Milton Magazine, Spring 2022 by Milton Academy

DA R E TO B E T R U E

SPRING 2022

Comedian and Filmmaker CJ Hunt ’03 (SEE PAGE 10)

THE POWER OF IMAGINATION BRINGING NEW IDEAS AND PERSPECTIVES INTO A COMPLEX WORLD

Contents spring 2022

“ A lot of creativity is about asking, ‘Where has there been darkness? Where have there been mistakes?’”

Features

BEKA STURGES ’90 (See p. 16)

Quad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

head of school . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Nurturing the Imagination faculty perspective . . . . . . . . . . 6

Exposure to the Arts Teaches Important Life Skills

16 On the Cover

At the heart of Milton’s mission is its commitment to nurturing every student’s curiosity about the world and the endless possibilities for growth and change. When C J HUNT ‘03 met up with photographer Brad Trent in Manhattan for his photo shoot in January, he was ready to try anything, says the photographer. The comedian and filmmaker liked the idea of making the props and lighting part of the shoot and was eager to try out multiple poses and expressions. “We had a lot of fun,” says Trent.

Hard Truths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 CJ HUNT ’03 confronts America’s distorted history around race in his recently released documentary The Neutral Ground.

Reimagining the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Navigating between the challenges posed by the natural world and the needs of humankind, landscape architect BEKA STURGES ’90 describes a profession that endlessly reimagines the future.

c l o ck w i s e f rom top l e f t : k a rol i n s c h no or; j onath a n koz ow y k ; ja s on g row; f e bi n ra j ; mac ke n z i e s t roh

The Power of Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

On Centre . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 DA R E TO B E T RU E SPRING 2022

upper school . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

HEAD OF SCHOOL

Science in the Modern Age

Todd B. Bland

lower school . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Jennifer Anderson

A Focus on Reading

Looking for Quantum Signs in Everyday Lıfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A passion sparked at Milton sent physicist JACK HARRIS ‘90 into a field of study that gives his imagination free rein.

in the news . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

New Board of Trustees president, student publishes in science journal, Astronomy Club photographs Orion Nebula, and more

E D I TO R

Sarah Abrams AS S O C I AT E E D I TO R

Marisa Donelan CO PY E D I TO R

Martha Spaulding DESIGN

Modus Operandi Design Patrick Mitchell

A Living Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Visual artist, choreographer, and educator BEAU BREE RHEE ‘03 works at the intersection of dance, drawing, and ecology.

C H I E F CO M M U N I CAT I O N O F F I C E R

CO N T R I B U T I N G A RT I S T S

Alumni Life . . . . . . . . . 49 class notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 alumni books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 in memoriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 board of trustees . . . . . . . . . . 65 nkotq: new kids on the quad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

Adam Avery Webb Chappell Jason Grow Jonathan Kozowyk Simone Massoni Bratislav Milenkovic Febin Raj Karolin Schnoor Mackenzie Stroh Brad Trent Jing Wei 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 opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, or 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, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, or national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school-administered activities. printed in the usa on recycled paper

Spring 2022

PREGAME HUDDLE Members of Milton’s boys’ varsity basketball team take a moment before the game with Loomis Chaffee in January. Their shirts honor varsity hockey player Jake Thibeault ’22, who was injured last fall.

Milton Magazine

L E A D E R S H I P & FA C U LT Y P E R S P E C T I V E S

photograph by

Webb Chappell

Spring 2022

Quad Head of School

Nurturing the Imagination

BY TODD B. BLAND, HEAD OF SCHOOL

Milton Magazine

it can feel a bit magical to watch Milton’s robotics team in action. □ On any given day, our Upper School robotics team can be found on the lower level of the Art and Media Center, excited, solving problems as they squeeze in time to build and practice with their robots or just hang out with one another between classes and after school. The atmosphere is vibrant and collaborative (and sometimes messy), bustling with activity as they improve their robots’ performance, repairing parts and revisiting strategy with an eye toward competition on stages big and small. □ Two things are clear: This is a special place for our robotics team. And this is a place that belongs to students. □ Their successes, and the fun they have while achieving them, are emblematic of the good that comes when a school celebrates daring; when students’ imaginations are boundless; when educators encourage kids to explore their interests; and when they incorporate those interests in the classroom. □ Our robotics team is noteworthy in another way, in that a majority of participants identify as female or gender-nonbinary. The robotics industry today is dominated by men, but in our students, I see a more inclusive future. The team has benefited from the powerful leadership of seniors and recent graduates who have welcomed one and all. Robotics newbies join when they can see themselves reflected on the team; they stay because they’re supported. They are helped, too, by the example set by educators such as Chris Hales in the Upper School and Bridget Sitkoff in the Lower and Middle Schools— teachers who embrace the cutting edge of technology and give their students space to explore new frontiers. □ Imagination at Milton spreads out like a sunrise across disciplines, student activities, and even the physical spaces on our campus. We are a school that rewards growth and thinking outside the box. And, increasingly, we’re a school that lets its students guide the way, under the sage watch of our talented faculty.

ja s on grow

FROM THE LOWER TO THE UPPER SCHOOL, CREATIVITY FLOURISHES AT MILTON

The result is teaching that appeals to students’ interests, recognizes and honors their lived experiences, and energizes our classrooms. Listening to our students is a transformative way to create and implement teaching plans as well as create meaningful student activities. Following their lead and being flexible empowers them to grow beyond what they might have imagined, develop a sense of ownership over their work, stay engaged in the face of challenging problems, and make connections across academic disciplines. An explosion of creativity happens with senior projects—opportunities to deeply explore topics that pique our students’ interests. Typically, students return at the end of May with inventions, performances, programming projects, art, research, curriculum ideas, crafts, and stories from volunteer missions or internships. One year, a student who studied medieval warfare built some replica weapons by hand; on the day of our senior project fair, a life-size, functional catapult was on Stokinger Field. Student voices are critical as our Middle School learners grow in confidence, independence, and advocacy for themselves and others. Seventh-graders select social issues to explore in an in-depth research project, where they also present inventive ideas to solve big problems. Eighth-graders deliver talks in which they tell their unique stories to classmates or take decisive stances on modern issues. This past fall, our youngest Middle Schoolers shared their own voices with the whole division as most of the grade, under the direction of Grade illustration by

Karolin Schnoor

“We are a school that rewards growth and thinking outside the box.”

6 English teacher Isabel Forward, performed a delightful—and delightfully original—song about the parts of speech. It’s hard to imagine sixth-graders being willing to get up and speak in front of their older peers, let alone sing for that audience. And yet, most of our sixth-graders were up there, proud and jubilant, rocking out over grammar. Even our youngest voices are heard in meaningful ways. Lower School students this year constructed a large, participatory art piece called the Unity Project behind the Pritzker Science Center. Using orange and blue yarn, visitors were invited to wrap strings around and between posts that stood in a circle. Each post represented some social identifier, from ability to gender ex-

pression to age and beyond. The effect was striking. Open to the entire K–12 community, the piece grew day by day. The project was not only a great, hands-on way for our Lower School students to learn about intersecting identities—a concept that’s out of reach for some adults—in a visual and accessible format, but also a creative reminder to all: See how connected we are to one another. See how strong we are together. Imagination is in the air that we breathe at Milton, and it starts, first and foremost, with the young people we educate. It is what will carry our venerable school onward across the decades to come, keeping our students engaged and excited, and inspiring our faculty to continually press forward. I can’t wait to see what’s next. ■

Spring 2022

Quad Faculty Perspective

Exposure to the Arts Teaches Important Life Skills CLASSES IN THE ARTS OFFER STUDENTS THE TOOLS THAT HELP THEM TO THINK CRITICALLY AND SOLVE PROBLEMS

WHO TAKES ART AT MILTON?

Every student in their freshman year is exposed to the full spectrum of what Milton has to offer in the arts—from the visual to the performing arts. The freshman visual arts requirement is a semester long, and during that time we offer a multitude of units that touch upon each genre of art—photography, drawing and painting, sculpture and ceramics, film and video, and technology and design. They dabble; they get one assignment from each of the genres that we offer. Then, later, sometime before they graduate, they choose one course in the arts to fulfill their graduation requirement.

Photography teacher Scott Nobles

CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY STUDENTS?

Every student in my photo program 6

Milton Magazine

after freshman year has elected to take my class. They may be taking it because they’re really excited about photography, or they may be just throwing a dart at the board to see what happens. But almost 100 percent of the time, once they’re in the class, they realize they can be creative, even if they didn’t think they were or even if they don’t have an arts background. That’s really what we’re striving to teach in the visual arts program—that everyone has creativity in them. And I think we reach most students. They get it. They are extremely talented and can apply their creativity to other areas of their lives. WHAT’S IT LIKE TO SEE THAT LIGHT GO OFF WHEN THEY GET IT?

Oh, it’s wonderful. That’s why I keep coming back to teaching. I love it. To see that spark, to see that “aha” moment, is lovely. It happens with most students; it’s just that they may be on a different trajectory in terms of when. WHAT’S THE PROCESS FOR GETTING STUDENTS TO THAT “AHA” MOMENT?

It’s tricky in photography because, as I explain to my beginning students, photography is both science and art. It’s technology plus creativity. I start from the ground and slowly elevate their skill level in both technique and aesthetics. Many of them find it daunting to pick up a camera for the very first time. It’s got so many buttons, and it’s very different from the smartphone camera that they’re so used to.

j oh n g i ll o oly

before arriving at Milton five years ago, photography teacher Scott Nobles worked for many years in New York City as a commercial photographer, with clients that included Canon, GE, Boston University, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Books, and various magazines, among others. He also taught photography at colleges in the New York area, including New York University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. He continues to maintain a commercial photography business. Shortly before the end of the fall semester, Nobles sat down with Milton Magazine to talk about teaching and helping Milton students connect to their inborn creativity.

The first couple of assignments are really just about exploring— looking up, looking down, getting low, getting high with their cameras. Then it slowly builds. The second assignment, we start playing around with a few additional buttons on their cameras and, at the same time, train their eyes a little bit more to look for specific elements in a composition. It could be lines or shapes or colors. As you build from one unit to the next, you’re taking the knowledge that you’ve acquired and adding to it. I’m at a point in the semester right now where the students know the camera inside and out. They have a good understanding of how to build a strong composition. Now we’re starting to have a bit more fun. We start to dabble with the back side of tweaking an image in Photoshop, or diving into the lighting studio and learning how to experiment and play with controlling light. It’s not meant to be scary. It’s meant to allow them to grow, especially if they have no experience whatsoever with photography.

a little bit of guidance. “What do you like about the image, and what could be improved?” Those questions can be asked of every single student no matter what level they’re at. As long as a student is open to hearing that feedback, regardless of their skill level, they will continually grow and start to realize they can improve and be more creative.

HOW DO YOU ENGAGE THE LESS-CONFIDENT STUDENT WHO MAY NEVER HAVE TAKEN A PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS?

I try to create a nurturing environment in my classroom. I try to teach all the students how to be respectful and how to raise everyone’s abilities—technically as well as aesthetically. One of the ways I do that is to dedicate an entire class to critiquing student work for each assignment. It’s a student-led critique with me jumping in occasionally just to offer illustration by

Karolin Schnoor

“Having a foundation [in the arts] teaches you about being imaginative and coming up with multiple ways of tackling a problem.”

WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT FOR STUDENTS TO KNOW THAT ABOUT THEMSELVES?

One of the key goals—for myself and for all my visual arts colleagues—is to show that the arts are for everyone and play an important role in a society. It doesn’t matter if you’re going on to college to study the arts or if you’re going to have a Spring 2022

career in the arts. Having a foundation teaches you about being imaginative and coming up with multiple ways of tackling a problem—whether it be a visual problem or any problem whatsoever. Iteration is a big word that’s thrown around a lot, which just simply means saying to yourself, “Okay, you’ve tackled the problem this one way, have you thought about a different angle? Have you thought about a different exposure or a different lens?” The first solution is not always the best solution. Knowing that can be applied to the arts, but it can also be applied to deeper, more critical thinking in general. They can take that knowledge and apply it to being a physicist, a lawyer, or an engineer. Creativity is vital to any career you go into. ■ 7

SPRING 2022

Milton Magazine

The Power of

Imagination

At the heart of Milton’s mission is its commitment to nurturing every student’s curiosity about the world and the endless possibilities for growth and change. In this issue, we feature some of the thinkers, artists, and scientists among us who’ve never stopped imagining, bringing new ideas and perspectives into a complex world.

illustration by

Jing Wei

Spring 2022

Story by Marisa Donelan Photographs by Brad Trent

Hard

Milton Magazine

COMEDIAN AND FILMMAKER CJ HUNT ’03 CONFRONTS AMERICA’S DISTORTED HISTORY AROUND R ACE IN HIS RECENTLY RELEASED DOCUMENTARY, THE NEUTR AL GROUND.

Truths

Spring 2022

There’s a tense moment in the documentary The Neutral Ground when filmmaker CJ HUNT ’03 asks a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to accompany him to the Whitney Plantation, a Louisiana museum dedicated to documenting the realistic lives of enslaved Black people in the antebellum South. At that point, Hunt has spent significant time with the man, Thomas Taylor, and several other neo-Confederates—even attending a battle reenactment with a group who passionately insist that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, not slavery, and that enslaved Black people were treated well by those who bought and sold them. Taylor immediately dismisses the idea. He would “never step foot” on the Whitney Plantation, asserting that the history taught there is “bullshit.” “An early viewer told me, ‘I was heartbroken when Taylor said he wouldn’t go to the slavery museum,’” explains Hunt, who wrote and directed the documentary. “And then that person said to me, ‘I asked myself, why did I think that’s where the film was going?’ That’s a heavy question. I also thought that that’s where the film was going.” “I had thought, maybe this film is going to be about us converting a white supremacist and changing his mind,” continues Hunt, who is Black and Filipino. “That’s what we crave in our stories about race. We want stories of reconciliation. We want stories about racists who— after a certain number of history lessons and heartfelt moments—experience a change of heart. What people don’t hunger for are stories about the messy work of reckoning,

but that’s what this film is.” Beginning with a volatile debate over the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans, The Neutral Ground, which was an official selection at the June 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and premiered in July on the PBS documentary series POV to critical acclaim, explores the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a false history that sought to justify southern secession and the Civil War. Those who insist that the monuments and the Civil War itself had nothing to do with race or slavery are well versed in the points of the ideology, Hunt says. Careful not to lend legitimacy to arguments supporting the Lost Cause, The Neutral Ground dissects the lies, highlights their absurdity, and shows how their dangerous legacy continues today. “The lie born 150 years ago is alive in the mouths and minds and memories of people now,” Hunt says. “It is the same lie that motivates somebody to walk into a Charleston church with a gun, and it is the same lie that motivates men to defend a Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, and it is the same lie that compels people to carry a Confederate flag as they storm the Capitol.” The Lost Cause developed after the Civil War to build a sense of heritage, comfort, and justification among mourning southern white families, particularly white women who had lost fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers in the war. It claims “states’ rights” was the cause of the war. And it invokes a false memory of a peaceful, genteel South where elegant white men and women cared for everyone and everything and where enslaved peo-

Milton Magazine

“To me it feels like sometimes a lot of being Black is remembering pain, and wearing that pain.... It is a freeing thing to be able to look at that history in a positive way, in a way that feels like we were agents of change.”

p hoto g ra p h by

Spring 2022

ple were loyal and happy, historian Christy Coleman says in the film. It ignores the brutality and violence of slavery, a system in which people were kidnapped, exploited for their labor, beaten, raped, tortured, and killed. The Lost Cause went from myth to shared memory to curriculum. At the behest of groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public schools across the South and beyond taught its tenets as factual history until as late as the 1970s. Monuments to Confederate leaders and slave-owners were erected not as immediate memorials in the years following the war but during later decades, as Black citizens were advancing in or fighting for civil rights. “It’s hard to argue that racism is not part of our structures in this country when you see white supremacy literally carved into a monument,” Hunt says. Hunt had been living in New Orleans in 2015 when the city became embroiled in protests over plans to remove four Confederate monuments—statues honoring Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and the Battle of Liberty Place—from places of prominence in a city where the majority of citizens are Black. “At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a filmmaker,” Hunt says. “I thought of myself as a comedian aspiring to be on something like The Daily Show or Full-Frontal with Samantha Bee. My only visual language for documentary was the latenight field pieces on those shows.” His friend and film producer Darcy McKinnon grabbed some cameras and met Hunt at a city council public hearing to film the

commotion, thinking they might get footage for a satirical video. “There’s a level of vitriol from some of the white folks at that meeting, and we thought it could be funny: ‘Oh my God, look at the crazy things people are saying out loud,’” Hunt says. “But then it became clear that the city was being sued to halt the removal—a democratic decision that had already been made—and in the lawsuit it came out that contractors [hired to remove the monuments] were leaving the job due to death threats and an alleged bombing of one of their cars.” The ﬁlm follows Hunt across the South, where he speaks with historians and visits sites such as the Whitney Plantation. He travels to Charlottesville, Virginia, during the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” demonstration protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. There, he meets a white man being chased by counter-protesters. The man removes the white polo shirt that signals his affiliation with the white nationalist group Vanguard America, attempting to ward off an attack. Hunt asks him why he’s there. It’s “fun,” the man says, “just being able to say, ‘Hey man, white power. You know?’” Hunt’s goal is to show The Neutral Ground in schools everywhere, his resolve strengthened by attempts by dozens of states to ban the teaching of critical race theory—a legal framework positing that racism is structural and embedded in American institutions—in public schools. Hunt says his next project will investigate how history and race are taught to children. “I’m measuring my impact based on how many student screenings we

Milton Magazine

P The Neutral Ground was awarded Best Documentary at the American Black Film Festival and Best Southern Documentary at the Hot Springs Documentary Festival. In addition to a Best Narration nod from the Critics Choice Association, the film has been nominated for Best Score by the International Documentary Association for its March 2022 awards. For information on viewing The Neutral Ground or bringing it to your classroom, visit neutralgroundfilm.com.

mic h a el dw y e r

“It’s hard to argue that racism is not part of our structures in this country when you see white supremacy literally carved into a monument.”

do,” Hunt says. He presented The Neutral Ground to Milton students in November, when he challenged them to “Dare to be true” by confronting uncomfortable truths. “I’m asking you to dare big,” he told students. “I’m asking you to make the motto real. Because when we dare to tell the truth, that daring is contagious, more contagious than a lie.” Hunt spent his early childhood on Long Island before moving to Massachusetts for middle school. At Milton, he enjoyed making people

In his speech at Milton’s 2018 Commencement, CJ Hunt ’03 encouraged graduates to take risks and challenge the status quo.

laugh and being in front of an audience during speech tournaments (he competed in the humorous interpretation category) and he was head monitor his senior year. He attended Brown University, where he performed sketch and improv comedy. He also began teaching while at Brown in a program called Summerbridge, and enrolled in Teach for America after graduating. The program took him to New Orleans, where he taught English and social studies; he also led an after-school program teaching improv, “but opening that door was like getting bitten by the comedy bug again.” He performed stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy at night while teaching, and later when he worked in the public defenders’ office. Eventually, he landed a job at the bet show The Rundown with Robin Thede. When The Rundown was canceled, Hunt was hired at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, where he worked as a field producer and director for three years. The whole time, he was working on The Neutral Ground, assembling a crew, traveling to shoot video, and completing the film on breaks from his day jobs. He left The Daily Show in 2021 to pursue future film projects. Throughout The Neutral Ground, in candid talks with his father, Hunt reckons with the evolution of understanding his identity and his anger. As a young mixed-race person in predominantly white environments, “it felt like a burden to talk about race because it marked me as different,” he says. Later in the ﬁlm, Hunt participates in a second demonstration, one very different from the neo-Confederates’ battle. He joins

a reenactment, organized by the visual artist Dread Scott, of the 1811 German Coast uprising—the largest revolt of enslaved people in American history. Hunt is among hundreds of participants who trace the journey of the 19th-century march on New Orleans. Scott concludes the event with a celebration honoring the heroism of the revolutionaries and their effort to fight for their own freedom and end slavery for all, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. Hunt, who has kept a straight face or a deadpan affect for most of the film, explains his feelings: “To me it feels like sometimes a lot of being Black is remembering pain, and wearing that pain... It is a freeing thing to be able to look at that history in a positive way, in a way that feels like we were agents of change.” He continues, “Marching in an army of Black rebels, I realize how long I’ve been doing the opposite. I feel Blackest when I’m chasing white supremacists. Like I’m somehow earning my spot when I put myself in danger or dive back in history to dig up the evidence. But the power I feel in this moment has nothing to do with staring at whiteness. It comes from being able to see myself outside of that chase.” The scene continues with no narration as it captures participants making music, dancing, and reveling in the recognition of an often-ignored—but very real—historical event. They wear period clothing and hold imitations of the weapons carried in the rebellion. Hunt bounces with the rhythm before realizing he’s in the shot. He turns to face the camera, and he smiles. ■

Spring 2022

p hoto g ra p h by

Reim

the

NAVIGATING BETWEEN THE CHALLENGES POSED BY THE NATUR AL WORLD AND THE NEEDS OF HUMANKIND, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IS A PROFESSION THAT ENDLESSLY REIMAGINES THE FUTURE. Story by Sarah Abrams

Photographs by Jonathan Kozowyk

Landscape architect Beka Sturges ’90, visiting one of her recent projects, Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.

agining

p hoto g ra p h by

illustration by

Tktktktk

Spring Fall 2022 2021

“The fact that we have not been safe inside and have had to find ways to learn, play, and be with our communities outside has been a reversal in the idea that the outside world is unsafe and our interior is safe.”

for decades, seaside park along the Connecticut shoreline has provided the residents of Bridgeport with 325 acres of sandy beaches and rolling fields. But as the city leadership moves to protect nearby neighborhoods from rising sea levels by elevating streets and erecting walls, residents are in danger of losing access to where they go to swim, play, and relax. From her office at Reed Hilderbrand in New Haven, Connecticut, landscape architect BEKA STURGES ’90 describes how the impending loss of a neighborhood’s open space is a good example of the kind of problem that landscape architects are often asked to solve. As part of Bridgeport’s resiliency efforts, Sturges and her colleagues are working to rebuild Seaside Park, creating landforms of gentle slopes and hills that will protect the neighborhood from storm surge and provide a way for floodwaters to recede. The rolling landform will also allow easy connections between the park and the surrounding neighborhood. “Landscape architecture is all about how you organize natural systems with human systems,” explains Sturges, who is a partner and principal at Reed Hilderbrand. “And within that, integrating civil engineering. We work to determine where the bridges, the roads, the conduits, utilities, and waste all go. What landscape architects do is help shape the environment so that both the cultural experience and ecolog-

ical life are robust.” “Basically water is always going to win, and people’s desires are also always going to win,” she says. “I like to say that what water is going to do and what humans want are the driving forces. And then there’s the reality: Where is the bedrock? What is the soil? How is the climate operating in this condition? And there are other factors: Is there an institution that has a certain mission, or is there a huge population explosion coming? Is there some technological advance that’s really interesting?” Learning to ask questions is critical to the creative process, says Sturges. “If you can ask a question that hasn’t been asked before, if you always bring a curiosity and conﬁdence that there is a way of imagining a solution, then you’re beginning to solve the problem. You’re asking, ‘What’s the future that we want to have, and how do we get there?’ And then, ‘What are the pitfalls? What are the past failures?’ A lot of creativity is about asking, ‘Where has there been darkness? Where have there been mistakes?’” At Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches each spring, Sturges encourages students to do the same. “Teaching design is a creative act; it’s very improvisational and collaborative,” she says. “Models and miniature worlds emerge over the course of the semester. I am always encouraging the students to ask specific questions and to draw through their answers.” It’s a learn-

Milton Magazine

ing process that she herself was exposed to at Milton, she says, from teachers such as Renee Neblett, “who held my hand as I experimented with conte crayons,” she says, and JC Smith, “who kindly recast some of my coarser observations about Faulkner. They’ve shaped what I have to offer my students.” ••• Sturges had completed two years of a Ph.D. program in literature at Princeton University when she changed her career plans. The environment was always an interest of hers. (At Milton she was a member of the environmental club lorax, and in her junior year she attended the Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki.) One day, while on break from her Ph.D. program, she sat at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in California, admiring the landscape and wondering how such stunning gardens were created. A course in drafting and an internship at a landscape architecture firm in Santa Barbara inspired her to take a different path. After graduating from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Sturges studied urban agriculture on a multi-year travel grant. In 2005, she joined Reed Hilderbrand, a landscape architecture firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eight years ago, Sturges opened a branch of the highly regarded firm in New Haven, where her husband, JACK HARRIS ’90, is a physics professor at Yale University (see story

on page 22) and where she saw an opportunity to expand the firm’s reach. Sturges is encouraged by how the profession continues to address the climate crisis. The field keeps raising its standards around mitigating harm to the environment. She recalls that on a project for the Clark Art Institute in 2009, which updated the institute’s 140-acre campus of meadows, forests, and streams, she and her colleagues were asking if the leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for limiting impact on the environment were as good as they could be: “We pushed for more-holistic engineering and united the building and site water systems. It felt very novel at the time to raise those kinds of questions, but today, it’s expected. That heightened awareness has become normalized.” Issues around equity have also become central to the conversation. “Our cities and our neighborhoods have not evolved equitably,” she says. Some communities, for example, have long been able to protect the natural environment while still having access to the land, whereas, in other communities, preserved lands are often inaccessible. Two recent projects—one in Houston and the other in Cambridge—are changing that scenario. At the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, situated within one of the country’s largest urban parks, the landscape architects at Reed Hilderbrand created a network of paths

that light can drop underneath it? Why is there shade for a wetland? We’re able to provide experiences that allow people to ask those questions and see.” People are also surprised and pleased, Sturges says, by how modest departures from the expected can change how they feel and remember a place: “It can be as simple as the placement of found stones or the texture of a handrail.”

Milton Magazine

••• Sturges also sees progress at the personal level, as climate change and the covid pandemic have forced individuals to reconsider how they interact with the natural world. She points to the Netherlands, where, for centuries, citizens have been active participants in controlling their environment. Since so much of the country is below sea level, they have used earthen barriers, called polders, and canals, to control water and organize development. Generally speaking, “in America, we don’t think about how we can and do design the environment,” she says. “We plant our trees and our parks, but climate change has created a sense of vulnerability that is helping all of us better understand some of the positive things we can do. If we plant more trees, take care of our wetlands, keep our water quality high, and stop polluting, we can mitigate its effects. This heightened awareness has made this amorphous, boundless, moving set of systems that are the natural world suddenly

a priority and a point of design and intention.” And covid has also sharpened people’s focus on the environment. “The fact that we have not been safe inside and have had to find ways to learn, play, and be with our communities outside has been a reversal in the idea that the outside world is unsafe and our interior is safe. The very idea of shelter has been a little bit turned on its head,” says Sturges. “And think of all the regulations, many of which were created as temporary solutions during the pandemic—bike lanes and street closings that make more room for pedestrians and sidewalk restaurants and cafes—that are now being looked at to become permanent. People love these pilot projects. Hopefully, we will soon be able to take off our masks and go back inside, but there are many times during the year when it’s actually wonderful to be outside. I think some of this will stay.” The willingness to ask the questions that haven’t been asked is what will continue to drive progress, Sturges says. “We need to always be asking, ‘What’s the future that we want, and how do we get there?’ People ask me all the time what actions they can take. Landscape architecture makes future environments; that’s what we do. It’s one of the fields that can provide a set of solutions and actions to help manage the damage and challenges of climate change.” ■

Clark Art Institute

Houston Arboretum and Nature Center

p hoto g ra p h by

that allowed residents access for the first time to some of the park’s most vulnerable environments (see sidebar). “Providing this kind of access allows people to value wetlands,” Sturges says. “We all know wetlands are instrumental in helping mitigate climate change, but if people only see them as swamps and don’t understand how they work, it’s hard to ask people to care for them.” In Cambridge, which has lost almost 20 percent of its trees over the past decade, the tree canopy is sparser in the city’s underserved communities than in the more affluent neighborhoods. “In cities like Cambridge,” Sturges says, “you can still see the legacy of redlining by where the street trees are; it’s not quite a direct overlap between neighborhoods, but it’s close. There are temperature and health issues related to that kind of inequity.” The firm’s Cambridge Urban Forest project (see sidebar) is designed to more equitably distribute tree plantings throughout the city’s neighborhoods. “Conservation commissions are often delighted by our work because what we’re doing is providing ways to see and value these vulnerable parts of our environment and creating best practices and tools for preserving them,” Sturges says. “How do you take care of a forest? It’s a really important question that doesn’t get asked enough. What makes a wetland work? Why is the boardwalk configured to make sure

Putting Her Imagination to Work Learning to ask questions, says BEKA STURGES ’90, a partner and principal at Reed Hilderbrand, is critical to the creative process. “If you can ask a question that hasn’t been asked before, if you always bring a curiosity and confidence that there is a way of imagining a solution, then you’re beginning to solve the problem.” A few of the firm’s landscape architectural projects are described below. SEASIDE PARK Designed just after the Civil War by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the 325-acre park (where Sturges’s photos were taken for this story), overlooking Long Island Sound in Bridgeport, Connecticut, features beaches, sports fields, picnic areas, and hiking trails. While the city works to protect the surrounding neighborhoods from rising sea levels, as part of the Resilient Bridgeport team, Reed Hilderbrand is working to keep the marine park accessible to its residents. CLARK ART INSTITUTE A project for the Clark Art Institute (left) updated the institute’s 140-acre campus of meadows, forests, and streams. Renewal of the campus provided better access and more-meaningful stewardship to the much-beloved Williamstown, Massachusetts, destination. HOUSTON ARBORETUM AND NATURE CENTER At the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center in Texas (bottom left) situated within one of the country’s largest urban parks, the landscape architects at Reed Hilderbrand created a network of paths that allowed the city’s residents access to some of the park’s most vulnerable environments for the first time. CAMBRIDGE URBAN FOREST Since 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a 4,500-acre city with 120,000 residents (below) has lost more than 20 percent of its tree canopy. Reed Hilderbrand is working with the city to create a long-term urban forest plan that will mitigate future risks and prioritize investing in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods.

p hoto g ra p h by

Spring 2022

Milton Magazine

A PASSION SPARKED AT MILTON SENT PHYSICIST JACK HARRIS ’90 INTO A FIELD OF STUDY THAT GIVES HIS IMAGINATION FREE REIN.

looking for

Quantum signs in Everyday Life Story by Steve Nadis Photographs by Jason Grow

Spring 2022

Quantum physics can govern the motion of everyday objects, but only if they are in pristine isolation from the rest of the universe. Magnetically levitating an object can provide the necessary degree of isolation. This image shows the magnetic field used by the Harris lab to levitate a millimeter-sized drop of superfluid helium.

Milton Magazine

ﬁrst laid down by Isaac Newton in the 1600s and completed in the 1800s, are good enough to explain much of what we see in the world around us, from the motion of balls on a billiards table to the trajectories of aircraft, rockets, and satellites. These “classical” laws were superseded in the early 20th century by quantum physics—an incredibly successful theory, which accurately describes not just the motion of tangible objects, but also the behavior of atoms, molecules, and photons. It describes how these microscopic entities combine to create the chemical, biological, and electrical processes that underlie organic life, the burning of stars, and much of the technology that defines our modern world. In addition to answering ageold questions, quantum physics has a flip side: It replaces certainty with probabilities, and brings with it lots of perplexing, counterintuitive notions. But conventional wisdom still holds that these bizarre quantum features only manifest themselves when things get very small—on the scale of atoms—and are thus not part of the familiar, macroscopic world. JACK HARRIS ’90 does not subscribe to the view that relegates quantum phenomena to the invisible, sub-microscopic realm. “Physicists seem comfortable with all this weirdness happening to very small objects like atoms,” he says, “but there’s nothing in the laws of quantum mechanics that says this doesn’t happen with big objects, too.” That’s not just an opinion. Harris’s research, which he pursues as a professor of physics at Yale University, is clearly demonstrating that very fact. It’s exhilarating work that often takes him to the outer limits

of physical understanding. In some sense, this journey began for him in 1987, the year he entered Milton Academy as a 10th grader. At the time, Harris had some interest in science. Like many of his peers, he thought outer space was “pretty cool.” But he had no idea what an actual scientist did, nor did he have any conception of a possible career or of what adult life might have in store for him. If anything, he enjoyed English classes most of all. He loved literature, both reading and talking about it and examining the craft of writing and storytelling. But that all changed rather quickly, and his life soon gained a clearer sense of direction, when he took a sophomore physics class at Milton taught by Rodney LaBrecque, “which totally blew my mind,” Harris recalls. “I was surprised that you could ask questions about the world that could be answered analytically, quantitatively, and exactly. I knew, for instance, that if you threw a ball, it would follow an arc. But I didn’t realize there were equations that could spell out its movements in precise detail.” The other great thing that happened in LaBrecque’s class was that students discovered they could slow down the lectures by raising their hands and asking “why” questions, such as: “Why does the gravitational force diminish as the square of the distance?” Fortunately, the teacher was happy to field such queries and to provide well-considered responses. What’s more, Harris came to realize that “if you ask a ‘why’ question in physics and get an answer, and ask again, and again, you will soon bump up against the frontiers of

c o urt e s y of h a rr i s l a b, ya l e u n i ve rsi t y

The principles of physics,

As a student at Milton, Jack Harris ’90 learned that asking “why” questions quickly“bump up against the frontiers of human knowledge.” Pictured here on the Yale campus in New Haven, Conn., where he is a Professor of Physics. Harris’s wife, Beka Sturges ’90, is featured on page 16.

p hoto g ra p h by

“Physicists seem comfortable with

human knowledge.” And he found that a very exciting place to be. Sophomore physics had a curriculum that LaBrecque was obliged to follow, so he encouraged interested students to read—on their own time—popular science books, written by authors such as the physicist Paul Davies, which routinely got into the kind of mind-boggling issues that Harris found most intriguing. Hearing and reading about these ideas, he says, “fired up my imagination. I couldn’t believe that the kinds of questions that we [students] were asking, and that these authors were writing about, were actually the stuff of scientific inquiry—that that’s what science could be about.” From that point on, Harris was “pretty much sold on physics.” Although he didn’t take another physics class at Milton, he continued to read books of the sort that his former teacher had suggested. He went on to major in physics at Cornell, though he was dismayed to find that only a few people in the department shared his interest in the deep foundational questions that surround the field of quantum mechanics. After finishing college in 1994, he began graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his research took a more practical, hands-on turn. A key part of this work involved building sensitive instruments that could measure the changes in reflection that occurred when laser light was directed at a shiny, movable object. Harris continued experiments along similar lines upon joining the Yale faculty in 2004. He was particularly interested in seeing

how a small mirror—consisting of a thin, one-square-millimeter wafer of glass—would move when struck by individual photons. His subfield of interest, called quantum optomechanics, is all about monitoring these quantum-induced motions. The discipline revolves around measurements like this aimed at determining how relatively “large” objects—such as the mirror in the just-cited case (a quadrillion times as heavy as a typical atom)—move around quantum mechanically when light bounces off them. He conducts a similar class of experiments on levitated, millimeter-scale drops of helium, which are cooled to near absolute zero to achieve a friction-free, “superfluid” state. The drops can trap photons, which rattle around inside, causing the drops themselves to move. And those motions are carefully recorded by Harris and his collaborators. Their observations demonstrate the fact that, unbeknownst to most of us, curious quantum behaviors do indeed arise in objects that are visible to the naked eye. For example, an object can be in two places at the same time—though it will be detected in only one place—and it can, with some probability, pass through seemingly impenetrable barriers. Moreover, objects behave differently—and their positions can become fixed in space—when they’ve been “measured,” a term that takes on a whole new meaning in the quantum domain. The phenomena documented by Harris and his group are subtle, hidden within a noisy and messy background, and it takes considerable ingenuity to elicit, measure, and then interpret the resultant quan-

Milton Magazine

tum motions. The main questions at the heart of his work are these, he says: “How big can an object get and still exhibit quantum behavior? Is there a limit to its size? And what happens when those objects get so big that their gravitational influence can’t be ignored?” A partial answer to the latter question is that if the objects become big enough to have non-negligible gravitational fields, Harris’s experiments may be able to shine light on the long-standing question of “quantum gravity.” This would be a major advance, since an accepted, workable theory of quantum gravity does not yet exist (though string theory and loop quantum gravity are some wellknown candidates). It’s clear that Harris is not likely to obtain a definitive answer anytime soon to the questions that drive his research. But to him, that’s nothing to be discouraged about. On the contrary, he considers himself extraordinarily lucky to be in a field of study in which his imagination is given free rein. Ironically, one of the things he’s learning through his research is that the world we occupy—when looked at closely and rigorously—is far stranger than most people (even himself, at times) ever imagined.

STEVE NADIS IS A FREELANCE SCIENCE WRITER BASED IN CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS. HE’S A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AT DISCOVER AND A CONTRIBUTING WRITER AT QUANTA. HIS ARTICLES HAVE APPEARED IN DOZENS OF OTHER MAGAZINES.

For a macroscopic object to exhibit quantum behavior, its vibrations must be precisely controlled. These images represent the tuning of two “notes” of a thin sheet of glass. At the center of each image, the two notes have precisely the same pitch and decay. The tuning is accomplished by pressing on the sheet with light. The pressure exerted by light plays a key role in our understanding of quantum physics.

all this weirdness happening to very small objects like atoms. But there’s nothing in the laws of quantum mechanics that says this doesn’t happen with big objects too.”

co u rt e s y of h a rri s l a b , ya le un i v e rs i t y

Spring 2022

LIVING

Story by Julia Hanna Photographs by Mackenzie Stroh

ART Milton Magazine

c ou rte s y of m a' s ho us e & bi p o c a rt s t udio i nc .

VISUAL ARTIST, CHOREOGR APHER, AND EDUCATOR BEAU BREE RHEE ‘03 WORKS AT THE INTERSECTION OF DANCE, DR AWING, AND ECOLOGY.

Beau Bree Rhee ’03 in her Brooklyn studio. Opposite, a detail from her series of paintings titled Menwees.

Spring 2022

October, when BEAU BREE RHEE ’03 arrived at Ma’s House, an art space and residency for bipoc artists on the Shinnecock Indian Nation Reservation, she went to a point where the land meets the sea. She gathered soil from this never-surrendered land, which is surrounded by the uber-manicured Hamptons on Long Island, New York. A visual artist and choreographer, Rhee has always been fascinated by intersections—by the rich moments when things cross over, be they in the natural world, in her work, or in her teaching at New York’s Parsons School of Design. Rhee transformed the soil into a pigment, the starting point for the Menwees, a new series of abstract works on paper that is the “conceptual core” of her work at the residency. (Menwee means navel in the native language and could also be read as mes nuits). Although she doesn’t work exclusively on paper, Rhee says she likes the delicacy and immediacy of it. “In that way, it relates to dance. I think of drawing as performative, too. If I’m not warmed up, if I’m not in a clarified place of a mind-body connection, it just doesn’t work out.” The process of creating pigment is a bit “like baking a brownie,” continues Rhee, who pulverized the soil with a mortar and pestle, mixed it with vinegar and gum arabic, and heated it in the oven. Later, she created a pigment from wampum shell dust. Her aim: to take something as ordinary as soil and transform it into something extraordinary. Rhee describes her body of work as an “ecosystem” of dance, draw-

Milton Magazine

ing, and ecology, with each medium crossing over with the others. A first-generation Korean-American, she grew up primarily in the Boston area, with seminal time in her childhood spent in South Korea and France. She was raised among these three cultures, completing her mfa in Geneva at the Haute école d’art et de design. “The three languages kind of swim around in my head, completing each other like a fluid Rubik’s Cube, each from a different aspect of my life,” she says. That fact, in addition to her experience of synesthesia, could be seen as the ideal circumstance for fostering a more porous perspective on language and the visual world. (Synesthetes experience one sense through another— for example, seeing a word as a color or hearing a sound and seeing a particular shape or pattern.) Rhee studied ballet and classical piano (“very seriously, like a lot of good Korean girls”) as a child, but an injury suffered as a teenager moved her away from ballet. “In some ways the injury was great, because it took me out of the hypercompetitive, non-body-positive space,” she reflects. Rhee explored other forms of dance at Milton and Barnard College of Columbia University, where she was a dance and art history double major. After graduating, she apprenticed and studied under choreographer Bill T. Jones, who visited Milton in 2002. “As a visual person, I started drawing as a way to notate movement very early on; if you’re working with other dancers and musicians, it’s a much more efficient way to com-

“One of the reasons the residency at Ma’s House was so important to me is that it’s rare for a space to be solely dedicated to bipoc artists— and I don’t know if I would have been comfortable saying that I needed that support out loud prior to 2020.”

Spring 2022

“As a visual person, I started drawing as a way to notate movement very early on; if you’re working with other dancers and musicians, it’s a much more efficient way to communicate.”

c o urt e s y of th e rh e e fa m i ly

municate,” says Rhee, who during her residency last fall choreographed Les Parages, a solo dance film performed on the edge of West Woods, a beach facing Shinnecock Bay. In French, she explains, parages can mean ‘shoreline’ or a ‘general spatial vicinity around a site’ (dans les parages), while in English it means an ‘equality of condition or dignity.’ Les Parages is also the title of her solo exhibition at Ma’s House, which opened in November. “I like the way that works as a metaphor for how we experience the land,” she says. “We think of the land as permanent, but it’s not; the shoreline is always receding and expanding.” Created in collaboration with Ma’s House leader and artist Jeremy Dennis (who filmed the performance by drone), Les Parages grew out of an Indigenous spiritual belief that souls enter the world from the east and leave from the west. “That was very moving; it got me thinking about the connection between the physical and spiritual worlds—the body and the cardinal directions,” Rhee says. “I wanted to film a dance that highlights the beauty of Indigenous land that is visibly different in the way it’s been stewarded, where it was not just me dancing—where it was as much about the shadows as the body itself.” Out of that dance came Corporality, a work on silk using seawater, blue pigment, and soil pigment that creates what Rhee describes as a “drawing X-ray of the movement.” It’s an approach she’s been using since 2017. “The drawings all have very different forms, depending on the choreography,” she explains. Corporality is “almost a diamond

Milton Magazine

compass-type form,” while others have more of a spiral movement or triangular shape. Some artists and writers consider teaching an unfortunate distraction from their work, but Rhee doesn’t see it that way. A part-time professor at Parsons School of Design since 2017, she is now one of two faculty leaders for Sustainable Systems, a required course that asks students to consider the social, environmental, and economic impacts of the products, systems, and services they design. “I think teaching has made me a better artist,” Rhee says, noting that her research on sustainable materials, in part, drove her interest in using natural pigments. Students in the course might study how a company is creating textiles from kelp-based fiber, devise a system to upcycle ocean plastic into polyester yarn, or look to historic examples of design and art that have engaged in social change. “They’re asked to rethink what design and art can be,” she says, “and how to serve through creativity.” The idea, says Rhee, is to empower—to instill a sense of love for and connection to the environment. “We all know that things don’t look great in relation to climate change,” she says, “but accepting things as they are isn’t an option for any of us, especially this generation.” That spirit of connection to the environment is one of the driving forces behind a new land art project Rhee has undertaken. Working with a narrow sliver of forest in East Hampton that she acquired in January 2021, she has allotted an area for a garden. A grant from the

Rhee (opposite), at the 2003 Milton commencement, where former president Bill Clinton was the speaker

New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center provided support for the beginning stages of the project. With the help of friends and research assistants, she cleared a portion of the land and regenerated a three-square-meter area with cover crops, plants that return more nutrients to the soil than they take. Eventually, when the soil is ready, she hopes to plant a forest garden with indigenous plant species, pollinators, and significant plants from her multicultural background. The site measurement is a nod to Modernist dialogues around housing, but turning that dialogue around soil in the Anthropocene. “The model I’m trying to activate on the land is one of stewardship vs. ownership,” she says. One inch of fertile topsoil, Rhee points out, can take anywhere from 500 to 1,000 years to develop. If industrialized agricultural practices that rely on existing pesticides and fertilizers continue, a 2019 United Nations study estimates, the world could run out of topsoil within the next 60 years. Shockingly, the origin of many chemical fertilizers contributing to soil degradation since wwii can be traced back to the industries of war. “And while not all of us are farmers, many of us could be gardeners and steward our own small plot of land: our lawn,” says Rhee. “It would be so amazing if everyone who has a lawn could steward that soil properly. That’s one of the biggest tragedies of soil loss—that in countries as privileged as ours, with many large properties, we’re unknowingly degrading one of our most precious resources.” The thread of social justice running through much of Rhee’s work and her awareness of experiences

particular to the bipoc community have become more pronounced since the pandemic began. Like others who participated in the Black Lives Matter movement, Rhee now finds herself in a different place—a place that includes a fuller understanding of her own identity. “One of the reasons the residency at Ma’s House was so important to me is that it’s rare for a space to be solely dedicated to bipoc artists—and I don’t know if I would have been comfortable saying that I needed that support out loud prior to 2020,” she says. “Before I would have said, ‘I’m just an artist, I’m not any type of artist,’ which is valid. But then you realize, no, actually my embodied experiences have been very different. That has been a turning point.” Rhee notes that many of the exhibitions where her work was featured in the past (at venues including New York’s The Kitchen and the Berlin Biennale’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art) were spearheaded by bipoc curators with keen socio-political agendas. One of her core missions as an educator has been to create a more just, well-balanced curriculum that represents more female and bipoc artists. “I was always aware that the projects I was participating in had certain important social dimensions,” she says. “But it took the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements to ask myself more personally why I was drawn to them, and to face this important need more directly,” she says. It’s a direction that is creating new confluences in the intersections that inspire Rhee and her work. ■

Spring 2022

JULIA HANNA IS A FREELANCE WRITER LIVING IN ACTON, MASSACHUSETTS.

On Centre

p hoto g ra p h by

Student Life at Milton

Milton Magazine

p hoto g ra p h by

illustration by

Febin Raj

Spring 2022

On Centre Upper School

Science in the Modern Age

“The class is all about [students] and their opinions. It’s not about me; it’s me dropping little thought grenades and then they get to talk about it.” Elizabeth Lillis

students in science teacher Elizabeth Lillis’s class hold up squares of green, yellow, or red paper. Green means agree; yellow, maybe; and red, no. The course, Science in the Modern Age, is a departure from the students’ typical science class. There are no microscopes, test tubes, or lab stands in sight; it is just Lillis and the students debating and considering— often for the ﬁrst time—some of the complex science-related issues that affect their everyday lives. On this day, the tone in the class is engaged yet casual, as they consider privacy issues around dna. When is it okay for your employer to collect dna? Should government agencies have access to dna databases—such as ancestry sites— in criminal investigations? Should a jury convict solely on dna evidence? As they consider Lillis’s prompts or questions, the students express their opinions respectfully, sometimes refining their positions as they expand upon their thoughts. This approach, she says, “helps students to clarify why they hold a certain position and what more they need to know to feel more confident in what they’re thinking. It’s about becoming more articulate about why they think the way they think.” “It prompts them,” she says, “to Milton Magazine

think about how they feel about what others have to say, or, if they had to make a recommendation for a loved one or a friend, what would be their guide in going about that? The class is all about [students] and their opinions. It’s not about me; it’s me dropping little thought grenades and then they get to talk about it. And it’s not about whether there’s an accurate answer, which, I think, is liberating.” Lillis has been teaching the class since arriving at Milton 14 years ago. Students enrolled in the half-credit course are primarily, but not exclusively, seniors who have focused on the sciences. The dialogue-centered nature of the class and their familiarity with one another, she says, helps them feel they are in a safe place to discuss complicated issues. Throughout the yearlong course, the students are asked to consider such complex matters as: Should phthalates [plastics additives] be more heavily regulated? When is it okay to mandate vaccines? What are the trade-offs between using ddt, an environmental toxin, and the protection it affords people from mosquitoes? What about the ethics around aids patients and doctor/ patient confidentiality? Lillis applies a range of interactive methods for the discussions.

BY SARAH ABRAMS

In addition to the colored-square discourses, students write papers, contribute to class chat boards, and engage in various forms of debate— sometimes taking on a view opposing their own or debating both sides of an issue. They gather and synthesize information from different perspectives and a variety of sources. Milton students, Lillis says, are very knowledgeable about current events and enjoy expressing their opinions, whether they agree or disagree. More often than not, she says, they are in agreement about being vaccinated, for example, but other topics might elicit a greater range of views. “There have been some years where students have wondered why we’re so worried about human reliance upon fossil fuels,” she says. “They’ll ask, ‘Can’t we just become more efficient about the carbon dioxide problem?’” Lillis is pleased by the positive feedback she hears from the students. “We’ve gotten to a really good spot where they’ll tell me about something they just heard on npr or they’ll mention a discussion they had at dinner around a topic that the class just discussed,” she says. “To me, anytime it spills over into normal life, it means that they’re getting a lot out of it.” ■ illustration by

Bratislav Milenkovic

j oh n g i ll o oly

SCIENCE STUDENTS TAKE ON SOME OF SOCIETY’S THORNIEST ISSUES.

On Centre Lower School

A Focus on Reading

“Instead of an abstract thing where you take the same approach with all 12 kids in a classroom and hope that they go off and apply it, it is much more powerful to be actually teaching them during the act of reading a book.” TYLER JENNINGS

three students sit in a crescent across from their second-grade teacher, Sue Munson, who is listening carefully as they read a storybook, each speaking just above a whisper. When Munson hears something that sticks out, she taps the table in front of a boy, prompting him to read louder. “You’re reading very smoothly,” she tells him. “You used to put your finger on every word, but now you’re moving much faster. Great job!” The Lower School has made reading a top priority this year, giving students one-on-one and small-group coaching as they develop, says Tyler Jennings, the Lower School dean of teaching and learning. Teachers are also focusing on phonics and the elements of language for all students, particularly the division’s youngest. Applying methods that are strongly supported by literacy and education research, the Lower School includes explicit phonics instruction for all students, along with guided reading. Guided reading is an effective approach that involves detailed assessment of each student’s growth and areas for improvement, Jennings says. Students are then grouped with two or three others who share similar goals and Milton Magazine

are reading at similar levels of difficulty; together, and with strategic guidance from their teacher, they read through texts at a level that challenges them without discouraging them. By breaking the students into groups, Munson is able to monitor their progress in real time, asking them to reread passages they struggle with and giving them positive feedback on areas where they’ve improved. She takes a holistic approach to helping the students understand each text, breaking down root words, homonyms, and letter sounds, asking them to respond to visual cues in the illustrations, and prompting them to explain how moments in the story make them feel. When they have finished their books, they’re asked to summarize the stories without retelling them and to identify the most important parts of the plot. For some groups, Munson previews potentially tricky vocabulary words the students will encounter in their books, while other groups focus on reading with expression according to punctuation. A couple of students tap the pages with their fingers to sound out words, but are moving toward a smoother reading flow and away from more stilted speech. Others still are onto

BY MARISA DONELAN

meatier chapter books. The students have their own strategies—identified by Munson—to help them improve. When certain kids are not in the groups she’s immediately addressing, she assigns some of them to partners. The peer support is an added help, she says. “The role of the teacher is to lift them to that next level of text sophistication,” says Jennings. “What’s so important is the opportunity for the teacher to coach students in those individual goals. Instead of an abstract thing, where you take the same approach with all 12 kids in a classroom and hope that they go off and apply it, it is much more powerful to be actually teaching them during the act of reading a book.” In addition to guided reading, Lower School teachers are following research-supported methods for teaching all students phonics, Jennings says. Educators now know that there is a false dichotomy in the choice between teaching “whole language” reading and phonics instruction. Both comprehension of texts and the foundations of words—including phonics—are critical. A debate about the best way to teach reading has existed for centuries in the United States. Writing for the Washington Post in 2021, reporter Valerie Strauss explains that illustration by

Adam Avery

j oh n g i ll o oly

TAKING A HOLISTIC APPROACH TO TEACHING STUDENTS TO READ

Horace Mann, the widely influential 19th-century educator, “argued against teaching the explicit sounds of each letter. He worried that students would concentrate on sounding out words rather than learning how to read for comprehension, so he argued that students should learn to read whole words instead.” A whole-language approach for reading, Mann posited, would be more engaging for new readers than studying the sounds of letters and syllables on a granular level. An alternative to Mann’s approach to teaching reading is a heavy focus on phonics, which matches the sounds of words with individual letters and groups of letters, and phonemic awareness, which California State University-Fullerton professor and researcher Hallie Kay Yopp describes as “an understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds.” Yopp explains that many kindergartners arrive at school with a “sufficient command of the phonemes that constitute their language; that is, they can pronounce most sounds clearly.” A kindergartner would understand “cat” as a “furry animal that purrs,” Yopp writes, but be unaware that the word “cat” is composed of a series of letter sounds or phonemes— the elements of a word that distinguish it from another. This divide, which is often presented in the media and by legislators and policy makers as “the reading wars,” is significantly more nuanced—an important fact to remember when states consider new laws about how reading is taught and how students are classified as reading-disabled. “Despite a time40

worn narrative, there is no sharply drawn battle line dividing experts who completely support or completely oppose phonics,” write the literacy experts and professors David Reinking, Victoria J. Risko, and George G. Hruby. Instead, reasonable differences exist along a continuum. More realistically, there are teachers who see phonics as an essential foundation for learning to read for all students, and others who see it as “only one among many dimensions of learning to read,” the experts write. “It can be a really confusing debate to research because there are so many different camps and the pendulum has swung so wildly between different beliefs about how children learn reading best,” Jennings says, adding that the argument for teaching phonics to all young learners has gained signifiMilton Magazine

cant ground. “Research increasingly demonstrates that explicit phonics instruction in early elementary school is essential for all children.” Some students enter school with large vocabularies and an ability to read books, but need to understand the foundations of language in the same way that less-confident readers need phonics. “It’s really cool and impressive in its own way, but it does not necessarily mean that they understand the phonics of the words or have phonemic awareness,” Jennings says. “If we don’t give them experiences with phonics, then later on, they’re going to encounter challenges when they come up against words they’ve never seen before. They need the skills to be able to break down words and put them back together.” Encouraging students to read

books that interest them and making reading fun are important ways to inspire students to become lifelong readers. Reading aloud is a great practice in growing students’ confidence in reading. When students are led to believe that certain books are for learning and others are for fun, it can create a separation in their minds, Jennings says. “It’s important that we choose, at all times and in all contexts, books that are really engaging for kids,” he says. “Even though we have some serious reading goals for them during guided reading, they should still be laughing. They should be smiling and bubbling up in conversation about the book. If those things aren’t happening, then something isn’t quite right. It should be a fun, inviting activity, even though we’re engaging with the science of reading.” ■

j oh n g i ll o oly

On Centre Lower School

Spring 2022

Milton Magazine

p hoto g ra p h by

In the News

“PREPARING OUR STUDENTS FOR THE FUTURE IS GOING TO BE ABOUT LOOKING AT EVERY PART OF THEIR EXPERIENCE,” SAYS INCOMING BOARD OF TRUSTEES PRESIDENT CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON ‘90

TRUSTEES

Next Board of Trustees President Claire Hughes Johnson ’90

In July, CLAIRE HUGHES JOHNSON ’90, a member of the Board since

2010, will become the president of Milton’s Board of Trustees. The daughter of longtime English Department chair Guy D’Oyly Hughes and a Milton “lifer,” Hughes Johnson attended Milton Academy from kindergarten through senior year. She served for 10 years as a vice president at Google and for the past seven years as COO at Stripe, a global billing and payments infrastructure platform. She recently became a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe. Hughes Johnson and her husband, Jesse Johnson, have two children attending Milton. Having served on the board for the past 12 years, can you talk about your decision to join and some of the changes you’ve seen during that time?

ja s on grow

I was asked to join the Board not long after Todd became the head of school, in 2009. At the time, I was in a leadership role at Google and a very busy working mom with small kids, but the opportunity to serve Milton was just too important to pass up. I knew Todd was going to be a fantastic head of school, and I really wanted to be part of his journey. Over the past 12 years, I’ve had the opportunity to appreciate both the challenges and the triumphs of executing Todd's strategic plan to advance the institution and expand on the offerings that compel and attract students of Milton’s

caliber—everything from hiring and retaining transformative educators to advancing the school’s work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice to building Milton’s endowment. As a technology executive, you’ve been involved in some of the most significant technological advances of the past several decades. Can you say a little about that? Technology can be understood by looking at what I’ll call decade-defining companies. From about 2005 to 2015, Google was the decade-defining company, and, beginning in 2015, Stripe emerged as a potential defining company, growing from tens of millions in revenue to billions. Being part of building those companies was and is a great privilege and a tremendous amount of work. The opportunity to be at Google, which grew from about 1,800 employees to more than 60,000 in the 10 years I was there, and then to build Stripe as a leader from 160 to more than 6,000 employees, doesn’t happen to many people in their lifetimes. What do you hope to accomplish as board president? I think a lot about how one builds an institution that lasts centuries, not decades. I enjoy the contrast in my life between being someone who’s helped build two game-changing technology companies and, at the same time, a graduate

and trustee of an institution that was founded in 1798. That combination of experiences and skills is what it’s going to take to develop the leaders of the future: a front-row seat in both worlds. I really value the institution of Milton—the history and legacy of excellent faculty, students, and programs. Many of Milton’s qualities transcend time and history—developing critical thinkers and instilling a love of learning and respect for one another—but to honor its mission, we need to think about what is the modern Milton. How can we support the faculty and prepare the students for a changing world, where their skills and leadership are needed and where they can successfully ‘Dare to be true’? Milton strives to prepare leaders and citizens for the future. In the same way that Milton needs to call on every ability of its administration, faculty, and students to do so, the Board also needs to do that. That will be my goal. What should Milton’s priorities be in preparing students for that future? The past couple of years have not been the easiest time for anyone. It’s not just the pandemic; it’s the impact of income inequality in the United States and the country’s clear inability to address systemic racism and the existential threat to humanity of climate change, not to mention the global trend toward nationalism. Milton students have always been agile

Spring 2022

learners, and the environment is one that celebrates constructive dialogue and inquiry. Preparing our students for the future is going to be about looking at every part of their experience, including the program and curriculum, and figuring out what we can do within and across disciplines and schools to amplify not just the learning aptitude, but the multidimensional dialogue and willingness to lead, even when uncertain. The students have to be fully formed humans, which requires empathy and an understanding of the human experience that acknowledges that not every human experience is the same. If you don't build that understanding, you're not going to be a very effective citizen. Todd has begun the next stage of work on equity and inclusion—we have a lot of exciting new faculty and staff members. We’ve doubled the endowment. But you don't get it all done in 14 years, and Todd would be the first to say that. We can be even more aligned as an institution on what Milton's role should be in today’s world—what skills we need and what type of community we need to build. I think there's an appetite to become even stronger. There is a fine balance to achieve at Milton between a celebration of the individual student and a common vision we share as a community to which each member holds the others accountable. Do you believe Milton can meet the urgency of these times?

On Centre In the News SCIENCE

Senior Shiloh Liu’s Honors Bio Lab is Published It’s not alway easy to find reasons for optimism, but my interactions with Milton during this time—even though it's been challenging in any school environment—are where I'm finding my optimism. Seeing my kids as Milton students engaged and excited, and meeting their friends and teachers, gives me a lot of reason for hope. We need to find sources of optimism and invest in them; Milton is one of those sources. If you look at the diversity in the student body and think about who those kids are going to grow up to be, we have every reason to be hopeful. And I’m excited to meet the next leader of Milton, be their support system and, frankly, show my gratitude to someone who's going to take on what I know from my own work is a tremendous responsibility. I know it can be challenging— and at times lonely. What I'm most energized by is making sure that person feels they have a partner and a Board that's active and involved in their success and in the success of the institution. In the past few years, it’s been rewarding to me professionally to grow beyond operational leadership to become more of a facilitator, enabler, and advisor. I'm always amazed by what humans can accomplish under the right circumstances. If I can help create those circumstances for Milton, then I can truly give back, because I owe so much of my success to Milton Academy.

Lisa Donohue ’83, Board of Trustees President, 2015-2022 LISA DONOHUE '83, Milton’s outgoing Board of Trustees president, has served during a period of significant growth in Milton’s history. Since 2015, Donohue has played an integral role in the implementation of Milton’s strategic plan, providing critical advice and assistance. This included supporting Milton’s capital campaign, Dare: The Campaign for Milton. The campaign helped double Milton’s endowment, expand and diversify its student body and faculty, and implement the campus master plan. A former marketing executive, Donohue served in several chief executive roles at Publicis Groupe, the world’s largest communications company, including CEO of Publicis Spine, a technology and data platform; Global Brand President of Starcom Worldwide; and CEO of Starcom USA. She now serves on several corporate boards, including Gap Inc. and NRG Energy. “Lisa has done an amazing job as Board president,” says Head of School Todd Bland, who has worked with Donohue since his appointment in 2009. “She has been my consummate supporter and, at the same time, has always pushed me to make sure I work in a way that is ultimately doing the best for Milton’s students, faculty, and staff. As a partner, she's done an exceptional job at that balance, which is not always easy. She was the perfect leader for Milton, because she's always thinking about how to move the institution forward, acknowledging with gratitude how many strengths we have, but always thinking about ways we can be better. That’s a balancing act that she strikes very, very well.”

Milton Magazine

In her junior year, CHEN-CHIH (SHILOH) LIU ’22 stayed remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, learning from her home in Taiwan. Still, she was a full participant in her Honors Biology course, completing lab assignments in her kitchen. And now, one of her experiments has made her a published scientist. Liu’s article, “How ethanol concentration affects catalase catalysis of hydrogen peroxide,” was recently published in the Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI), an online scientific publication for students in college, high school, and middle school. Liu worked throughout the summer—meeting with her Honors Biology teacher, Michael Edgar, via Zoom several times and receiving feedback from the JEI team of graduate students who helped her refine the experiment.

ma ri sa d on el a n ( li u )

[CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE]

LEADERSHIP

New Director of Restorative Practices

m a r isa d on e l a n

After holding various spiritual and community development roles at Milton for 16 years, Suzanne DeBuhr has moved into a new position as an Administrative Council member: director of restorative practices. DeBuhr, who is also a faculty member in the History and Social Sciences Department, took the role—a new position at Milton—midway through the 2020–2021 academic year. Milton began considering restorative practices in 2017, after students staged a walkout to protest the school’s handling of racist social media posts. The initiative, by Dean of Students José Ruiz and former Associate Director of Admission SARAH WOOTEN ’04, helped in identifying the need for the new role. “In the early stages, we’re figuring out how to educate the community about what this work is going to look like, which is an evolving and organic thing,” DeBuhr says. “Restorative justice addresses [the incident], but it’s also effective for looking at the whole and trying to understand what led to the incident. It’s not just about resolving one occurrence but going into the past, going into the relationship, and thinking about what repair needs to be done.” Aside from the longer-term work of preparing to expand restorative practices at Milton, DeBuhr partners with the school’s Department of Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, where she works to investigate, mediate, and help resolve bias incidents at both the student and adult levels. A restorative system is one that focuses on the repair of harm in a conflict between parties, rather than punishment directed toward the person who caused the harm. Restorative practices also rely on proactive community-building, so DeBuhr introduced circle practice

to Milton employees, partnering with Suffolk University’s Center for Restorative Justice for training. Circle practice, or being “in circle,” has its origins in Indigenous conflict-resolution methods, and requires all participants to think about their role as individuals within a greater, but deeply interconnected, society. “It’s about the people, themselves,” DeBuhr says. “And it’s about their relationships and what went wrong—not in the person, but what went wrong around the person—to result in the harming of a relationship. It asks of everyone involved to tell the truth and take responsibility in a way that allows everyone to move forward. It recognizes that harm is never only between one person and another.” Instead of punishing or publicly shaming someone for doing something harmful, repairing relationships is a more community-focused approach to most conflicts, she says. It has applications for many situations, including student-disciplinary matters and conflicts between work colleagues. “American culture is hyper-individualistic: You have to take care of everything on your own,” she explains. “Having restorative processes as part of our practice means that we don’t have to do it alone. It means that we’re in this together, that there is a community of support, and that, yes, we’re going to have conflicts and we’re not always going to get along with one another. But we can build skills to help resolve those issues and even train people who can help negotiate difficulties.” DeBuhr is working toward her master’s degree in restorative justice from Vermont Law School. She received her bachelor’s degree from St. Olaf College and her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.

Spring 2022

ARTS

LEADERSHIP

Concert Honors Music Teacher Jean McCawley

Melissa Roja Lawlor Named Upper School Director of Equity and Inclusion

Jean McCawley, a dedicated musician and teacher at Milton for more than 40 years, was honored at the school’s Annual Winter Concert in December. McCawley, who taught at Milton beginning in 1949, died in November. Over the years, she instilled in students a lifelong love of music. Music teacher Ted Whalen (below), who led the choral portion of the evening’s concert, recalled McCawley’s passion for Renaissance music. Introducing a piece by 17th-century English composer Thomas Weelkes, Whalen noted, “This piece is very in sync with whom this concert is named for tonight. Jean never had a lot of advice for me for concerts, but she always commented when there was at least one Renaissance piece.” Members of McCawley’s family attended the concert, which featured the Milton Academy Glee Club, the Chamber Singers, members of the Wellesley Choral Society, and the Milton Academy Orchestra. The orchestra was led by Adrian Anantawan, chair of Milton’s Music Department. BEN KIM ’22 conducted the Milton Academy Chamber Strings.

In her new position as Upper School director of equity and inclusion, Melissa Lawlor wants all students at Milton to feel they can be their true selves. Her own journey—both personal and professional—is what brought Lawlor to this juncture in her life. Growing up, she attended an independent high school in California, and, for more than 16 years, she has served as a teacher, coach, and dorm parent at independent schools in both New York and New Hampshire. What drives her, she says, is her own experience in high school struggling to assert her identity as one of only a few students of color. “I had wonderful teachers who saw me, but institutionally it was difficult,” she says. “I felt really disconnected from my Filipino identity, and I love that part of me. But I hid it for so long in high school. So much of what I do in this office is think about ‘What do folks need to be able to embrace pieces of themselves that they feel initially they should hide at a predominantly white school?’ That's really become the focus of my life's work.” Lawlor arrived at Milton in July after 11 years at Brewster Academy, in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where she built a DEIJ program from the ground up. Brewster, she says, was successful in attracting students of color, but had few plans in place to support them. As director of the program, Lawlor piloted the school’s first equity

Milton Magazine

and inclusion program, created a faculty professional development program, developed a curriculum that included issues around identity, and established a support system for students of color. Last summer, Lawlor, with her husband, Matt, who was recently appointed Milton’s associate athletic director, moved to Milton with their three young sons to become Milton’s first Upper School director of equity and inclusion. She was attracted to Milton by the work the school has already begun around equity and inclusion. “Part of the draw was that Milton has a definitive community priority for anti-racism and anti-oppression work,” she says. “The fact that Milton was establishing a team aspect for equity, inclusion, and justice with a well-defined strategy was a real plus.” According to Lawlor, the challenge now becomes how Milton reckons with the past

and begins to move forward. “Milton's Transition Program is 37 years old,” she says. “I’m coming into a program with an historically articulated commitment, but a commitment to DEIJ looks different today at Milton than it did even five years ago. “There are some people in this community whose identities are feeling the effects of oppression or marginalization. So the challenge becomes, how do we as a team make sure these children and adults feel validated, seen, and empowered—and how do we cultivate the kind of culture that will support this?” Lawlor wants to be a part of creating an environment at Milton that addresses issues of equity, inclusion, and justice in a healthy, restorative manner that calls people in to repair. “It’s important in how we hold people accountable,” she says. “I've seen shame and blame used as the only accountability tools, and it sometimes runs

mic h a el dw y e r ( l ef t) ; gr e gory w h i t e ( a b ove )

On Centre In the News

STUDENT NEWS

O B I T U A RY

H. Marshall Schwarz ‘54 P’84

■ Orion Nebula, approximately 1,400 light years from Earth, photographed by TEDDY SUNSHINE ’22. Sunshine, along with JOHN MATTERS ’22, cofounded Milton’s new Astronomy Club.

counter to the goal; it creates a toxic environment.” “We’re at a pivotal moment where we need to establish the tools that help people take responsibility for past hurts, learn how to repair, and identify a restorative path forward that allows for growth as a community,” she says. “In the end, my hope is that these are practices that allow us to grow and learn to be better humans. That's what this work is all about; it’s acknowledging humanity and our role in the entire push toward establishing just and equitable practices.” In the months since her arrival, Lawlor has been heartened by what she has learned about the community’s commitment to growth and change. “It's been refreshing to have conversations with faculty around equitable practices, and to know I’m not the only one doing this work,” she says. “People have done significant work to evaluate their own teaching practices, curriculum, and intentionality. But we need the whole community involved, and many people are at different stages of learning. As for the students, “We know Milton graduates are going to go out there and change the world, unequivocally. They're brilliant, they're bright, they're motivated, and what I'm hopeful for is that they learn along with us, and carry with them a sense of purpose for becoming better humans who treat each other fairly and equitably. That's really at the heart of why we're doing what we’re doing.”

■ JAKE THIBEAULT ’22 greets a fellow student during his

surprise visit to the fall pep rally. Thibeault, a Goodwin House senior and varsity hockey player, received support from Milton and beyond in his rehabilitation from an injury at the start of the school year. (Photo by Mark Connolly.)

Spring 2022

Trustee emeritus H. MARSHALL SCHWARZ ‘54, whose loyalty and generosity to Milton spanned decades, passed away on November 19, 2021. “There are few people who embody ‘Dare to be true’ more than Marshall,” says Head of School Todd Bland. “He was, in the best sense,a godfather to Milton, someone who was always thinking about Milton and always wanting the very best for the school.” Although he no longer served on the Board by the time Bland was appointed head of school, Schwarz continued to keep Milton close, recalls Bland. “He would call me regularly just to see how things were going. He rarely had an agenda; he was just always this presence.” Schwarz’s ties to Milton are deep and enduring. He began his tenure on Milton’s Board in 1985 and served as its president from 1997 through 2002. In 2004, Schwarz and his wife, Rae Paige Schwarz, provided the funds to build the Schwarz Student Center. “I am so glad that this space, which represents the heart of the Upper School, is named for someone who had such a huge heart,” Bland says. A retired chairman and chief executive of the US Trust Corporation, Schwarz began his career at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. Several generations of the Schwarz family have attended Milton Academy, including his son, JAMES SCHWARZ ‘84.

Reunion Weekend 2022 F R I DAY, J U N E 1 7 A N D SAT U R DAY, J U N E 1 8 FOR CLASSES IN YEARS ENDING IN ‘2 AND ‘7 I N C LU D I N G A S P E C I A L 5 0 T H R E U N I O N C E L E B R AT I O N F O R C L AS S E S 1 9 7 0, 1 9 7 1 , A N D 1 9 7 2

Join us for special class events, speakers, and celebrations!Learn more and register at W W W. M I LTO N . E D U / R E U N I O N

Alumni Life News & Notes from Our Alumni Community

ALEXANDRA ALVES ’07

and her husband, Steven, welcomed August Alexander Polanco in July 2021.

Spring 2022

Class Notes 1946–1956

lona, Paris, and London.

1946

In a time of COVID-19 and wildfires in the Santa Cruz mountains, JONATHAN BEECHER writes that he and his spouse, Merike, have worked on longterm writing projects. His book Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 was published by Cambridge University Press last spring, and an English translation of Between Three Plagues, by Jaan Kross, is currently being worked on by Merike.

TOM RUGGLES fears that

he may be the last of a vanishing species, being 93 years old. He is sad to hear that his classmate RUSSELL “RUSTY” BOURNE has passed. He looks back on his three years at Milton with fondness and is still in contact with friend GEORGE LORING ’45. 1949

At the grand old age of 90, BAYARD HENRY recently visited Jack and JUNE ROBINSON ’49 and is happy to share that they are as exceptional as ever. Bayard writes that his daughter SARAH LEDERMAN ’77 manages a farm and has retired from teaching in NYC. Sarah’s three sons are employed around the globe; one has made him a double great-grandfather, another son is an avid skier, and his son Snowden, with his wife Paula, continue to be his “go-to” savior in a myriad of ways. 1952 JOE BARR writes that he now has 12 grandchildren, ranging in ages from 6 months to 24 years old. They bring him great joy and happiness. EMERY BRADLEY GOFF CARHART writes that she has

been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and COPD after a hospital scare this fall. She suffered a

KIT (CHRISTOPHER) BINGHAM writes that he is aging fairly gracefully, if sorrowfully. He lost his wife, Carolyn, after 52 years of marriage and has been building a life by himself. Every week he gets together with a friend from church to play violin/viola and piano music. He explains that

JONATHAN BEECHER

small stroke while in the hospital and is slowly recovering, hoping to drive again in a few months. She and her husband, Bill Carhart, are living in senior housing in Portland, Maine, a short drive from East End Beach. She regrets to share the passing of her border collie, Meg, and reminisces about all the wonderful dogs she and her husband have had in their 45 years of marriage. Emery’s grandkids have served as a lifeline for her and Bill by

Milton Magazine

keeping in touch and providing transportation; they have been a marvelous support system.

WRITERS AND

REVOLUTION INTELLECTUALS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF

1848

195 4 MARY PRATT ARDANT shares that 2021 was much happier than 2020. Her family was last able to gather in August at Squam Lake, New Hampshire. She has grandchildren studying and working in Boston, Berkeley, Berlin, Barce-

up curling for fun and exercise. Previously living in Tennessee, her daughter has relocated to Providence, Rhode Island, for which Jean is joyful. She is now within driving distance of all three of her children. CYNTHIA HALLOWELL is enjoying being in Converse House, Burlington, Vermont, near her brother Rob, although she does miss being in Boston. She welcomes calls to catch up with classmates. Please email alumni@milton.edu to connect with Cynthia.

the encouragement of DAVID EHRLICH is what got him back into music, and for that he is extremely grateful. In the meantime, Kit has enjoyed bicycling all over the Twin Cities and spends time maintaining a local website and writing programs. He inherited a large flower and vegetable garden from Carolyn, of which he is taking care. He hopes to travel east in the spring. JEAN WORTHINGTON CHILDS writes that she and her husband are involved with different committees at North Hill in Needham, Massachusetts. She chairs the library committee and enjoys being a part of the group. “It seems many people use a Kindle or cell phone and the library is not as busy as one would think.” John has helped by keeping the finances and buildings in shape. Jean shares that she has taken

DUFFY ROYCE SCHADE writes that with COVID-19 restrictions relaxed, she and Gerhard are enjoying visits with family and friends. She is involved with a book club and conservation-related activities at Stone Ridge in Mystic, Connecticut. They spent a month at their wonderful house in Gouldsboro, Maine. However, some activities were curtailed by Gerhard’s extensive back surgery. We wish him the best!

tells the story of her life while living on a six-square-mile island in the Dutch Caribbean. She encourages alumni to contact her at rosamondvanderlinde.com.

experiences at Milton, are now attending Brown University and are on the rowing teams. She is very proud!

JEAN CUTLER WHITHAM had a hip replacement in January, but is involved with bridge, a book group, and knitting at the Riverwoods, Manchester, Continuing Care Retirement Center. Whit will have a knee replacement, just to keep up! They will be off to Boulder, Colorado, to visit their daughter and her family soon.

195 6

195 5 KATHARINE GRATWICK BAKER

shares that two of her grandchildren, ELOISE BAKER ’18 and COLIN BAKER ’21, who had great

HANNAH HIGGINS BARTLETT and her husband, Jim, are happily settled at The Commons in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She writes that they have made wonderful new friends and have easy access to Boston and their son who lives in Winchester. Hannah recently had a long talk with MARY STRANG, who is still working her cattle ranch for the beef industry all by herself in these challenging times. RUPERT HITZIG writes that he finished a major stream for Connect Universe, advocating for a more

Pam Watson Sebastian ’62 with her husband John

ROSAMOND VAN DER LINDE

shares that she has finished her third book, titled Our Dear Deer Island, which includes stories from 40 summers of adventures in New Brunswick, Canada. She wrote the book to help the island celebrate its 250th year. “The island is as old as Beethoven!” Rosamond’s first book, A Piano in Every Room, tells the true story of her family of seven who lived in a 42-room house with 34 pianos. Her second book, The Land of No Laws,

Spring 2022

Class Notes 1956–1969

1 961

Milton Class of 1961 Reunion Dinner in November 2021. Standing, left to right: ROBERT MORSE, KENNETH HORAK, JOHN COOPER, BETTE BAPTISTE COOPER, JOSEPH KNOWLES, GB BRIGHAM, PETER WILDER. Seated, left to right: CHARLES HOWLAND, PAUL SCHMID, PETER TALBOT, WALTER MACK.

connected world. He has also optioned a new novel for a movie, which he finds very exciting. He and his wife have been married for 52 years now. His oldest son, Sebastian, suffered an infection that damaged his heart, but has been given a new life with a heart transplant. His second son, Barnaby, and his wife have had another baby. Rupert sends well wishes to all his Milton friends. 1957 JIM BOWDITCH and his wife, Felicity, share that they have moved into Quarry Hill, a retirement village in Camden, Maine. They have downsized from a 4,200-square-foot space to 1,630 square feet. Jim and Felicity have been working to downsize their belongings to spare their children for when they pass.

1 95 8 JOHN V. WOODARD writes that he and his wife, Linda, recently relocated from Dedham, Massachusetts, to Brentwood, New Hampshire, to be closer to their daughter Heather and nearby family. They now live in The Villages at Three Ponds, an over-55 community. John and Linda enjoy their new home, neighbors, and surroundings.

1 95 9 LYDIA (BUTLER) GOETZE and JINX (GOODYEAR) ROOSEVELT write that

they are both retired teachers, Lydia from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Jinx from Metropolitan College of New York. They share a love of photography, reading,

Milton Magazine

sailing, and gardening. Over the past year, they were able to get together in Maine to enjoy hiking and conversation on Mount Desert Island and the Blue Hill Peninsula. They are saddened to learn about the passing of their classmate KATE (DAY) BEARE. They remember Kate fondly for her talents as a cellist in the English Chamber Orchestra. FAITH WILLIAMS is temporarily living in Arizona, near her youngest and his family.

196 0 CHAS FREEMAN is a visiting scholar at Brown, where he continues to speak out on foreign policy issues of national concern. Texts are available at chasfreeman. net or at watson.brown.edu/ people/fellows/freeman.

SHELDON STURGES writes that he and Waldo (Spike) Forbes have collaborated on a new book titled A Tree in the Woods, which was published in October by Sturges Publishing Company. LIZA FORBES TRIPP writes from London, where her daughter and family live. She shares it has been a long wait due to COVID-19, and most people there are masked too.

1 961 KENYON (TIM) BOLTON writes that he is happy to be a Flat Rock, North Carolina resident and winters in Santa Barbara, which is closer to skiing.

1962 JIM KAPLAN writes that he pub-

the Milton Chapel 50 years ago, and have a wonderful, happy life together. In September, John was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer and has opted for no treatment. Pam and John are living one day at a time and counting their blessings. (SEE P. 51) 1 96 4

lished an op-ed with the Tampa Bay Times that he would like to share with other graduates: www.tampabay.com/opinion/2021/10/15/think-all-is-bleakheres-the-way-out-column/. DIANA ROBERTS writes that she is working part-time as a director of advancement at Gore Place. She has joined the vestry of Saint Michael’s Church in Milton and is co-chairing the 2022 stewardship campaign. She still enjoys singing and playing squash. She hopes to publish her third book, Both Sides Now, in the coming year. Diana hoped that she and her husband, Bob Bray, would see their children and grandchildren for Christmas on the West Coast. (RIGHT) PAM WATSON SEBASTIAN

writes that she and her husband, John, were married in

NICK HINCH writes, “It has been a very eventful year, not for me, but for my wife.” After living with back and leg pain for 14 years and a failing spine due to scoliosis, his wife finally had her spine straightened in a seven-hour operation back in August. It will take about a year for her to fully recover, and her spine has pins and rods from the base of her neck to the base of her spine. “Her spine looks as though it is now surrounded by the Eiffel Tower.” She spends most of her time resting and can only do brief periods of activity. They are taking one day at a time. Nick is still working at the United Airlines Training Center, teaching aircraft systems on the Airbus 319/320. He says it is more like a semi-retirement job and only works half a month. He is not sure how long he will continue in this position, but after 53 years in aviation, he still enjoys teaching flying and the camaraderie of other pilots. Nick wishes all the best for 2022!

book, revised the play Bringing Home the Birkin, and walks 7,000 steps a day. 196 5 SCOTT L. PARKIN writes: “I am helping form a ‘village’ for elders here in Reston (á la Beacon Hill Village) and have spent the last few months building a new website called RestonforaLifetime. org. We’re hoping to stimulate the growth of small villages around Reston versus one large community-wide one. So, still keeping a foot in the aging field when not painting, playing tennis, or just living.”

196 8 KATE HADLEY BAKER writes she has survived the great Texas freeze with no hardscape or house damage, thanks to extensive planning and preparation.

She only lost power for 36 hours. The warmest place inside was 39 degrees when power was restored. Shortly after, Kate lost water service for several days. She jokes that her 17-year-old cat, who has now passed, was not happy with her abilities as a caretaker during the bad weather. 196 9 EMILY BURR is a recently retired Unitarian Universalist minister, living in Canterbury, New Hampshire. She and her husband do short-term and emergency foster care, which she finds very rewarding; it gives her life purpose and helps keep her young. Emily now has two adult children and a four-year-old granddaughter. EDWARD PELLEGRINI writes that he and his wife are in excellent health. He says the secret is paranoia and being very care-

JESSE KORNBLUTH writes that he has written a new novel during the pandemic titled The Next Dalai Lama. He also shares he collaborated on a nonfiction

Spring 2022

pau l a n thon y mo or e fl ic k r . c om /r h e da e

Class Notes 1969–1972

1 97 0

RICHARD SISE has retired as operations manager of Cross Sound Ferry Services in New London, Connecticut, after 42 years of service. He leaves behind a thriving ferry company to better concentrate on his wife, kids, farm, and their boat.

Milton Magazine

ful. He encouraged his kids to practice sports this year, such as surfing, hiking, skiing, biking, and climbing in moderation. Edward shares that his kids are doing great in tech and financial technology. He remembers that he had two dreams when he came to “Hollyweird:” to create an iconic character and write a fantasy epic. After 12 years of labor, he has done it. “Life is wonderful. Living lean…next stop off the grid.”

gathered at Great Hill, hosted by MARGARET TRUMBULL NASH. Pictured left to right are NASH, TAP FRANCIS TITHERINGTON, TISH O’CONNOR, and HOLLY SMITH. They were joined by SALLY CLARK DONAHUE, CHRIS POPE, his wife, Sarah, and RUSS LYMAN for a festive potluck feast.

DAVID J. STONE regrets to inform his classmates of the passing of DONALD “GREG” JACKSON.

SYLVIE PERON hoped to be able to join her classmates for the 50th Reunion celebration last June. She is also happy to share that she got her third COVID-19 vaccine and is hopeful the pandemic will come to an end. Sylvie still edits Ultimate Jet, a magazine dedicated to business aviation. She is now enjoying life on the French Riviera with her partner, Luc. She looks forward to welcoming more of her friends (Margaret, Tish, and Hope), as they seem to appreciate her lifestyle in the Provençal back hills.

19 7 1

19 7 2

TISH O’CONNOR writes that although the formal events for the 50th Reunion were canceled, some classmates

RICHARD BAYLEY writes that after residing in Massachusetts for many years, he moved to northern New Hampshire in 2013. He shares

Spring 2022

19 7 0 BILL HARWOOD writes from Maine that he has joined the Governor’s Energy Office as senior advisor for regulatory affairs.

Class Notes □ A LU M N0000–0000 I BOOKS

Martin Luther King and the Trumpet of Conscience Today RÉGINE JEAN-CHARLES ‘96 ORBIS BOOKS

In Martin Luther King and The Trumpet of Conscience Today, Régine Jean-Charles ‘96, the Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice, director of Africana studies, and professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern University, examines three contemporary social justice movements— Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and prison abolition—through the lens of a series of lectures that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave in 1967 for the Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC). At her book launch at Northeastern last fall, Jean-Charles said she wanted readers to see King from a different angle—beyond his “I Have a Dream” speech—and reflect on King’s messages as they relate to contemporary social-justice movements.

Sandfuture JUSTIN BEAL ’96 MIT PRESS

In Sandfuture, artist Justin Beal ‘96 writes about the life of the prolific architect Minoru Yamasaki, one of the United States’ most influential yet under appreciated architects. A 20th-century visionary, Yamasaki strove to humanize modernism, designing major buildings around the world, from the Century Plaza Towers and Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles to William James Hall at Harvard University to the Dhahran Airfield in Saudi Arabia. His most famous, yet least representative, projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York— were both destroyed on live television. Beal presents a portrait of Yamasaki’s work and the world at that time of architecture, power, money, and the making of a culture. “It is not like any other book on architecture I have read,” wrote Edwin Heathcote last fall in the Financial Times. “And that is a very good thing. Beal is not an architect, an academic or a writer but an artist with architectural training who, handily, can really write. He joins some very disparate dots, skirting around the history of Modernism, its successes and failures.”

Milton Magazine

Advocating for the Environment: How to Gather Your Power and Take Action SUSAN INCHES ‘73 NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS

What can ordinary citizens do about the environment and climate change? While the steps to mitigating climate change can seem daunting at the individual level, in Advocating for the Environment, environmental advocate and educator Susan Inches ‘73 offers readers a practical, empowering guide for taking action. In Part 1, Inches shows how effective communication through storytelling and empathy can help in engaging others—including climate change skeptics—to enact change. In Part II, Inches discusses how to organize events, form coalitions, collaborate with policymakers, and work with the media. A senior official for many years in the Maine state government, where she worked on issues that included renewable energy, energy efficiency, and land use planning, Inches shows how it is within everyone's power to take on the challenge of climate change.

Cecil (Mike) North Jr ’48 (center), who passed away on October 4 in Belvedere, CA., pictured with his stepson Tad Kinney ’74 and son Alex North ’81.

that the winters are cold, but traffic jams are now in the past. Richard never married, but his success in the stock market allowed him to travel extensively and meet many wonderful people. 19 74 GEORGE PROUT recently accepted the position of divisional president of Craft Diamonds, a global lab-grown diamond producer and jewelry manufacturer, and the largest supplier of labgrown diamonds in North America. He shares that at Craft, they have begun the process of building one of the largest solar panel arrays in Asia next to the growing facility in order to achieve carbon neutrality in the production process. He looks forward to leading the effort to create an ethical, sustainable alternative for the next generation of American consumers, while simultaneously making the jewelry industry’s most important product category—with its unique, luxurious capacity for demonstrating affection—more accessible to everyone.

19 75 SARAH (SALLY) C.M. PAINE, the William S. Sims University Professor

at the U.S. Naval War College, gave the George C. Marshall lecture in military history at the annual convention of the American Historical Association in January 2022. The lecture was titled “Centuries of Security: Chinese, Russian, and U.S. Continental vs. Maritime Approaches.” Her publications include The Wars for Asia 1911-1949 (winner of the Leopold Prize), The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War, and Imperial Rivals: China, Russia and Their Disputed Frontier (winner of the Jelavich Prize).

a month, he sees STEVE ARNASON at a fun book club that started 20 years ago. He also encounters many other Milton graduates from earlier classes in local travels. He is looking forward to his 45th reunion! 198 1 JAMES (ALEX) NORTH regrets to inform classmates that his father, CECIL (MIKE) NORTH JR ’48, passed away on October 4, in Belvedere, California. “Dad was a Milton man through and through. He was always wearing his Milton hat, Milton windbreaker, or both. He never stopped

learning and demonstrating Milton’s ‘Dare to be true’ motto.” 198 2 AMY GRILLO writes that four years ago she moved on from her teaching position in the Department of Psychology & Education at Mount Holyoke College to help start a new College of Education Studies at Wesleyan University. “We are up and running, finally back to in-person learning on campus, and I’m enjoying seeing the offspring of many former Milton friends come and go at Wes!” When Amy is not at work, she is living in southern Vermont

1 980 ALBERT (MORY) CREIGHTON III

writes that he is living with his family on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His two sons, Sam and Andy, graduated from college and are working both locally and far away. Albert remains busy with his growing company, Pinpoint Laser Systems, building laser measuring systems that are used by high-tech companies around the globe. He also is active with local volunteerism and mentoring at a local high school on the robotics team, along with being an active member of a local land conservation organization and formerly the chair of his town’s finance committee. About once

1 984

DAVE SALWEN (center) shares a photo of a mini class of 1984 reunion in London this past October. Joining him were EDWARD SHUGRUE (left) and DOUG GRINDLE (right).

Spring 2022

Class Notes 1982–1992

In Memoriam 1940 –1949

Darthea Park Stalnaker ’40 Barry A. Carson ’45 Randolph K. Byers ’46 Cecil J. North Jr. ’48 Adlai E. Stevenson III ’48 1950–1959

Joan D. Wilson ’50 E. W. Hall Jr. ’53 Darley T. Randall ’54 H. Marshall Schwarz* ’54 Samuel E. Marcellino Jr. ’55 John Noble Jr. ’55 Elliott R. Morss ’56 Duncan B. Neuhauser ’57 Anthony Pantaleoni ’57 David Endicott Gannett ’58 Kate (Day) Beare ‘59

1989

JAMES WILLIAMS writes that a few 1989 classmates recently got together on Zoom. Clockwise from top left, BRIAN TRAW (Zooming from Nanjing, China) JOHN YU, ANIL THOMAS, LES MARSHALL, and JAMES WILLIAMS.

1960– 196 9

Faith Howland** ’61 Charlotte Forbes Wunderlich ’62 19 7 0–1979

Hendrik M. Ecker ’70 Jesse Abbott ’74 Robert G. Soule ’75 David L. Mercer ’79 1980–1989

Molly F. de Ramel ’88 Fa c ulty and Staf f

Jean M. McCawley *TRUSTEE EMERITUS **FORMER TRUSTEE

ALUMNI, FACULTY, AND STAFF WHO PASSED JUNE 26, 2021—DECEMBER 10, 2021. TO NOTIFY US OF A DEATH, PLEASE CONTACT THE DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI RELATIONS OFFICE AT ALUMNI@MILTON.EDU OR 617-898-2447.

with her family and too many chickens. She has one daughter about to graduate from Bard College and one who just started at Pitzer College. Amy looks forward to seeing classmates at the upcoming reunion and notes that if anyone is doing college visits with their kids at Wesleyan, she has a room for you on the edge of campus. BEN JESUP writes that he and his wife are doing well and still living in a mid-century modern house in Hollin Hills in Alexandria, Virginia. Ben is working as assistant solicitor for fish and Wildlife at the Department of the Interior. He also authored a chapter in a recent book, Endangered Species Act: Law, Policy, and Perspectives. His daughter

Milton Magazine

1990

LAWRENCE SCHWARTZ, LEFT, shares a photo of himself, SUMUL SHAH, and JAMES RAMAGE, (all class of ‘90 Hallowell House members) celebrating James’s 50th birthday in New York.

Sarah graduated from Haverford College in 2020 and is working in the AmeriCorps VISTA program. Ben and Sarah self-published a book, which is available on Amazon, based on Sarah’s senior thesis, titled Memoria. The book is a remembrance of her grandparents and their orchid-collecting hobby. For fun, Ben can be found birding, playing tennis, and biking. He has connected via Zoom with a group of old Robbins House friends a few times over the past year. He hopes to see people in person at his reunion and hopes everyone stays safe.

1995

SCOTT TREMAINE married Sonia Fernandez (second from right) on October 22 in Madrid, Spain. After having lived in Europe for the past 16 years, he is planning a move back to the United States and hopes to be able to join his next reunion. Pictured above with Scott and Sonia are his daughter Lucia (far left) and Sonia’s daughter Lucia (far right).

1983

1 986

EMILY BINGHAM writes that COVID-19 has brought her family of five back under her roof in Kentucky for the first time since her first child left for boarding school, 10 years ago. She shares that it was scary, yet heavenly, and involved an immense amount of cooking and cleaning. Emily recounts the grief and horror Louisville felt for the killing of Breonna Taylor this past spring. “We protested and listened and tried to see through old systems and assumptions that paved the way for this tragedy and many like it. A book I had been working on for several years about the 1853 Stephen Foster hit, ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ was suddenly even more swamped with irony.” Learn more in Emily’s book: My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song.

CHIP TENNILLE writes he and Holly D. Roberts were married in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on June 5, 2021.

1 989 LYGEIA RICCIARDI writes that she lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Eric, and two daughters, ages 12 and 16. She has been working at the intersection of technology and health and is currently building an online wellness community focused on women. TOURÉ shares that he published an oral history of Prince called Nothing Compares 2 U, his seventh book, and a sister podcast called Who Was Prince? SAM WILLIAMSON writes that he and his wife, Eleanor, have moved to Miami, Florida, where

he is the managing partner of the new office that his law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, just started. 19 9 0 MICHAEL CERVIERI writes from southern Rhode Island, where he now lives after spending almost 30 years in New York City. He, his wife, Homa, and their two daughters made the move in March 2020. Michael spends his days designing and developing websites, chasing after his three- and two-year-olds, and tending to his garden. In the if-not-now-when/you’re-havinga-mid-life-crisis department, Michael and Homa just bought 30 acres to start an orchard and retreat. “Why? Because when 50 is staring you in the face, you have to outcrazy it.” BEN GOODMAN is living in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Spring 2022

19 9 2 ANDREW BERISH writes that he is living in Tampa, Florida, with his wife, Maria, and two kids, ages 11 and 8. He is an associate professor at the University of South Florida in the humanities and cultural studies department. His wife is also an associate professor at the University of South Florida. Andrew writes about jazz and American popular music. His book, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility and Race in Jazz of the 1930’s and 40’s, was published in 2012. He is currently working on a book about jazz, listening, and emotion. Andrew also writes humor for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He shares that Tampa is a lovely place with amazing beaches, but with alligators and snakes. “You can’t get everything you want, right?” His professional website can be found at andrewberish.com.

Class Notes 0000–0000

NATE BIHLDORFF shares that he and his wife are still located near Seattle, Washington, with his two ridgeback dogs. He spends much of his free time hiking the Cascades and Olympics or wandering around the San Juan Islands. Nate is the senior vice president of product development & publishing at Nintendo of America. During these challenging times, he spends most of his workday figuring out how to deliver smiles. He looks forward to returning to the East Coast and seeing his family and classmates. Nate welcomes emails from fellow alumni and can be reached at natebihldorff@hotmail.com.

19 93 TINA ASPIALA shares that she has spent the pandemic developing an iOS calendar application for people with ADHD called PiCal.

1 994

19 9 7

NOAH FREEMAN writes that he is a divorced father of two kids, Ella, 12, who is in fifth grade at Milton, and Julian, 8, who is applying for fourth grade next year. While living in the South End, Noah has joined Google’s AI team, where he runs an R&D group in the Cambridge office. He also is a guest teacher in Milton’s Computer Science Department.

FRANCES TILNEY BURKE writes that after eight military moves over the course of 14 years, her family is back in Washington, D.C., for the fourth time with her four kids in tow (ages 13, 12, 8, and 2). She finished a Ph.D. at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in 2021 and is now writing a book as the George P. Shultz Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Frances would love to catch up with any classmates in the area.

1 995

During the lockdown, PAUL COSTELLO took up oil painting outdoors. He attended a workshop on Nantucket and spent much of the summer on Cape Cod with his easel in his car. He is happy to share that he even sold a couple of paintings, one to a passerby and one at a charity auction.

Milton Magazine

19 98 CAROLINE AIELLO is keeping the groceries stocked at DeLuca’s Market in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. She and her sister, VICTORIA ’08, plan to carry on the century-old family business and focus on community engagement and sustainability.

Caroline welcomes you to stop in and say hello!

▲ MIKE DESCOTEAUX shares that he has decided to change careers after two decades in arts leadership. Over a few short years, he acquired the professional licenses, ratings, and experience to work as a flight instructor out of Norwood and Providence. He has since been hired by Cape Air, where he flies passengers all over New England. Mike is currently based

in Rockland, Maine, and resides four days a week with former Milton faculty members Bryan and Marilyn Cheney (parents of IAN CHENEY ’98.) Every night they swap Milton stories over dinner. PRUDENCE TSANG shares a photo from a Thanksgiving gathering on November 19 (Tsang, back row, fifth from left) by the Hong Kong Alumni Association. A wide range of alumni from 1990 to 2006 attended. “It’s been two years since we’ve had our Thanksgiving dinner, due to COVID-19. Glad to see happy faces on everyone and the turnout was great!” (TOP LEFT)

19 99 LILY BROWN and her family relocated to New England from California at the beginning of the pandemic and are living outside Portland, Maine. Cora, 2, is enjoying taking care of her backyard chickens, jumping in

leaf piles, and sledding in winter. SARAH WHITE MACINTYRE

recently got together with 1999 classmates at a mutual Georgetown friend’s wedding in Tampa, Florida. Pictured are SARAH, CHRIS PITINO, and KELLY MENICE (previously Sullivan). (TOP RIGHT)

In December, JOSE ORTIZ JR. was appointed to lead the economic and workforce development committee to assist Eric Adams in his transition to New York City mayor. JOANNA OSTREM and BETH PIERSON recently reunited

with their families in New York City. (RIGHT) 2000

MAISY SAMUELSON and her wife, Jen, welcomed their first child, Willa Dwyer Samuelson, on June 3, 2021, in San Francisco. On the same day in

Spring 2022

Class Notes 2000–2004

Tel Aviv, NAOMI HAUSMAN SHOIHAT ‘00 and her husband, Boris, also welcomed their first child, Adam Shalev Shoihat. Maisy and Naomi were lab and doubles partners at Milton and have enjoyed supporting each other through pregnancy and parenthood including texting from delivery rooms across the world.

low gross and net. Teresa and Stephanie were not far behind and both played well. (ABOVE)

cisco school librarian position at the end of the 2019–20 school year and spent the next year traveling to figure out where he wanted to live next. The process led him to the Columbus School for Girls in Columbus, Ohio, where he is the new director of library services. It is his first time living in the Midwest and his first time managing so many projects and staff at once. He is excited for the challenge. and his wife, Emily McGoldrick, welcomed their baby daughter, Shea, on August 1, 2021. FREDDY DEKNATEL

2003 COREY BAKER

left his San Fran-

CHRISTINA SARGENT gave birth to her second daughter, Luciana Monroe, on May 21, 2021. Luciana’s big sister Selena, 3, has been very affectionate and loves making “her baby” laugh. After temporarily relocating her family to Nashville for a job with the hospitality company Sonder, Christina has now transferred to a role in Chicago managing 250 apartments.

2 004 JOANNA CHOW and husband Bret Anderson of Brookline welcomed Byron “Hunter” Anderson, on September 14, 2021.

2 0 02 AMELIA ALI sang the national anthem at Fenway Park in September. “Go Milton Class of 2002!” CLAIRE CHENEY, owner of Curio Spice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently learned that Curio Spice made the 2021 Best Shops by Shopkeepers, a publication celebrating “unique, creative, and inspiring independent shops.”

In July, CAROLINE (CURTIS) HAYES ‘02, STEPHANIE (TURCHI) GREELEY ‘01, TERESA CURTIS ‘07, and VICTORIA BENDETSON ‘02 played in the Wianno Member Guest in Osterville, MA. Caroline won longest member drive, and Caroline and Victoria teamed up to win

2008

MEGAN CAMPOS married Adam Cogbill in northern Vermont with several Milton classmates in attendance. From left to right are VICTORIA AIELLO, GAIL WATERHOUSE, EMILY RIDER-LONGMAID, the bride, DINEEN BOYLE (bridesmaid), ALYSSA BLAIZE, and KATIE ST. GEORGE (bridesmaid).

Milton Magazine

2008

p hoto g ra p h by

In 2021, MADELEINE MURRAY started teaching painting and drawing at an independent art school in Vermont and resumed selling her paintings with great success. In her first in-person show since the pandemic began, she sold 13 original paintings (including Upstairs, pictured here) in 24 hours. To date, she has sold nearly 90 paintings. You can see and commission her artwork at mmurrayart.com.

illustration by

Tktktktk

Spring 2022

Class Notes 2005–2016

ELISE LOCKAMY-KASSIM and her husband, Ayodeji, Kassim welcomed their first daughter, Fiona, on October 30, 2021. Their family resides in Atlanta, Georgia. The family’s baby shower featured surprise appearances by Milton alumnae GLADYS GIRABANTU and JARVON CARSON ‘06.

2 0 07

ALEXANDRA ALVES and her husband, Steven, welcomed

August Alexander Polanco in July 2021. (SEE P. 49)

2 008

FRANK SMITH recently wrapped filming on the first three episodes of OPEN TO IT, his LGBTQIA+ webseries written, produced by, and starring him. Frank was featured on Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo in 2019 and will be back on your screens in 2022—this time alongside Laganja Estranja from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Follow him on Instagram using @ frank.arthur.smith for Frank and #opentoit for the show.

After a tumultuous year transforming Mei Mei Restaurant into a packaged dumpling company and founding Project Restore Us to support food access for working families and immigrants, IRENE LI is switching gears. She recently started a fellowship in the inaugural class of the Visible Hands venture capital accelerator and is working on a tech solution to support restaurant owners and work-

Milton Magazine

ers as they rebuild the industry. She also joined the board at The Food Project and the steering committee at RAISE, the employer-centric arm of One Fair Wage. 2 010 MICHAEL BORYS and RUTH WELD were married

on September 18, 2021, in Chocorua, New Hampshire. In attendance were Ruth’s father STEPHEN WELD ‘65, godfather NED ROGERSON ‘65, and many beloved Milton al-

ca rol i na m a rl e s

2 0 05

Milton Academy Board of Trustees 2021-2022

ums who graduated between 1965 and 2020. Pictured (all Class of 2010): MARY LOPEZ-MOTZER, RYAN MCDANIEL, AMELIA WHALEN, JONATHAN YU, EMILY PERKINS, MICHAEL AND RUTH, SOPHIE BECHEK, DYLAN WILLIAMS, MONICA DAS, and NIA PATTON. (LEFT) and Aneesha Mehta welcomed a baby boy, Miles Mehta Harris, on July 26, 2021. ALEX HARRIS

2 0 12 JESSICA CARLSON produced and executive produced a short documentary called Davis Out of the Unknown with a team of young filmmakers in New York and Los Angeles through her production company, Young & Lucid Media. It is a documentary following Davis Point, a seven-year-old living with a rare disease called Koolen-de Vries Syndrome. The work-inprogress, privately screened for scientists at Global Genes RARE Health Equity Summit, focused on DEI in the rare-disease community. Special thanks to teammate CHARLOTTE ZONIS ’15!

2 0 16

COREY HALES’S new video was released in November. The song “Cherry Tree” was written and performed by Corey.

Elisabeth B. Donohue ’83

President

New York

Stuart I. Mathews P ’13 ’17 ’17

Vice President

Waban

Edward E. Wendell Jr. ’58 P ’94 ’98 ’01

Vice President

Milton

Claire D. Hughes Johnson ’90 P ’24 ’27

Treasurer

Milton

Robert Azeke ’87

Secretary

New York

Bradley M. Bloom P ’06 ’08

Emeritus

Wellesley

James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 P ’87 ’90 ’93

Emeritus

Chestnut Hill

Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 P ’98

Emeritus

New York

David B. Brewster ’90

Cambridge

Yeng Felipe Butler ’92 P ’25 ’33

Milton

Douglas Crocker II ’58

Delray Beach

Jason Dillow ’97

New York

Randall C. Dunn ’83

Chicago

FL NY IL

Shadi Farokhzad P ‘23 ‘25 Waban

John B. Fitzgibbons ’87

Bronxville

Eleanor Haller-Jorden ’75 P ’09

Wädenswil

Peter Kagan ’86

New York

Sonu Kalra P ’23 ’26 ’28

Milton

Elizabeth B. Katz ’04

Boston

William A. Knowlton P ’23

Boston

Switzerland

Yunli Lou ’87 P ’24

Shanghai

China

Ravi Mallela P ‘22, ‘24

Honolulu

John D. McEvoy ’82 P ’19 ’20 ’25

Milton

Meika Tylese Neblett ’90 Lincroft

Gene Reilly ’79 P ’10 ’12

North Andover

Hendrick Sin P ’23 ’25 Hong Kong

China

Gabriel Sunshine P ’22 ’24

Boston

Dune D. Thorne ’94

Lincoln

Patrick Tsang ’90

Hong Kong

Luis M. Viceira P ’16 ’19

Belmont

Sylvia P. Westphal P ’18 ’21 ’25 ’27 ’27

Boston

Ronnell L. Wilson ’93

Jersey City

Kevin K. Yip ’83 P ’16 ’23

Hong Kong

China

Spring 2022

China

Class Notes

. Q . T . O . N.K

Miles Mehta Harris

CHILD OF ALEX HARRIS ’10 AND ANEESHA MEHTA (SEE PAGE 65)

on the QuaLAdTE ST A D D IT IO N S * New Kids IL IE S & TH EI R M A LU M N I FA

Fiona

CHILD OF ELISE LOCKAMYKASSIM ’05 AND HER HUSBAND, AYODEJI KASSIM (SEE PAGE 64)

Milton Magazine

Willa Dwyer Samuelson

CHILD OF MAISY SAMUELSON ’00 AND HER WIFE, JEN (SEE PAGE 61)

Adam Shalev Shoihat

Postscript

CONTINUED FROM P. 68

CHILD OF NAOMI HAUSMAN SHOIHAT ‘00 AND HER HUSBAND, BORIS (SEE PAGE 62)

ing an expansive imagination is, I think, generally finding the world and its people fascinating (and perhaps other worlds, too). What helps me as a writer is twofold: First, as with my family dinnertable conversations, there needs to be a lull. A pause. Some quiet when I’m walking the dog or doing laundry or planting potatoes. And in the quiet, my imagination breathes. My mind benefits from being away from phone, from screen, from distractions. Just being. The second is what was there all along—the ability and desire to ask questions: What’s the most exciting idea in mathematics these days? What was your favorite childhood food, and who made it with or for you? What do you miss most when you’re at sea for months at a time? What do you wish people knew about you? I write to understand. I write to be better informed. I write to share uncommon experiences that can explain a common truth—something relatable that might help a reader or listener feel less alone. Imagination has the power to ease suffering. Imagination is wondering what could be from what we already know. Most of all, imagination is thinking. Wondering. Listening to people, finding out who they are, where they’ve come from, what they know, I find my own views expand, informing how imagination is at play in my work and in my day-to-day life. To use imagination on the page, we must first use it in our day-to-day lives. We have to wonder about others. We have to find ways to connect.

Byron “Hunter” Anderson

CHILD OF JOANNA CHOW ’04 AND BRET ANDERSON (SEE PAGE 62)

Cora

CHILD OF LILY BROWN ’99 AND HER HUSBAND, CHARLES (SEE PAGE 61)

Spring 2022

EMILY FRANKLIN ’90, P’17, ’22, ’25 IS THE AUTHOR OF MORE THAN 20 NOVELS. HER DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION WAS PUBLISHED IN 2021. HER NEXT NOVEL, BECOMING ISABELLA, BASED ON THE LIFE OF ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER, WILL BE PUBLISHED IN 2023.

Postscript

What If? AS A CHILD, EMILY FRANKLIN ‘90 WAS ALREADY CURIOUS ABOUT LIFE’S NEVER-ENDING CONUNDRUMS AND POSSIBILITIES

when I was growing up, we had dinner table discussions about politics, art, who had what to do later, and who had to be where when. But there were also lulls. And in those quieter moments, I often asked questions—of my parents, grandparents, siblings. Sometimes the questions related to the news of the day, and other times they began with a “What if…?” or “What would you do if…?”. These questions became so regular that in my family they were called “Em questions.” At the core, when I asked an Em question, I was asking someone to consider their role in the world. The experiences they’d had and ones they hadn’t but might. How might they react? How might they find empathy in their responses? I wanted to know about people—not what they presented but who they were inside. I wanted to know what mattered. When I am writing either poetry or fiction, I am almost never thinking about imagination. I am almost always problem-solving. Usually this begins with asking a series of “What if” questions: What if Rashomon were retold as a young adult story, with three teenagers stuck inside an abandoned movie theatre the last night before graduation, each one an unreliable narrator of the same tragedy? This turned into my novel Last Night at the Circle Cinema. What if we examined the idea of imaginary numbers as experienced through what we see, specifically the field across from my house in which there are often cows and sometimes not? This turned into my poem The Math of Cows. What did street lamps look like in Boston in 1861? This led to the

opening scene in Becoming Isabella, my next novel, based on the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Sometimes the questions I’m asking are broad: Can someone commit a terrible act and still be a good person? This is an example of a question that led to more questions: What if a (primarily) good character committed a crime? What if she only did that in reaction to something terrible she experienced? When I begin to allow myself the freedom of wondering,

Milton Magazine

of flow-charting possible outcomes, I find I can quickly narrow down some ideas for plot—What if the person who did the horrible thing is now a physician who helps others? And then just as quickly broaden again to ask questions I’ll need to examine in the book either directly or as a sort of backdrop: What role do secrets serve in our lives? Are they helpful or harmful? If we unravel bad things we’ve done, would it unravel the good—or perhaps lifesaving—things we do now?

Sometimes the questions are less specific and more examinations of parts of being human that interest me. How does trauma inform our choices? How does grief? And often, as I learned at Milton, I engage not only my own brain with these questions but also other people who have their own set of experiences and who are experts in other fields (astrophysics, cardiothoracic surgery, being a person of color in the field of mycology). Part of havCONTINUED ON P. 67

illustration by

Simone Massoni

MILTON FUND SUPPORTING OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL

The Milton Fund provides an essential part of our School’s operating budget. Used in the year they are given, gifts fund core mission areas and emerging needs, fulfilling the promise of an exceptional Milton education. This year, when you make your gift to the Milton Fund, you can choose to support a priority area:

DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION

FACILITIES

FACULTY SUPPORT

FINANCIAL AID

SCHOOL’S GREATEST NEEDS

Explore your options online: www.milton.edu/give

STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Milton Magazine

Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Boston, MA Permit No. 58423

Milton Academy Communication Office Milton, MA 02186

Change Service Requested

“At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a filmmaker. I thought of myself as a comedian aspiring to be on something like The Daily Show or Full-Frontal with Samantha Bee. My only visual language for documentary was the late-night field pieces on those shows.” COMEDIAN AND FILMMAKER CJ HUNT ’03 ( S E E PAG E 10)

Milton Magazine, Spring 2022

Articles inside

in memoriam

postscript

upper school

on the quad

alumni books

class notes

in the news

lower school