Summer 2014 Hotchkiss Magazine

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EMERITI

Emily Pressman ’98

Howard C. Bissell ’55, P’82

Chip Quarrier ’90

John Coumantaros ’80, P’16

John R. Chandler, Jr. ’53, P’82,’85,’87, GP’10,’14

Casey Reid ’01 VP and Chair, Communications Committee

Ian R. Desai ’00

Frederick Frank ’50, P’12

Tom Seidenstein ’91

Thomas J. Edelman ’69, P’06,’07

David L. Luke III ’41

Bryan Small ’03

William R. Elfers ’67, Vice President

Dr. Robert A. Oden, Jr. P’97

Sheria Smith ’01

John E. Ellis III ’74

Francis T. Vincent, Jr. ’56, P’85

David Tan ’91

Diana Gomez ’76, P’11,’12

Arthur W. White P’71,’74, GP’08,’11

Michael Thompson ’66

Board of Trustees Thomas C. Barry P’01,’03,’05

Sean M. Gorman ’72, Secretary

Carolyn Toolan ’97

Edward Greenberg ’55 John P. Grube '65, P'00 Kevin M. Hicks, Ex Officio Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet ’85 Christopher H. Meledandri ’77, Vice President Kendra S. O’Donnell Thomas S. Quinn III '71, P'15,'17 Jean Weinberg Rose ’80, President Roger K. Smith ’78, P’08 Jane Sommers-Kelly ’81 Marjo Talbott John L. Thornton ’72, P’10,’11,’16, Officer-at-Large

EX-OFFICIO MEMBERS

Alumni Association Board of Governors

Kevin M. Hicks, Head of School

Ed Greenberg ’55 President

Dan Pullman ’76

Christina Bechhold ’03 VP, Chair, Nominating Committee

Past President, Alumni Association

Lance Beizer ’56 Miriam Beveridge ’86 Doug Campbell ’71 Secretary and Chair, Membership Subcommittee of the Nominating Committee Adam Casella ’06

William B. Tyree ’81, P’14, Treasurer

Robert Chartener ’76

Daniel Wilner '03

Charlotte Dillon ’10

Stephanie Bowling Zeigler ’84, Ex Officio

Patricia Barlerin Farman-Farmaian ’85 VP and Chair, Gender Committee

TRUSTEES RETIRING AS OF

Mark Gall ’59

JUNE 30, 2014

Peter Gifford ’93

Lawrence Flinn, Jr. ’53

Caldwell Hart ’87

Elizabeth Gardner Hines ’93

Keith Holmes ’77

Eleanor Green Long ’76

Nisa Leung Lin ’88

Forrest E. Mars Jr. ’49, P’77,’82, GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14

Alessandra Nicolas ’95 Nichole Phillips ’89 VP and Chair, Alumni of Color Committee

Katie Berlandi ’88 Past President, Alumni Association

Stephanie Bowling Zeigler ’84, President, The Hotchkiss Fund Jeannie Weinberg Rose ’80, President, Board of Trustees

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COVER PHOTO: JONATHAN DOSTER

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A Sunset splash at the Lake, May 31, 2014

HEAD OF SCHOOL

Dr. Kevin M. Hicks EDITOR

Roberta Jenckes DESIGNER

Christine Koch, Boost Studio CLASS NOTES EDITOR

Divya Symmers, Communications Writer

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In this issue we pay special tribute to the six retiring faculty members who have served Hotchkiss for a quarter-century or more. To us, these remarkable women and men are not only giants in the classroom, but also models for a purposeful life. Instructor in History Julia Wu Trethaway, whose entire working life was spent as a teacher at Hotchkiss and whose children, Perry ’06 and Paul ’09, grew up on the campus, is featured on pp. 15-16.

It is with immeasurable sadness that we write you that our beloved Julia Trethaway died on July 9, just a few weeks after she was honored at a campus reception alongside her husband Tom ’75 and other retiring faculty.

Julia’s knowledge, vitality, and boundless enthusiasm inspired generations of students and all of us who knew her. For her generosity of spirit and her invaluable contributions to our community, we are grateful and dedicate this issue to Julia.

WRITERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Tyler Gardner Dr. Kevin M. Hicks Randy Kennedy Lewis Lapham ’52 Henry McNulty Divya Symmers Brenda Underwood Ellie Youngblood ’10

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Thank You to Our Retiring Faculty

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Environmental Stewardship: From Practice to Pedagogy

The Hotchkiss School does not discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion, race, color, sexual orientation, or national orientation in the administration of its educational policies, athletics, or other school-administered programs, or in the administration of its hiring and employment practices.

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Readers Write

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Campus Connection

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Alumni Profile

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Class Notes

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In Memoriam

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Peter Matthiessen ’45

by Lewis Lapham ’52

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It’s My Turn

Hotchkiss Magazine is produced by the Office of Communications for alumni, parents, members of the faculty and staff, and friends of the School. Letters and comments are welcome. Please send inquiries and comments to: Roberta Jenckes, The Hotchkiss School, 11 Interlaken Road, Lakeville, CT 06039-2141, email to rjenckes@ hotchkiss.org, or phone 860-435-3122.

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FROM

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of school

On May 30, as this remarkable year drew to a close, T H E 1 7 3 M E M B E R S O F T H E C L A S S O F 2 0 1 4 C E L E B R AT E D T H E E N D O F T H E I R T I M E AT H O T C H K I S S W I T H G R A D U AT I O N E X E R C I S E S T H AT W E R E B L E S S E D B Y S U P E R B W E AT H E R A N D T H E F U L L - T H R O AT E D S U P P O RT O F F R I E N D S A N D FA M I LY.

In the following week, as underclassmen dutifully finished their projects and sat for finals, we began to sense the promise of the community they will help create next year in collaboration with almost 200 new students.

As a result, even those among us most in need of summer’s more measured pace can find ample reason to look forward to returning to campus in late August.

In a letter written earlier this spring to welcome the parents of our new students, I observed that the happiest, healthiest, and most successful students I’ve known: • Set reasonable goals informed by a revisable definition of success; • Recalibrate the skills that have brought prior success to the demands of a new environment. More specifically, they are quick to seek help from others in developing effective strategies and skills to understand, organize, and prioritize challenges; • Manage their time, liberty, and energy with consistent discipline; • Commit to getting eight to nine hours of high-quality sleep most nights in order to meet each day with patience, perseverance, good humor, respect for others, and joy; • Strive to work hard and smart and improve, rather than be perfect.

I subsequently referred to this letter in writing to our current parents upon the release of our students’ second-semester

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grades, and suggested that they could help their children take stock of the year by reflecting on these non-cognitive factors influencing performance. I then offered the following questions that might make for good conversation starters: • In light of the English novelist David Storey’s axiom that “self-confidence is the memory of success,” what parts of the past

year are worth committing to memory?

• What did you learn from others this year about friendship? What did you teach others about friendship?

• On the basis of your actions—specifically, how you spent your time and energy—to whom and to what did you give respect this year?

• What’s the difference between nourishing and satiating one’s emotional and spiritual needs? What did you learn this year about what you must do in order to feel nourished?

I share these thoughts with you for several reasons, not the least of which is to honor what I understand to be the School’s distinctive tradition of thoughtful introspection. If the work our students do still feels significant to them in ways that transcend the ordinary, it is because they are still encouraged by caring, inspiring teachers to recognize that there is always a broader project afoot; that the School, in the end, is fundamentally a safe and meaningful space in which to engage and test different versions of one’s self, with the ultimate goal of providing some authentic service to others.

The key ingredient in the preceding paragraph, of course, is the caliber of our teaching faculty. Here, I should note that, in keeping with tradition, this edition of the Magazine celebrates teachers who are retiring with more than 25 years of service to

PHOTO BY HELLEN HOM-DIAMOND

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Hotchkiss: Robert Barker, George Faison, Nancy Gaynor, Sandy Mirabile, Julia Trethaway, and Tom Trethaway. Each one, in his or her own way, has had a remarkable and enduring influence on countless students, colleagues, and the School. Though we are inclined to say that they are “irreplaceable,” which is no doubt true, we should take comfort in the fact that so too were Dick Gurney, Robert Hawkins, and many others who have helped build the School’s reputation. Surely, we can see that our current retirees’ worthy successors are already among us.

Of course, we are also bidding farewell to others, who—though of briefer tenure, and therefore not profiled in these pages—are also deserving of our recognition and gratitude. Of these, it is fitting to call your attention to the following two: • Manjula Salomon, our inaugural Director of Global Initiatives, who has developed and implemented international programs and partnerships that now allow us to provide our students with an education deeply relevant to the globalized world they will inherit, and who taught us all how to meet the challenge of building true community with imagination and courage;

• Pat Redd Johnson, Senior Associate Director of Admission, whose lifelong commitment to multicultural outreach and tireless advocacy for students and families have revolutionized our admissions practices, diversified our student body, enhanced our intercultural literacy, and transformed young lives.

In closing, I invite you to join our current students, faculty, and staff in taking up this year’s all-School Read: The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Born in Ghana, educated in England, Prof. Appiah is truly a citizen of the world and widely celebrated as a deeply thoughtful cultural theorist.

His book begins with a simple question: “What can we learn about morality by exploring moral revolutions?” In five engaging and accessible chapters, four of which constitute case studies of intriguing historical episodes, The Honor Code explores the way that honor — as an idea with deep implications for social identity — works across space, time, and culture. As he moves from one area of inquiry to another — dueling in Europe, Atlantic slavery, Chinese footbinding, and violence against women (specifically “honor killing” in the Middle East) — Prof. Appiah develops gener-

OPPOSITE: After the ceremony Head of School Kevin Hicks shares a moment with Derek Spence ’14.

ABOVE: Those seniors graduating with Classics diplomas show their joy on Graduation day.

ative distinctions among terms like honor, morality, respect, and dignity that we all too often conflate unthinkingly.

As we turn our attention with increasing focus to the quality and integrity of our life together at Hotchkiss, and work to ensure that all here enjoy equal access to safety, trust, and respect, Prof. Appiah's book will provide a valuable conceptual frame for thinking about how individuals learn to live within a group, how groups learn to live with ideals conveyed by an institution, and how individuals, groups, and institutions must continually reconcile their respective values and practices in order to achieve their fullest potential as forces for good.

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THANK YOU TO OUR RETIRING FACULTY

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RECOGNIZING 203 YEARS OF SHARING KNOWLEDGE AND INSPIRING STUDENTS | BY HENRY MCNULTY As is our custom, in this issue we pay special tribute to the retiring faculty members who have served Hotchkiss for a quarter-century or more. This year, their years of service total 203! In modeling dedication and commitment to a place and a craft, they demonstrate for our students and all of us what it means to live in a community, to be a contributor to something greater than oneself, to serve willingly, and to take part in the chores, as well as the spontaneous joys, that make the Hotchkiss engine turn, day in and day out. To us, these remarkable women and men are not only giants in the classroom, but also models for a meaningful life.

SANDY MIRABILE | ATTENDING PSYCHIATRIST THANK YOU!

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Charles Mirabile started his Hotchkiss career almost by accident.

“I had been invited to a cocktail party at a faculty member’s house,” he recalls, “and we got an emergency telephone call that there was a crisis, and would I please help. A young man had taken some LSD and was having a bad trip. It was quite a dramatic event; this poor teenager was really incapacitated. [Headmaster] Bill Olsen and [Dean of Students] Arthur White were there, and to make a long story short, when the whole thing got under control, Mr. Olsen said, ‘I’d like you to come to my office about working at Hotchkiss.’

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That was how I got hired.”

Now, four-plus decades later, Dr. Charles “Sandy” Mirabile Jr. is ending his long career as the School’s attending psychiatrist.

Sandy was born in Hartford and grew up in Farmington. He graduated from Avon Old Farms, then from Yale and McGill’s medical school, where his parents had met.

“I was supposed to take over my father’s surgical practice,” he says, “but instead, I went into psychiatry and worked at the Institute of Living [psychiatric facility in Hartford], where I did a residency and was in the research department.” He and his wife, Gail, lived in Sharon, and he commuted to Hartford.

At the time, few boarding schools had formal counseling programs to deal with students’ emotional health. “To an extent, we invented the model – on the back of an envelope,” Sandy says.

“Part of it involved looking at problems in new ways.”

During the 1970s Hotchkiss, like almost every other boarding school, saw major changes, including coeducation and a great increase in diversity. One of those changes was, in Sandy’s words, “the beginning of balancing the discipline system with other kinds of approaches to problems. When I joined the School, that movement had already begun, but I also played

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a pretty important part in formulating the policies and essentially trying to help the faculty accommodate this kind of transition.” Several other independent boarding schools followed Hotchkiss’ lead.

Hotchkiss students were far from his only concern. Besides his large private practice, which he ended last year, over the decades he consulted with as many as eight independent schools, including Salisbury, the Berkshire School, Indian Mountain, and Kent. For a time he was the only psychiatrist at Sharon Hospital.

“I used to work many days 14 hours or more,” he says. “It was a most remarkable time, but tiring, and Hotchkiss is perhaps the reason I stayed. It’s a wonderful institution. I had no schedule, but I was a full faculty member and attended faculty meetings and instituted various meetings with the administration. In later years, in-house counselors were hired, and we would schedule meetings. But otherwise I was on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when School was in session.”

Over time, the nature of his services evolved. “Initially, all I was doing was mopping up,” he says. “It was one crisis after another. Somebody would take some pills, and I’d have to deal with it. Or somebody was smoking marijuana, or whatever. So in the early years, it was wall-towall crisis intervention. As time passed, we designed a system at Hotchkiss where we were trying to monitor students proactively – trying to deal with problems before they got out of control.

And that has been a very different thing from what it was initially. Now, there’s the equivalent of two full-time counselors at Hotchkiss, plus the director of

health services. Nancy Bird, the first director, and I built a lot of the present system together.”

In a way, Sandy’s work involved advising faculty and administrators as much as students.

“There are many subtle issues that have to do with how to influence young people in a positive way, and I feel that has been my mission and my contribution at Hotchkiss,” he says. “For years, control was the principal instrument; if you wanted to affect behavior, you just needed to come up with the way of adequately controlling students.

There has been a gradual transition to a way to steer kids in a more positive way without getting into battles.”

Although he is leaving Hotchkiss, Sandy won’t exactly be retiring. “I’m going back to my research career,” he says. “It’s just a change in emphasis. I’m writing a book, and my wife and I run a little vegetable farm.” His first wife died in 1999. He and his present wife, Susan Parker Boal, live in Lakeville, not far from the Hotchkiss campus.

Sandy and Gail’s three children all attended Hotchkiss, as did Parker’s two children from a previous marriage.

“If I’ve accomplished anything at Hotchkiss,” Sandy says, “it is in the area of trying to shift the emphasis from punishment or control to individual responsibility.

“When you have the better part of 600 adolescents, it’s very hard to relinquish control. But when you try to control someone, you put them in a dependent posture. In other words, you’re saying ‘you’d better do what I tell you, because I’m the authority.’ The real goal of getting young people to adulthood is not to make them dependent, but to help them gain indepen-

‘‘

IF I’VE ACCOMPLISHED ANYTHING AT HOTCHKISS, IT IS IN THE AREA OF TRYING TO SHIFT THE EMPHASIS FROM PUNISHMENT OR CONTROL TO INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY.

dence in a responsible way.

“So the question is how to foster that growth, and that’s been my mission from the word ‘go.’ One of the great misperceptions is that to relax certain of the controls is permissive. For years I have tried to get this message out there: That giving up authoritarian control does not have to be permissive.”

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GEORGE FAISON INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH, INDEPENDENCE FOUNDATION CHAIR

THANK YOU!

ABOVE: George Faison, with, from left, wife Lorraine, grandson Lane, son Edward (Class of ’91), grandson Kip, and Edward’s wife Brooke

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Before he began teaching English at Hotchkiss, George Faison spent 20 years in public education. While pursuing an M.A.T. from Harvard, he did his practice teaching in Concord, Mass., and was asked to join the faculty in 1964. “I also considered trying for a position in a private school,” he says, “but I’d already had a full dose of exclusivity.”

George graduated from St. Paul’s in 1957. “There was virtually no diversity to the student body,” he says, “no African Americans, hardly any Asians or Jews – maybe one or two – and no girls. We were insulated, entitled, and often stupid. With hardly a qualm, we said things that were really outrageous.

Thus, as I embarked on my teaching career, I found the inclusiveness of a public school tipped the balance in its favor.”

Earlier, in 1961, after earning an English degree from Harvard, he entered the Army and was sent to Puerto Rico to help

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Spanish-speaking recruits learn English. “Every eight weeks I faced a new class, the same class, for six hours a day. I learned patience quickly, and that’s where I got myself into the teaching business, although it was already in the blood.”

George’s father, a legendary professor of art history at Williams College, was instrumental in returning art objects looted by the Nazis during World War II to their rightful owners; as part of that effort, in 1950, when George was in fifth grade, his family spent a year in Munich. “One day, my father took my older brother and me into his office,” he recalls. “He said, ‘I just want you to see this office, because you’ll never see another one like it.’ And there were stacks and stacks of paintings – masterpieces – leaning against the walls, and on the walls were Watteau, Rembrandt, and Rubens. There began my appreciation of the history of art.”

After his teaching years in Concord, George and his family spent two years at Fay School in Southborough, Mass., where his wife Lorraine was already the School librarian. By that time, he says, “private schools had mellowed and matured, so there was a more diverse student body.”

Intellectually, though, he felt the call of the upper grades and began to consider teaching at a secondary-level boarding school.

Happily, Lorraine pushed him to make the move.

“My father knew [Hotchkiss English teacher] Robert Hawkins,” he explains, “and at some point, Pop was going to Lakeville to have lunch with him.

I happened to mention that he might ask if there were any openings at Hotchkiss. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Hawkins, ‘I’m retiring in a year or two, so why don’t we get together?’ The job materialized and I was happy; like other prep schools, Hotchkiss by that time was a more appealing place

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than it was back when I was new to teaching – so I’m awfully glad that I waited.”

He started at Hotchkiss in 1986. In the 1990s, he was coChair of the English Department with Pat Jones; in fact, he has chaired English at all three schools in which he taught. He found the diverse student body much to his liking. “It’s very exciting to face a class with kids from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia – you name it.

It’s good to have so many points of view. Coeducation, too, was relatively new at Hotchkiss, but I was aware of the civilizing influence girls brought to the feel of the School.”

George and Lorraine were dorm parents in Bissell, then lived in the duplex apartment in Van Santvoord before moving off-campus. He also coached Junior Varsity soccer for a while with French teacher Alban Barker. “I didn’t know much about coaching, though I took note of Alban’s methodology – ‘Pass the ball, you twit!’” George laughs: “Our JV teams did very well indeed, so he must have known what he was doing.”

But his extracurricular passion was directing one of the three yearly Hotchkiss stage productions – or as he puts it, “coaching varsity theater.” “I directed two dozen main stage plays at Hotchkiss, including four musicals, American classics such as The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, English comedy, Greek tragedy, [and] French farce. Those plays were extraordinary directing experiences because I had so many talented students to work with.”

One of the standout productions, George recalls, was 1998’s Death of a Salesman, “because I had four fine young actors in the lead roles. If I had difficulty with a certain scene, I’d say, ‘OK, here’s my problem,’ and they’d

put their heads together and they’d solve it in about three minutes. They were terrific.”

Another memorable play was the 2001 production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. “It was one of the plays I did with a predominantly AfricanAmerican cast, and Pat Johnson, now retiring from Hotchkiss Admissions, was instrumental in getting me to do it,” he says.

His introduction to drama had come years before, when he was teaching in Concord. “One day, the principal said, ‘We don’t have anybody to do a play this year; you’re it.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it. I never did anything in the theater.’ He said, ‘Doesn’t matter.’ So I did everything – the music, the costumes, the lights, set construction.” That exciting initiation led to an acting baptism in community theater appearances, including Reverend Hale in The Crucible and Ernest in The Importance of Being Earnest.

“When I arrived at Hotchkiss and had [drama instructor] Joel Brehm as a technical director, I was in seventh heaven – so many aspects of production that were no longer my primary responsibility. Later on, Sarah Tames and Allen Babcock were enormously helpful,” he remarks. “This experience with stage work gave me a whole new dimension for seeing kids and educating them in different ways.”

George will have fond memories of the classroom, especially ‘Shakespeare and the Bible.’ “I took over the course after Roy Smith retired, adopting some of Roy’s curriculum but reshaping it as well, including a fair chunk of the history of art to accompany the Bible selections.”

George’s retirement plans are flexible. “I have ideas of things I‘d like to pursue, but I also enjoy the prospect of a clean canvas.”

‘‘

I DIRECTED TWO DOZEN MAIN STAGE PLAYS AT HOTCHKISS, INCLUDING FOUR MUSICALS, AMERICAN CLASSICS…ENGLISH COMEDY, GREEK TRAGEDY, [AND] FRENCH FARCE. THOSE PLAYS WERE EXTRAORDINARY DIRECTING EXPERIENCES BECAUSE I HAD SO MANY TALENTED STUDENTS TO WORK WITH.

’’

He and Lorraine plan to make trips to California to see their son, Weston, a painter in San Francisco with two children.

Their younger son, Edward ’91, also with two children, is a research ecologist at Highstead, a private nature conservancy in Redding, Conn. “I will get into my garden, I may teach at the Taconic Learning center,” he says. “Maybe we’ll get to Europe again. Who knows?”

But he will miss the classroom.

“The most wonderful aspect of teaching,” he says, “is that as a teacher, you are constantly a learner. If you pretend, your students will see right through you, and you will lose an opportunity to learn from them. Pretenders have a hard time learning much of value. Whether the insight was something I had never thought of before – and that often happened – or a new way of saying things, for that kind of growth I am forever grateful to my students. Fifty years of teaching have never diminished it – the growth or the gratitude! I will miss those young learner-teachers, but I am ready to move on.”

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NANCY GAYNOR | COUNSELOR IN HEALTH SERVICES

THANK YOU!

OPPOSITE: Nancy Gaynor, at work with a team of students at this year’s Eco Day, an annual event for the School community that she co-founded in the 1990s with former Instructor Jim Morrill

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In her more than 25 years at Hotchkiss, Nancy Gaynor has seen the School’s counseling program grow from a small, almost ad hoc, effort to deal with adolescent issues to being an important part of the boarding school experience.

In the early days, “students used to kind of sneak down to my office and not let anyone know they were in counseling,” she says.

“Now, that’s not necessarily the case. There’s a greater willingness to seek support, and a greater willingness in the Hotchkiss community to accept it.”

Nancy came to Lakeville in 1986 when her husband, Wayne Gaynor, took a job as an instructor in mathematics.

“When we first came,” she says, “I did not know that I was going to be working; our first son was five, and our second son had just been born that spring.

During the summer, I felt ready

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to return to work and began poking around to see what possibilities for jobs there might be in the area. I wrote to Sam Coughlin, who was Dean of Faculty at the time, to ask whether she knew of places I might investigate.”

Nancy already had a history of counseling adolescents. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., she graduated from Haddonfield (N.J.) Memorial High School and earned a degree in sociology from the University of Hartford (Conn.), where she met Wayne. She then spent a year at Valleyhead, a small residential school for girls with a history of learning and emotional issues, in Lenox, Mass. “I was on the residential staff and taught math,” she explains. “The social and emotional parts were more important than the academic side.”

She and Wayne married in 1976; he started teaching at Cheshire Academy, then moved to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa. Nancy taught reading and study skills there, and earned a master’s degree in education, with an emphasis in adolescent and family counseling, from the nearby West Chester University.

They stayed at Hill into the 1980s, and during the last three years there Nancy was the director of an outpatient counseling center at a youth service bureau, working with adolescents and their families.

“At the time,” she says, “Hill was still an all-boys school, and we were interested in being at a coed school. Wayne’s roots were in New England – he had grown up in Mystic, Conn. – and so we were happy to settle in northwest Connecticut.”

Nancy asked Sam Coughlin whether Hotchkiss “would be interested in having somebody do counseling a few hours a

week; at that point Hotchkiss was thinking of enlarging the program and there was an interest in having a counselor on campus. So, I threw my name out, they were interested, and I was hired. I started at eight to 10 hours a week; I would see students in my apartment in Coy.” Her second year of counseling involved about 15 hours a week, and by her third year she was working full-time.

“The issues that came up in counseling were the problems that you would see in any population of teenagers,” she says.

They were typical adolescent concerns, with the added complexities of life at a boarding school.”

Her contributions to Hotchkiss include both curricular and extracurricular initiatives.

Along with Director of Health Services Nancy Bird, she created a peer-led health course, Human Development, which combined sex education with a range of other topics -- life skills, adolescent adjustment, living in a community, diversity, drugs, and alcohol. “This class filled a longstanding void at Hotchkiss,” says Kim Martineau ’91. “It was the product of years of grassroots work by the Nancys that has visibly made Hotchkiss a kinder, more welcoming place.”

Nancy Gaynor also worked with biology instructor Jim Morrill and members of the Students for Environmental Awareness on campus projects.

In time, Morrill and Gaynor became the founders of the annual Eco Day. She became a central part of the Independent Schools Gender Project, which is now approaching its 20th anniversary. “It began when a group of women

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from 31 independent schools gathered together to look at gender equity on our campuses,” she says. Through regular surveys to gather data, the ISGP has tackled a number of different questions involving perceptions of equity for students and adults in independent schools. “We looked at a number of issues involving women, both students and faculty. Besides employment equity, we have examined questions such as how many female students are in leadership positions, what’s the comfort level in dorms, are we reading as many female authors as male authors – many issues.”

Every other year the group hosts a conference at Hotchkiss, with about 20-25 schools participating.

The theme for this year’s conference in June is “Show Up, Speak Up, Act Up: Reclaiming Feminism.”

When asked how counseling students has changed over the years, she says, “There’s much more involvement from families these days.” The Internet also has

an increasing impact on student behavior. “I haven’t sorted it all out yet --” Nancy says, “the whole reliance on social media, as opposed to direct interaction. Part of why I got into counseling is that I believe that in the end, our relationships are really the most important thing. I don’t know how it will work out – I’m willing to stay open – but it’s yet another change, and I don’t automatically want to think it’s bad. It is important for people to keep time and space in their lives for face-to-face human interaction.” With so much emphasis on private social interaction, she says, “there’s a greater opportunity for adolescent stuff to go on outside of adult awareness and supervision. I would also say that students are much busier; it’s not as easy for them to find ways to relax.”

Apart from working on a house she and Wayne own in South Portland, Maine, Nancy has no firm retirement plans – and Wayne is not retiring now.

Keeping in touch with their children will be a priority. Their older

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I’VE LOVED THE WORK I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO HERE. IT HAS BEEN AN HONOR TO WORK WITH STUDENTS, THEIR FAMILIES, AND MY COLLEAGUES.

son, Peter Gaynor ’99, is chair of the history department in the middle school at Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, N.J.; he is married, with a son. The younger son, Andrew Gaynor ’04, is enrolled at the Maine Maritime Academy.

“I’ve loved the work I have been able to do here,” Nancy says. “It has been an honor to work with students, their families, and my colleagues. But it’s time for change. A lot of the work my colleagues and I did was getting a program in place.

And now the resources are here.”

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ROBERT BARKER | DIRECTOR OF ASIA RELATIONS

THANK YOU!

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Robert Barker taught history at Hotchkiss for 36 years, and for two decades held the E. Carleton Granbery Endowed Teaching Chair. Those accomplishments alone place him in the ranks of Hotchkiss notables. But he also has been, at one time or another, Dean of Dormitory Life, Dean of the Class of 2005, Chair of the History Department, Interim Dean of Admission and Financial Assistance, Development Assistant to the Head of School, and founder of the Summer Portals program.

Born in New Hampshire, Robert was brought up in Bermuda and went to boarding school in England, at Trent College in Nottinghamshire.

“Trent exposed me to the intellectual world, and taught me

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what a school could be,” he says.

“I knew from age 16, and probably before, that I wanted to be a schoolteacher.”

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of New Hampshire, he completed an internship at Exeter where, he says, “I had two really inspiring people who took me under their wing. I learned how to teach at Exeter.”

In September 1975 he brought that teaching experience to Hotchkiss. Initially, he taught history to Preps; in his second year he offered a course called Tudor England, and ended up teaching it for 34 years. “I had done a lot of work, both as an undergraduate and in graduate school, on the subject,” he says.

“I loved it; I taught it to seniors almost every year.” He also taught Western civilization.

Although Robert was single when he arrived, that changed when an effervescent, dark-haired woman entered the picture. “I met my wife, Candice, through mutual friends,” he says. They were married in the Hotchkiss Chapel, and Candy kept her job in New York City working for an advertising agency. “She used to spend most of the week there,” Robert says, “but she wanted a dog, so I bribed her. I said, ‘you leave New York and live here, and we will get a dog.’ So by that summer, she was here, and we had our first poodle.”

For years, Candy was the executive assistant to the headmaster of Indian Mountain School. She joined the Hotchkiss staff in 1988 and served in several posts, including as the executive assistant to the Head of School and then as director of events, before retiring in 2011.

In the meantime, Robert had

discovered Hotchkiss’s hidden caches of art.

“I knew there was a lot of art around the School, but wasn’t too sure where it was,” he says.

“So I went to [Headmaster] Bill Olsen, and he told me that when they dismantled the old main building they collected a lot of the art that [former Headmaster] George Van Santvoord had put in place, and eventually put it in a room in the basement of the chapel. I was given permission to catalogue it, and some funds.”

He worked on recording each work and arranged a system by which faculty could borrow the works for their classrooms and offices. “There was also a lot of art that had not been conserved for a long time,” he explains.

“Some of it was in iffy shape. I found a young woman who had been trained at the Louvre in restoring art. She came and restored a lot of the art – portraits, mostly.”

In 1994, Robert became dean of dormitory life, now called dean of residential life.

“Dormitory life at a boarding school is, next to the classroom, one of the most important things that goes on,” he says. “We instituted the first real proctor training program and formalized the dorm heads committee. You need consistency among dormitories, and kids also need to know the boundaries: How do I conduct myself with my peers, and with the families with whom I’m living?”

He was also a class dean, which in the late 20th century had a different setup that it does today, and Robert observed that the system could be improved.

“I convinced [Head of School] Skip Mattoon that the class deans should start out with kids in their Prep year and go all the

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LEFT: Robert and Candy Barker at Princeton University for the awarding of the Freshman Scholar Award to Robert’s former student and dear friend, Bobby Zhu ’09

way through with the class.

There’s much more consistency that way.”

Jon Terbell ’05 speaks appreciatively of the strong connection he had with his class dean. “I’ll always remember and be thankful for Mr. Barker ‘keeping his left eye on me.’ From the first day I arrived in Lakeville, Mr. Barker made me feel like he had a special interest in my success and was truly counting on me to do great work... to go above and beyond.

I’m sure there are countless other students he was able to make this kind of connection to, and instill that kind of inspiration in.”

The 2005 graduates, whom he was with for four years, made him an honorary member of the class – “a great honor for me,” he says.

For one year, he was Interim Dean of Admission. “That showed me how the world sees Hotchkiss from the outside,” he remembers.

“I was always looking at Hotchkiss from the inside.”

In 2004 he founded Summer Portals, the acclaimed seasonal program for 12- to 15-year-olds

interested in chamber music or environmental science. “There had actually been two or three summer programs before, but it had been almost 10 years since they had existed,” he says.

Founding Summer Portals “brought together all my Hotchkiss experiences – the residential side, the class dean side, the teaching, admission,” he says.

The program continues to flourish today, drawing about 90 middle- and high-school students from around the world.

Besides creating Summer Portals, the other accomplishment that brings him the most happiness is holding the E. Carleton Granbery Chair, funded by Ned Goodnow’44, for 20 years. “For me a teaching chair is the highest honor a school can give a teacher,” he explains.

Robert stepped aside from teaching history in 2011. After a sabbatical year of travel, he returned to serve as Development Assistant to then-Head of School Malcolm McKenzie and more recently as Director of Asia Relations, where his experience traveling for Portals for recruit-

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SCHOOLS ARE, OR SHOULD BE, ORGANIZATIONS WHERE THE PERSONAL IS VERY MUCH A PART OF WHAT THE PLACE IS, BECAUSE LEARNING TAKES PLACE IN SO MANY WAYS, NOT ONLY IN THE CLASSROOM.

ment has proved to be valuable to the School.

In retirement, he and Candy will live on Cape Cod, where he is a trustee of the Cape Symphony & Conservatory of Music & Arts.

“One of the most rewarding things for both Candy and me is to have so many of those kids come back to see us,” he says.

“Schools are, or should be, organizations where the personal is very much a part of what the place is, because learning takes place in so many ways, not only in the classroom.”

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JULIA AND TOM TRETHAWAY | THEY MET AND MARRIED AT HOTCHKISS AS 20-SOMETHING FACULTY MEMBERS. NOW THEY'RE RETIRING AFTER THREE-PLUS DECADES OF INSPIRATIONAL TEACHING AND MENTORING.

THANK YOU!

JULIA WU TRETHAWAY THE AUDREY MEYER MARS CHAIR INSTRUCTOR IN HISTORY | BY ROBERTA JENCKES When asked what advice she would give to a young teacher, just starting out, Julia Wu Trethaway responds unhesitatingly: “Be passionate. Love it.”

It’s advice she has lived in her 34-year teaching career. It’s also emblematic of everything she does, whether in her work as a class dean, as the School Service Program administrator, or on the ice with the Salisbury Stingers, a Hotchkiss faculty women’s ice hockey team she founded. She wowed generations of students in the classroom. They recall her teaching style with admiration and some astonishment.

Bo Armstrong ’05 was visiting Hotchkiss for the first time in 2002, when he sat in on Julia’s European History class.

He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“She was standing on tables, jumping up on cabinets, and just filling the blackboard with notes,” he recalls. “Mostly, I couldn’t imagine how the kids could take it all in.”

Andrew Miao ’05 has a similar memory. “Mrs. Trethaway would fill the whole blackboard,” he says. “Yet still, she had so much more to say – so much to tell us. She kept jumping up, trying to fill the last open spots on the board. I don’t think I had ever seen a teacher

be that enthusiastic, that determined to fill every little space.”

Fast-forward to today, and you hear similar comments. Blanca Sanz-Magallon’16, a student in her Lower Mid Humanities course, says, “Mrs. Trethaway is a wonderful teacher. Her class is very well structured and organized, and something that I have learned especially from her class is how to complete assignments, notes, and papers effectively and with discipline. I especially like the class discussions and writing prompts we have, since they prod us to look beyond the surface of events and into their effect and significance today, and they always result in lively debate.”

For a teacher who wins the respect and appreciation of students and colleagues alike, Julia Wu’s first days at Hotchkiss were not exactly auspicious. Hired to begin at Hotchkiss in the fall of 1980 after graduating from Wesleyan University with majors in East Asian studies, Modern European studies, and education, she went straight into the classroom.

“I had no preparation, no orientation, no nothing,” she says. “They just said, ‘Here are your books, here is your classroom … Go, teach. Your class-

room was your kingdom.

“I think I was the youngest teacher ever hired here. I was only 21. I was one of four fulltime women faculty that year,” she says.

And was it a bit overwhelming for the new college graduate? “I was a little bit too young to be overwhelmed,” she reflects. “I loved teaching; I loved being with the students. I don’t think I had ever worked harder in my life, but it was so rewarding. I had come right out of college to this place, which was a little piece of heaven.

“I had wanted to be a teacher since I was in kindergarten,” she says. “I come from a family of teachers; I went to Wesleyan, and I took a lot of education classes, and I, you know, student-taught during college.”

Born and brought up in Ann Arbor, Mich., Julia grew up with the influences of her parents, especially their love of music. Her father was an architect who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, and her mother was a writer and pianist. Julia began playing piano at about the age of five and gained her trademark passion for the piano as well as other studies. She even toyed with becoming a pianist, but decided she wasn’t

accomplished enough for the university level. She acquired new interest in her Asian heritage, traveling to China to learn more while she was in college.

“In 1978, I went to live with my aunt and my cousins in Shanghai for a time,” she says.

“Then I became very interested in Chinese—the language, the culture, the history.”

She was able to share some of that firsthand knowledge not long after she began at Hotchkiss. After teaching here for two years, Julia applied and was accepted to the Ph.D. program in East Asian studies at University of Michigan. The School hired Tom Trethaway ’75 to be her replacement, and the rest, we might say, is history.

For an interim year, he was teaching Chinese and Japanese history, and she taught U.S. history and medieval history. They worked well as a team; in 1984, they married in Manchester, VT. Their two children, Perry, Class of 2006, and Paul, Class of 2009, grew up on the campus, much to their parents’ delight.

After several years of living in three different dorms, the Trethaways moved to one of the big houses by the lake. The other constant feature in their lives has been a dog. “We had a

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I LOVED TEACHING; I LOVED BEING WITH THE STUDENTS. I DON’T THINK I HAD EVER WORKED HARDER IN MY LIFE, BUT IT WAS SO REWARDING. I HAD COME RIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE TO THIS PLACE, WHICH WAS A LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN.

’’

quite popular border collie, named Skye, who used to come to class with me,” Julia says.

“The students loved the dog; now we have Addie, an Australian shepherd.”

Another memory that students and colleagues have of Julia is her stockpile of jokes. “I can’t forget a joke,” she says, “that’s the problem! I used to fib and tell the kids that I was a joke-aholic and that I went to Joke-aholics Anonymous, and that I had to stand up and say, ‘My name is Julia Trethaway, and I’m a joke-aholic and I can’t stop telling jokes.’ And the kids BELIEVED ME. Some of them were skeptical, but it was pretty funny.”

Recent alumni, especially those from the Classes of 2008 and 2012 will have special memories of Julia, because she was their class dean. And she brought her trademark enthusiasm and energy to the additional role. During Spirit Week, when the students choose on Clash Day to combine colorful stripes and plaids, or on Taft Nerd Day to search for their suspenders and high socks, she showed up in the dining hall

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with fake teeth, scotch-taped glasses, and pocket protector with mechanical pencils. She made an extra effort to greet everyone that day.

During those years as class dean, she recorded the students’ Hotchkiss lives in film, taking an astonishing 5,000 photographs of the Class of 2012 alone, in all their daily activities and special events. The photos lit up the School website and thrilled the students and their parents.

“Yeah, I think it was a high point in my career,” she muses.

“It brought me into a different relationship with the students, and I loved being with them. I was always a little bit of a photographer, but I think the photographs made the Class that much more solid.”

And it was during the years as dean of the Class of 2012 that another remarkable thing happened. She returned to the piano after having not played for about 15 years. An outstanding pianist in the class, Angela Chen, approached her about playing a duet of a Fauré piece.

“Angela inspired me,” Julia says. “She asked me to play with her. I certainly didn’t ask her!”

“My duet with Julia highlights my senior year,” says Angela.

“When we started, it had been decades since she had last seriously played piano, but throughout the course of the year, her grit, determination, and passion won out, and we had an amazing time together. I remember our first rehearsal in the music wing’s chorus room: we didn’t get very far in the music, and Julia struggled through the notes most of the way. Julia being Julia, she started to worry and fret. However, she calmed down, and from that day forward, she always came to

every rehearsal completely prepared and eager to work.

“By no means was the duet easy; Julia’s commitment to the music on top of her hectic life as an extraordinary dean and teacher was inspiring. She would always talk high-speed, telling me how much she practiced, how she practiced, and what she was having trouble with. As a team, we improved at a great pace. By the end of the year, both of us accomplished so much more than either of us had originally expected.”

The two performed their duet in a recital at the Katherine M. Elfers Hall of the Esther Eastman Music Center, in chapel, and in a faculty meeting. And then they performed at Graduation that year, also a Fauré piece.

“I had a little motto for the class, OMAH -- open mind and heart,” Julia says. While it may be “little,” the motto speaks volumes about her impassioned approach to teaching and to life.

“Working with her this semester,” says Instructor in History Tom Drake, “has reminded me of her exceptional contributions to collaborative work. Julia sets out clear markers for students, and she does a wonderful job of making sure that they stay with those markers. She also provides students with very clear instructions and a sense of exactly what they need to do in order to be successful. At the same time, in working with a faculty team, Julia shows great flexibility. The tension between a clear structured set of requirements and the necessity of spontaneous adjustment to the interests of others is no easy thing to resolve. But Julia does it with good humor and grace.”

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TOM TRETHAWAY ’75 THE HUBER BUEHLER CHAIR, INSTRUCTOR IN HISTORY | BY BRENDA UNDERWOOD

THANK YOU!

ABOVE: Tom Trethaway engages with students in his East Asia class, circa 2010.

Thomas Trethaway ’75—a quiet and athletic boy recently graduated from the Harvey School in Katonah, NY—came to Hotchkiss as a Lower Mid as the first in his family to go to boarding school. He was happy to come to Hotchkiss, arriving when it was still an all-boys school.

“Although I wouldn’t say I had the best time of my life,” Trethaway says, “I knew I was getting a great education.”

His favorite teachers—Rick Del Prete, William Massengale, and “Uncle Roy” Smith— taught the subjects toward which he gravitated. He was a member of the Swimming Team, and played J.V. and Varsity Lacrosse, and J.V. and Varsity Soccer. At that time, he could not have guessed he would experience some of the most significant moments of his

life at Hotchkiss.

After graduating from Hotchkiss, Trethaway toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher, but it was only one item on his “short list” of possibilities. At Dartmouth, while pondering whether to major in English or history, the idea of teaching crystallized when he took a course in Chinese and Japanese history with a “young, smart, and engaging professor.”

He ended up majoring in history with a concentration in Chinese and Japanese history.

“It was an unexpected turn in my life,” he recalls.

With an A.B. degree (1979) in hand, Trethaway accepted a position as instructor in history and English at The Harvey School (1981-1982).Then, eventfully he came to Hotchkiss in 1982, hired to replace Julia

Wu, who had just been accepted into a Ph.D. program in East Asian studies at the University of Michigan.

There was an overlap of one year between Wu and Trethaway as he assumed his teaching responsibilities and duties in the Admissions office.

That overlap was significant; it created the environment for building a life in Lakeville and a career at Hotchkiss. Julia and Tom were married in 1984 and continued teaching at Hotchkiss.

In 32 years, Trethaway has been active in all areas of the School—as an associate director of admission, a class dean, associate director of the Centennial Campaign, resident director of the School Year Abroad in Beijing, and co-head of the humanities and social sciences department.

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He has taught Chinese and Japanese History, American History, European History, American Literature Survey, and Contemporary American Fiction elective, and has been an Advisor to Hotchkiss’s literary magazine and newspaper.

He has coached boys J.V. soccer, boys Varsity soccer, boys J.V. lacrosse and girls Varsity swimming.

George Faison, who has team-taught American Studies with Trethaway, says of his colleague, “Tom has mentored me in matters historical, both material and methodological.

By demonstrating innumerable ways to make students think for themselves while guiding them to live up to his demanding standards, he represents the stuff that Hotchkiss should always be about. I have come to know Tom as a friend whose mind is keen, whose word is true, and whose devotion to his students is unmatched.”

At an end-of-year campus event, Dean of the Class of 2017 Keith Moon similarly expressed admiration for his friend and colleague. “Tom has been endlessly and consistently excellent—the classes are all magnificently taught, the advisees are spectacularly handled, the sports are professionally coached—but he has never demanded nor enjoyed much School-wide attention.

“But there is a subset of this faculty that knows this: there is no more loyal or capable friend, father, or husband than Tom Trethaway. He’ll make anything work and with an efficiency that startles…. He helps out when it seems that no one else can or will.”

In their time at Hotchkiss, Tom and Julia raised two chil-

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dren, Perry ’06 and Paul ’09, in an environment he describes as an unbelievably beautiful place.

“It’s a paradise to bring up kids: it’s safe; it’s clean. Frankly, I give Hotchkiss a lot of credit for helping me to raise my own children. It certainly helped that they were around smart people, people with good vocabularies, and people who valued education. Whatever Julia and I did to make them into the adults that they have become… wouldn’t have been as easy in another environment.

“I’m going to miss my colleagues a lot; I’m going to miss the students probably more,” he says. “Every day is a new day when you teach. It’s a profession that I think is anything but routine. The students are smart, they are motivated, they are completely fun to be around, and they make teaching incredibly easy. They make all of us look like great teachers.”

His appreciation for his students’ perspectives is reciprocated, as students have appreciated his skills as a nurturing educator. Caroline Hollo ’15 says, “Mr. Trethaway is one of my favorite teachers because he brings the class alive. When he talks, you listen. If a student doesn’t understand, he is the teacher who goes the extra mile to explain it differently.”

“One quality that makes Mr. Trethaway a great teacher is his ability to convey information while using his sense of humor to make learning fun and relevant for his students,” adds Maisie Thomas ’15. “Perhaps the best example of this is the way he infuses every history class with current events, ranging from missing flight 370 to the latest escapade of the evercontroversial Miley Cyrus.

Analogies to current prob-

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lems… always helped to make even the most complex readings understandable.”

Tom doesn’t have any specific plans for retirement. He and Julia are going to live in the small town of Oxford, Conn., where they will be closer to Julia’s family and to their children in New York City.

Apart from relaxing and “enjoying having his own schedule for a while,” he would like to return to his writing.

“I’m not in a hurry to do that, but it is something I enjoy.”

In the 1975 Mischianza, “Treth” wrote: “I’m not sure that any of the specific activities we all do here are really that important; many things that

happen at Hotchkiss are trite, frustrating and absurd.

Realizing this, finding goodnatured humor in it, having fun and learning something along the way (even in the classroom) has been my ‘Hotchkiss Experience.’ The three years I have spent here learning from, with, and about people (I’m sure I don’t remember the equation of a parabola) have been and probably will remain the most formative and rewarding ever.”

That last statement is one that countless other Hotchkiss alumni are able to say because of teachers like Tom Trethaway.

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EVERY DAY IS A NEW DAY WHEN YOU TEACH. IT’S A PROFESSION THAT I THINK IS ANYTHING BUT ROUTINE. THE STUDENTS ARE SMART, THEY ARE MOTIVATED, THEY ARE COMPLETELY FUN TO BE AROUND, AND THEY MAKE TEACHING INCREDIBLY EASY. THEY MAKE ALL OF US LOOK LIKE GREAT TEACHERS.

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Graduation

Class of 2014

Imparting Messages of Hope and Gratitude Then, on the Saturday before Graduation, the senior dance took place at Fairfield Farm for the second consecutive year. The following Tuesday, the seniors headed to the lake for their Class Picnic with the head of school.

On the last day of classes for all students, the school day ended at 11:55 a.m., giving everyone time to get ready for the events on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday afternoon, guests and the campus community filled the Katherine M. Elfers Hall of the Esther Eastman Music Center for the traditional student recital.

This was followed by a jazz reception and buffet dinner preceding the awards cere-

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ABOVE: Seniors applaud a special moment during the ceremony.

mony in Elfers Hall, where the major school prizes, among others, were announced and presented.

Commencement Day dawned, with Memorial Quad a busy hub of preparations in welcome sunshine. Eying their seats for the ceremony were parents, family, and friends, who had flown in from all over the world for this day. They converged on Hotchkiss from Ghana and McLean, from China and Boston, from Colombia and San Francisco, and from

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ALL PHOTOS BY JONATHAN DOSTER, EXCEPT AS NOTED

Friday, May 30 – Graduation day – provided a memorable capstone for 173 Hotchkiss seniors after numerous special events, just for them, in the month of May. First off in early May, the seniors’ celebrations were launched with an induction dinner where members of the Board of Governors of the Alumni Association welcomed them into the alumni body. On May 18 the Hotchkiss Chapter of the Cum Laude Society inducted the elected members of the class of 2014 into the Society. At the dinner Lisa Brown ’78, vice president and general counsel at Georgetown University, addressed the students and their parents.

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IN THE SIGNIFICANT HOURS OF OUR LIFE …

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We all live by what others HAVE GIVEN US

Afghanistan and Virginia, a veritable United Nations in microcosm. Before the Commencement ceremony, they gathered in the chapel for the Baccalaureate service, led by Chaplain Lou Pressman.

“We all live by what others have given us in the significant hours of our life,” said Lou Pressman, “so the test of what you have learned here will be less what you remember than in the habits of mind and heart that you carry forward. What habits are worth carrying? What is worthy of attention.”

This sentiment was echoed by Dr. Kevin Hicks, Head of School, in his welcoming remarks to the Commencement audience.

This is “a celebration that is made all the more meaningful by the presence of so many who have done so much to make this day possible,” he said.

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Think deeply, Speak gently, LOVE MUCH, LAUGH

A LOT, WORK HARD, GIVE FREELY AND BE KIND.

OPPOSITE: A pictureperfect day for the graduates and their families

OPPOSITE BELOW LEFT: Graduation speaker Philip Gourevitch talked about the importance of experience, and School presidents Martin Carrizosa and Anna Balderston spoke of gratitude.

RIGHT: Seniors make their way to the platform.

BELOW RIGHT: Head of School Kevin Hicks offers congratulations.

“To whom shall you express your gratitude?” Hicks asked. “Each one of your sacrifices has been shared and in many cases surpassed… by the people who have come from near and far to celebrate this day with you. The only compensation … you will be able to offer to them is to look each one of them squarely in the eye and say… thank you for everything you have done to help make this day possible.”

School presidents, Anna Balderston and Martin Carrizosa, also spoke of gratitude: “I know I speak in the name of almost everyone here when I say that coming to Hotchkiss has been the most unbelievable, enriching and life-changing experience of my life,” said Martin, who continued with the story of an email he had received from his grandfather in Colombia (now in the audience). Attached to the email was a pic-

ture of a pillow with the words: Think deeply, Speak gently, Love much, Laugh a lot, Work hard, Give freely and Be kind, sewn into it. “I thought it was one of the cheesiest things I have ever read but, after a while, I realized how much it was intertwined with my Hotchkiss experience.”

Alternating their responses, Anna and Martin expressed what those sentiments meant to them. They offered these examples: Think deeply. “Sitting around Harkness tables with people from 34 different countries is the perfect recipe for two things,” said Anna, “chaos or fruitful conversation.

The conversations that have shaped my way of thinking I will carry with me for the rest of my life.”

Love much. “Hotchkiss has instilled in us the value of love regardless of our ages,

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FOR OUR BASIC HUMAN COMMONALITIES.

on telling you the meaning of life because I don’t think I can improve on what Franz Kafka said about it. ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’”

He spoke instead about the importance of experience and how achieving it was a process. Although he had become an accomplished “prose craftsmith” and, after years of rejection slips was getting published, he knew he hadn’t found his voice or his subjects; he still needed experience.

It was only when he was assigned by The New Yorker to go to Rwanda to write about the aftermath of the genocide in that country, that he found his voice.

“Entering Rwanda was something like entering a library for the first time – every person was another book packed with information and stories. You might take books off the shelf willy-nilly until slowly your search narrows and what you have learned teaches you what you are looking for.”

Concluding his remarks, Gourevitch observed that when he graduated from high school, the big preoccupation was the fear of nuclear annihilation. “Now,” he said, “it’s planetary obliteration by ecological degradation.”

“When he won the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner said that this fear of obliteration is the defining thing of our time. ‘I decline to accept the end of man,’ he said. ‘I believe man will not only endure but that he will prevail.’”

“It is your task as the next generation coming along,” said Gourevitch, “to see to it that we do.”

gender, country of origin, religion, culture, sexual orientation or system of beliefs,” said Anna. “We’ve learned to appreciate each other for our basic human commonalities.”

Dr. Hicks introduced award-winning author Philip Gourevitch, the graduation speaker, as “one of the most distinguished American nonfiction writers of his generation. His mastery of his craft—expressed in prose that is luminous and empathetic, yet thoroughly tough-minded—embodies our School’s enduring values: intelligence, discipline, curiosity, and fidelity.”

Gourevitch recalled his own graduation: “I didn’t want to hear advice or to be told the meaning of life. I wanted something other than words. I wanted experience. As the queen of country music, Dolly Parton, once said on the subject of advice, ‘What has worked for me may not work for you. Take for instance what has worked for me,’ Dolly said. ‘Wigs, tight clothes, push up bras.’ I’ll also take a pass

PHOTO: HELLEN HOM-DIAMOND

BELOW : Singing “Fair Hotchkiss”

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We’ve learned to appreciate EACH OTHER

LEFT: Newest alumni, with a good beginning on lifelong friendship, from left, Jack Zamacona, Will Wagner, and Murphey Harmon

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C O M M U N I T Y

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A W A R D S

THIS YEAR’S RECIPIENTS ARE ELIZABETH A. SCHMIDT ’02 AND DAVID D. SHIELDS ’73 By

wo extraordinarily accomplished alumni returned to Hotchkiss on April 25, for the all-School award ceremony where they were honored for their achievements and presented with the 2014 Community Service Award. Award recipients are selected by the Nominating Committee of the Alumni Association Board of Governors. This year’s recipients, Elizabeth A. Schmidt ’02 and David D. Shields ’73 had excellent advice for the students in the audience.

“I arrived like most of you,” said Schmidt, “with confidence and strong convictions, but also with a complicated sense of my future. I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do in life.

“At Hotchkiss,” she continued, “you are thrown into an environment where you

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have to learn to manage a lot of things at once.” Schmidt, who had been a competitive figure skater before coming to the School, started to realize that she wanted to pursue meaning in something greater than herself. “I wanted to do something that would benefit someone other than me.”

That idea continued to grow while she was a student at Middlebury College and when, to enlarge her world, she decided to spend several semesters abroad—one in Paris living with a French family, one teaching English in a small village in Costa Rica, and another in Australia. And back at Middlebury, she continued to reach out by mentoring 14-year-old Ariel, “who came from a community vastly different than mine.” Through these experiences she realized “that some of my life’s greatest lessons

so far had been learned in communities very different than my own, when I was most outside of my comfort zone.”

In her senior year at Middlebury she applied to Teach for America. She was assigned to teach tenth-grade English in a school in the South Central Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, “one of the poorest and most unsafe urban schools in the country.” This is where her Hotchkiss training in tenacity and quickness served her well.

Schmidt was shocked by what she found.

“I was blown away by the low expectations set for these students who on average read at a fifth-grade level,” she said. “There were so many issues. Twenty percent of my students already had a child, if not two or three. There were no books. The number of challenges outside the classroom was stag-

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PREVIOUS PAGE: From left: Head of School Kevin M. Hicks, Sam Blair ’14, David D. Shields ’73, Beth Schmidt ’02, Arnelle Ansong ’14, and Ed Greenberg ’55, president of the Alumni Association Board of Governors.

LEFT: Beth Schmidt

gering: parents in jail, homelessness, domestic and gang violence and kids just trying to get to and from school safely. The system was failing them miserably.

“But I experienced something more interesting than these statistics. Despite all of this disappointment and darkness and adversity in my students’ lives, these kids were still proud. They were motivated by the same things I was at their age. They wanted to feel a sense of dedication, purpose, and confidence in something like I did in figure skating. They had great passions and hopes and dreams just like all of you, and they wanted to be writers, scientists, lawyers, and doctors.”

Schmidt realized that she needed to change tactics when she assigned a paper and only eight out of 150 students handed it in. “They were showing up, but they were discouraged at the utter lack of opportunity,” she recalls. So she gave them an assignment to write about their passion, find a program outside of school that supports that passion, and then present a position about why they should attend that program.

More than 75 percent of the class turned in the paper. They were interested in such things as stem cell science, mock trial institutes, and leadership programs. She knew she had hit on something.

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Hoping to capitalize on what she felt was “a surging momentum,” Schmidt decided to run the Los Angeles Marathon. She raised $12,000 “to send as many of my students as I could to the extracurricular programs they had written about in their papers.

She then put together booklets with photos and descriptions of each student and sent them out. The response was encouraging. “People, several within the Hotchkiss family, wanted to help,” she says.

After running four marathons, she decided that it was no longer a sustainable form of fundraising and and so she created to create a platform that would link disadvantaged students to learning experiences. In 2010, Wishbone.org was born (http://wishbone.org); its online platform connects low-income high school students to a variety of programs, and at the same time allows prospective donors to learn about individual kids.

Wishbone.org has now funded over 250 low-income students to pursue their passions after school and in the summer. And it all started with those first seven students from Locke who all graduated from high school, attended college, and give credit to this program by changing the way they thought about what could be possible for their lives.

“You may not realize it today,” said Schmidt, “but these opportunities, this development, this education, these teachers and peers will leave you equipped to do absolutely anything in the world. The gifts you receive here at Hotchkiss will allow you to give your life meaning beyond yourself, will allow you to make the world better.”

Schmidt is a Kauffman Labs Education Ventures Fellow and was celebrated on Forbes’ “30 under 30” list in both 2013 and 2014 for her work in education.

DAVID D. SHIELDS ’73 For David D. Shields ’73 it was Hotchkiss that reinforced his love of the land and the environment and eventually led to his career in land conservation. “My senior English class with Blair Torrey was spent almost entirely outdoors,” he said to the students. “Mr. Torrey opened my eyes to things previously unnoticed; he helped cement my interest in all things natural and out of doors.

“I would roam the woods, fields, and streams where I grew up, and I hunted and fished with my father long before I came to Hotchkiss but, once I arrived here, I couldn’t resist the woods beyond the golf course, the lake, the streams, the marshes and fields,” he said.

With other members of the Fur, Feather, and Fin Club, he fished Sucker Brook. He came to admire faculty members like Arthur Eddy and Walter Crain, his corridor master in Buehler. “Hotchkiss shaped my character,” Shields reflects. “I learned how to live in a community and how to think, how to study. And the number-one rule in the Blue Book –‘Be a gentleman.’ Those are

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really valuable things I got from Hotchkiss.”

After graduation, Shields earned a B.S. degree in Natural Resource Economics from the University of Vermont. An expert on conservation easements, he is associate director of the Brandywine Conservancy, a unique environmental, arts, and cultural preservation organization in Delaware County, PA. He also volunteers with many other environmental and community organizations.

“I’ve spent a career preserving land in my local community,” he said. “It has been my great fortune to work with an organization that has been on the forefront of land conservation … and has had the strength of character, and the resources, to take on great challenges, stay focused on its mission, and persevere during hard economic times.”

“My work in land conservation is really designed to protect water and watersheds— the most essential of community resources,” Shields continued. “We protect land, not just for farming and parks and the wild things, but because what happens on the land is ultimately reflected in our streams and rivers. We need to protect the land to protect our water.”

“And just preserving the land from development is insufficient. We need to help and guide and educate the landowners to be better stewards of their property — to keep the soil in place, to keep the livestock out of the

streams, to prevent polluting run-off, to understand the value of trees and riparian buffers. This is not an easy task . . .

“And land conservation is not just happening out in the countryside,” Shields pointed out. “Land trusts and conservancies are also working in urban and suburban areas … preserving historic houses and sites—often the heritage of a community.

They are preserving vacant lots for community gardens to show city kids from where their food comes. They are trying to reconnect people to the land and to instill, or re-instill, in them a land ethic.”

During his tenure at the Conservancy, Shields has secured more than 340 separate easements, five major fee-owned preserves, and many other properties that total nearly 30,000 acres. He has raised more than $20 million for land and easement purchases, and he has secured more than $10 million for land and easement endowments.

A frequent speaker at Conservancy events and presenter at conferences, Shields coauthored the Conservancy’s publication, Catalyst for Conservation. He also led the preservation of 450 acres of private land where one of the largest battles of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Brandywine, occurred on Sept. 11, 1777. And he continues to work on preserving battlefield lands that have not already been developed. He serves on the Boards of the Mt. Cuba Center and Red

ABOVE LEFT: David Shields ABOVE: Dr. Kevin Hicks addresses the audience in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall of the Esther Eastman Music Center.

Clay Reservation, and is a member of the Brandywine Valley National Scenic Byway Advisory Board and the Red Clay Valley Scenic Byway Alliance. He lives in Kennett Square, Pa., with his wife, Mary Louise “Zig” Shields.

“You represent the next generation of conservationists,” said Shields, directly to the students, “and will face far greater challenges [such as] competition for limited resources, population growth, climate change, species extinction and deforestation.

We will need all of you, in whatever field of study you choose, to participate, to understand, and to get involved.

“Community service is not limited to the walls and grounds of this school or to the time you spend here. It is a lifetime endeavor; an obligation, if you will, to give back, to pay it forward, to make things better. We are all counting on you.”

To view the entire 2014 Community Service Awards presentation, go to the School website’s alumni home page at www.hotchkiss.org and scroll down to “videos.”

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Visitor PAUL MULDOON IS THE AUTHOR OF NUMEROUS COLLECTIONS OF POEMS, ALONG WITH LIBRETTI, ROCK LYRICS, AND SEVERAL BOOKS FOR CHILDREN. HE IS OFTEN CALLED “THE MOST SIGNIFICANT ENGLISH-LANGUAGE POET BORN SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR.”

He was also a guest of honor at the 1950s-themed Lapham’s Quarterly Decades Ball in New York last year, hosted by Lewis Lapham ’52. By coincidence, Poet-in-Residence Susan Kinsolving was there as well. “Of course I knew who he was,” she says, still bemused by the memory of tables festively bedecked with cans of Aqua Net. “I immediately asked if he’d be interested in coming to give a reading in Lakeville. Luckily, he said yes.”

News of Muldoon’s arrival at Hotchkiss on April 24 – in an announcement made by Head of School Dr. Kevin Hicks at Auditorium the previous week and via School-wide email that morning – created a buzz loud enough to attract an SRO audience of more than 300 students, faculty, and staff, plus members of the Lambert family, whose endowment in memory of P. Christopher Lambert Jr. ’76 generously funds annual visits by distinguished literary guests.

“He is sacred, profane, simple, complicated, dead serious, and riotously funny,” Dr. Hicks pointed out in his e-mail. “He contradicts himself, and embraces multitudes.” As the poster that flooded School walls before his appearance put it, he’s also very cool.

“Reading Paul Muldoon’s work for the first time, I felt an immediate connection to the writing. In both his lyrics and his 11 volumes of poetry, he writes with elusive style and wit, emphasizing the value of far-fetched metaphor to change the way his readers view their world,” said upper-mid Carly Craig ’15, who introduced him that evening in the Faculty Room.

“Allusions to his Northern Irish heritage appealed to me because after several visits to that part of the world I fell in love with its atmosphere.”

“What a fabulous introduction,” the poet said, smiling and shaking her hand before taking his place behind the podium. His voice soft yet deliberate, he advised his already attentive audience to “please feel free to ask a question or make a point or make an observation.”

After beginning with a pair of poems set in the Cold War

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon explained the art of inspiration

By Divya Symmers era, he moved on to one called “The Loaf,” about an 18th-century house he’d lived in in New Jersey, where echoes of the colonial past seeped through a hole cut for a dimmer switch during renovations.

“Like many poems and songs it has a refrain which is on the cusp between sense and nonsense,” he explained, suggesting a little audience participation. “Let me give you a clue here as to what we might do: There’s this line that goes ‘with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.’ Can we do it? Don’t you feel better?” He laughs. “And each of them has some little variation of that … ‘with a stink and a stink and stinky-stick….with a wink and a wink and a winkie-wick…with a link and a link and a linky-lick.’”

“I can see why you’re all at Hotchkiss,” he said dryly, after the refrains were recited with surprising enthusiasm and accuracy. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a group of fast learners.”

His mop of greying curls gives him the look of an aging rock star – not far from reality, really, since he plays in two bands – but Paul Muldoon is a poet’s poet. The 63-year-old native of County Armagh in Northern Ireland has been poetry editor of The New Yorker since 2007, and he was a close friend and former student of the late Seamus Heaney, who graced Hotchkiss with his own unforgettable presence a few years ago.

“I was very fortunate in that I met him when I was actually your age, about 16. He came to give a reading in the town where I lived,” he said, after being asked to comment on their long friendship. “He was my teacher at university, and very kind to me.” (A well-known story has the teenage Muldoon showing drafts of his poems to Heaney and asking what he should change, and Heaney famously replying, ‘Nothing.’)

Taking a deep breath, he changed the subject to how writing poetry is an adventure and also a process, one you have to learn on the job. When a student asked how to find the correct words to convey an emotion or idea, he noted, “What’s interesting about the attempt to write poems is that only so much of what one has experienced prior to embarking on that particular poem will stand you in any particular stead.”

Married to the writer Jean Hanff Korelitz, Muldoon has lived in the U.S. since 1987 and for most of the ensuing time he’s taught poetry and writing at Princeton, where he is Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and Chair of

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the Fund for Irish Studies. Between 1999 and 2004 he was also Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where his lectures were published in 2006 as The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry. Along the way he’s received a slew of high poetic honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Prize (1997), the Shakespeare Prize, the European Prize for Poetry, and – in 2007 – the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for his book Moy Sand and Gravel, which also won the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

It was the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland when he was a student at Queen’s University in Belfast, and “there were lots of bombs, lots of shootings,” as he once told The Paris Review. He published his first book of poetry while still an undergraduate and presumably the youngest member of the Belfast Group, an influential critical society whose other members included Seamus Heaney.

Observing that Muldoon’s poems often alternate the serious with the unexpectedly light, a Hotchkiss senior asks if this is done on purpose. The poet answers: “First of all, I never know what I’m doing when the poem is being written. Perhaps you write poems yourself? Do you? One of the reasons why people write poems is for a little adventure, to learn something about the world and how it works. Rather than going in with a sense of how things are, ideally [the poet] is open to learning something, to some revelation, however minor; it might not be a huge revelation. Who’s to say what a small revelation is or what a large one is?”

Nodding to Carly Craig in the front row, he adds: “One of the things I loved about your introduction was your saying that you come out not quite seeing the world in the same way. And that’s one of the ideals, is that you come out of the poem and think, wow, what happened to me in there? Because there has to be a reason why you’re in the poem; otherwise, you could be doing something probably more interesting. You could be at the movies or playing hockey or something.”

When not writing poetry, Muldoon writes song lyrics, a more collaborative and convivial pursuit, he admits. He famously collaborated with the late Warren Zevon on two rock noir songs, “My Ride’s Here” and “Macgillicuddy’s Reeks.” His latest collection, Word on the Street, includes an accompanying CD from one of the two bands he plays with, the Wayside Shrines. It also features the poem “Comeback,” described by a reviewer as “a blistering critique of the music industry,” which ends with the verse “when we take each other’s hands/let’s remember/We’re just another band/With only two surviving members.”

His voice is so conversational when he reads it’s as if he’s telling you something you’ve temporarily forgotten or didn’t know to begin with. Although “many of the great poems in Irish are also songs,” Muldoon believes songs are more difficult or at

least more mathematical, “Because once you got a template for the verse, say, you more or less have to stick with it.”

Later, introducing a poem about his son, he stops suddenly and looks down to his right. “Is that a question? Sorry I missed you there!”

“What inspires you to write all these poems?” asked Jack Herold, son of Study Skills Counselor Jane Herold and Instructor in English Thomas Herold.

“Good question!” Muldoon said. “The word ‘inspires’ is an important one because the root has to do with breathing in … spirare, did you say?” he turns and nods to a student in the middle of the room. “Do you study Latin here? You’re so lucky to have that opportunity, you really are. So, yes, something breathes through you,” he said. “The key notion is that one is a medium, as if the poem is being written through you. One doesn’t know, ideally, what’s going to happen – you let it do what it wants to do with you. You have to keep an eye on it, mind you. You have to bring your intelligence to bear on it, your conscious mind as well as your unconscious. And then you need to figure out what sense it makes, what impact it will have on the world. Does that make sense to you? Do you write some poems yourself? How old are you, may I ask?”

“Seven,” said Jack.

“Seven. You know what? You are coming to the prime age for writing poetry. Which I believe is really,” the poet paused and announced, “eight! Next year’s going to be a big year for you.”

The room erupts in laughter.

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NOTES

2014 ALUMNI AWARD WINNER, FORREST E. MARS JR. ’49 Forrest E. Mars Jr. ’49, P’77,’82, GP’09,’09,’11,’11,’14, retired co-president of the success story that is Mars, Inc. − the global enterprise that employs 72,000 people − civic leader, philanthropist, and Hotchkiss volunteer extraordinaire, has been selected to receive the 2014 Alumni Award, the highest honor that Hotchkiss bestows. The award will be presented in an all-School program on Friday, September 26, 2014.

“Forrest is the perfect person to win the Alumni Award,” said President of the Board of Trustees Jean Weinberg Rose ’80. “Beyond his tremendous business successes, he personifies so many values and characteristics that we hold dear at Hotchkiss − loyalty, integrity, humor, humility, and a passionate desire and commitment to give back to those people and institutions that have played an important role in his life.”

PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARS

In January, Seniors Connor Roth, Maya Ghose, and Ryan Epprecht were named as candidates for the 2014 Presidential Scholar Award.

Connor was notified in May that he was named a 2014 Presidential Scholar from the District of Columbia. The 50-year-old Presidential Scholars program recognized 141 high school seniors as finalists from among 3,900 candidates who qualified. Connor attended an award ceremony in June and received a medallion. Previous Presidential Scholars from Hotchkiss include trustee John Ellis ’74 and Jeffrey Wein ’92.

RECENT APPOINTMENTS Instructor in Mathematics Heather Perrenoud has been appointed Dean of Residential Life. In her three years as dorm faculty and dorm head in Bissell, Heather has been a strong and effective voice in Bissell and on the dorm heads committee. After earning her B.A. at Arizona State and M.A.T. from Grand Canyon University, Heather taught at West Ranch High School and Royal High School, both in California, before coming to Hotchkiss.

Instructor in Humanities and Social Sciences Michael Eckert will serve in the post of Associate Dean of Academic Life. Appointed in 2013, he brings substantial experience to this position. Before coming to Hotchkiss in 2013, he served as the history department head at the Blair School and as the dean of students at the American Overseas School of Rome. He earned his B.A. at Harvard and his Master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Yocelin González has been appointed senior associate director of admission and director of multicultural outreach, succeeding Patricia Redd Johnson, who retired in June. A graduate of Boston College, González comes to Hotchkiss from The Buckley School, where she was associate director of admission and co-director of multiculturalism & inclusion.

NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARS

PHOTO BY MICHAEL MARSLAND

For the 2013-14 year, the National Merit Scholarship Program had advanced seniors Arnelle Ansong, Jessica Deng, Maya Ghose, and Casey Klingler to the finalist standing. Jessica Deng then went on to be one of 8,000 students awarded a $2,500 National Merit Scholarship. Congratulations to these students on their outstanding achievements.

2014 LUFKIN PRIZE WINNER

This year’s Lufkin Prize winner is Instructor in Chemistry Richard A. Kirby, a member of the faculty since 1996. While the Prize recognizes excellence in teaching, advising, coaching and overall service to the Hotchkiss community, the constant demonstration of ethical character, moral leadership and commitment to these values in day-today interaction with students are the critical factors in the selection.

Dan Lufkin ’49, P’80,’82,’88 attended the award presentation.

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Heather Perrenoud with a student

REMINDER! Richard Kirby

PA R E N T S W E E K E N D O C T. 1 7 - 1 8 MAKE YOUR HOTEL RESERVATION NOW.

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Hotchkiss Alumni in Print When the War Came Home

BY BILL NEWMAN ’68 LEVELLERS PRESS (JUNE 2014)

A collection of previously published newspaper columns and additional essays on subjects ranging from war and politics to civil liberties and the aftermath of 9/11, the underlying theme of When the War Came Home is the ethos of the anti-Vietnam war movement and its influence today. A lawyer and longtime head of the ACLU office in Western Massachusetts, Newman was a college student in Ohio in April 1970 when, in the event that gives his book its title, young National Guardsmen opened fire on young anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. Noam Chomsky writes: “Newman … captures the courage and commitment of the activists of the 1960s, the civilizing effect on the country in the years that have followed … an enlightening collection, inspiring and often shocking.”

The book’s personal passages include a section about Hotchkiss and about meeting the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Civil and Uncivil Wars: Memories of a Greek Childhood 1936-1950

BY NICHOLAS X. RIZOPOULOS ’54 TIDEPOOL PRESS (APRIL 2014)

A profound and moving reminder that “the full measure of war and domestic unrest is best appreciated through the telling insights of the young,” Civil and Uncivil Wars is an absorbing memoir that gives a candid boy’s-eye-view of the complexities of Greece before, during, and after the German occupation of World War II, when the country was simultaneously embroiled in a civil war that saw rightists, centrists, moderate leftists, and Communists vying for local dominance. The author’s equally complex family life is beautifully described, from his early childhood in northern Greece to his schoolboy years in an upscale neighborhood of occupied Athens and the later revelation of being a student in Lakeville. Rizopoulos, an accomplished historian who has taught at the Honors College of Adelphi University since 1995, has written “a compelling coming-of-age story … as gripping as the best novels and as powerful as the finest works of history.”

In Paradise

BY PETER MATTHIESSEN ’45 RIVERHEAD BOOKS (APRIL 2014)

Peter Matthiessen’s first novel since Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008, this was also, sadly, his final one, something he anticipated before publication by saying “it might be my last word.” In Paradise tells the story of a group gathered for a weeklong meditation retreat at Auschwitz – and the unsettling revelations that unfold. Having participated in three Zen retreats at the former death camp, Matthiessen had long wished to comment on the Holocaust but “as a non-Jewish American journalist, I felt I had no right…Only fiction would allow me to probe … the great strangeness of what I had felt.” The Washington Post called In Paradise “a haunting and bewildering novel” whose central character, a 55-year-old academic, “tends to agree with the many who have stated that fresh insight into the horror of the camps is inconceivable.” Somehow, this last book by one of the country’s most distinguished authors succeeds in doing just that.

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Hotchkiss Alumni in Print (continued) The Bigs

BY BEN CARPENTER ’76 WILEY (APRIL 2014)

Aptly subtitled The Secrets Nobody Tells Students and Young Professionals About How to: Find a Great Job, Do a Great Job, Be a Leader, Start a Business, Stay Out of Trouble, Live A Happy Life, Wall Street veteran Ben Carpenter’s The Bigs offers specific, comprehensive, and practical tips for success – while also telling a quintessentially American story of his own journey through a successful career and life. Inspired by a question from his daughter about an e-mail she was about to send to her first boss, Carpenter realized that, despite a first-class college education, “she had no clue how the working world actually, well, worked.” With The Bigs, he remedies this and other potential reality gaps through a combination of colorful anecdotes and tactical advice, and lays out a blueprint that employees of all ages and experience can use to get – and do – a great job.

Daily Enlightenments: 365 Days of Spiritual Reflection

BY NATHALIE WARRINER HERRMAN ’85 LLEWELLYN PUBLICATIONS/AMAZON (JANUARY 2014)

Illustrated with lovely topical photographs, Daily Enlightenments is a practical compendium of five-minute daily contemplations designed to encourage self-reflection and mindfulness yearround. At the top of each page is a quote from wisdom sources ranging from Sathya Sai Baba to George Bernard Shaw; at the bottom, is a summary affirmation that allows readers to reinforce each day’s message through silent repetition. In-between, an inspirational passage provides a simple blueprint for better living, from dealing with stress to believing in what’s possible and living one’s dream. “If we can learn to ground ourselves for just a moment in some kind of spiritual truth, then I believe we can improve the quality of our lives.” writes Warriner, a Reiki master and massage therapist who offers additional insights at enlightenmentdaily.blogspot.com. “Each entry is a reminder: to make better choices, to pause, to question our limiting beliefs.”

And I Said No Lord: A Twenty-One-Year-Old in Mississippi in 1964

BY JOEL KATZ ’61 UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS, TUSCALOOSA, AL (MAY 2014)

Joel Katz’s volume of powerful black-and-white photographic essays chronicles his travels through “the shifting islands of fear and loss, freedom, and deliverance that was segregated Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964.” That June, as a Yale undergraduate, he boarded a bus in Hartford that transported him to a world of brutal inequality where resilient individuals lived heroically ordinary lives. Over the next seven weeks, he taught at a freedom school, was harassed by police, and narrowly escaped being killed, all the while snapping “quotidian photos” on his Pentax; six weeks into his trip, the bodies of three missing civil rights workers were found in an earthen dam. “The seismic shift that was taking place in the country vibrates below the surface of these quiet photographs,” wrote one reviewer. “It cuts to the quick of one’s … conscience about matters of race, power, place, and moral obligation. It makes us see,” wrote another.

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Master Techniques in Surgery: Hernia

BY DANIEL B. JONES, M.D., FACS ’82 LIPPINCOTT, WILLIAMS & WILKINS, PHILADELPHIA (SEPTEMBER 2012)

Part of a scholarly series that presents common and advanced procedures in major sub-specialties of general surgery, this illustrated text is a fine addition to any serious medical library.

Containing “vivid original drawings, diagrams, and photographs as well as step-by-step descriptions for the operative repair of hernias,” including the most challenging scenarios, the 420-page volume is “ideal for any surgeon who fixes hernias as part of their practice” as well as surgeons in training, commented a peer review in the Annals of Surgery last May; the reviewer went on to describe the book’s color images as “amazing” and praised “the breadth of techniques described in detail by many different experienced and expert hernia surgeons” as offering insight into the true complexity of hernias and the numerous options for their repair. A companion website offers procedural videos as well as a fully searchable text.

The Boarding School Survival Guide

BY JUSTIN ROSS MUCHNICK AND CONTRIBUTORS, INCLUDING EMILEE BAE ’14 PETERSON’S PUBLISHING (JUNE 2014)

A fun and useful new book written by students for students, The Boarding School Survival Guide is the brainchild of Phillips Andover student Muchnick, who wisely believes prospective boarders will benefit from the insights offered by those who have gone before. Emilee Bae, a member of the Hotchkiss Class of 2014, contributed lively Chapter 11: “Dorm Living: Roommates, Laundry, Communal Bathrooms, and More.” In it, she offers tips and common courtesies such as cleaning out “the lint thing in the dryer” and brushing one’s teeth 15 minutes before lights out to avoid that airport-terminal-during-the-holidays-last-minute-rush which (she reports) can result in toothpaste on one’s back and the need to search bathroom floors for lost contact lenses. Despite these and other messy adjustments, your dorm will eventually become a home, she reassures readers, with mentoring dorm parents there to help you through potential rough patches.

Alumni in Other Media Trombone for Lovers ROSWELL RUDD ’54 SUNNYSIDE CD (NOVEMBER 2013)

A joyfully eclectic collection of jazz standards and pop classics, Trombone for Lovers is the latest album by legendary trombonist and 2006 Alumni Award recipient Roswell Rudd, now 78 and as cool as ever. Successfully funded by his Kickstarter campaign of two years ago, the resulting compilation offers stellar recaps of Lennon and McCartney’s “Here, There & Everywhere” and Booker T. and the MG’s “Green Onions” while also breathing sharp new life into everything from “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to “Autumn Leaves.” Reflecting Rudd’s lifetime of listening, it also features a stunning group of fellow musicians that includes renowned organist John Medeski, vocalist Bob Dorough, and swinging Cajun violinist Michael Doucet. This is musicianship at its best (available through Amazon).

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n a warm September afternoon at the start of a new school year, the incoming ninth-grade class gathered at the Fairfield Farm. They saw firsthand the corn that would eventually be served in the dining hall and learned about the process of harvesting the crop. For many, this was their first time at the Farm — and for most this was the longest time spent on any farm, ever.

They assembled around Assistant Head of School and Director of Environmental Initiatives Josh Hahn, who posed a simple question to them: “Have you ever planted a seed and eaten what was grown from it?”

Of 109 students, only nine said yes.

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IN THIS ONE SPECIAL PLACE, ALL THE ELEMENTS UNITE – LANDSCAPE, LAKE AND PONDS, WOODS, AND CONSERVED LANDS. THE SCHOOL PLANS CAREFULLY TO PRESERVE A PRECIOUS LEGACY.

THIS PHOTO AND PHOTO ON PRECEEDING PAGE BY JONATHAN DOSTER

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ABOVE: During their first year, the preps make a visit to the Farm in September and return throughout the year to learn about sustainable agriculture and food practices.

OPPOSITE: This map by Boundaries, L.L.C., done as part of the School’s Master Development Plan mapping project, shows the areas of natural diversity on campus.

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Throughout the course of the year, the prep class would return to the Farm and learn about sustainable agriculture and food practices as part of a collective class project. The experience of working soil by hand, harvesting crops, and tending to animals as a team offers students a different kind of learning, one that is not found in the classroom. Such experiences, sometimes referred to as “place-based learning,” are now being incorporated into a new Core Science curriculum, which will launch this fall beginning with the next prep class (see the story on page 36). It will draw upon campus resources such as the Farm, Lake Wononscopomuc, Beeslick Woods, and the award-winning biomass facility, to provide a practical context for the science taught in the classroom.

“The course will be built around three basic themes – food, energy, and water – and each term, students will focus on one of those topics through intensive study of a related campus resource – the farm as it relates to food and plant biology, the biomass plant as it relates to energy and the study of physics, and the lakes and rivers as they relate to water chemistry,” says Hahn.

Over the years, the focus in environmental initiatives has evolved at the School from traditional conversations about conservation and preservation to one which emphasizes practical actions that can be taken now and the science behind these actions, such as regenerating natural resources in building fertile soil, growing food, efficiently producing ener-

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gy, and reducing carbon.

“After all,” asks Hahn, “shouldn’t educational institutions model behavior beyond consuming resources and focus on modeling what we teach through substantive action?”

THE EVOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS Environmental stewardship is nothing new at Hotchkiss. In practice, programs in conservation, recycling, and environmental stewardship were well established by work performed by the Committee on Conservation and Environment, chaired by Instructor of Art Brad Faus, and the trustee committee on Buildings, Grounds and Environment.

Historically, The Woods Squad, Blair Torrey’s and Geoff Marchant’s classes and Jim Morrill’s pioneering AP Environmental Science classes all had elements of environmental thinking. In 2009, thenHead of School Malcolm McKenzie appointed Josh Hahn in a newly created position to broaden the scope of these efforts and eventually to fuse practice with pedagogy. Through the years the work guided by all these committees, Hahn, and the Buildings and Grounds staff has shaped what the campus looks like today.

“Our goal is to incorporate environmental stewardship into every aspect of School life, and to model what we teach,” says Head of School Kevin Hicks. “By taking a solution-oriented and data-

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NATURAL DIVERSITY DATA BASE Natural Diversity Data Base areas represent known locations, both historic and extant, of state listed species and significant natural communities. State listed species are those listed as endangered, threatened or special concern under the Connecticut Endangered Species Act. Some examples of significant natural communities in Connecticut include acidic atlantic white cedar swamps, sand barrens, and poor fens. This dataset represents over 100 years worth of field observations, scientific collections, and publication. The data have been compiled from a variety of sources and in most cases do not represent a comprehensive or statewide survey. Sources included state biologists, university students and professors, conservation organizations and private landowners.

Natural Diversity Data Base areas are a generalized representation of species and community locations.

The exact locations and species names have been masked to protect sensitive species from collection and disturbance. Natural diversity data base areas are represented as polygon areas and mapped for use at 1:24,000 scale. This dataset is updated every six months and reflects information that has been submitted and accepted up to that point.

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driven approach to environmental problems, we will prepare students for conscientious engagement with our planet's future.”

In discussions beginning in 2009, the School created an energy policy in response to these questions: “How do we want to address energy use on this campus, and how can our answer to this question be consistent with what we teach in the classroom?” The policy was coupled with a climate action plan, with specific focus on reducing the current campus use of greenhouse gas emissions.

Heating the School and providing hot water were the largest on-campus sources contributing to total emissions. The School has set a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2020; first by cutting its consumption through conservation and efficiency; then by providing for the bulk of its energy needs through renewable sources; and where renewable resources are not practicable, seeking carbon offsets in ways connected with student learning.

Since creating the policy, the School has reduced its overall energy consumption by one-third, despite increasing its overall square footage in building space by one-third. This has been achieved in part by raising awareness of daily habits in energy usage.

The Buildings and Grounds staff helped to implement technological solutions, like CO 2 sensors in large gathering spaces to assure healthy air quality without overdoing fresh air intake, and motion sensors that turn off lights in rooms when not needed.

Additionally, staff and faculty have replaced 7,000 conventional light bulbs with LED lights. The LED project took place in partnership with Connecticut Light and Power and is a model energy efficiency project in the state.

Perhaps the most notable example of Hotchkiss’ commitment to sustainable energy, the biomass central heating facility was completed in time for the 2012-13 school year. The facility has garnered numerous awards, such as the 2013 Alexion Award of Excellence from the Connecticut Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council and the 2013 American Institute of Architects (New England and Connecticut) Honor Awards, for its design and thorough approach to renewing local energy sources. Providing power for 85 campus buildings, the biomass facility replaced an aging power plant that used more than 300,000 gallons of #2 fuel oil annually in past years. Today, the facility burns approximately 5,500 tons of wood chips per year, all of which are harvested from sustainably managed forests within 50 miles of the campus. The waste ash from the facility is sent to a local farm, along with food waste from the dining hall, to be composted.

The biomass facility has already cut the School’s

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“Hotchkiss is a unique environment for the study of science,” says Head of the Science Department and Instructor in Physics Jesse Young. And, says Young, a new Prep Science Core curriculum making its debut in the fall will make best use of all the School’s resources on campus and in the immediate environs. The curriculum’s unifying themes of food, energy, and water will find especially abundant opportunities for learning at the lake and nearby ponds, at Fairfield Farm, and in the sustainable practices of the School’s dining hall.

“As far as we know,” he says, “there is not another course like it. We’ve modeled it based on what we feel is important to our students and the curriculum development here.”

All entering preps (approximately 121) will be enrolled in Science 150, studying with instructors of the Science Department in sections of the course limited to 16 students.

Science faculty members have been “brainstorming” on the new curriculum for two years, says Young, and formalized the plans at a department retreat last fall.

A conversation with Jesse Young offered more answers on this exciting development for preps.

What is the new science core curriculum for ninth-graders?

JY: SC150 – Prep Science Core – is a skills-based course that will provide students an understanding of energy conversions through the lens of our immediate environment around Hotchkiss. Focusing primarily on the development of lab and problem-solving skills, the course will explore three major units: plant growth, energy, and water. Each of these topics integrates concepts essential to the

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mastery of physics, chemistry, and biology. Hotchkiss is uniquely suited to this particular course design because of our unique environment for the study of science. The facility at Hotchkiss − both our natural surroundings and physical plant − rival that of any high school learning community in the country. A traditional approach to classroom teaching does not give our students the full benefit of those amazing resources.

Through exploration of this place, students will gain a broad understanding of natural interactions. In the fall students will be studying agriculture at Fairfield Farm, as well as on our 860 acres of fields and woods; all of these provide ample locations for examining plant growth and development. In the winter months, our LEED-certified biomass facility gives students a valuable resource for studying the conservation of energy. When the spring melt flows from Sucker Brook into Lake Wononscopomuc, students gain the opportunity to study water at various locations and in diverse ways.

Why teach this to preps?

JY: There are mixed opinions on what science is most appropriate for ninth-grade students. Some think an algebraic form of conceptual physics is most appropriate. Others think biology is most appropriate, as it requires no math skills. We believe that embedded within both of these subjects is conservation of energy (COE). COE is one of the most fundamental scientific concepts and can be seen across every branch of science. This concept will be addressed in each of the three units in the science core.

Furthermore, we believe the ultimate goal is mastering the ability to investigate questions through the methods inherent in scientific inquiry. One way to do

this is through the development of essential laboratory and data analysis skills that will provide students with the tools they need to succeed in upper-level science courses. Because of the breadth of topics in this course, students will be exposed to and begin their mastery of specific upperlevel science skills such as titration, filtration, mass spectrometry, linear regression, and error analysis. These skills will translate seamlessly into our upperlevel science courses, thereby increasing their ability to solve complex scientific problems.

ABOVE: Melissa Belardi, teaching fellow in science, and a student work on solving a question.

Why change the current model (SC250/260)?

JY: We know from feedback over the years what has been successful in Science 250 and 260. And we know that, because of the variety of programs nationwide, students enter Hotchkiss with a breadth of science and math backgrounds.

Based on their varied placements upon entry, our experience was that 40 percent of students were not completing the two-year core program. A core program should be one that is appropriate for all students. As a result, we have redesigned the curriculum so that it meets the needs of each student, while capitalizing on the incredible resources at our disposal.

academic fit, they will have maximum flexibility to progress.

Advanced students will be wellserved, because they may be approved to pursue AP-level science classes early on in their Hotchkiss career. Most students will be well-suited to pursue our 350-level science course offerings in biology, physics, and/or chemistry. Some may choose to then advance to one or two APlevel courses in their upper-class years. Others may go on to any number of 400- level electives instead. In this way, all Hotchkiss students will be able to find an appropriate challenge within the science curriculum.

What do lower mids take after the Prep Science Core ?

JY: Tenth-graders will elect to take one of the School's 350 level sciences −physics, chemistry, or biology.

How will students advance through Hotchkiss’ science curriculum?

JY: The laboratory and data analysis skills that students will acquire in the Science 150 course will translate across the science curriculum. Based on individual students’ skills and

From The Hotchkiss School 2014-15 Course Listing: (www.hotchkiss.org/academics/ coursecatalog/index.aspx) SC150 – Prep Science Core Year Course Hotchkiss, as a place, infuses much of the prep student’s experience, and the foundational science course is no different. A yearlong interdisciplinary initiative for preps is designed to introduce students to ecological concepts and environmental topics while providing them with a background in the four

major science disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science. Using food, energy, and water as unifying themes, students will learn to explain the complex natural systems around them and to communicate their investigations to others. As a lab-based course with a field work component, students will apply content and scientific practices as they explore the places and environments that comprise our campus. The course will focus students on their place in the local environment, helping to bring context to current global concerns. From this course students will progress into a 350-level course.

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ILLUSTRATION BY KATHARINE PASTORE ’14

CC&E brought two students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies to conduct a study of the forested and wet areas on School property. The hope is that this study will help guide future plans for managing the flora, invasive species, wildlife, and resources that sustain them in the remaining natural spaces on campus—such as Beeslick Woods, trails, fields, ponds, and lake.

ABOVE: A student’s art: Katharine Pastore ’14 won a Gold Key award in the 2013 Scholastic Art competition for this charcoal drawing of the biomass facility, “Industrial Interior, 24 x 18.”

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carbon footprint by approximately 45 percent, moving Hotchkiss closer toward the goal of carbon neutrality. This is based on a climate action plan that identifies greenhouse gas emissions.

Additionally, Hotchkiss can claim currently 30 percent of its electricity to be offset through windpower purchase. This school year, through March 31 (in an exceptionally demanding winter), Hotchkiss avoided $1.3 million through purchasing wood chips instead of #2 home heating fuel. In the first two years of the central heating facility’s operation, the total amount in cost avoidance for the School was $2.1M. The biomass facility is one of only three LEEDcertified plants in the country, with LEED being the U.S. Green Building Council’s designation for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. It fits into the aesthetic of the landscape to the point of nearly disappearing at certain vantage points; its undulating roof is vegetated, matching the coloration and flora of its surroundings, and it mitigates storm water runoff, controlling stream bank erosion and promoting the health of the wetlands and the lake.

The biomass facility provides a space for prospective students, visitors, and classes to learn about harvesting and using renewable sources to create energy. In a science class, students track the wood chips from the forest to their emissions in both hands-on and virtual ways. A number of classes are held in the biomass facility now, including AP Environmental Science, Physics, Architecture, and Art. Additionally, there is work being done to assess the health of the whole campus and to determine how best to manage the natural resources in other parts of the 827-acre campus. This spring, the

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FROM FARM TO TABLE TO CLASSROOM Fairfield Farm, located on Route 41 less than a mile from the campus, provides the School with fresh food, including tons of winter squash and about one-third of the estimated 20 tons of potatoes consumed in the dining hall during the school year.

A six-acre garden at the farm also produces thousands of pounds of tomatoes, pickles, beets, chard, kale, carrots, and more. Raising pigs, turkeys, and chickens is a relatively new venture at the farm.

“This year,” says General Manager of Hotchkiss Dining Services Andy Cox, “we raised seven hogs with a weight of just under a ton, 22 turkeys, and 550 chickens. We use 90 percent of the food for the dining hall, donating 10 percent to local food banks.”

The original 260 acres of farmland were acquired in 2004 from Jack Blum ’47, a former trustee who raised Black Angus cattle on the land. Then, four years ago, Hotchkiss purchased the remaining land, family home, and three outbuildings on the farm, bringing the total acreage to 287.

Such a scenic and rural space allows the School to host numerous community events, such as the Senior Dance, Reunions, faculty and staff School functions, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation’s 25th Anniversary Celebration. The greatest advantage and primary purpose of the Farm are that it provides a venue for curricular and co-curricular activities for Hotchkiss students and teachers — as well as a popular Summer Portals program—that can further enrich the academic experience.

Instructor in Art and lifelong outdoorsman Charles Noyes ’78 plays the role of Fairfield Farm Curriculum Coordinator and head of the student co-curricular group, the Fairfield Farm Ecosystems and Adventure team (FFEAT).

“When I first began working on the farm with students almost six years ago,” he said, “I simply wanted kids to like being outside the way I liked being outside. But the more we got involved with clearing trails, with identifying birds and trees, and with growing food for the School, I was pleasantly overwhelmed by the degree to which my students became connected to and passionate about that piece of earth.”

At the School’s 22nd annual Eco Day program on

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tectural firm from Philadelphia known for innovative and environmentally friendly buildings, the building will function as a classroom, with porch space large enough for classes to be held outside.

“Our students said, ‘People don’t go to Fairfield Farm to be indoors,’” Hahn says, smiling, “so the building will have a big covered porch that can be used for classes. The kitchen space will double as an indoor gathering venue.”

Such efforts have already changed the student experience by merging the practices with pedagogy.

As Noyes shared at Eco Day, Bridget Payne ’13 described her experience with FFEAT this way: “The Hotchkiss farm has changed my life. It seems ironic that I would find my connection with a farm at a boarding school, removed from my small town life, but I have. Every day, when I step off of the veggie [bio-diesel] bus and onto the farm, my life isn’t just about homework and college. It picks up new components: ones of responsibility, of selfawareness. Hotchkiss has done the right thing by incorporating the farm into our lives. By doing so, they’ve provided Hotchkiss with a platform for learning, with fresh, local produce, with leadership opportunities, and with the ability to be more than just a series of majestic buildings on a hill.”

BELOW: A new building at the farm, currently under construction, will serve as a storage and food processing facility and will also host classes.

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY SNEARY ARCHITECTURAL ILLUSTRATION

April 17, 697 students, faculty, and staff members formed 35 teams to help maintain the surroundings with an aim of understanding the landscape. These tasks ranged from clearing invasive species and brush in Beeslick Woods, to picking up trash in the towns of Salisbury, Sharon, and Canaan. Planting at the Farm and preparing the soil for new crops were a large part of the day.

Although usually the featured speaker is an environmentalist from outside the School community, this year’s speakers were Noyes; Ellie Youngblood ’10, the new Fairfield Farm Manager and a 2014 Carleton College graduate (See accompanying article with her talk to students at Eco Day 2014.); local farmer and Fairfield Farm advisor Allen Cockerline, owner of the neighboring Whippoorwill Farm — a grass-fed beef operation and model of sustainable agriculture. Cockerline has long served as an advisor regarding the land and the local agricultural community and now shares his decades of farming experience with FFEAT students and those managing the Fairfield Farm operation.

Construction began in May on a new building at the farm that will serve as a storage and food processing facility for food that will be used in the dining hall. Designed by Voith and Mactavish, an archi-

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STAYING PUT:

PHOTO BY JONATHAN DOSTER

ON DEVELOPING ATTENTIVENESS AND ADORATION OF A PLACE

BY ELLIE YOUNGBLOOD ’10, MANAGER OF FAIRFIELD FARM

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When I first accepted this job – to come to Hotchkiss as the manager of Fairfield Farm – everyone I talked to wanted to know how weird I thought it would be to come back. See, I grew up just down the Housatonic in Kent, so moving here is a homecoming beyond a simple yet bold return to work for my high school not two weeks after finishing college.

In fact, I have spent the past few years in Minnesota steadily spreading the word that this corner of the world is perhaps the most beautiful. And I do believe that still. I was swept off my feet by the expansiveness of the prairie – the floral arrangements swaying in the wind, negotiating a journey through a maze of seven-foot grass. Nevertheless, I found myself constantly longing to be wedged between these rolling hills, perhaps hip-deep in the river or gently navigating the curves of Route 7. …

The other day, I was with some students who marveled at the length of Geoff Marchant’s tenure at Hotchkiss. The general consensus was: “I can’t imagine being anywhere for 40 years.”

And that is what I want to talk about, that feeling many of us have – especially as young people – that we can’t see ourselves staying put for a substantial chunk of time. With the majority of our lives ahead of us, pipe dreams rarely include sitting still.

But there must be a magic in finding that, staying somewhere long enough for the frenetic noise, impatience with the mun-

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dane, or frustrations borne from the uncontrollable, to subside. If we stay long enough, we allow ourselves to develop a deep-seated attentiveness and a humble adoration of a place.

Scott Russell Sanders wrote an essay titled “Settling Down.”

We’re going to jump in partway, as he is describing a family he grew up with whose home was torn down on four separate occasions by tornadoes. Instead of moving, they chose to rebuild in the exact place. He says the following: “After the garage disappeared, the father hung a sign from the mailbox that read: TORNADO ALLEY. He figured the local terrain would coax future whirlwinds in their direction. Then why not move? Plain stubbornness was a factor. These were people who, once settled, might have remained at the foot of a volcano or on the bank of a flood-prone river or beside an earthquake fault. They had relatives nearby, helpful neighbors, jobs and stores and school within a short drive, and those were all good reasons to stay. But the main reason, I believe, was because the Millers had invested so much of their lives in the land, planting orchards and gardens, spreading manure on the fields, digging ponds, building sheds, seeding pastures. Out back of the house were groves of walnuts, hickories, and oaks, all started by hand from acorns and nuts.

Honeybees zipped out from a row of white hives to nuzzle clover in the pasture. April through October, perennial flowers in the yard pumped out a fountain of blossoms. This farm was not just so many acres of dirt, easily exchanged for an equal amount elsewhere; it was a particular place, intimately

known, worked on, dreamed over, cherished.

“Psychologists tell us that we answer trouble with one of two impulses, either fight or flight. I believe the Millers’ response to tornadoes … arose from a third instinct, that of staying put.

When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither fight nor flight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, than at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are.

By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own. If indulged only for a moment… this reverent impulse may amount to little; but if sustained for months and years, as by the Millers on their farm, it may yield marvels. The Millers knew better than to fight a tornado, and they chose not to flee.

Instead, they devoted themselves, season after season, to patient labor. Instead of withdrawing, they gave themselves more fully. Their commitment to the place may have been foolhardy, but it was also grand. I suspect that most human achievements worth admiring are the result of such devotion.”

Perhaps if the Millers’ house had been torn down the first week or year they lived there, they would have broken down camp and set up shop elsewhere.

But their endless hours of toiling and cultivating, tending, pouring themselves into the earth connected them indelibly to that singular plot. It seems like we

forget that farming is a complete manipulation of the land, and therefore our success with growing is at the mercy of the elements, forces of nature far greater than ourselves. Working the land, then, must be a humble activity, a patient one, filled with menial tasks and small steps forward, and through that loyalty to a place we may develop a deep reliance on it that transcends physical survival and dips into the spiritual and emotional. …

So when people suggest this job is a stepping-stone for me, it’s not necessarily false. I highly doubt that I will be the manager of this farm forever. However, when I do plant an orchard, dump my food scraps into a pigpen, and spend hours pawing through bean plants searching for slender pods, it will not be far from here. It is a deep honor to shape a small piece of this land that has been guarding my aspirations and nurturing my dreams for years, and I would be humbled by the opportunity to do so

for the rest of my life.

After graduating from Hotchkiss, Ellie Youngblood ’10 studied at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. She received her B.A. in biology in 2014, graduating magna cum laude. While at Carleton, she was a teaching assistant, research intern, and greenhouse assistant, and spent a semester at Round River Conservation Studies in Namibia. As an undergraduate, she was co-manager of the Carleton College Organic Farm and worked in the summer on a three-acre organic produce farm in Kent, Conn.

While at Carleton, she was the college’s representative at the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service Conference. She began as Fairfield Farm manager in April and gave this speech at Eco Day on April 17.

‘‘

IT IS A DEEP HONOR TO SHAPE A SMALL PIECE OF THIS LAND THAT HAS BEEN GUARDING MY ASPIRATIONS AND NURTURING MY DREAMS FOR YEARS, AND I WOULD BE HUMBLED BY THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO SO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

’’

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HOTCHKISS

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IN REMEMBRANCE Peter Matthiessen ’45: My memories of an extraordinary man

by Lewis Lapham ’52 I first encountered Peter Matthiessen in the summer of 1949, on a beach at Fishers Island where he soon was pointing out the sights to be seen if one had the wit to see them – seven or eight species of seabird inshore and off-shore, the likely change in the weather inferred by the wind veering around to the south, the Latin name for a nearby snake or crab, the probable catch in the hold of a trawler bearing east by north on the far horizon.

The meeting had been called by my godmother and Peter’s father, long-abiding friends whose houses on the island were a short distance from one another; by both parties it was thought that Peter could tell me what to look out for at the Hotchkiss School, from which Peter had graduated in 1945 and at which I was a member of the class embarking upon its lower middle year. I was 14, Peter seven years older, a senior at Yale tormenting himself with the ambition to become a writer of important books. Literature in those days was understood to be a noble calling, the high and not easily traveled road to light and truth.

The first question put to Peter about Hotchkiss proved to be the last. He didn’t wish to discuss what he deemed to be an ornamental pillar of the bourgeois status quo, and so as the afternoon went on (many fish to be seen and named, further sightings of sandpipers and gulls) I was surprised by the likeness of his interests and turns of mind to those of Mr. George Van Santvoord, the headmaster of the school with whom Peter seemed to share not only a love of words and nature but also the courage to lead an examined and examining life. Before the day was done I’d compounded the likeness of Mr. Van

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Peter Matthiessen in the 1945 Misch

Santvoord with that of the druid, Merlyn, in T. H. White’s, The Sword in the Stone, one of the books on the school’s list of suggested summer reading. By the time I returned to the lamps being lit on my godmother’s sundeck, it had occurred to me that Peter’s teachings on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean not only resembled those of Mr. Van Santvoord’s to the Hotchkiss woods squad but also those that under the walls of Camelot Merlyn had vouchsafed to the young King Arthur: “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails....you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Which was the lesson that the young Peter Matthiessen developed into both a life and an

art. Over the course of his long, shape-shifting day in the sun (1927-2014) he never stopped asking questions; it was his fierce and passionate will to know and understand that prompted him to try his hand as a naturalist, an explorer, a novelist, a Zen Buddhist, a journalist, a commercial fisherman, an investigative asset in Paris for the Central Intelligence Agency. From his travels high into the Himalayan mountains and low under Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, through the jungles of Peru and across the frozen desert of the Arctic, he returned with reports – on the Snow Leopard and the Musk Ox, on the banyan tree and the Great White Shark – that placed him, together with Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, and Loren Eiseley, in the front rank of American writers illuminating the book of nature.

Peter’s novels wander around in the tropical swamp of man’s inhumanity to man, asking of the natives, himself among them, “Who is there?” The question seldom leads to answers suitable for framing in a college commencement speech or a state of the union address. The critics who praised Peter’s care for the music of words were careful to say that the force of his writing derived in no small part from his willingness to confront – look squarely in the face, acknowledge the reflection in a mirror – mankind’s vainglorious cruelty and greed.

The only American writer to receive a National Book Award for both non-fiction (The Snow Leopard, 1978) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008), Peter once told an interviewer that prose held captive to the facts “cannot fly,” but there were poetic exceptions to the rule when the subject was the oriental crane (red-crowned, white-naped, or goldeneyed) for which Peter had a particular affection and in search of whose breeding grounds

Harper’s Magazine, of which I was then the editor, sent him in 1992 to the Siberian basin of the Amur River.

Since our first meeting on Fishers Island we had stayed intermittently in touch within the company of writers and editors gathered around the center of literary gravity that was George Plimpton’s Paris Review. Peter in 1953 had joined in the founding of the journal that also served as his cover for what he later called the “youthful folly” of his brief stint with the CIA. Plimpton as the editor in 1956 moved its headquarters tent from a barge in the Seine River moored to a quai four miles downstream from the Louvre to his Manhattan apartment on East 72nd Street alongside the East River, six miles upstream from the Brooklyn Bridge, and for the next half century, while the Review published the major American writers of the second half of the 20th century, among them William Styron, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Evan Connell, Terry Southern, Irwin Shaw, and Peter Matthiessen, the apartment was where, sooner or later, everybody went to help out with the drinking, rejoice in the favor of attentive young women, steal from one another the secrets and sorrows of Grub Street, add fuel to the fires of their ambition and pride.

For 50 years no week went by in which George didn’t give at least one party (sometimes preceded by invitations, more often not) in praise of a newly-published issue or book – a first novel, a volume of essays, an interview with W. H. Auden, James Baldwin or Ernest Hemingway, an epic poem, a revised biography, a collection of short stories, a translation from the Medieval French.

It didn’t matter how many people were present – sometimes 20-odd, sometimes upwards of 200 – nor did it matter whether any famous authors were to be found, like Easter eggs, asleep under the piano or passed out on the pool table.

People didn’t come with the thought of reading their names in the next day’s papers. They came for the fun of it, drawn

PHOTO BY LINDA GIRVIN; PHOTO COURTESY OF RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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to the light of George’s insatiable curiosity and irreducible enthusiasm. Peter possessed the same adventurous and life-grasping spirit, forever asking questions, relentless in his rage to know why the world wags and what wags it.

Over the years at the 72nd Street address Peter spoke of many things – of bears and pack mules and Richard Nixon, of Cesar Chavez and Ronald Reagan and Crazy Horse – and as he grew older, and the lines drawn on his time-worn but still handsome face more deeply set, I was more often reminded of his likeness to both Mr. Van Santvoord and the druid, Merlyn. I came to know him well enough to know that more than once he’d lost

an only love, that he’d seen a great deal of the world about him devastated by evil lunatics – by the stupidity of the war in Vietnam, and the selfishness of America’s moneyed classes, by the ruin of his beloved biosphere at whatever compass bearings could be sold for a handful of silver – but also well enough to know that he never forgot that the best thing for being sad was to learn something. He published 33 books, the last of them In Paradise, a novel coming forth from the press during the same week in April 2014 that he died, at the age of 86 at home in Sagaponack, Long Island, on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.

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IT’S

MY tur n

Writing twice-weekly essays on Facebook: Signing up to the same challenges we give our students B Y

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HEAD OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AND INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH

I take great pride in working for an institution such as Hotchkiss with access to seemingly endless resources. Through use of the William R. Kenan Fund, I had the privilege of working alongside some of the most inspired teachers from around the globe this past summer at the Bread Loaf School of English.

My time in Santa Fe, NM would prove beneficial on many levels, but professionally it would inspire me to begin work on a two-year writing project that would ideally offer students an example of what it looked like to become completely immersed and engaged with the practice of writing.

Professor Jeff Nunokawa, of the Princeton English Department, offered a course on “The Essay and Its Vicissitudes.” Impacted by such writers as Dr. Samuel Johnson, Lord Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, and even Nunokawa himself, I felt an urgency to join the conversation through the written word. I considered a project that would force me to make writing become habit; a project that would demand both diligence and literary exploration on a daily basis.

In emulation of both Johnson’s The Rambler essays and Nunokawa’s own daily Notes on Facebook, I committed to writing 208 essays over the course of a two-year period, posted on Facebook on Wednesdays and Sundays. Every essay would attempt to engage, further, challenge, question, critique, or simply appreciate other works of literature. Professor Nunokawa’s own daily Notes, which I might recommend to anyone in need of a daily reminder of our shared humanity, had shown me just what was pos-

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sible when we chose to embrace the digital world and its capacity to offer us an immediate and genuine readership; a readership that could offer us unfiltered feedback and constructive criticism.

I wanted to show students that we, as teachers, are also writers; we are not just readers of their writing. We are not just educators; we are practitioners of our craft. If we want to produce, we, too, need to grind; we, too, need to revise, and rewrite, and revise, and rewrite. Of 80 essays I have published to date, several have been directly inspired by class discussion and curricular texts; I owe a great deal of the thought behind these essays to the students who make up the current English classes at Hotchkiss. Without their constant effort and enthusiasm to explore these texts in new ways, this project would have most likely come to a halt months ago.

I also wanted the project to remind students that in order to write well, we must first and foremost be willing to become voracious readers. Since studying in Santa Fe, I have found myself reading more carefully and diligently than ever before in search of that one line that will inspire a line or two of my own. Thoreau suggests that we spend as much time contemplating a text as the writer spent writing it, and I trust that there is a

line in every text, whether it be written by Dickens or by one of our own preps, that is worthy of both our deliberate attention and our patient consideration. And by starting each essay with the words of another, I emphasize that this conversation belongs to all of us. We are all welcome to participate when we are ready, and it is our job, as those who have already joined, to pass on the skills and the passion to engage with the craft in a responsible and selfless manner so that no voice ever feels silenced, and no voice ever feels excluded from participation.

A member of The Hotchkiss School faculty since 2011, Tyler Gardner earned his B.A. from the University of Vermont and M.A. from Georgetown University. He also has studied at the London School of Economics. He taught at Thetford Academy in Vermont before coming to Hotchkiss. He is currently working toward a second master’s degree from Middlebury College, for which he chose as a final project the writing of essays he describes here. He took as his inspiration 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays, which were published biweekly in journals.

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MESSAGES FROM THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

DAY OF SERVICE: Over 250 alumni, parents, families, and friends participated Community service has been part of the fabric of The Hotchkiss School since we opened our doors in 1891.

To honor this tradition in the School’s history and its commitment to service in its mission today, the Alumni Association Board of Governors and the Office of Alumni Relations offered the fourth annual Day of Service on May 17. This year more than 250 alumni, parents, families, and friends participated in the 14 events planned in 13 locations around the world.

‘‘

For me, the most remarkable aspect of the Hotchkiss Day of Service is how enthusiastic our alumni are about participating in the program,” said Casey Reid ’01, co-chair of the event. “Attending a DOS event provides us not only with a terrific opportunity to interact with fellow Hotchkiss alums, but also to support extraordinary service organizations.

’’

‘THANK YOU’ TO DEPARTING ALUMNI ASSOCIATION B.O.G. MEMBERS It is always difficult to say “goodbye” to departing Alumni Association Board of Governors members as they complete their terms. This year is no exception, as four Board members depart after rendering distinguished service to the Hotchkiss School Alumni Association: B I L L B E N E D I C T ’ 7 0 leaves the Board of Governors after six years of service. He was a member of the Communications Committee and an instrumental part of the Nominating Subcommittee for Membership.

K E I T H B E R N A R D ’ 9 5 served on the Board for seven

years as a member of the Gender Committee and Chairman of the Alumni of Color Committee.

Q U I N N F I O N D A ’ 9 1 completed six years of service as a member of the Nominating Committee and Chair of the Communications Committee.

G E O R G E T A K O U D E S ’ 8 7 served a seven-year term on the Alumni Association Board of Governors, including two years as Chair of the Nominating Committee.

We offer sincere thanks to these departing BOG members and thank them for their service to Hotchkiss.

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