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1. Martha Fuller Clark ’60 2. The view from Centre Street

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3. Ellis Waller ’55 4. Airborne 5. Swinging for the fences 6. Christopher “Critter” Gilpin, Bo Hurd, Margot Pollans, Kate Orchard, Peter Smith, Maggie Turner, and Kirsten Hilgendorf— all Class of 2000

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1. Cortney Tunis ’00 2. Inside the new Pritzker Science Center

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3. Head of School Todd Bland with members of the 5th and 10th Reunion classes 4. A good spot for ice cream and a chat 5. Dare to Be True luncheon in Wigglesworth Hall

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1. Fritz Kempner, representative from the Class of 1940

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2. The Quad at dusk 3. Back in the classroom 4. Martin Hale ’90, Andy Welch ’90, Dan Stilwell, Tara Stilwell ’90 5. Jean McCawley and friends 6. Brad Perry and Gid Loring— both Class of 1945

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They valued Milton’s influence.

They’re extending that influence to others.

Married for over 60 years now, they continue to appreciate and celebrate their long and storied relationship with Milton Academy.

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nne Brewer Stone ’42 and Galen Luther Stone ’39 credit Milton for introducing them—best friends and partners for life. Anne first set eyes on Galen when she was a 14-year-old violinist in the Orchestra.

Galen, a five-year boarder in Wolcott House, was in the Glee Club and Choir.

Married for over 60 years now, they continue to appreciate and celebrate their long and storied relationship with Milton Academy.

Anne and Galen believe the education they received at Milton was the best of any institution they attended, and that Milton was most influential in their lives in the Foreign Service. “The preparation

and training in French, German, writing and mathematics at Milton was superb,” says Galen, who went on to attend Harvard.

The Stones have also experienced Milton as parents, and as grandparents. For their family’s experiences and their own, Galen and Anne have committed to financially supporting Milton’s mission, giving yearly to the Annual Fund and investing in the School’s future with a planned gift. Also giving of their time and energy—Galen as a class agent and champion for the Class of ’39—the Stones epitomize Milton’s motto, “Dare to Be True,” through their generosity, friendship, and constant support of the School they love.

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Sports Spring Sports Scenes: Indulge in Nostalgia

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In•Sight Wigglesworth Hall

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OnCentre

Colin Cheney ’96 Wins Prestigious National Literary Award olin Cheney ’96 was awarded a prestigious 2010 Pushcart Prize—a prize that has honored some of America’s foremost writers since 1976—for his poem “Lord God Bird.” Winners of the Pushcart Prize appear in an annual anthology of stories, poems, essays and memoirs selected from hundreds of small magazines and presses throughout the world. The Pushcart Prize collection series was founded by Bill Henderson and a group of founding editors that included Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates and Reynolds Price.

The annual Pushcart Prize collection has been called “The ex-officio house organ for the American literary cosmos” by the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times calls the publication “a distinguished annual literary event.” Each Pushcart Prize edition features works by about 60 authors from dozens of presses.

Little-magazine and small-book press editors may make up to six nominations each year for the collection, and selections are chosen by Pushcart’s staff of distinguished Contributing Editors.

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Photo credit: Aya Brackett

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Colin Cheney ’96

Writers who were first noticed in Pushcart collections include: Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving and Rick Moody.

Colin’s poem is from his first book, Here Be Monsters. It was selected as a winner of the 2009 National Poetry Series Open Competition, and was released in 2010 by the University of Georgia Press.

In choosing Here Be Monsters for the National Poetry Series award, David Wojahn said, “Colin Cheney writes with a searching urgency that is frustratingly rare in contemporary poetry. His keen awareness of how personal history and public history inextricably commingle aligns him to some of the most demanding and ambitious masters of the past half-century,

most notably Oppen and Lowell.

But Cheney is very much his own man, both for the range of his concerns and for a sense of music that is both memorable and refreshingly quirky. Here Be Monsters is the sort of debut from which important careers arise.”

In 2006, Colin was awarded a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, Poetry, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Shenandoah and Kenyon Review.

Speakers on Campus Fields Medal Winner, Shing-Tung Yau, Talks with Students On May 19, the Math Club and mathematics department sponsored visiting speaker Professor Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard University. Professor Yau is a recipient of the prestigious Fields Medal, which honors excellence in mathematics research, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the “Genius Award,” in 1984. Professor Yau’s work is primarily in the field of differential geometry, which uses methods of calculus and algebra to study problems in geometry.

His work links—and has made significant impact upon—the fields of both mathematics and physics. Professor Yau has contributed to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity—one of the most distinguished applications of differential geometry—by proving that the sum of the universe’s energy has a positive value, a discovery that has helped mathematicians understand how black holes form. His work has also included direct applications to string theory.

Growing up as one of eight children of humble means in southern China, Professor Yau made his way to Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he studied mathematics, to U.C. Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. in only two years, at the age of 22.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Clinton in 1997.

Shing-Tung Yau

at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film won excellent reviews and 15 festival prizes, at film festivals across the country. Tze’s earlier short film, Windowbreaker, was selected to play at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and also at more than 30 other high-profile international festivals. Windowbreaker is a semi-autobiographical film based in a mixed-race Boston suburb, where paranoia and stereotype-driven suspicions are at play. It won the audience award at the 2006 New York City Short Film Festival and best short film at the 2007 Vietnamese International Film Festival.

John Bisbee ’84 worked with visual art students during his visit to campus.

John Bisbee ’84 Is Melissa Dilworth Gold Visiting Artist John Bisbee, Milton Academy Class of 1984, teacher of sculpture at Bowdoin College, and winner of the New England Rappaport Prize, was a 2009– 2010 Melissa Dilworth Gold Visiting Artist. John’s elaborate welded metal sculptures are made of thousands of nails arranged into beautiful patterns and progressions in space. Solo exhibitions of John’s work have taken place throughout the country, in galleries from the West Coast through the Midwest to the Northeast. During his four-day visit to Milton, John worked with many groups of visual art students to create a large-scale art installation on campus.

Students then heard John speak in the Fitzgibbons Convocation Center about what inspires him, where he started out, and how his work has progressed and changed over the years. John’s visit concluded with an artist’s workshop for the AP Studio Art students at Milton High School.

Upcoming exhibitions of John’s sculpture will take place at the Snite Museum of Art at the

University of Notre Dame in Indiana (2011), and the Coleman Burke Gallery in New York City.

John Bisbee is a graduate of Alfred University in Alfred, New York, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine.

Tze Chun ’98

Tze Chun ’98, Artist and Filmmaker, Is the Hong Kong Series Speaker The 12th speaker in the Hong Kong Series, Tze Chun, graduated from Milton Academy the year in which the series began, 1998. Tze’s artistic expression is broad, as is his success. He is a writer; a visual artist and painter; and a filmmaker. Tze’s work in film may be most widely known. His debut feature, Chil­ dren of Invention, premiered

As a writer, Tze and his partner Mike Weiss served as screenwriters for Darren Star’s primetime drama on ABC, Cashmere Mafia. After graduating from Columbia with a concentration in film studies, Tze began his arts career as a portrait artist.

The CVZ Contemporary gallery in Soho represents his work, and his commissioned portraits hang in private residences in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New Orleans. Tze also painted the original artwork for the poster of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Academy Award–nominated film, Half Nelson, as well as the children’s book drawings used in the film.

Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author, Jeffrey Eugenides, Was This Spring’s Bingham Visiting Reader On March 3, students in Classes II and I filled King Theatre to hear Jeffrey Eugenides read some of his unpublished fiction as this year’s Bingham Visiting Reader. Mr. Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to wide acclaim in 1993. It has been translated into 34 languages and made into a feature film. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize

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Speakers on Campus, continued for his novel Middlesex, which remains one of the best-selling contemporary novels of all time and won him a coveted spot in Oprah’s Book Club. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, and Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.”

Lisa Baker, of the English department, introduced Mr. Eugenides, saying of his novel Middlesex, “[the book] is thrilling

Jeffrey Eugenides

in its epic scope and flavor, with intertwining plots that migrate across decades, continents, family generations, and ultimately genders…” while his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, “intimately inhabits the longings and anxieties of the teenaged mind; its sentences are intricately wrought, the plot relentlessly singular, and the effect of the novel is both irresistible and illicit… Mr. Eugenides’s narrative diversity seems bold, even

countercultural—an unintentional challenge to the literary world to risk more, to resist the pacifying effect of consistency…

His fiction makes us laugh as hard as it asks us to deeply consider the world around us.”

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, Mr. Khazei and his law school roommate Michael Brown started City Year as a youth service corps engaging 50 young people in Boston.

As City Year expanded to other cities, Mr. Khazei was appointed to the Corporation for National and Community Service by President George H.W. Bush.

He served as a vice-chair from 1990 to 1992. President Bill Clinton cited City Year as the inspiration for AmeriCorps, which was the nation’s federal investment in national youth service. Today, City Year is a global organization operating in 19 cities in America and in Johannesburg, South Africa.

profit that creates national public awareness campaigns promoting citizen service as a practical solution to problems facing our communities and our country.

In 2009, ServiceNation, the first campaign to be launched from this platform, secured the greatest federal expansion of national service in the country since Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

Mr. Eugenides teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

City Year Founder, Alan Khazei, Opens Seminar Day at Milton

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lan Khazei’s history could define the term “social entrepreneur”—a creative person who applies the thinking and strategy normally associated with business ideas to solve social problems or respond to significant social need. Mr. Khazei, founder of two groundbreaking nonprofits that have helped increase citizen engagement in problem solving, opened Seminar Day convincing Milton students that they were both capable of and responsible for change in “their century.”

In an interactive kickoff to an idea-filled day, Mr. Khazei explained his concept of the “big citizen” and shared examples of young people, from Martin Luther King to Wendy Kopp (Teach For America founder) who had acted definitively on a passionate belief. Creating a mechanism to draw others to action is not so hard, Mr. Khazei seemed to suggest. A belief in yourself and conviction about your idea is the beginning of what could have immense impact on the world.

In June 2003, when AmeriCorps faced a drastic funding cut, Mr. Khazei joined with other service leaders to organize the “Save AmeriCorps” coalition, an effort that helped restore half the funding for the program that year and then achieve an increased appropriation of $100 million the next year.

Inspired by the success of the Save AmeriCorps campaign, in 2007, Mr. Khazei launched Be the Change, Inc., a nonAlan Khazei 52

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Mr. Khazei has served on the boards of City Year, Citizen Schools, the Harvard Alumni Association, the Mass Service Alliance, New Profit, Inc., Serve Next, Share Our Strength and Teach For America. He has received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Jefferson Award for Public Service, and the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award. In 2006, U.S. News and World Report named him one of America’s “25 Best Leaders” and the Boston Globe Magazine identified him as one of 11 Bostonians “Changing the World.”

Jackie Bonenfant Is Milton’s Academic Dean

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ackie Bonenfant of the mathematics department has succeeded David Ball as Milton’s academic dean. Jackie has long been respected as an excellent teacher and leader in her discipline, and an energetic participant in the many aspects of student and faculty life on campus. A member of the Milton Academy faculty since 1981, Jackie has taught all levels of mathematics from Algebra I through BC Calculus, including AP Statistics. She served as mathematics department chair from 1999 through 2006. Jackie has co-coordinated Milton’s assembly programming and the School’s standardized testing program; she has been Milton’s Math Club advisor. Her diligence, thoroughness and wisdom are consistently sought; she has been a valued member of numerous ad hoc committees over the years, as well as of trustee committees and the Discipline Committee.

Always fully immersed in the life of the School, Jackie has lived in both Faulkner House and in Goodwin House, serving as house head in Faulkner from 1985 to 1988. She taught in Milton’s one-week Transition Program for students of color and international students from 2003 to 2007, and again in 2009. In 1994, and again in 2009, Jackie earned the Talbot Baker Award for Excellence in Teaching. Bestowing the award last June, Interim Principal Sarah Wehle noted a comment from one of Jackie’s peers: “Jackie is masterful in getting her students to engage in the learning of mathematics, balancing the need for instruc-

Jackie Bonenfant, Academic Dean

tion with the need for critical questioning. Her students love her caring and demanding approach.” Ms. Wehle noted, “Ms. Bonenfant has such experience and expertise as an educator that other teachers naturally seek her out to discuss both material and students. She served skillfully as department chair and is frequently asked to coordinate course groups since her collaborative leadership style allows teachers to develop their craft, just as her classroom style allows students to further their understanding. Eager to continue her own education, Ms. Bonenfant is always among the first to test out new technologies and adapt them to classroom use. Respect for her knowledge of teaching mathematics extends well beyond the walls of Milton.

Other specialists in mathematics curricula appreciate her deep knowledge of the discipline and regularly ask her to evaluate the mathematics programs at other schools.”

New Members of the Board of Trustees Robert Azeke ’87 is managing director of the investment firm Parish Capital Advisors in New York City. Prior to joining Parish Capital, Rob founded Sunday Group after experience in investment banking and private equity on Wall Street. Earlier, he was a principal at Compass Partners LLC, and also a senior officer in the mergers and acquisitions department of Lazard Freres LLC. After his Milton years, Rob attended the University of North Carolina as a distinguished Morehead Scholar and earned his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Robert Azeke ’87

Mark Denneen ’84 of Boston founded Denneen & Company in 1993—a brand management and growth strategy consultancy with clients across a broad range of industries, from chemicals and health care to higher education. Recently, Mark led a valuable ad hoc study with Milton administrators focused on our financial aid structure and strategy, and he is now helping Todd lead a newly formed council evaluating Milton’s marketing and branding strategy. Mark is one of four brothers who attended Milton: Michael ’81, William ’85, and Jeffrey Denneen ’88 bracketed the ’80s at Milton.

Mark earned undergraduate and

Mark Denneen ’84

graduate degrees in history from Harvard before returning to the Harvard Business School for his M.B.A. Caroline Hyman of New York City is a Milton parent. Caroline and Ed Hyman’s daughter, Prudence, graduated in 2000 and their son Curtis will graduate in 2012. Caroline has served the boards of the Episcopal School in the City of New York and La Scuola d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi. She has also been involved with the Brearley, St. David’s and Collegiate schools.

She currently serves on committees at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York City Library of the Performing Arts. She has been

Caroline Hyman

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Retiring Faculty

New Members, continued

Nancy Fenstemacher Lower School Faculty, 1984–2010

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Chris McKown

an active Milton parent, and has graciously hosted Milton events in New York, including a gathering to introduce and welcome Todd. Caroline and her husband have been Milton enthusiasts for many years.

Chris McKown is the co-founder of Health Dialog, a leading provider of care management, health care analytics, and decision support. The firm is a private, wholly owned subsidiary of Bupa, a global health care company. Health Dialog provides population analytics, interactive decision aids, and health care decision programs. Prior to forming Health Dialog, Chris founded and served as president of Response International Services Corporation, a property and casualty insurance company. Earlier, Chris was a principal in Booz, Allen & Hamilton’s New York City–based financial services practice. Chris and his wife, Abigail Johnson, live in Milton; their daughter, Julia, is a member of the Class of 2013.

Chris has served on a number of boards, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, WGBH Educational Foundation, and Pine Street Inn. Chris earned his undergraduate degree from Penn State and his M.B.A. from Harvard University.

o understand Nancy Fenstemacher as a teacher, visit her classroom over the course of a year. A fully puffedout spiny blowfish hangs from the ceiling. At an eight-year-old’s eye level, a tank of living sea stars, hermit crabs and snails collected at Brant Rock beach burbles away. Horizontal surfaces are covered in seashells, shark jaws, coral specimens, books, balances and microscopes.

A math and science display compares the morphology of ocean-dwelling fish with a dozen different geometric shapes.

On another visit, her classroom—and adjacent rooms—are really the ticketing desk, waiting room, passport check, and passenger cabin of a China-bound flight. A third visit turns up a bustling costume shop and puppet factory, as students prepare their legendary Shadow Plays.

Nancy’s room is an ever-evolving canvas for engaged thematic learning.

sion, and that she is unflappable.

She is a quiet yet powerful presence. Twenty-six years of bright-eyed second graders have coursed through her room, and all have felt her gentle, even manner. They’ve seen her playing soccer or pitching a ball, and they’ve waited for her to release their sleds down the hill behind the Junior Building. She shapes children, and she never, ever gives up on a child. (A few years back, Nancy actually chased a student who had run away from School, all the way home.)

So too has she shaped today’s Milton: as a member of the Middle School Committee, the K–8 Committee, and the Head of School Search Committee, among other responsibilities.

Nancy herself wrote, “I like to learn. I am committed to being a lifelong learner.”

Nancy models this approach.

She has traveled to Lowell to create a unit about inventions, and to Washington, D.C. to visit the U.S. Postal Museum to research Owney, the 19th-century mail dog and second-grade summer reading character. As the Hong Kong Chair, she was off to China to expand her own expertise and enrich our curriculum.

Come August, picture Nancy in Lower Manhattan, trekking the High Line, that elevated rail bed recently turned into natural park space. She never tires of the quest, or satisfies her curiosity.

One colleague describes Nancy as kind, thoughtful, diligent, and inquisitive. Another calls her wise, and supportive of all of us. Still another notes that Nancy models care and compas-

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“Learning makes life perpetually interesting,” Nancy says. We rue her departure from Milton Academy and hope we have learned from her to stay interesting ourselves. We celebrate the fact that Nancy will be here a while longer, covering Sachiyo’s maternity leave through Thanksgiving. Having a little more time with her is a gift, a sort of coda that will reprise the best of Nancy: a wonderful teacher, a great colleague, and a true friend to all.

Marshall Carter K–8 Principal

Retiring Faculty

Ellie Griffin Director of Health and Counseling, 1974–2010

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ne colleague described 1974, when Ellie arrived at Milton, this way: “The world was changing, schools were changing, and the role of women in schools was changing. Schools were just beginning to think about how adolescents grow outside of academics and athletics.” Since then Ellie has been a leader, at Milton and in the independent school world, in advancing our understanding of gender and adolescent development.

The start was not a promising one. Ellie gave up teaching French at Hamilton-Wenham High School to follow her husband, Dick, who was hired to teach history, coach wrestling, and restore order to a thenunruly Robbins House. Ellie signed on to co-head Robbins.

Since a woman leading a boys’ dorm was more than unconventional at the time, that appointment was kept sub rosa. Only the head of school knew, officially.

Given Ellie’s personality— direct, probing, forceful, and committed to doing right—that appointment was not kept quiet for long. Students identified Ellie as someone they could trust. Faculty spouses gravitated to Ellie for similar reasons. She encouraged them, in the words of one spouse, “in doing things that gave value to the School.

Nowadays that idea seems commonplace, but back then it was almost radical. She changed traditions.”

Ellie realized that she had found a calling as a counselor. To assure success in that role, she earned a master’s in counseling psychology from Lesley College while working parttime at Milton. At that same time, events in the independent schools indicated the need for more intensive work on educating adolescents about issues of sexuality. So, in 1978, Ellie teamed with Jack Starmer, then completing his own mas-

ter’s in public health, to create HS&R: our Human Sexuality and Relationships course. The course was groundbreaking, advanced in its concept and successful in its execution, and even now, 30 years later, schools ask Ellie to help them develop similar programs. Milton students who have taken the course (some 3,000 and counting) often cite HS&R as a memorable and enjoyable part of their time at Milton. Always looking to make the course more effective, Ellie instituted SECS (Students Educating the Community about Sexuality), a select group of seniors who serve as teaching aides in the HS&R classes. A number of SECS seniors have created peer counseling programs at their colleges, using Ellie’s concepts.

Nationally, she is co-founder and co-director of the Human Development Institute and, since 1979, has consulted with schools on issues of sexuality, gender, and adolescent development. For 23 years she taught young teachers about these issues at the Boarding Conference. She served on and then chaired the Council of Women in Independent Schools for NAIS. She is co-founder and co-director of the Independent School Gender Project which has been addressing issues of equity for girls and women in a number of independent schools since 1997. She leads workshops every summer, notably for independent school management.

For many, Ellie is the guru of gender and adolescent development; she is a significant national presence.

Ellie’s role at Milton marked a turning point and created a legacy; she founded the counseling department. After degree work at Lesley, Ellie quickly moved from half-time to fulltime counselor at Milton; the need was great. Ellie has worked

Ellie and Dick Griffin

tirelessly to make sure Milton serves students’ emotional and psychological needs, growing the counseling department to three full-time counselors, initiating studies on race and gender, helping to develop the affective education program. Said a colleague, “Ellie has been a strong proponent of all students, an important initiator of ideas and programs. Most importantly, she has honored confidentiality in all her work and has made her office a safe place for student and adults to bring their troubles.” Ellie was awarded the Moyer Chair in recognition of her caring work with students.

We will miss Ellie’s strength.

Few can hold as steady in a storm; Ellie helps us hold onto our better selves with her ability to stay clear-eyed and calm in the most challenging circumstances. We will miss

Ellie’s courage. When she sees a wrong, she names it. Ellie’s willingness to speak about uncomfortable truth has led the community to many meaningful discussions. We will miss Ellie’s love and friendship. Ellie was attentive to our well-being, encouraging of our taking next steps, and joyful about the good things in our lives.

Thank you, Ellie, for what you have meant to so many of us for so many years. Milton is a better place because of your gifts to us and your long, faithful commitment to the health of our School community.

Rob Skinner ’72 Director of College Counseling

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Retiring Faculty

Bernard Planchon Modern Language Faculty, 1985–2010

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lready a legendary teacher at the Park School, Bernard Planchon was persuaded by David Eastburn, then chair of the modern language department, to join us at Milton.

Bernard arrived with a boundless enthusiasm for all things French and Francophone. He brought a deep understanding of cultures and literature, and he believed that immersion in both could improve the lives of his students. For 25 years, it has.

Vitality, creativity and passion define Bernard’s teaching.

Wedded to the highest standards, he challenged students to reach new levels in their study of language and broaden their thinking about literature and life. In his self-evaluation of 1989, Bernard said, “The first objective of foreign language teaching is the acquisition of a competence in communication in the broadest sense.... The second objective…is at the root of the liberal arts education: selfknowledge and the increased awareness of one’s own identity as a culturally and socially defined individual.” Bernard lived these principles, modeling them for his students. As one student said, “He teaches with such enthusiasm, passion and humor that every class becomes an enjoyable learning experience.” Another commented that the “atmosphere allowed each student to take risks, with…continual guidance.” A third added that Bernard “taught me analytical skills that I have been able to use outside of French…my writing in English has improved due largely to his class.” Seeking balance in the liberal arts tradition, Bernard mixed scholarship with spontaneity.

methods, and fair in his support of each individual teacher. He embraced innovation while maintaining the primacy of the classics. He upheld the intellectual rigor of the department, offering many upper-level courses, including AP French Literature.

He lived by the explication de texte, the time-honored exercise for teaching literature to French students. In sum, Bernard followed Montaigne’s dictum that a teacher ought “right from the start, according to the mind he has in hand, to begin putting it through its paces, making it taste things, choose them, and discern them by itself.”

Bernard’s own paces have led him all over the world. Having lived and worked on three continents, he understands the transformative power of travel. Over the years he coordinated trips to Provence, Quebec, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Bernard enjoyed sharing—and in some cases facilitating—students’ discoveries. Through his contacts in Martinique, for example, he orchestrated a meeting between the great poet Aimé Césaire and a Milton student on senior project.

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Not defined by his scholarship alone, Bernard is a Renaissance man—he loves soccer and cycling. He coached both at Milton, recognizing that coaching helped him maintain the energy he needed for class.

Living the motto “Sound mind in sound body,” Bernard would regularly cycle 200 miles per week with his team. However, while his mind mused about Voltaire and his lungs burned for vélo, his heart sang opera. He used music to set the mood, to introduce a cultural movement, or simply to rejoice. Bernard’s knowledge is encyclopedic, and his collection of recordings and audio equipment to do them justice is enormous.

Still, Bernard’s greatest gift was his willingness to share. His keen eye for cinema inspired him to develop the elective in French film. He trained a generation of film buffs in the innovations of the French New Wave, urging his students to draw parallels between the cinematographic art and their own experience. One of his most successful projects on campus was the production of an orches-

tral version of Bizet’s Carmen.

His faculty-student production allowed many students to be swept up in something magical, something that drew them into high art.

A man of ideas and passion, Bernard loved discussing all things with his colleagues. We found him a warm and generous spirit. Don Dregalla commented, “It is great to be around a lifelong lover of great music.”

Ana Colbert said, “Bernard is the embodiment of a concept of culture which transcends countries, epochs, and particular trends.

The warmth, the joy, the enthusiasm he brings daily are irreplaceable.” Bernard proved that an engaged attitude to life and art makes all the difference. That is his gift to us: the affirmation that language, art and culture— wherever one finds them—do make a difference. His legacy will live secure in the fortunate Miltonians who experienced his very palpable spirit.

Mark Connolly Modern Language Department Chair (With great help from Bill Moore and Ana Colbert)

Dick Griffin Campus Safety Officer, 1981–2010

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ick Griffin came to Milton Academy in 1981 and served the community—from end to end on our 125-acre campus—for 29 years. According to his own telling, Dick was on duty every single weekend for 29 years. Prior to his Milton career, Dick had been director of loss prevention for First National Stores (a major grocery chain).

When he arrived at Milton, he was the only campus safety officer on duty, and keeping the campus and its residents safe was only one of his duties. He drove a pickup truck and emptied trash barrels, as well.

Carol Smith Miller Board of Trustees, 2002–2010

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arol Smith Miller was elected to the board in 2002.

Carol and her husband Jeff had become active volunteers at Milton when their daughter, Alex, Class of 2003, joined the School, and continued through son Matt’s time at Milton. Matt graduated in 2005.

Members of the board were quick to sense Carol’s many competencies, and they asked for her leadership often.

Carol brought financial insight to the board, as well as powerful analytical skills, sensitivity, a deep belief in Milton’s mission, and a real willingness to serve.

She said “yes” quickly to whatever Milton asked of her, for many years, and was an example to us all of follow-through—carrying out responsibilities with dedication, skill and grace.

We know Carol as an unusually balanced and gracious person.

She balances a keen intellect with a willingness to ask questions and to learn something from everyone. She balances great analytical and organi-

While Dick no doubt conferred many of his insights and experiences on new campus safety officers over the years, he was the de facto expert and trainer on Academy doors. Dick knew through daily experience the nooks, crannies and idiosyn-

Dick was a straight arrow, preferring the days when rules ruled, and exceptions were not permitted. In checking for compliance with School rules, he was undaunted by a person’s name or theoretical stature, and was direct and fearless in applying the letter of the law.

Dick is a person of integrity, loyalty and dependability. He served all of us in ways we recognize and also in ways we will never fully know. We wish Dick happiness—and plenty of free weekends—in his well-earned retirement. We thank him for his devoted service to this School and to all its people for so many eventful years.

zational skills with an appreciation for people’s feelings, or how decisions might affect people. She balances a certain rigorous scholarship in how she approaches projects, with a sense of humor and an appreciation of fun.

Carol was an active contributor on many board committees: Budget, External Relations, Student Life, Capital Campaign Steering Committee and the Long Range Financial Planning Committee. She led Milton’s major thank-you, Celebration 2008, for the people whose gifts had secured our financial strength and our ability to meet the future.

Carol is a problem solver, an idea person, and someone with great perspective. Carol’s most important gifts to Milton’s students and faculty may have come of her intense appreciation for the Milton experience and her desire to keep it vibrant and strong. We are very grateful for the energy and effort she devoted to our School.

crasies of the many, many individual keys that controlled access to all the doors on campus. He transferred that complex security system to every new team member.

Dick served during the tenures of five heads of school: Jerry Pieh, Ed Fredie, Robin Robertson, Rick Hardy and now Todd Bland. His memories, Campus Safety Director Jay Hackett contends, would be worthy of a book, and perhaps a film. His experiences and deep knowledge of the School, as well as his day-to-day observations and information gathering, served him well, as his tenure extended through many phases of Milton’s history.

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Alumni Authors Recently published works

The Little House at Sandy Neck

by Edward Otis Handy, Jr. ’47 The Little House at Sandy Neck

by Ned Handy is like a bowl of New England clam chowder: satisfying, delightful, comfortingly warm, food for thinking and reminiscing—a taste of sea and land that leaves you wanting more. The history of Barnstable Harbor, the Great Marsh, and particularly the Little House located in the south side dunes of Sandy Neck are brought to life by Mr. Handy’s extensive research and profound love for this area of Cape Cod. The educational and entertaining chapters of this labor of love are much more than a “record of the past and present uses of

Barnstable Harbor and Sandy Neck.” They include the history of clamming, fishing and cranberry growing; historical photographs; collections, recollections and interviews with locals and family members; descriptions of native wildlife as well as tasty native recipes; and, ultimately, a deep concern for the future and conservation of this beloved part of the Cape.

Knowledgeable locals and newcomers to the Barnstable area will enjoy the book’s humor and insight. Ned leaves his readers with a lingering taste for the remote dunes and the harbor, shared experiences and humorous lore, and most of all for the love of family.

Suzie Hurd Greenup ’75

Newsgirl

by Liza Ketchum ’64 Liza Ketchum’s most recent book, Newsgirl, tells the story of 12-year-old Amelia Forrester whose family has arrived, penniless, in San Francisco in 1851 hoping for a new life.

Discovering that newsboys can make a fortune, Amelia ignores their warning—“No girls in our gang!”—and cuts her hair, dresses in trousers, and quickly figures out how to best the rude boys in the business. At first, Amelia’s disguise gives her an exciting new freedom, but she soon finds herself on an accidental and harrowing adventure: riding in a hot-air balloon over the bay, which lands her in the “diggings,” the mountainous area where miners pan for gold.

To pay for her passage back to San Francisco, Amelia writes and sells her story to the local paper.

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Reviewer Cynthia Levinson writes, “Ketchum has produced another gripping adventure story with believable, off beat characters and rich historical detail in a mid-19th-century setting that seems newly alive. The story of Amelia’s balloon ride is based on an actual event in which a teenaged boy became an accidental ‘aeronaut.’ Other details of newspaper writing and selling, sailing ships, San Francisco, and women’s livelihoods suffuse the story, making this an original historical novel that will appeal to both boys and girls.”

Liza has written many books for children and young adults.

Newsgirl was selected for Vermont’s Dorothy Canfield Fisher list and has been nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award Starred Title.

Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town

by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon ’75 Will Nixon ’75 and Michael Perkins—friends, fellow poets, and “kindred souls”—decided at a poetry gathering one evening to undertake a “subversive endeavor”: to walk across Woodstock, New York—Will’s hometown for over 13 years.

They traversed the old village of bluestone quarries, abandoned forest paths and mountain views, which they often had all to themselves. Many of their tales and adventures were first

published as columns in the Woodstock Times—chronicling the delights of finding spring flowers as well as the fears of a mountain rescue. Their stories are full of humor, history, friendship, nature, hikers’ lore, and walkers’ musings.

Champions for the protection of wilderness, the authors also touch upon the importance of resolving many environmental issues through ecologically sound means. In addition to the sustainability of the act, Will identifies two essential personal benefits from walking: “Freedom—walking gives you freedom in a way that noth-

ing else does. Friendship—it’s deepened over the experience of walking together. I feel people are at their best when walking.”

Modern China: Continuity and Change 1644 to the Present

Author Mikhail Horowitz writes, “This is a book by two free men—two men who have consciously chosen to forsake the desperate quest for speed that characterizes our increasingly impatient age in favor of long, slow, discursive rambles on foot over hill and dale, mountain and meadow, crag and creek and country road. Among other things, to walk in the way that [the authors] do is an act of devotion, an act that entails a close reading of the landscape—and happily for us, they write as well as they read.”

by Sarah C.M. Paine ’75 and Bruce A. Elleman Modern China: Continuity and Change 1644 to the Present, a textbook by Sarah C.M. Paine ’75 and Bruce A. Elleman, offers a compelling way in which the Western student can begin to understand China’s complex modern history. Unlike other survey books, which can be simplistic vehicles for the listing of facts and dates, this text builds itself around three central narratives that emphasize the roles that China’s distinct culture, unique history of civil and foreign wars, and complex relationships with its immediate neighbors played in its evolution. It does not assume to have the last word, but it does offer a refreshing approach illustrating the underlying cultural differences between Chinese and Western civilizations. The three narratives are systematically examined through the lenses of five different cultural elements that the authors have identified as the primary driving forces in Chinese history. The first three—described as “spatial” because they include top-down, bottom-up and radial forces— directly influenced how power and authority were allocated in China. The last two elements— defined as “temporal” because they comprise the traditional Chinese worldviews—largely determined the “policy choices” or “options” for China since the beginning of the Qing period.

These five cultural elements combined to define, and sometimes limit, the reach and effi-

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Alumni Authors Recently published works

cacy of the Chinese state. While the approach may be unconventional, as the authors readily admit, it does provide a sophisticated and useful starting point for the study of China. These cultural elements are revealing, and they warrant a more thorough examination here as a way to illustrate the strength of this important text.

The first three cultural elements that determined the distribution of power in China, according to the authors, were the top-down imperial authority exerted by the duopolistic ideologies of State Confucianism and Legalism, the bottom-up influence of Daoism, and the spoke-like, Sino-centric worldview radiating outward from the Forbidden City. These philosophical bedrocks helped to define China as the historic hegemon of East Asia, and drove its domestic and foreign policies.

In civil affairs, the emperor, as the legitimate sovereign, possessed the political and moral authority over the empire through a divinely sanctioned mandate to rule. However, the mandate itself was contingent upon his ethical benevolence, and his actual ability to manage and direct the Chinese ship of state. He was assisted in his task by a complex bureaucracy, staffed by an elite group of Confucian scholar-officials who were selected through a rigorous set of examinations based solely on the Confucian classics.

Furthermore, he relied on an age-old Legalist Code that placed him above the law, and gave him the coercive means to enforce his will over his people. As long as the sovereign was seen as possessing the mandate to rule, his subjects, from the most humble peasant to the highest-ranked minister and the richest gentry, were obligated to give him their unquestioned allegiance. The 60

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passive orientation of Daoism, which advocated internal contemplation and avoided confrontation against the prevailing social and political order, helped to soften popular discontent, and kept the socio-political fabric intact. Similarly, the Sinocentric vision of China’s place in the world allowed the legitimate Son of Heaven (Tianzi) to assume submission from his “barbarian� neighbors, who were expected to acknowledge their inferior status by sending tribute missions before him to carry out the requisite kowtow. This

interlocking web of relationships, at least in theory, brought about social harmony and political stability, and encouraged Chinese statecraft to become intensely hierarchical and personal. At home, this meant authoritarianism that tolerated no dissent; abroad, an ethnocentric confidence that assumed the superiority of Chinese civilization. In this Confucian context, one was valid only as a member of a larger group; the personal liberties and individual rights, so central to Western thinking,

were secondary to the far more important Chinese concepts of social responsibility and group obligations. This is why, according to the authors, the ideas of Face and Guanxi, both expressions of social prestige and influence, figured so prominently in determining the course of Chinese history.

Following the three spatial elements, the authors posit two temporal orientations that heavily influenced the Chinese worldview. The first was the cyclical

explanation for change and turmoil in the context of historical continuity, as expressed by the interlocking symbol of Yin and Yang. Thus, human events, from the most trivial matters to the gravest catastrophes, were all part of a continuous advance and retreat of social forces in a “prescribed succession, explaining the endlessly repeating cycles” of history. Coupled with this cyclical understanding was a cultural acceptance of fate and destiny that connected the Chinese to the Confucian order, “fixed” their social obligations at birth, and fatalistically predicted the rise and fall of all families.

Thus, China’s response to the challenges posed by the rising West was one of peering deep into its historical past for analogies and “retrospective” solutions, and the British gunboats became no different from the marauding barbarians along the northern border who could easily be bought off, or flushed away.

Clearly, Britain was far more potent and dangerous than the Chinese had first estimated, but given their cyclical sense of history, and their assumption that “the past contained everything necessary to understand the present,” it is not difficult for the Western student to understand China’s response.

These five cultural elements provided the framework for the understanding of China as it began to confront the power of the West in the modern era. The traditional Chinese worldview, with its emphasis on political harmony and social stability, collided tragically with a Western capitalist system fueled by the twin engines of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

While the Chinese expected the West to behave within the accepted Confucian norms, the West saw the Chinese demand

as both archaic and a hindrance to free trade. When that free trade involved huge shipments of contraband narcotics, and massive profit for the British, the outcome of the Opium Wars became sadly predictable.

The central theme of China’s tumultuous history since then has been the lurching effort to uncover the “secrets” of Western power, and the desperate attempt to preserve the Chinese soul. The Self-Strengthening Movement, the May Fourth Movement, and later, the Great Leap Forward and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, all took place under radically different political regimes, but they shared the same goal of trying to strengthen a China severely weakened by foreign predation and internal chaos.

Deng Xiaoping’s “Gai Ge Kai Fang” policies of the late 1970s finally unleashed the collective energy of more than a billion talented and industrious people.

However, as China returns to the front rank of global power, the verdict is still out on whether Deng’s vision can adequately transform the Celestial Kingdom into a truly modern nation. Today’s China, with its peculiar blend of authoritarian politics and relatively free market economics, remains an old soul trapped in an awkward teenage body. The road to understanding the “New” China, then, is to understand the old Chinese soul. This text begins that journey admirably.

Michael Shiao-liang Lou History Department

Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with One Mom, Four Kids, and 102 Recipes

by Emily Franklin ’90 As the book’s jacket describes, Emily Franklin’s food memoir Too Many Cooks was born of two simple loves: food and children.

A foodie and former chef, Emily wants to pass her love of good cooking on to her children. Each chapter of her new book is a vignette, a story, about exploring a new taste or idea, along with anecdotes and memories from a year’s worth of growing up, new-baby milestones, and the changes that happen so fast in children.

Over the course of a year, Emily introduces her children to new dishes—some exotic, some thrown together with whatever she has in her cabinets—with varying degrees of success.

Employing the inventiveness a mother depends on, Emily writes about the genius of the “nugget.” (Fish, chicken—children will eat anything if you just bread it and call it a nugget.) Creating her own version of the treat, Emily unfolds how she then successfully stepped her children from nuggets all the way up to Lemon Panko Chicken. Undaunted by failure along the way (“This tastes like sand!”), she discovers how a delicious (or even disastrous) meal can bring families together and feed the soul.

Faith Durand of thekitchn.com writes, “This is one of the best books I’ve read on cooking by instinct. Emily shares story after story of cooking in the kitchen surrounded by kids, a busy schedule, a nursing baby, a busy husband with his own tastes and preferences, and tells these great little stories about how recipes and dishes emerge out of those busy moments.”

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Class Notes 1935 Sally Campbell Hansen writes, “My family remains international—my son David and his family live near Melbourne, Australia.

He has two daughters and a twoyear-old granddaughter. One daughter is living in Boulder, Colorado, working toward her Ph.D. in math and astronomy, which is beyond my comprehension. My daughter Deborah has three children and works for a government agency. She also makes time to help her aging mother. I am 93 years old and grateful.”

1949 Michael Henderson and wife Erica were married in 1966 and have one daughter, Juliet, who teaches at the Hotchkiss School.

They also have two granddaughters, Lola (6) and Lucy (4).

Michael’s most recently published books are See You after the Duration, which includes much about the Academy, and No

Enemy to Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World, published in 2009 (with foreword by the Dalai Lama).

1950 Philip L. Nash has been married for 55 years to Eris T. Dietz of Baltimore and has three children. Daughter Kimberlee Clymer and her husband, Jeff, have three children—Lauren, Eliza and Jillian. Daughter Brenda Buchanan has four children—Samantha, Kayla, Madaline and Stephan. Son Clayton lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Philip and Eris have lived in Sterling for 41 years and have a cottage on Lockes Island in Gilford, New Hampshire. Their home in Sterling was built in approximately 1775 and the small town has been a great place to bring up their children.

1955 Hobart A. Spalding reports, “2010 marks the 45th consecutive year that an academic publication of mine has appeared in print. I helped organize a conference in New York City that drew 3,400 people from five continents to discuss issues from globalization to global warming to whither capitalism. My youngest daughter earned her Ph.D. in education and technology, and her older sister went back to school for her master’s in social work. My wife is a superintendent in the Bronx, trying to ensure equal access to quality education. I work out four to five days a week, and we take long walks on weekends in one of Manhattan’s two great parks, which are ten minutes from our home. I look forward to our next reunion!”

1965 Helen Kimball-Brooke works as a homeopath in London. Her daughter Cecilia (22) will work toward her master’s in translation at Bath next year, and daughter Laura (18) earns A’s in school and will be undertaking a geology course at Exeter or Durham.

Mark Schmid shares, “married in haste (1973), repenting in leisure.” He has two sons—Sandy Schmid ’95 and Mark Philip Schmid ’96.

Perkins Bass ’30 traveled from New Hampshire to attend his 80th Milton Reunion in June 2010.

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Sara Spang earned her Ph.D. in anthropology and philosophy and worked with a think tank in Menlo Park, California, analyzing cultural changes created by new telecom technologies. She became a market analyst and then started her own firm. She

has two children, Rachel and David, and now works in international real estate; she’s also involved in community development work for organizations in education and the arts.

1970 Georgia Brown Pollak lives in White Plains, New York, with husband Bill and is vice president for communications at Yeshiva University. Her real passion, however, is music. “I am low on talent, but I play piano as a soloist and a duet partner at a local conservatory of music, where I serve on the board. I’ve tried my hand at composition and never had more fun.” Her children, Charlie and Sarah, are both married and live in the New York area.

1976 Jeanne Thrower Aguilar is director of human resources at Boulder Valley School District, where she has been since 2004.

Jeanne met up with Margaret Bergan Davis in Arlington, Virginia, last year and Margaret suggested University of Virginia as a law school option for Jeanne’s daughter, Genevieve.

Genevieve was accepted to UVA and stayed with Margaret’s daughter, Caroline Davis ’01, who is attending the Darden School of Business at UVA. Genevieve fell in love with the school and Charlottesville, and she plans to attend in the fall.

Jeanne says, “Orange and blue prevail again!”

1978 Dr. Laura Appell-Warren, teacher of Third Form Seminar and Anthropology at St. Mark’s

Jane Cheever Carr ’53 married Andrew W. Hertig on December 28, 2009, in Boston, Massachusetts. Pictured with Jane and Andrew are their families, including Milton graduates Wendy Carr Ellison ’78 and Gordon Carr ’85.

Jane Cheever Carr Hertig ’53 met with classmates Alexandra “Sandy” Boyd Earle ’53 and Sarah Howland Godfrey ’53 at Art Club Museum in Providence, Rhode Island.

Milton grads gathered during the New York Yacht Club’s 154th annual cruise to Maine in August, on Little Cranberry Island off Mount Desert. Pictured here are (left to right) David Giandomenico ’77, John Barbour ’77, Joe Merrill ’77, Mike Ryan ’77, Chris West ’77, Peter Gregory ’77, Bob MacKay ’64 and Peter Holmes ’64.

Pam Watson Sebastian ’62, Judy Perry Guggenhime ’62, Scilla Blackwell Hastings ’62, Amy Bright Unfried ’62 and Julia Cheever ’62 all gathered for lunch in San Francisco, California in March 2010.

School, has recently edited a monograph titled The Iban Diaries of Monica Freeman 1949– 1951: Including Ethnographic Drawings, Sketches, Paintings, Photographs and Letters, published by the Borneo Research Council.

1984 Heather Heuston Rosett and her husband, Charles, are both teachers at a small private school in Salt Lake City, Utah. The two were married in a blizzard in Vermont during Heather’s junior year at Yale, and have been together for over 23 years.

Their son Max just finished his sophomore year at Yale, and son Leo (Lisa Friedman Miller’s godson) is working at a Rubbermaid factory in Texas. Isabelle (age 14, and Rob Sheffield’s goddaughter), and Eli (13) are still at home.

Lisa Friedman Miller and her husband, Phil, visited Heather and her family last fall. Lisa’s daughter, Lila, is Heather’s goddaughter.

“I think frequently of my days at Milton,” Heather says, “and of what a privilege it was to be there. So many people were kind to me when I was a homesick new junior in Hathaway House.

The teachers I had at Milton hover over my classrooms now, and I will be forever indebted to them.”

1988 Joel Del Rosario lives with his wife, Shelini, and two children, Maya (4) and Joel Jr. (nine months) in East Meadow, Long Island in New York. Joel looks forward to connecting with Milton alumni in the area.

Dave Wolff and his wife, Amy, along with new big brother, James, welcomed Emma Kate into the world on June 28, 2010.

1989 Bill Hanson and his wife, Alex, had twin girls—Willa Maeve and Ellery Maire—on February 26, 2010. The twins made a big sister of Tenley Sophia (4).

1990 Douglas Dohan and his wife, Heather, announced the birth of their son, Charles Atlee, on December 1, 2009. Douglas recently completed the requirements for his architecture license and works for Callison Architecture in Seattle, Washington.

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Class of 1945: front row (L to R): Rod Nordblom, Dawn Nordblom, Peter Toulmin, Sunny Toulmin, Brad Perry; back row: Emilie Coolidge, Frank Coolidge, Gid Loring, John Thorndike

Class of 1950: front row (L to R): Ann Cobb, Elizabeth Boyd Stevens, Dave Malcolm, Nancy Burley Chase, Judith Mackay Phillips; back row: Philip Nash, Kingsley Durant, Robert Weiss, Samuel Batchelder, Lucius Hill, Frederick Jackson

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Class of 1955: front row (L to R): Catherine Stinson Carleton, Albert Scullin, John Adams, Ellis Waller, Evelyn Hill Spalding, Elizabeth SchellFrederick, Daphne Abeel; back row: Paul Robinson, Lydia Stout Dane, Richard Reilly, Edward Francis, John Filoon, Llewellyn Howland, John Parker Damon

Class of 1960: front row (L to R): Sheldon Sturges, Fred Filoon, E.V. Stebbins Sweeney, Barbara Williams, Abby Mellen, Sally Morris Gayer, Dottie Altman Weber, Elise Forbes Tripp, Susie Abell Morison, Charlie Francis, John Kemp; second row: John Zamecnik, Alison Gardiner, Eric Fuller, Roz Stone Zander, Lissa Cabot Lyman, Liz Cenedella, Charlotte Goodhue, Debby Schabert Owen, Chas Lyman, Judy Zetzel Nathanson, Cynthia Brown Lloyd; third row: Richard Kennelly, Prescott Crocker, Jake Millet, Bill Bradlee, Charlie Bolton, Mary Jackson, John Meigs, Dan Cheever, Fred Faulkner, Francoise Bingham; fourth row: Steve Bingham, Spike Forbes, David Straus, Bill Minot, Sam Harding, Anne Curtis, Sukie Williams Dickie, Martha Fuller Clark, Edith Twombly Eddy, Nick Littlefield; back row: Sandy Noble, Tom Holcombe, Eliot Wadsworth, Tom Bolton, Bob Norris, Tim Hayward

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Class of 1965: front row (L to R): Scott Parkin, Judith Holmes, Jane Lyman Bihldorff, Sara Spang, Toby Hurd; middle row: Susan Cheever, Nick Clark, Lucie Hayes Semler, Grace Munger Buckley, Sarah Elder, Sara Perkins, Mary McCutcheon; back row: Larney Otis, Fred Sykes, Ben Taylor, Peter Flynn

Class of 1970: front row (L to R): Ogden Hunnewell, Peter Snyder, William De Schweinitz, Rosanna Means, Georgia Brown Pollak, Heather Smith Collins, Grace Holden, Wendy Bremer Archibald; middle row: Stephen Gifford, George Powers, Hugh Osborn, Alexandra Evans Guild ’71, Jane Cruckshank Zimmerman, Gertrude Miller LaVigne, Martha Sullivan Brady, Christina Carr, Marian McCue, Mina Carson, Edward Hays; back row: Anthony Garvan, William Forbes, Bruce Shaw, Francis Underhill, Charles Haydock, Nathaniel Weeks, Richard Dougherty, Edward Batchelder, Lydia Graves, William Corea

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Class of 1975: front row (L to R): Louise Preston Werden, Kym Lew Nelson, Suzie Hurd Greenup, Jane Rogers Rosenberg, Julia Rabkin, Rhona Mahony; back row: Clinton Loftman, Erik Gaensler, Marvin Anderson, Frances Johnson South, Foerd Ames, Martha Smith McManamy

Class of 1980: front row (L to R): Alice McNay Curtin, Emily Benton Morgan, Christine Sang, Nancy White Theberge, Hope Windle, Kate Mali Pingeon; back row: Roger Hallowell, Cornelia Trowbridge, Brooke Herndon, Henrietta Kernan, Nicholas Zervas, Christopher Sear, Sean McVity, Ginny Kingsley Kapner

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Class of 1985: front row (L to R): Reni Doulos Cadigan ’86, Christine Hoey DeMatteo, Jim Morrissey, JacQuie Parmlee-Bates, Jose Robledo, Elizabeth Davis, Caitlin Meaney Burrows, Cristina Mathews, Mark Tribe; second row: Luke Cadigan, Eric Tsang, Martin DeMatteo, Alexandra Colt, Hong Duong, Tom Clayton, Lynda Ruiz, Dan Berger; third row: Steve Cervieri, Chris Wyett, Mark Chan, Joli Mitra, Rachael Weber Sabates, Christina Takoudes Morrison, Charles Pratt, Chris Henrikson, Tim Fitzgibbons; fourth row: Pat Flaherty, Tara Parel Wilson, Tom Atkinson, Bill Cassin, Maggie Parker; fifth row: Tim Mackey, Allison Churchill Flaggert, David Schore, Davida Pines, Laurence George Chase, Katy Downes, Jamie Forbes, Maria Panarese Dala, Gordon Carr; back row: Ed Hartman, Eamon O’Marah, Alex Timken, Sara Ranney, Chris Churchill, Jon Slavet, Liz Day Churchill, Tim Perini, Seth Handy, Tim Ziegler, Sarah Smith Klingbeil, Joe Chase

Class of 1990: front row (L to R): Sarah Culver, Ben Goodman, Martin Hale, Gregg Miller, Joshua Carpman, Sarah Burley Reid, Dorado Kinney; second row: Patty Smith (former faculty), Tara Connolly Stilwell, Eliza Sullivan, Jaspaul Singh, Robert Ramage, Lawrence Schwartz, Alex Taylor; third row: Lydia Unfried, Tania Rodriguez, Maria Colbert, Caroline Bell Ritchie, Kimberly Blair, Seth Reynolds, Sumul Shah; fourth row: Samantha Adams, Claire Johnson, Wendy Kaufman Gale, Andy Welch, Andy Wanning, Marta Hummel Mossburg, Mark Fraioli; fifth row: Caroline Roberts, Eric Morrissey, John Sweeney, Sage Brennan, Kristin Lester Revill, Amy Isaac, Ellen Casey Boyd, Preble Jaques; back row: Louis Berk, Michael Cervieri, James Millard, Julie Kleinman, Erin McIntyre, Douglas Dohan, Andy Wiemeyer, Kimberly Liftman Knispel, Moon Lee

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Thaddeus Ferber ’93 and Heather Rieman were married on March 28, 2010, in Tucson, Arizona.

Ben Olken ’93, wife Amy, and big brother Sam welcomed the newest member of the family, Sarah Olken Finkelstein, on February 2, 2010.

Gigi Saltonstall ’93 married Jean-François Goldstyn on September 26, 2009, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Milton alumni helped them celebrate: (pictured from left to right) Lucy Byrd ’01, Alice Byrd ’99, Kate McGuinn Motley ’93, Alison Burnes Balster ’93, Amy Saltonstall Isaac ’90, Gigi Saltonstall ’93, Tim Mackey ’85. Missing from photo: Christina McGinnes McCormick ’90.

Sander Cohan ’96 and his wife, Katie, recently welcomed their son, Peter Connolly Cohan.

Jocelyn “Rose” Rosenthal lives in San Francisco, California, with her husband, Steve. She is acting, writing, and studying to become a certified sommelier.

Jocelyn invites fellow alumni to check out her blog at www.winesandrose.blogspot.com.

1991 Joanna Hayley Bernstein Gilbertson and her husband, Ashley, celebrated the first birthday of their son, Hugo Fox, on June 22, 2010, in their new West Village home. Joanna writes, “Although Uncle Alex Millet and his fiancée, Claire Beech, were

Marc Pitman is the campaign director for a gubernatorial race in Maine. A fund raiser and author, Marc will lead the campaign’s efforts to promote Senator Peter Mills’s strategic plan to bring fiscal restraint, government accountability, and economic expansion to Maine.

unable to attend the festivities, they brought thoughtful gifts the following week.”

Hannah Miller-Lerman writes, “My longtime sweetheart, Kendall, and I are excited to announce the birth of our son, Spencer Miller Cook. He was born in Reno, Nevada, on March 1, 2009. Let me know if you are in Tahoe; I’d love to see classmates.”

Amy Hamill McDonough and her husband, Michael, joyfully welcomed their third son, Oliver Bede Hamill McDonough, on March 4, 2010, in Hong Kong.

1993

Spencer Miller Cook and new mom Hannah Miller-Lerman ’91

Thaddeus Ferber married Heather Rieman on March 28, 2010, in Tucson, Arizona.

Thaddeus (vice president for policy at the Forum for Youth Investment) and Heather (an Obama political appointee working in the U.S. Department of Education) share a passion for Milton Magazine

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education equity, travel and photography. Thaddeus and Heather enjoyed wedding pie instead of wedding cake as a tribute to the PieFest charity event they host every year.

Mike Fitzgibbons and wife Lindsey welcomed their son, Nathaniel Taylor, on January 31, 2010.

Ben Olken and wife Amy Finkelstein welcomed their daughter, Sarah Olken, on February 2, 2010. Sarah joins big brother Sam (3). Amy and Ben are both economics professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and live in Brookline.

Cabot Cheese. Corey is also a sergeant currently deployed to Afghanistan with the 173 IBCT (Mountain Unit) out of Vermont, but he looks forward to spending time with his son when he returns next year.

Massachusetts, where Laura is an associate in the Real Estate, REITS & Real Estate Capital Markets Group at Goodwin Procter LLP in Boston. Terry is a software engineer at SolidWorks Corporation in Concord.

Nat Kreamer and his wife, Marisa, are thrilled to announce the birth of their daughter, Carolina Margalit, born on February 15, 2010, in Los Angeles, California.

1996

Laura Semerjian Sherman and husband Terry announce the birth of a son, Alexander Trenton, born on February 6, 2010. They live in Arlington,

Andrew Kay and his wife, Le, welcomed their first daughter, Maiya Eden, on March 4, 2010, in Dallas, Texas.

Sander Cohan and his wife, Katie, are proud to announce the birth of their son, Peter Connolly, born on June 25, 2010.

1998 Sarah Kahan Abbett and her husband, Jonathan, welcomed their second son, Moshe, in May 2010. Sarah reports, “Older brother, Avi, loves giving his new brother lots of hugs and kisses.”

Elizabeth Simon-Higgs and her husband are thrilled to announce the birth of their son, Daniel Ari, on October 29, 2009.

2000 Brian Foley married Robin Delamater on April 10, 2010, in Santa Barbara, California.

Gigi Saltonstall married JeanFrançois Goldstyn on September 26, 2009, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Albert Yu left the Four Seasons and world of corporate hotels in September 2009 and is now teaching hospitality management at Mission College in Santa Clara, California. Albert writes, “I saw Demetrios Efstratiou in Key West last summer—he was my roommate in Forbes House junior and senior year, and he’s currently running for judge in Key West, Florida.”

1995 Kerry Bystrom visited Germany this summer with husband Florian Becker and their families. Kerry and Florian also spent time teaching in the International Human Rights Exchange Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, before returning to the University of Connecticut (where Kerry is an assistant professor of English) and Bard College (where Florian is an assistant professor of German).

Ann Cross Chapman and her husband, Corey, welcomed a baby boy—Oren Cross Chapman—on February 9, 2010. He joins sisters Shannon (4) and Addison (7). They live in Tunbridge, Vermont, where Ann is an EMT and Corey is a dairy farmer who milks for 70

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The Foley family gathered in Santa Barbara, California, for Brian Foley’s (Class of 2000) marriage to Robin Delamater on April 10, 2010. The celebration included Kevin Foley ’96, Brian Foley ’00, Ed and Anne Foley (Milton faculty member), Ed Foley Jr. ’84, Meg Foley Burke ’91 and Sam Foley ’16.

Will Lyons ’96 and his wife, Melissa, are enjoying life in Boston with their daughter, Grayson Schieffelin Lyons, who was born October 10, 2009.

Michael Walsh ’01 and Caitlin Flint ’02 were married on September 6, 2009, in Mashpee, Massachusetts. Helping them celebrate were many Milton friends: Morgan Blum ’02, Peter Cohen ’01, Nick Rosenthal ’01, Jackie Flint ’06, Emily Driscoll ’02, Caroline Curtis ’02, Anne Marie Evriviades ’01, Molly McGuinness ’02, Nora Delay ’02, Tripp Egan ’01, Erin Mulvey ’06, Ryan Walsh ’05, Sarah Ceglarski ’02, Vicki Bendetson ’02, Sam Burke ’02, Julian Madden ’02 and John Pope ’04.

Will McLennan ’00 and his wife, Dagan, welcomed Teague Asher McLennan into the world on April 24, 2010.

Class of 1995: front row (L to R): Alyssa Burrage Scott, Sandy Schmid, David Colbert, Jordan Woods; second row: Wat Tyler, Ben Flynn, Jess Meyer, Rosanna Rossi, Paula Lyons, D.J. Min, Jason Morales; third row: Sulai Sivadel, Ali Stumm Pogorelec, Ed Fenster, Mairi Beautyman, Alejandro Amezcua, Atticus Gifford, Alice DuBois; fourth row: Shana McMenimon McCarthy, Elizabeth Erickson, Sophia Carroll, Christine Curley Skiadas, Adam Kurkjian, Jenne Colasacco, Justin Bowers; back row: Nick Hausman, Lyle Bradley, Olivia Peoples, Ruth Arras Barbie, James “Cape” Flood, K. Alexandra Pappas, Michelle Morrissey

Class of 2000: front row (L to R): Tyler Caine, Carri Chan, Rachel Feinberg, Amanda Burrage, Rebecca Leventhal, Jane Innis, Maame Agyeiwaah, Hilary Karls, Shauneida DePeiza, Natalia Solano, Jen Taylor, Maggie Turner, Bree McKenney, Katherine Sims, Lizza Weir, Prianka Chawla, Sara O’Brien, Molly Perkins, Kate Orchard, Tadge Dryja, Debo Aderibigbe; next row (L to R): Kirsten Hilgendorf, Zoe Wright, John Sullivan, Josh Pressman, Rob Weller, Molly Graham, Merrill Feather, Margot Pollans, Kate Doniger, Cortney Tunis, Tim Gravel, Sophie Beal, Drew Konove, K.C. Schwartz, Shannon Gulliver, Maisy Samuelson, Critter Gilpin; back row (L to R): Dave Huoppi, Josh Cohen, Mark Angeloni, James Ollen-Smith, Bo Hurd, Peter Smith, Chris Feige, Matt Goethals, Vincent Lee, Bud Bishop, Jason Bowen, Jennie Bartlett, Ashley Carter, Andy Lapham, Dave Malkenson, Michael Lerman, Colin Gartska, Eugene Izumo, Scott Vasquez, David Chang, Henry Ladd, Ellen Manz, Brent Bucknum

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Shortly thereafter, they left for an extended honeymoon in Europe. Brian regrets missing his 10th Reunion but sends his best to all.

Will McLennan announces the birth of his son, Teague Asher.

Teague was born on April 24, 2010, and was delivered, according to plan, at home in the tub.

2002 Caitlin Flint and Michael Walsh ’01 were married on September 6, 2009, in Mashpee, Massachusetts.

2003

Deceased 1931 Charles F. Woodard, Esq. 1934 Adeline Hooper Hugo 1935 Elizabeth Wentworth Kellogg 1936 William F. LeSourd Donald C. Watson 1939 Catherine Ross Ervin David A. Goldthwait Hallett C. Lang

1942 Stephen C. Harris David Jeffries Sarah W. Rollins 1944 Anne Edwards Boutwell Elizabeth McIver Flavin Marie Clark Hodges Nathaniel S. Preston Robert E. Toppan Barbara Lane Wright 1945 Willard C. Macfarland David B. Stone 1949 Betsy Brown Bower Reginald H. Smithwick

1955 Chandler Bigelow II 1961 Chris Kane 1965 Caroline Saltonstall Robinson 1967 Philip A. Role 1974 Anne Chase 1979 Robert A. Nebesar, Jr. Paul J. Ouellet Former Faculty Gloria Eade Gallic Perkins

Thomas Coleman is living in London.

Class of 2005: front row (L to R): Amanda Levin, Randy Ryan, Sofia Warner, Jenna Larson Boyle, Naja Baldwin, Tess Kenner, Meredith Kernan, Yunji Kim, Julie Ellison, Neil Katuna, Laura Will, Laurel Carter; second row: Ian Kwok, Mike O’Sullivan, Charlie Haydock, Colin Geoffroy, Martha Pitt, Liesl Kenney, VyVy Le, Marianna Tu, Clare Bernard, Dilshoda Yergasheva, Jason Yeager, Catherine Buzney, Julia Kingsdale; third row: Zac Trudeau, Sheldon Bond, Andrew De Stadler, Spencer Platt, Casey McCourt, Buddy Calitri, Dennis Donovan, Boris Rasin, Arkady Rasin, Jacob Frank, David Dennis, Vanderley Cabral, Yi Li; back row: Brittany Delany, Jamie Phinney, Charles Gill, Sam Stone, Lee Seymour, Jon LaRochelle, Noah Lawrence, Andrew Pinkham, Jit Gupta, Jessica Heitman, Kate Godkin, Meredith Nelson, Lawrence Duggan, Matt S. Miller, Cam Skinner, Randi Spoon, Katie Lazares, Rachel Doorly, Sara Pulit, Taylor LeMelle, Matt D. Miller, Doria Cole

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