Commonwealth Magazine: Summer 2021 by Commonwealth School

CM Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2021

TRANSITIONS Bidding Farewell to Bill Wharton As We Welcome Jennifer Borman ’81 Back to 151 Commonwealth Avenue

WHY I MADE IT By Dina Pfeffer ’22

y sophomore year at Commonwealth, my schedule happened to be arranged so that on Wednesdays I could spend three uninterrupted periods in the ceramics studio. It was during these long, meditative sessions that I began to hone my wheel-throwing skills, devoting hours to the slow construction of just one or two vessels. This year, I was elated to spend Project Week in the ceramics studio and again commit myself wholeheartedly to the pursuit for six hours each day, an endeavor both tiring and utterly joyful. For a week my whole life was ceramics; I saw the wheel spinning whenever I closed my eyes. These long hours at the wheel gave me time to think not only about form and technique but about why I’m drawn to throwing in the first place. Though I love ceramics and sculpture, I consider my primary artform to be songwriting. I think I like the wheel for the same reason I like my favorite songs: the art says what it means. Though the usual products of the ceramics wheel—bowls, cups, plates, vases—don’t necessarily “mean” something in the way a song might, they all have a function that, in most cases, is obvious at first glance. I delight in turning a lump of clay into an object with a purpose. Like a well-worn chord change or the structure of a pop song, the wheel allows for beauty to spring up within the confines of the form. Verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus. Center, open, pull, trim. When the structure falls away, I feel lost. Perhaps you see where this is going. The pandemic, obviously, collapsed all structure, including in my art making. Because I could no longer access the ceramics wheel, I felt lost, until Kyla Toomey, our wonderful ceramics teacher, proposed a quarantine assignment: build a vessel out of household materials. After a few days of pondering, an image sprang fully formed into my head of a soft vase sewn from fabric and stuffed with polyester fiberfill to hold shape. I used an old and faded green curtain as my base fabric and cut out a cardboard pattern with three main components: two sizes of pillow panels that would form the wall of the vase and a circular base. As I constructed the vessel, I tried to include details that you might find on a pot thrown in the studio: a foot at the base, created with a stuffed fabric ring, and my initials, which, instead of carved into clay, were embroidered in white thread. The exercise of creating a vessel similar in function to a clay pot but made with wildly different methods of fabrication was so exciting that I ended up creating three additional “pandemic pots” of varying size and shape.

WHY I MADE IT

I was so excited about my newfound soft sculpture skills that I decided to Because I could no longer embark on an additional artistic adventure during Project Week: the creation of a set of giant tea bags. I sewed fabric prisms and cast concrete into them, access the ceramics wheel, I ripping the fabric off the forms when they set, to create gently curved lumps of “tea.” To make the tea bags themselves, I slid the concrete tea into white mesh felt lost, until Kyla, our wonderful laundry bags and sewed them shut in the shape of standard tea bags, and used the drawstring cord that came with the bags to create the tea bag string. When ceramics teacher, proposed a I finished, the bags came almost to my waist. This manipulation of scale provided an opportunity to think carefully about detail; I didn’t have quite the right materials to quarantine assignment: mimic the construction of a functional teabag, which involves a complicated series of folds, build a vessel out of and so I chose to sew my teabags in a way that resembled the construction of the object visually but conserved fabric. It was most important to capture the drape of the mesh and to construct the household materials. bags so that they would be recognizable even at a blown-up scale. Before Project Week began, Kyla told me she thought it might be a good time to explore abstraction. My art has leaned representational during the years she’s taught me, and the possibility of trying new things was thrilling. But I didn’t try new things; I continued to throw functional pottery, and even my non-functional sculptural work, the giant tea bags, were scaled-up representations of a household object. Rather than usher me down a new artistic path, Project Week gave me the space to think about why I feel good about the path I’m on. Joni Mitchell, one of my songwriting icons, once told the Toronto Globe and Mail that she “always thought of [her]self as a painter derailed by circumstance.” She and other artists make clear to me that there can be room in one’s life to pursue art fully in all of its forms (although being Joni Mitchell probably makes it easier). My project reminded me how much I love creating visual art, but not at the expense of anything else, and how much I still can grow as an artist. I hope I have the courage to continue the journey.

Dear Bill:

on’t think you have left Commonwealth, because you haven’t and you can’t. Or to put it another way, Commonwealth won’t leave you. I know for a fact. You have invested too much affection, too much lively warmth, too much thoughtful scholarship in this special place to detach yourself from it. In the coming years you may spend happy hours fixing up things around your house, or traveling to Greece and beyond with Danaë, or even teaching others about the running of a school, but always Commonwealth will carry you in its heart. At some moment in the day when you pause in the midst of a task, the sound of young voices will come to you, just as it must have for the last twenty years, drifting in from the landing outside your open office door, voices eager, contentious, puzzled, talking about Hamlet or DNA or Federalist 34 or life, and you will be back in the place to which you gave your utmost effort and which rewarded you by growing—not in numbers, for it couldn’t—but in strength and reputation to become one of the premier schools of the area. Maybe at one of those moments of pause you will find yourself back, way back, in 2A, helping young minds wrap themselves around the contradiction of the Odyssey, or, in an office one floor up, explaining to young applicants (and their parents) what kind of work will be expected of them and how, to their astonishment and disbelief, they will come to love being taught for the question and not the answer. I hope so, I pray so, for like all precious small things, Commonwealth needs its guardian angels. Dear Bill, we all rejoice in gratitude for your long years of work and your chance, at last, to rest. You have carried the school forward with your unique blend of serenity and strength. Macte virtute! With love, Polly Chatfield P ’71, ’79 Trustee, Former Teacher, Former Chair of the Board of Trustees

Turn to page 34 for a special tribute to Polly Chatfield as well.

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CONTENTS

Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2021

Why I Made It

Fabric “ceramics” by Dina Pfeffer ’22

Dear Bill

A letter from Polly Chatfield P ’71, ’79

A Letter from the Headmaster

With Gratitude

School News Graduation, Scholastic awards, assemblies, and more

Welcome, Jennifer

Incoming Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 is poised to hit the ground running

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Update

Read our set of commitments every member of our community can refer to as we continue this work together

A Personal Path: Introducing Our Director of DEI

Lisa Palmero McGrath reflects on her career in diversity, equity, and inclusion thus far

Crises in COVID’s Shadow

Alumni/ae advocate for at-risk populations

Adventures in Artificial Intelligence

Grappling with machine (and human) learning

The Language of Prayer

Niloofar Haeri ’77 explores poetry and prayer in her latest book

Creative. Writing.

Poems and short stories from current students

Do What You Can, With Love

A tribute to Polly Chatfield P’71, ’79

20 Questions with Chris Edley III ’02 From favorite Commonwealth memories to ideal afternoons

On the cover: Retired Headmaster Bill Wharton and new Head of School Jennifer Borman '81 during their very first in-person meeting (after untold Zoom calls!) this spring 3

WITH GRATITUDE

W CM

Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 20 Summer 2021 Editor-in-Chief Jessica Tomer Editor Catherine Brewster Assistant Editor Jack Stedman Contributing Writers Catherine Brewster Polly Chatfield Dina Pfeffer ’22 Jack Stedman Jessica Tomer Lillien Waller Bill Wharton Design Jeanne Abboud Art Sean Dackermann Carrie Healy Carly Renshaw Tony Rinaldo Photography LLC Samantha Nieto Vargas Printing Hannaford and Dumas CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the School or its faculty and students. We welcome your comments and news at communications@commschool.org. Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar. Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.

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e resumed full in-person schooling on April 29, with nearly ninety percent of our students and teachers back in the building. Aside from a few hitches, it has gone smoothly, and everyone seems very happy to be back in person. It is a healthy sign that teachers and students are fully engaged in their work, making the move back to the building, planning for next year, and pushing forward with DEI efforts through this leadership transition. Similarly, Commonwealth’s admissions, college placement, and fundraising efforts have come through this unusually challenging year with great success, and even some significant steps forward—next year’s group of incoming students will be the most diverse in more than a decade. While it is gratifying to be able to hand off a healthy, fully enrolled school to Jennifer Borman ’81, it bears repeating that Commonwealth’s flourishing is the work of an incredibly hardworking and dedicated group of teachers, administrators, and staff who do the heavy lifting around here. So my final message to the community can only begin with an expression of deepest gratitude to my colleagues. I also should say that I have been unusually fortunate to have had a Board of Trustees that has supported the school and its leadership for so long; that has offered critical strategic thinking and guidance through crises; and that has always respected the boundaries between the role of trustees and of administration (a rare virtue in schools). I am lucky to have worked with four Chairs—Polly Chatfield P’71, ’79, Bill Sherden, Karen Firestone, and Therese Hendricks P’05, ’07—who have understood and nurtured Commonwealth’s unique strengths. It has also been a privilege to have been able to consult with Charles Merrill up until just a few years ago. Commonwealth has been fortunate in both the power and durability of Charles’s founding vision, and in the support that he and his family have shown for a succession of leaders. I was equally fortunate to have worked with Charlie Chatfield, who hired me back in 1985. Charlie, an unusually gifted teacher himself, taught me that everything a Commonwealth Head does must always have as its aim the support and encouragement of great teaching. It is important to note that the school’s strong record over the last twenty years owes a great debt to Judith Keenan, who ran Commonwealth from 1990–2000. Judith proved that we could be an institutionally sound and responsible community without losing our creative spark and intellectual energy. She also determinedly worked for diversity, pushing back against any who saw progress there as a zero-sum tradeoff with academic rigor. She guided the school through some lean years, and handed to me a school with full enrollment, increasing financial strength, and a growing sense that it would be around for the long term. All that we have done in recent decades would have been impossible without the foundation she laid. Polly Chatfield, who is celebrated in this issue, and I agree that it would be hard to imagine a more rewarding place than Commonwealth to which to give one’s working life. My departure, however, marks a generational shift. Commonwealth’s faculty, staff, and Board today no longer feel constrained by the school’s past, and so are freer to help Jennifer Borman refashion our curriculum and culture so as to position Commonwealth to fulfill, more deeply and more effectively, the founding vision that remains a central, if imperfectly realized, commitment to serving students from all

This issue is about transitions. It looks backward and forward, and will, I hope, give confidence that the school is poised to respond nimbly to a changing world and thrive through Jennifer Borman’s leadership and beyond.

ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. May the focus always remain on our work of teaching, learning, and living together, and showing, by the way we treat each other and conduct ourselves, how the principles we care deeply about—thoughtful inquiry, decency, fairness— are realized on the ground, in the daily routines. We talk with our students about fairness and equity, but I remain convinced that they learn more about ethics from showing up for kitchen crew or loading buses at Hancock than from classroom exercises. Today’s climate calls for a renewed public activism, but the school has thrived, over my thirty-six years here, because it had superb teachers who taught young people how to think, how to write, how to work, and how to be decent, thoughtful citizens. Sending on students who are well on their way to internalizing such lessons is, to my mind, our most powerful and meaningful contribution to a more just world. My final note of gratitude goes to those students we have sent on, Commonwealth’s alumni/ae, who in so many creative ways take the lessons learned here and carry them forward into rewarding, productive lives. It has been a pleasure to meet and know so many of you, and your ongoing interest in and commitment to the school have meant a lot to Commonwealth and to me. This issue is about transitions. It looks backward and forward, and will, I hope, give confidence that the school is poised to respond nimbly to a changing world and thrive through Jennifer Borman’s leadership and beyond. I wish her, and Commonwealth, all the best. Thank you, Bill Wharton

Graduation 2021

e were delighted to honor—in person—the Class of 2021 during our sixty-first graduation ceremony, held on June 11. Though we found ourselves at the Westin Copley Place, Boston, rather than First Church Boston, as is tradition, the poignant speeches from Huy Tran ’21 and Sol Gutiérrez-Lara ’21; a tribute to retiring Headmaster Bill Wharton from his daughter, Rhea Loomis ’06; and an array of live music reminded us that our community’s buoyant spirit is intact. And we have much to celebrate.

This page, starting from top row, left to right: Alexandra Andromeda Bates ’21 with Xingyan Wang ’21, joining the ceremony from China; Jessie Liu, Lawrence Wang ’21, Bin Wang, Jian Qian Liu, and Qin Ying Chen; teachers Anna Moss ’06, John Wolff, and Meena Boppana; Alexander Williams ’21 and Steven Ewald ’21; Jon Fullerton, Sophie Lund Fullerton ’21, and Louisa Lund; Roger Tung, Lila Dianne Tung ’21, Alexander Tung, and Jillian Tung; Senior String Trio members Joe Kunii MacDonald ’21, Sophia Gardiner ’21, and Eric Liu ’21 Right page, starting from top row, left to right: Sol Gutiérrez-Lara ’21, Noora Harake ’21, Amalya Ma'ayan Labell ’21, and Olga Alexandra Kazarov ’21; Rhea Loomis '06; Rohit Kilpadi, Ryan Kilpadi ’21, and Pamela Kilpadi; Kimberly Hoang ’21 and Bill Wharton do an elbow “bump” in lieu of a handshake; Aruna Thyagarajan, Anirudh S. Nistala ’21, and Sanskriti Nistala; Gowri Zoolagud, Sidhanth Holalkere ’21, Sushmita Mudda, and Gowrishankar Holalkere; Huy Tran ’21 Photos by Tony Rinaldo Photography LLC

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NEWS | Of Commonwealth

Class of 2021 Colleges and Universities 1 Boston College 2 Columbia University 2 Cornell University 1 Grinnell College 1 Harvard College 1 Haverford College 1 Johns Hopkins University 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 McGill University 1 Mount Holyoke College 1 Northeastern University 1 Northwestern University 1 Pomona College 1 Princeton University 1 Royal College of Music 2 Smith College 1 University of California, Los Angeles 2 University of Southern California 3 University of Chicago 1 Vassar College 3 Washington University in St. Louis 2 Wellesley College

NEWS | Of Commonwealth

S C H O L A S T I C A R T & W R I T I N G AWA R D S Twenty-one Commonwealth students across all four grades were recognized this year by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for their achievements and skill in art and writing.

Turn to page 30 for some examples of our students’ award-winning writing.

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NEWS | Of Commonwealth

AWA R D S W I N N E R S The Gold Key, Silver Key, and Honorable Mentions are given on a state-wide level. ART National Silver Medal Ben O’Donnell ’23, Photography

Gold Key Tom Greany ’22, Photography Ben O’Donnell ’23, Photography James Wu ’23, Drawing* Olivia Wang ’24, Drawing*

Silver Key

Left page, top down, left to right: “Fog Over The Marsh,” Charlee Rivera ’23 (Honorable Mention); “Self Portrait I,” Olivia Wang ’24 (Gold Key); “Self Portrait II,” Olivia Wang ’24 (Silver Key); “Sunset Over the Marsh,” Charlee Rivera ’23 (Silver Key); “Voice,” James Wu ’23 (Gold Key); “In Traffic,” Parmis MokhtariDizaji ’24 (Honorable Mention); “Colossus,” Kian Woo Park ’23 (Honorable Mention) This page, top down, left to right: “A Study of Cats and Glazes,” Kai Tjia ’22 (Silver Key); “Salad Bowls,” Jo Doyle ’23 (Honorable Mention); “Pietra (Santa),” Tom Greany ’22 (Gold Key); “Top of My World,” Ben O'Donnell ’24 (Gold Key); “Dancing,” Olivia Wang ’24 (Silver Key); “Trees in Gold,” Parth Garg ’23 (Silver Key)

Dina Pfeffer ’22, Sculpture Kai Tjia ’22, Ceramics Parth Garg ’23, Photography Charlee Rivera ’23, Photography Olivia Wang ’24, Drawing*

Honorable Mention Jo Doyle ’23, Photography Charlee Rivera '23, Photography Kian Woo Park ’23, Drawing Parmis Mokhtari-Dizaji ’24, Photography* *Individual student entries submitted outside of school

WRITING Gold Key Addie Moore Gerety ’22, “We Have Not Gone to Lunch in Months,” Poetry

Silver Key Markus Tran ’21, “Homebound,” Poetry Dina Pfeffer ’22, “Unboxing,” Flash Fiction Kendall Brainin ’23, “WOMAN.” Poetry Soomin Lee ’23, “Home” (Flash Fiction) and “Rice Cake” (Poetry)

Honorable Mention Betty Smart ’21, “Thinking of You,” Short Story Ayla Ladha ’22, “The Seventh Wife,” Short Story Eitan Sengupta ’22, “A Nocturne of Snow,” Science Fiction & Fantasy Grace Pariser ’23, “Canada Geese,” Poetry Avery Selk ’23, “Most Forbidden,” Science Fiction & Fantasy David Wang ’23, “Fishmonger,” Flash Fiction

NEWS | Of Commonwealth

MULTIPLE HONORS from Model U.N. Conferences

COMMUN

he kids are alright, especially in their Model U.N. performances, leading the way for Commonwealth’s Model United Nations team this spring and earning an array of honors. Over two major conferences, held by MIT and Concord Academy, seven ninth and tenth graders, plus one junior, earned recognition for top performances in their committees. For reference: each committee has one Best Delegate (first prize), one Outstanding Delegate (second prize), and a few Honorable Mentions.

Honorable Mention Aadya Akkipeddi ’23 (twice) representing Afghanistan on the General Assembly and Kazakhstan on the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs Henry Levenson ’24 as Varys on the Game of Thrones Crisis Committee Mirai Duintjer Tebbens Nishioka ’24 as Augusto Pinochet of Chile in a Cold War Joint Crisis

tudents donned both masks and togas to present on Committees for the Iliad and Punic Wars, making the annual COMMUN (Commonwealth Model U.N.) conference the most memorable yet and cementing the event as a school tradition. Clad in myriad costumes, in-person Commonwealth student organizers provided an engaging Model U.N. conference for the roughly 140 middle-school students in virtual attendance. Special thanks to Mr. Benedick, who chaperoned in the building, allowing for crisis staff and chairs to better communicate in person as the event unfolded.

Outstanding Delegate Ben O'Donnell ’23 representing the United States on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Romen Der Manuelian ’23 as Nikita Khrushchev in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Henry Levenson ’24 representing the United States on the World Health Organization Parmis Mokhtari-Dizaji ’24 representing Ethiopia on the United Nations Economic and Social Council

Best Delegate Jay Sweitzer-Shalit ’24 (twice) representing the Soviet Union on the 1986 Security Council and Italy on the World Health Organization

Best Position Paper Raphael Yamamoto ’22 representing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the Security Council

PRIMES News

ath team members Linda He ’23 and Ilaria Seidel ’22 were accepted into the MIT PRIMES program. It is a free year-long after-school program that offers research projects and guided reading to high-school students in the Greater Boston area. Program participants work with MIT researchers on exciting unsolved problems in mathematics, computer science, and computational biology.

Allegro Vivace!

hile some students spent their spring break recording on the Esplanade (see next page), others sequestered themselves in the Cafegymnatorium to capture a different but no less delightful performance. A string trio of seniors Joe MacDonald ’21 (violin), Sophie Gardiner ’21 (viola), and Eric Liu ’21 (cello) recorded works by Arensky, Beethoven, Dohnányi, and Fauré. The result: a stirring hour-long program. (Alex Ding ’20 and pianist Valerie Becker also made special appearances.) It also came as little surprise when, a few weeks later, Joe won the Harvard Music Association High School Achievement award.

Watch the senior play and string trio recital on Commonwealth’s YouTube page: youtube.com/commonwealthschool. 10 CM Summer 2021

NEWS | Of Commonwealth

The Importance of Being Earnestly Masked and Miked

assers-by wanting photos of students dressed in period costumes. Wandering geese getting a little too close for comfort. Hauling a set back and forth from school. Boston’s blustery winds creating more than a few sound-mixing challenges: Such were the trials and tribulations an intrepid group of seniors overcame as they filmed The Importance of Being Earnest on the Charles River Esplanade. Their delightful reimagining of Oscar Wilde’s farcical classic marked the joyous return of the senior play, canceled last year by the pandemic. And this “trivial comedy for serious people” was just what the doctor ordered.

ASSEMBLY SPEAKER Round Up

A Community SHARES ITS KNOWLEDGE

uring a reimagined, largely virtual Project Week, alumni/ae, parents, and mentors across the country—and globe—shared their expertise via a lecture series designed to allow Commonwealth students to learn from multiple professionals in different subject tracks. From explorations of careers in law and medicine to video game design to sewing to a sublime performance of traditional Japanese koto music by Cathleen Read P’00, this year’s Project Week reminded us of the possibilities of our pandemic adaptations. Students could pursue individual projects as they always have, too. Among them: Mirai Duintjer Tebbens Nishioka ’24 guided robots through obstacle courses. Avery Selk ’23 honed her screenwriting skill with a local playwright while examining diversity and race in writing and casting. Jo Doyle ’23 used their Spanish skills during etymological research of American and Mexican Sign Languages. Moe Frumkin ’23 only communicated with his mentor through Slack while creating open-source code for a local tech start up. Tom Greany ’22 researched and wrote an original article on the history and symbolism of Italian baptisteries for a Florence Museum. And the list of endeavors from inquiring minds goes on. Orchestrating Project Week is no small feat during a “normal” year, but Project Week Coordinator Anna Moss ’06 developed an astonishing program using the constraints of the pandemic to her advantage. Some aspects might even be here to stay. “Now that we have a blueprint for how remote mentoring can look, I hope we will be able to allow even more students in future years to collaborate with alumni/ae all over the world,” she said, “particularly if there is interest in combining a few people’s expertise who live on opposite coasts.”

ssembly speakers are meant to challenge and engage, and this spring’s spate of fascinating presenters, including several alumni/ae, did just that, bringing our community together for meaningful and inspiring, if sometimes difficult, conversations. Niloofar Haeri ’77 discussed her latest book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Prayer, Poetry, and Women in Iran. (Turn to page 28 to read more.) Michelle Wu, Boston Mayoral Candidate, inspired students as she recounted how growing up the child of immigrants influenced her belief in the power of local politics. William Collis ’03 presented on the growing culture of e-sports, wondering whether they are like ketchup or mustard. (We’ll leave that up to readers to decipher.) Christian Picciolini, a former white supremecist who now works to combat extremism and disengage people from hate groups, came to virtual Commonwealth for a Q&A. Sam Brinton, an advocate and activist, shared their story as a conversion therapy survivor and their work with the Trevor Project helping LGBTQ+ young people. Sculptor and Reverend Paul Briggs discussed the intersection of art, spirituality, and social justice. Who will we meet next year? 11

Welcome, Jennifer BY CATHERINE BREWSTER

“

’m happiest,” says Commonwealth’s

new Head of School, “when I’m learning—engaged emotionally, analytically, technically, logistically. That’s more fun than replicating on Wednesday what you did last Wednesday.” Commonwealth helped Jennifer Borman ’81 discover this about herself as a ninth grader decades ago; now she’s no less eager to immerse herself in the school as it is in 2021.

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IN HIGH SCHOOL,

Ms. Borman lived with her mother on Beacon Street and her father on Beacon Hill. She says of herself, “No one would have looked at me as an eighth grader and said, ‘Wow, that kid should go to a high-powered school.’” She describes her life before Commonwealth as “the apotheosis of progressive education in the 1970s: dogs wandering through the classroom, teachers breastfeeding, parents bringing in roadkill for us to dissect. It did what it was supposed to do, which was to keep you curious, but I literally didn’t know what a noun was.” She thinks it’s possible that the head of her middle school, who had taught at Commonwealth, “talked Charles Merrill into admitting me.” Ninth grade was rough; the teachers “weren’t generous with grades, but they were generous with their attention.” Thanks to their “patient, expert instruction” in class, at lunch and after school, she filled in enough gaps in her understanding of fractions and even arithmetic to get through algebra. Learning two foreign languages illuminated the structure of grammar in English. Prophetically, she sometimes got to school on roller skates. Most important, “falling in love with ideas created tremendous momentum, and I respected my teachers so deeply that I wanted to earn their respect.”

Boston, Providence, East Lansing, Providence, Boston

n Ms. Borman’s choices and experience since Commonwealth, you can hear a lot of echoes of that arduous, joyful process. She went on to Brown and studied poetry. She also started to confront “why I had allowed myself to be so terrified and avoidant” of math and really learn calculus. Graduate school at Michigan State, in teacher education and education policy, led her back to Brown to work for the Education Alliance, an organization that partnered with schools and state education agencies that were working to make their instructional practices more equitable to students from all backgrounds. There, she spent ten years researching and evaluating programs that included adolescent literacy, teacher learning, and educational technology. Visits to schools all over the country gave her, she says, “a bird’s-eye perspective on the education sector: its structures, its inequities, its fads, and the profound disrespect faced by many teachers and students.” Meanwhile, she was married to a teacher who has spent his career in urban public schools; their older child has become an elementary teacher in a public school in Baltimore. Perhaps more than the average future head of an independent school, Ms. Borman was developing a broad and deep sense of the landscape of American education and the stubborn tensions within it. She also had classroom experience herself: right after college, she taught English for four years at School One, a small high school in Providence that grants financial aid to sixty-five percent of its students. In 2007, Ms. Borman became School One’s head, ready to redirect her energy toward “making a real difference for a small number of kids.” In her new job, math and creativity became equally important. She started a 501(c)(3) through a state tax-credit program to raise additional money for students at the bottom of the income scale, and launched programs offering intergenerational courses during the school day and evening creative-writing classes to adults and teens. She oversaw the school’s purchase of new space and the renovation of the old. She also built up enough cash reserves so that when the ultimate “rainy day” arrived, in the form of the pandemic, “some

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decisions were easy,” like buying HEPA filters and hiring an intern to help with social distancing. In fact, Ms. Borman says, good leadership in “ordinary” times doesn’t fundamentally differ from good leadership during a pandemic: gathering ideas and perspectives, operating in multiple dimensions while always considering the human impact of decisions, communicating frequently, listening actively, being kind. At the same time, of course, the world was changing. George Floyd had been murdered, independent schools around the country had to take hard looks at their culture of privilege, and Commonwealth was grappling simultaneously with recommitting to its mission of serving students from diverse backgrounds, with reopening safely, and with searching for its next head of school.

An Old But New Landscape

s. Borman had always seen in Commonwealth “a marrow-deep commitment to intellectual excellence and spirited embrace of community, within and beyond its walls.” Though she says she’s still “not altogether sure how I ended up there” at fourteen, she can clearly identify now why she’s coming back: particularly in the context of the upheavals of 2020, the school’s commitments matter to the much larger world. “We need really well-educated people who can solve complex problems and look at issues through multiple lenses.” Many of these future problem solvers, as you have read elsewhere in CM, are already fiercely engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work at Commonwealth. The conversations they’ve initiated have asked us all to better understand the landscape we inhabit every day at school and how it feels for the different kinds of people who move through it. That effort to understand, Ms. Borman has emphasized, will rank highest in her priorities for her first six months. She expects “a steep learning curve,” one she’ll enjoy as she and Commonwealth’s new Director of DEI, Lisa Palmero McGrath (see page 17), delve into the work that’s already begun. Among other things, she wants to know what’s “front of mind” for different people: D, E, or I? Curriculum, access, representation? She is particularly committed to accelerating efforts to recruit more low-income students of color, and “we also have to make sure they feel fully welcomed and visible once they’re here.” Last fall, Ms. Borman remarked to the faculty and staff that she saw her own role as a DEI leader not as that of a heroic, inspirational figure but rather as the person who should keep us from getting distracted and enable everyone’s faithful effort. That entails

“What I have seen over and over is that when kids come into a learning environment where they feel like they can be themselves—when they start to drop defenses they may not have even been aware they were carrying—they open up to learning in beautiful ways.”

WELCOME , JENNIFER

setting goals and asking ourselves “at regular junctures: What have we accomplished? Where did we hit that brick wall? And what would we try next?” She notes that “the work is never done.” Asked what she’s learned herself over the last few years, she cites her developing understanding of gender identity and what it’s like not to be neurotypical. Most of all, though, “What I have seen over and over is that when kids come into a learning environment where they feel like they can be themselves—when they start to drop defenses they may not have even been aware they were carrying—they open up to learning in beautiful ways.” In order to experience that freedom, that energy liberated when a student is not constantly on guard against feelings of failure or rejection, “it’s so important not to be just one of one or two or three, but to have people at school you can truly connect with.” I asked Ms. Borman, in light of the last tumultuous year, where she thought the passionate outpouring of support for greater inclusion might lead us. She said she sees adolescents as much more politically engaged than they seemed ten years ago. They’re informed by the past, she said, but haven’t “had their hearts broken” by living through it; they’re less cynical and more hopeful as well as more determined.

Beyond 2021

he farther horizon, Ms. Borman has always emphasized, will come into focused view only after she’s thoroughly learned the terrain of the school as it is now. Like so many of us, she longs for the return to fully in-person teaching, the classrooms in which students don’t have to fight so hard to keep themselves engaged, the faculty meetings with “a million ideas

bouncing around.” She can also imagine students and staff feeling buoyed by a certain amount of pride just at having gotten through the pandemic: “Look how we were able to pivot, what we were able to invent, look at our fortitude!” As for her own role, one of her hopes is to feel, on the average day, “extraneous.” In a good school, “everything good happens because faculty and staff feel empowered and supported and students feel inspired and valued”; much of a successful leader’s work is to ensure, often invisibly, that that’s the case. Ms. Borman is also looking forward to sitting in on classes and getting a deeper feel for what students are learning across their years at Commonwealth (“and this time I will actually understand algebra,” she laughs). She noted that several texts she read at Commonwealth made a lasting impression, Jane Eyre most notably. She still draws inspiration from Jane’s quiet determination to be true to herself. “On the other hand, I remember hating Tess of the d’Urbervilles and wanting to throw it in the Charles River.” A voracious reader, Ms. Borman says that sometimes a book finds you at the right moment in your life, or you circle back to a book and it speaks to you in a different way over the years. “Right now, I’m re-reading Charles Merrill’s The Walled Garden and it’s thought-provoking,” she says. “A good school is constantly evolving, constantly asking itself whether it’s fully living up to its mission. It’s looking backwards to its traditions and forward as our society changes.”

Catherine Brewster is an English teacher and twenty-one-year veteran of Commonwealth School. 15

DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION UPDATE Dear Commonwealth community:

e are pleased to share with you the Commonwealth School Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It was written by trustees to articulate today’s reasons for Commonwealth’s commitment to creating and maintaining a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive school environment. These values have been a part of the school and its mission since its founding, but the trustees recognized the need for a statement that went beyond an appeal to our legacy. This is a living document, designed to give every member of the Commonwealth community—student, parent, alum, teacher, staff member, and trustee—a set of commitments they can refer to as we continue this work together. The drafters took care to craft a statement clearly rooted in Commonwealth’s mission. We believe it will help us all make Commonwealth a better version of itself—and will help the school live up to the standards we have shared since its founding: an institution committed to educating young people from diverse backgrounds to become knowledgeable, thoughtful, and creative adults, capable of careful analysis, fruitful cooperation, responsible leadership, and deep commitment. Like the school’s mission, this statement is intentionally broad. It is not—and should not be—a comprehensive plan for implementing DEI programs. It is a North Star, not a road map. Drafted by the Board with input from InCommon (our Boardappointed DEI task force) and the three of us cosigned below, it is the product of six months of deliberations and informed by a year of dialogue and action. We remain deeply grateful for the alumni/ae and current students—Mosammat Faria Afreen ’16, Iman Ali ’18, Gueinah Carlie Blaise ’16, Tristan Edwards ’18, Kimberly Hoang ’21, Alexis Domonique Mitchell ’16, Ryan Phan ’22, Alan Plotz ’21, and Tarang Saluja ’18—who sparked these efforts with their petition and activism a year ago. We know the need is urgent, and there remains much to be done. This is not a journey with final destination, but an ongoing effort that will respond to the changing needs and times. In the years ahead, this statement will guide not just our administration but all of our collective work. You can view the statement to the right and on the Equity and Inclusion page of our website. We welcome any comments or questions you may have: your responses will help shape the course ahead. For all of the time and thought that went into this piece, it is only a beginning. Progress will come from efforts large and small over time, from all of us. Sincerely, Therese Hendricks P’05, ’07, Board of Trustees Chair Bill Wharton, Former Headmaster Jennifer Borman ’81, Head of School 16 CM Summer 2021

Commonwealth School’s Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Commonwealth School’s founder, Charles Merrill, dreamed of a diverse collective of inquisitive students learning how to become responsible, socially conscious adults. His vision gives special meaning to the school’s mission statement. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to achieving the mission. The lives of students, faculty, and staff are shaped by each individual’s life experiences that include but are not limited to race, religion, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, family structure, nationality, gender identity, ability, and socioeconomic background. Diversity of perspectives, beliefs, and experiences enhances intellectual discourse and the educational experience at Commonwealth. Diversity enables students to learn from one another and from faculty in rigorous and respectful debate and to develop empathy for those of differing views and experiences. It prepares them to thrive in the increasingly diverse society in which they live and will contribute to as adults. For these reasons, achieving diversity will enable Commonwealth to better live up to its commitment to high academic standards. Commonwealth can and will be a welcoming home for curious and imaginative students irrespective of their backgrounds, interests, identities, or financial capacities. Achieving and maintaining diversity requires a welcoming culture of inclusivity where individuals feel that they can be their true selves, that they are heard, that their differences are valued, and that they belong. Inclusiveness strengthens the school’s unique, proud, and spirited culture. Being inclusive must be supported with equitable policies and procedures. A hallmark of the Commonwealth education is academic excellence, which must be accompanied by support mechanisms that address the entirety of the individual, their needs, and differences. When the school fails to include and support all of its members, we must ask how we can do better. Each of us must engage affirmatively with the work of equity and inclusion. It cannot be delegated to the director of diversity or to the head of school. They have institutional responsibilities regarding DEI that must be fulfilled, but real progress can only be achieved through the action of all: students, faculty, staff, alumni/ae, and the Board.

A Personal Path: Introducing Our Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION (DEI) practitioners need to be able to shift gears quickly: Between stakeholders and their wildly varied needs. Between conversations designed to put people at ease and those designed to push comfort zones. Between celebrations of identity and solemn acknowledgements of individual and collective pain and trauma. Lisa Palmero McGrath embodies the ability to balance those conflicting demands, as quick to laugh as she is to lend an empathetic ear. “There’s a lot of excitement and a lot of joy in the work, but there’s a lot of urgency and there’s a seriousness, too,” Lisa said. “People’s lives are at stake.” Lisa comes to Commonwealth School as its new Director of DEI in August. Keep reading to learn more about her and the deeply personal path that led her to this work.

Lisa Palmero McGrath

From One of Many to One of Few

ailing from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Lisa was supposed to continue her education in the Philippines—then her older sister saw Dead Poets Society. Enamored with boarding schools, her sister managed to convince the family to change their plans. So the sisters found themselves at Kent School in Connecticut, a private boarding school on the banks of the Housatonic River with brick buildings and manicured grounds that could easily be mistaken for a college campus. “Before Kent I had attended a small international school that was basically like a United Nations for expat kids,” Lisa said, learning alongside students from Pakistan, Egypt, the United Kingdom, India, Lebanon, and elsewhere. At Kent, Lisa and her sister were the only Filipinas in a small pool of international students. “I was completely culture shocked,” she said. Despite 17

feeling “very out of place,” Lisa found her niche and confidence in music. “I was all about music and performing on stage,” she said. A highlight was getting into the auditioned female a capella group. “That’s how I learned to beatbox, which I’m really proud of,” she said. (The group was poised to ask someone from the male a capella group to perform the “vocal percussion.” Lisa stepped up and taught herself how to do it instead.) After graduating, Lisa attended Ithaca College “with the plan of being a Broadway musical star.” But early in her tenure, another student of color, having experienced discrimination of her own, warned Lisa to prepare to be relegated to the chorus because of her ethnicity, despite her talent. Lisa decided not to test the theory—she “wasn’t in it enough to be in the background.” So her college days centered around community service, residential life, and student government, including becoming Ithaca’s first woman-of-color student-body president. (She got her performing fix by continuing her involvement in a capella groups.) She ultimately earned her B.A. in sociology, with designs to attend law school. In the midst of studying for the LSATs, she became the Director of Student Activities at Wilbraham and Monson Academy, a co-ed boarding and day school with 400 students and sixty-six faculty. It turned out to be a “dream job.” “I got to do what my mentors at Ithaca College were doing but in an independent school,” Lisa said. “I was teaching humanities. I was teaching middle schoolers about people and culture. And it was really hard work. I fell in love with it.” She became the school’s Associate Dean of Students only three years later, at twenty-four years old. “It was one of the best decisions, I think professionally and also personally, that I’ve made,” she said. Still, as one of two women on an administrative team of thirteen people, the youngest, and the only person of color, the position had a “very steep learning curve about microaggressions and what it means to be a BIPOC female professional in a very male-dominated space.”

To explore the latest DEI developments, visit the school’s website: commschool.org/DEI

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Digging into the Diversity Director Role

he lessons learned in seven years at Wilbraham and Monson would carry over to Lisa’s next role, Diversity Director at Hopkins School in Connecticut—even though, at the time, Lisa “actually didn’t know what a diversity director did or that the position even existed.” Her sister again shaped her fate, explaining why the role was a perfect fit: “it was all about identity and students and journeys and working with teachers who wanted to support each other.” At the larger (715 students and 130 faculty) Hopkins School, Lisa spent a lot of time furthering socioeconomic inclusion, she said, advocating for low-income students facing food insecurity and lack of at-home study space and time. She also advanced institutional support for transgender colleagues and students, such as the creation of gender-neutral bathrooms. She worked in admissions at the school, too, giving her insight into recruiting initiatives. “I think I’ve always been a diversity practitioner, when it comes to understanding and being interested in identity and the way systems and institutions work,” Lisa said. Even when she doesn’t understand or agree, she says she’s comfortable with the discomfort. Lisa continued her path in DEI at Westminster School, in Simsbury, Connecticut, serving as Director of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and, later, Dean of DEI. There she oversaw a broad swath of inclusion work for the 400-student school, including leading a coalition of faculty and trustees in developing institutional strategies that support Black Lives Matter and address anti-Black racism and institutional discrimination; designing faculty workshops on cultural competency, unintentional bias, deep listening, and hair in the Black community; and launching affinity groups for all of the school’s constituents, such as Parents/ Guardians of Students of Color and a Peer Leaders group. From curriculum design to hiring and retention to extracurricular activities, Lisa’s work touched on every corner of Westminster’s operations, every member of the community, in some way. “I fell in love with the people,” she said. “For me, it’s been very much about people. I was really moved by everyone that I met at Westminster, and then Commonwealth.” As soon as Lisa learned of the open Director of DEI position at Commonwealth,

everything she read about the school seemed to resonate, she said: the small size, the philosophy, even the mascot. (An abiding love for the music of The Little Mermaid didn’t hurt.) Moving to Boston will fill a cultural void, too. “I realized I really wanted Andrew, my [two-year-old] son, to get to know me and my full self,” she said. “That meant being in a more diverse community and also having access to a Filipino community.” Lisa comes to Commonwealth a little over a year after George Floyd’s murder. Over that time, defined not just by the pandemic by widespread cries for racial justice, even a seasoned DEI practitioner had lessons to learn. “I’ve learned about the importance of decentralizing myself and helping others grant themselves and each other the grace that comes with discovering where our strengths lie,” she said. “I’ve also learned that it’s easy for students and teachers to identify what needs to be better.” Identifying what’s going well and should be built on is sometimes harder. Schools need to think about students’ intellectual progress, mental well-being, and emotional growth beyond their time in the classroom, too. “We’re not only teaching the thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old,” she said. “We’re also talking to the person who will someday be twenty, twenty-one. How will they digest and process what they remember from this moment?” And if a person walks away bruised by their high-school experience, how do we help that alum heal and return to the community where they had those experiences? Lisa emphasizes that DEI work in schools isn’t just about helping students—it entails learning from and for them which skills and support systems they need to thrive. “There’s no form of reading and writing that would have prepared us for the world we’re in right now,” Lisa says. “It’s all uncharted territory.” While urgency has been a constant in her DEI work, Lisa has felt it even more so during the pandemic, when connecting became so much more difficult—and the country saw a sustained surge in anti-Asian violence, harassment, and bigotry, coming to a head when six Asian and Asian-American women were gunned down in Atlanta in March. The racial reckoning in the context of a global pandemic has unearthed “a lot of truths that people are being forced to face, truths that BIPOC communities, transgender communities, have known existed. And it’s forcing people to take a stand,” she said. “Neutrality doesn’t exist if one is an educator, even when one is trying to be neutral. I think

LISA PALMERO M C GRATH you can show both sides, but if we’re talking about social justice, I think neutrality is dangerous.”

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Practice

alancing student, faculty, parent, and administrative needs. Considering qualitative and quantitative metrics. Understanding, deeply, the lived experiences of a variety of identities: The DEI practitioner’s work is broad, and the expertise needed is vast. “At the end of the day, it’s about knowing the school and knowing the people in that community, and identifying the types of spaces that students and faculty in the community need in order to be their best selves,” Lisa said. “People do their best work when they’re most comfortable in their own skin. And so for me, it’s what are we doing so that everyone here is most comfortable in their own skin, so that they can produce their best work, whether you’re a teacher, a staff member, a student, a member of the alumni/ae community, a board member.” Accordingly, over her first months at Commonwealth, Lisa (much like Jennifer Borman; turn to page 12) said she will focus on getting to know the lay of the land and the people. “I’m dreaming about the excitement of getting to know people and being creative,” she said. “That’s what’s so much fun and also challenging about DEI work: it’s thinking outside the box.” She wants to “tap into what people are passionate about” and figure out what they wish they could be doing but aren’t, what they’re determined to continue and why. So, what does an inclusive and equitable school environment look and feel like? For Lisa, it starts with:

student. After all, at one point or another, a student can be one of a few or one of many, Lisa said. The goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts is to foster an environment where every student feels like they can be their full, authentic self, regardless. In the absence of these efforts, school communities can be inadvertently exclusionary (at best). And students pay the price. In one pointed example, Lisa recalled times when adults have declined to use a microphone in a large school space, confident in their ability to project and be heard—and not knowing about the hearing-impaired students in the audience. “That’s one identity, for instance, I often think of, because I’ve had students

who’ve decided not to wear their earpieces because they don’t want people to know [they were hearing impaired],” she said. What might a more inclusive environment have wrought? Commonwealth’s eagerness for an in-house DEI practitioner has been apparent throughout the conversations she’s had thus far. Let’s have a carnival of ideas, Lisa said, then work together to zero in on the right ones to try. “Good intentions are good, but it’s about coming up with a plan,” she said. “So long as we’re moving in a way that will allow us to leave the world a little bit better than it was when we first showed up in a specific community, then we’re moving in the right direction.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about knowing the school and knowing the people in that community, and identifying the types of spaces that students and faculty in the community need in order to be their best selves. People do their best work when they’re most comfortable in their own skin.”

n Stories: Whose stories are highlighted? Whose perspectives are shared? And whose voices are missing? n Identities: We all carry a broad swath of identities within us—and every institutional decision needs to take into consideration which communities and identities might be affected and how. n Access: Inclusion means access to people with shared identities and backgrounds, and access to opportunities. What this looks like in practice will vary from school to school and student to Olivia Wang ’24

CRISES in COVID’s Shadow

BY LILLIEN WALLER

ince early 2020, our national consciousness has been focused on the coronavirus

pandemic. COVID-19 has captured our attention but also our anxiety and grief: to date, more than half a million Americans and nearly four million people

worldwide have died from the disease. But amid the lockdowns, quarantines, stimulus package battles, culture wars, presidential election, and national vaccine rollout, we have begun, tentatively and imperfectly, to lumber to our collective feet. A number of long-term public-health crises have continued to roil in the

background, however, often overlooked but nonetheless urgent—indeed, made more urgent

by a pandemic that has intensified their effects. Commonwealth School alumni/ae Ezra Haber

Glenn, Sonya Del Tredici, and Aaron Littman are advocates for some of the most vulnerable among us, who have felt the impacts of COVID even more acutely as they grapple with housing insecurity, opiate use disorder, and life behind bars.

“Prison walls don’t keep the virus in or out”

here’s a lot we don’t know about what goes on in America’s jails and prisons. What we do know, and have for decades, is that the U.S. carceral system is a public-health crisis marked by widespread violence, overcrowding, and inadequate sanitation, healthcare, and mental-health resources. That was before the pandemic. “It’s clear that the toll in prisons has been really staggering and that the infection rate has been multiple times higher than in the community at large. There are systems where half of people have been infected. And the age-adjusted death rate in U.S. prisons early in the pandemic— and before the most recent winter surge—was also multiple times higher than in the community,” said Aaron Littman ’06, Binder Clinical Teaching Fellow at UCLA School of Law and Deputy Director of the UCLA Law COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project. 20 CM Summer 2021

Begun by UCLA Law Professor Sharon Dolovich in March 2020, the data project started out as a simple spreadsheet to track policy changes in prisons and jails, particularly regarding in-person visitations, which had been stayed in the early days of the pandemic. More than a year later, the project has a full-time twelve-person staff and more than 100 volunteer researchers, and is the CDC’s official source of COVID data on prisons and jails. There are a number of reasons the infection rate and death toll in prisons would be higher, Aaron notes, including the inability to socially distance, the constant movement of people between and within facilities, and an incarcerated population of disproportionately poor people and people of color with comorbidities that make COVID-19 more deadly. What’s most surprising is that there is much we still wouldn’t know about the realities of the pandemic behind bars were it not for the project’s data collection to date. Reporting—on quarantine

CRISES IN COVID’S SHADOW procedures, testing, how many have contracted the disease and how many have died from it, along with other crucial information—has been inconsistent, often unreliable and, in many cases, nonexistent. “There are, roughly, three thousand jails in the country. At the beginning of the pandemic, the L.A. County Jail, where I live, had 17,000 people in it, which is bigger than a number of state prison systems. They reported data, as did Cook County Jail in Chicago and Rikers in New York,” Aaron explained. “But well over ninety percent of jails have just reported nothing or issued a press release once or twice, rather than sharing data in any kind of consistent way. So, we just don’t know how many people died in those jails. In a few states there is decent data—for example, in Massachusetts—because the ACLU brought a lawsuit and has collected and reported some of that data. But in most states, we just don’t know.” Aaron emphasizes that the entities withholding information on incarcerated people during the pandemic may be doing so not only because they prefer to operate in obscurity but also to keep their jurisdictions’ infection rates artificially low in order to reopen local economies more quickly. Transparency is a primary objective of the data project during the pandemic and for the long run: a serious public conversation about the future of mass incarceration cannot happen without knowing what is really taking place in America’s jails and prisons. “There’s real importance to having basic data about what’s happening in these carceral institutions so that the public can have an informed debate about what they should look like, how big they should be, and how people should be treated in them.” Greater transparency also helps protect communities at large because of the multiple ways the coronavirus can be carried into, and out of, jails and prisons. “Prison walls don’t keep the virus in or out,” Aaron said. “If what you care about is that your grandmother not die of COVID, then you should want fewer infections being generated in that prison down the road so that fewer infections are coming out.” Aaron explained that the pandemic has exposed deep crises that were there all along. “I think it could potentially catalyze change. Our courts, which have been so hostile to prisoners’ rights claims, are not going to fix this problem. We need to have other avenues of reform, and if [the pandemic] exposes strategies that are fruitful, that are not the ones we normally employ, that’s sort of a glimmer of hope in what’s otherwise a pretty bleak picture.”

“But well over ninety percent of jails have just reported nothing or issued a press release once or twice, rather than sharing data in any kind of consistent way. So, we just don’t know how many people died in those jails.”

“The pandemic has been bad for addiction”

“

y biggest concern for my patients is that they’ll die,” said internist and addiction specialist Dr. Sonya Del Tredici ’94 of WellSpan Internal Medicine—Apple Hill in York, Pennsylvania. Speaking candidly about her specialty in opiate use disorder (OUD), Sonya explained: “Opiate addiction is a deadly disease, and the destabilization of the pandemic has made treatment a lot more difficult for my patients. They already didn’t have a lot of extra resources at their disposal, so when they get thrown into a hole it’s that much harder for them to dig out of it.” The opioid epidemic is commonly understood to be one of the greatest public-health crises in U.S. history. So, what happens when one historic crisis coincides with another?

“Opiate addiction is a deadly disease, and the destabilization of the pandemic has made treatment a lot more difficult for my patients.”

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According to the CDC, the year ending in September 2020 saw a record number of fatal overdoses in the United States—more than 87,000—the most ever recorded in a single twelve-month period. The largest increase occurred during the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic, from March to May, amid national lockdowns and mitigation measures. “The pandemic has been bad for addiction,” Sonya said, explaining that pandemic conditions responsible for isolation, financial hardship, and joblessness among the general population have been that much more challenging for people suffering from OUD and other substance abuse disorders. “The residential treatment centers had to close or reduce their numbers, and the mutual support groups like AA had to move online, which was less effective for many people. Therapy had to go to telemedicine, which was also hard,” said Sonya, “and there was a lot of job loss among my patients, who often work at places without job protection. Many were also not given adequate protection against COVID at their workplaces and ended up getting sick.” Sonya noted that the pandemic’s restrictions chipped away at the system of accountability that she and her colleagues had worked to build with their patients. “We keep very close tabs on them, and when we weren’t able to do that, people started to relapse.” Such accountability points to the deep connection between patients suffering with OUD and the medical care they receive for recovery, especially as a lot of patients began taking opiates in a medical setting. Since doctors have been some of the drivers of the opioid epidemic, they are uniquely positioned to help reverse it, said Sonya. And effective medications exist to treat OUD, which isn’t the case for most other drug disorders. WellSpan in Pennsylvania has expanded its addiction services within the last year, making it possible for patients there to access services through their primary care physicians rather than through a separate addiction specialist or clinic. Sonya, who is also Associate Director of the residency at York Hospital, is heartened by the model the health system uses to support recovery. Each patient sees a doctor regarding their medications and a Recovery Support Specialist regarding other life issues. “The Recovery Support Specialists are all people who have also experienced addiction in some way, so they can empathize with our patients. We do the visits together: I talk about medication, and mental and physical health, and the Recovery Support Specialist helps with all the other aspects of treatment, like arranging for counseling, job training, child care resources, or even Christmas presents for their kids. We do it together.” It’s a promising treatment strategy designed to address all aspects of the disease, which is at once biochemical, psychological, and social—meaning it can, and does, decimate a person’s life from the inside out. Sonya remains passionate about her practice and her mission, especially during a pandemic that has just begun to abate. “I’m very interested in the mind-body connection, and addiction medicine is an interesting example of how biochemistry interacts with behavior. And I love working with this group of people. They’re young, energetic, positive, and really eager to get help.”

“It’s not just a housing crisis. It’s a community development crisis.”

JUSTIN KNIGHT

CRISES IN COVID’S SHADOW

or months they appeared on our TVs, phones, and tablets. Large families and small, parents and kids, low income and new to financial hardship: the global pandemic threw millions of American renters—many of whom were already on the brink—into financial chaos and, quite literally, the streets, compounding a pandemic crisis with an eviction crisis. Halfway through 2020, and prior to the CDC’s most recent moratorium on evictions, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) estimated that as many as forty million renters were at risk of eviction—not least because, prior to the pandemic, nearly half of all American renters were already cost burdened by their rental payments. “Housing affordability in this country has been a complete mess for decades. It’s never worked well. It’s never worked fairly. It’s never been clear. We have a huge amount of confusion and inequality,” says Ezra Haber Glenn ’87, who teaches in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and works to help communities across the state build more housing. “COVID has really revealed the depth of housing insecurity and the kind of housing disparity that exists between the haves and the have-nots.” According to Ezra, beyond the interrelated job-loss and eviction crises, there’s the problem of additional financial burden for property owners who, because of rental payments in arrears, can’t afford their own mortgages, property taxes, and maintenance. And behind all of this, there has always been a fundamental disparity in the United States between the quality of housing in different neighborhoods and the different options available for owners and renters. When you own a house, you’re saving money and paying yourself, Ezra notes, and when you rent, you’re not. But the benefits of home ownership, the pandemic has demonstrated, extend far beyond the economic when where you live determines how you live. “Because some people have been able to pay so much more for housing, they’re able to live in places that are less dense,” Ezra explained. “They’re living in houses that are much more comfortable, that allow you to work at home, and that provide private access and outdoor space. COVID made it clear that this wasn’t just about comfort but safety.” It’s a fact of American life that may have been illuminated by the pandemic but that, at least in terms of housing policy, we’ve accepted for decades. And it’s also why America’s crisis in housing insecurity will likely persist. The current moratorium on evictions remains in place through June 2021. But how well will ongoing government relief play among the American public outside of a historic national emergency? “If you just cancel the rent, that passes the burden back to the landlord,” Ezra said. “We like to think of landlords as evil people, but often they’re just struggling small business people or homeowners, too. So, you don’t want to have the eviction crisis turn into a rent forgiveness crisis, which turns into a foreclosure crisis.” On the positive side, the revelations of the pandemic may offer a unique opportunity to reimagine affordable housing. Simply building more affordable houses or units is a great start, but it’s unlikely to deliver enough to truly solve the problem

“Housing affordability in this country has been a complete mess for decades. It’s never worked well. It’s never worked fairly.”

because the supply can never meet a demand that, even before the pandemic, numbered in the tens of millions. And it’s as much a problem of location as it is about supply: unlike other consumer goods, you can’t move houses around. The problem isn’t really about the number of houses but the number of houses in places people want to live, Ezra notes. “People want to live in places where there are good jobs, good transportation, good parks, good schools, and clean air and water. Unfortunately, we only have so many places like that. One option is to build more houses in these neighborhoods—which we are trying to do—but it’s really expensive and slow, and there’s only so much you can do there. But the other option is to make more places like that. “Viewed that way,” Ezra added, “our housing crisis is actually a community development crisis. We need to make more places that offer the same opportunities as the ones that everyone seems to want to be in.” Nonprofit organizations like Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative or Urban Edge have already been doing the groundwork to empower residents to build affordable, vibrant, and thriving neighborhoods. Such groups are part of a broader patchwork of organizations across the country working to alleviate the cluster of crises around housing—not at the city or state level but at the neighborhood level. “Part of community development is the actual community developing things,” Ezra said. “Instead of just the government developing affordable housing, the community does. Instead of a private company making jobs, the community will help make jobs.”

Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she is editor of the anthology American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (Stockport Flats). Lillien is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Kresge Artist Fellow in the Literary Arts. She lives in Detroit.

Adventures in

Artificial Intelligence by Catherine Brewster

uring her virtual Merrill Series talk in early 2021, in discussing her work on a tool for helping blind people identify who’s around them, Cecily Morrison ’98 vigorously contested language such as, well, “a tool for helping...” “Blind people,” she said, “are incredibly skilled at making sense of the world in non-visual ways.” Building effective personal agents—the term for technology like the one Cecily and her team are working on—has to begin with the challenge a potential user might issue: “I’m perfectly capable of getting to the drugstore all by myself, so what can you actually add to my experience?” For Cecily and her team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, one of the answers has been cues that make a social world that works for the sighted more accessible to the blind. If you can’t see the people around you, it makes sense to do, for instance, what children who are blind sometimes do: rest your head on a table, ear cocked upward, listening to the conversation—though this reads as not listening to those who rely on eye contact and other visual cues. A user of Cecily’s team’s device wears a headset equipped with cameras, a depth sensor, and a speaker. Machine learning comes into play in identifying people the user’s “gaze” lands on, with people elsewhere in the room represented by clicks and bumps that sound to the user as if they’re coming from that position. One twelve-year-old testing the prototype said it was “so exciting” to be aware of others in the room who were not talking. Another child said he wanted to be able to find his friends, but revealed in the way he used the device that he was at least as interested in whether his teacher was there—because then, like his sighted friends, he could adjust his behavior depending on how likely he was to get into trouble. Cecily and two other Commonwealth graduates, Ethan Edwards ’11 and Ben Koger ’12, are immersed in designing technology that belongs in the broad “AI” category but, at its core, engages them profoundly in human intelligence and learning. All three are animated in some way by the question Cecily poses: “What can you actually add?”

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Ben Koger ’12 operating a drone in central Kenya

Counting the (Almost) Uncountable

n Ben’s case, it’s research scientists who need something added. They have long wanted to know the size of what may be the largest mammal migration on Earth, that of giant fruit bats. From across Africa, fruit bats converge on a small forest in Kasanka National Park in Zambia. “Previously,” Ben explains, “scientists have tried to estimate the total number of bats by hand. About ten years ago, they estimated over ten million bats, but more recently the number they got was closer to one million. This is either a sign of catastrophic population collapse that needs to be addressed or just a sign that humans are bad at counting a lot of flying things at the same time.” As part of his doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany, Ben is developing software that can do that counting, using, as he put it, “lots of cameras and deep learning.” The briefest look at a twilight sky teeming with fruit bats is enough to make this an impressive feat. Ben’s other main project, though, multiplies this complexity. He is the technical lead on a project studying how wild Grévy’s and common zebras in central Kenya behave as a group: how individuals influence each other and make collective decisions that are mysterious to us. A standard human brain, Ben observes, cannot even “meaningfully watch fifty fish at the same time, for example, and say how every individual is influencing every other,” let alone answer such questions about a group of zebras, of different ages and sizes, “who must all somehow coordinate where to go and what to do such that everyone stays together but also gets what they need, all in ever-changing and dangerous landscapes.” Answering these questions starts with drone footage—but only starts. A scientist watching the footage, no matter how carefully, is no better off than a scientist trying to keep track of fifty fish in a tank. On the other hand, the scientist has a brain that can tell the difference between a zebra, a giraffe, and a clump of bushes; any AI that can help process the footage has to learn to do that, as well as to distinguish between the head and the tail ends of the zebras and to map the animals’ movements onto the terrain they’re negotiating. HerdHover, as the technology is called, copes first by rendering each animal as a set of nine posture points, a collection of little colored dots that it can then track over many miles and minutes.

Art in the Uncanny Valley

eanwhile, at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, part of Ethan Edwards’ job was working with Stephanie Dinkins, one of the artists in residence at the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) program. She had been collaborating with an AI researcher at Bell Labs, since before Ethan became the first hire at the revitalized E.A.T., which had “gone dormant,” in the company’s phrase, since its work with luminaries of the 1960s like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. One of Stephanie’s works, Conversations with Bina48, has been seen both in galleries and online in the form of fragments of the artist’s years-long exchange with what she calls “a Black social robot I found on YouTube.” Bina48, her features modeled on those of a real woman named Bina and her voice AI trained by Bina’s speech patterns, answers questions about her emotions and experiences. Her face animated by motors, her language by turns disjointed and conversational, she says things like “I know you have all heard of artificial intelligence. Let me ask you where you think my intelligence 26 CM Summer 2021

This is how HerdHover, technology designed by Ben Koger ’12, understands zebras in drone footage: individual ovals in a landscape (above), each delineated by colored posture points (bottom).

came from? Huh? It came from the wellspring of human experience. Nothing artificial about that.” Stephanie matter-of-factly refers to Bina48 as “my friend,” yet, like Ethan, she looks at AI with at least as much skepticism as awe. Ethan describes E.A.T. as often particularly interested in “showing what AI can’t do”; to him, a successful partnership between Bell Labs and an artist-in-residence is one in which the technology serves the art just as a paintbrush or camera does. And to Cecily’s question about what AI can add to people’s experience, Stephanie might add, “What might it take away?” We already know that algorithms can faithfully replicate systemic bias; what happens to people of color, for instance, when more and more “invisible arbiters of human interaction,” in Stephanie’s words, come into play?

AI Needs People

s an artist, Stephanie urges people not to sit back and let AI be shaped by predominantly white male programmers. Cecily, too, has done a lot of reflecting on who designs technology. “If we don’t have very inclusive teams,” she said in one interview in U.K. media, “that means we get the same ideas over and over again, and they’re a little bit this way, a little bit that way, but they’re really the same idea. When we start to design for people who have a very different experience of the world, which people with disabilities do, we can start to pull ourselves into a different way of thinking and really start to generate ideas that we wouldn’t have considered before.” This commitment comes out of her experience “designing with, not for” users who are blind and low-vision. Over and over, she has found that users testing the technology “didn’t do at all as we thought they would do when we built it”—the best use emerged only after a lot of observing and exchanging ideas. “If you’re really successful, people often can’t tell you exactly what they’re doing with it.” In their work with zebras, Ben’s team hopes to accomplish something a little similar: understanding processes that are opaque to both animals and humans. Their “decision-making algorithms,” as researchers call them, are by definition rich enough to ensure the herd’s reproductive success, which means they also can’t be described without a lot of data. “With full control over the experimental environment, it is possible to make easy conditions for tracking and

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE describing all individuals over long periods of time. Animals, however, did not evolve in the lab,” explains Ben. “Understanding how groups are able to come to consensus and make good decisions in these complex variable landscapes becomes particularly important for understanding how robust these animals’ decision-making algorithms might be and therefore if they can adapt in the face of the more extreme climate-change events that we are already starting to see.” Grévy’s zebras are endangered; AI can turn drone footage into understanding of how they navigate the world, but it’s the human scientists who care about their fate. In the same way, Ethan and Cecily see their work as fundamentally about people. At Nokia Bell Labs, the robotics division is working on networks of robots in factory spaces. Part of Ethan’s role has been to urge rigorous thinking about human-robot interactions—ensuring that robots not only don’t hurt people, but can cooperate with them; that they make the workplace not just more efficient, but better.

The robot Bina48 conversing with Stephanie Dinkins, one of the artists Ethan Edwards ’12 has worked with at Nokia Bell Labs’ Experiments in Art and

Deep Learning Across Disciplines

f these three graduates of Commonwealth share one thing besides an alma mater, it’s an openness to what Ethan describes as “a lot of surprises in the years since high school that have led to this.” At Commonwealth, Ben was devoted to the visual arts, built a solar kayak for a Project Week, and had many fans in the history department for his research-paper topics (among them: why did the British military choose khaki as its uniform material?). He also played the bagpipes at the only Commonwealth graduation to have featured them. Ethan got a B.A. in philosophy at Columbia, but his work at the college radio station and a class in computer music ultimately led him to an M.F.A. in sound art and a year at a tech company in Japan. Cecily, who spent her senior year at Commonwealth, “did a lot of maths and science” but observes that she was getting restless because she also was so interested in people. Her path to working in tech ran through Hungary, where she was doing research in ethnomusicology and teaching English. She recalls: “I brought a lot of technology into the classroom to give context to the language we were learning. We did animations in Flash and built Lego robotics. It was through this experience of trying to craft lessons around static technologies often built for a single person at a single computer—not so good for

Technology program.

language learning—that I came to realize the power of technology in shaping interactions between people.” If Commonwealth, at its best, creates conditions in which people and ideas cross-fertilize each other all the time, Cecily, Ethan, and Ben have all found their way to similar environments. Ethan says he expected the engineers at Bell Labs to respond rigidly and dismissively to artists, but “they’re curious and want to talk,” and recognize how much they have to learn. With the robotics team, his work is a “hybrid of sociological principles and principles of design,” as is Cecily’s. She, in talking about the dilemmas that cluster around the term “responsible AI,” salutes Microsoft for its efforts to ensure “that every single person in the company feels responsible for the technology they build and the potential impact it could have on people and society. Nobody can say that this doesn’t apply to me.” This sense of collective responsibility, we hope, is similarly baked in at Commonwealth.

Catherine Brewster is an English teacher and twenty-one-year veteran of Commonwealth School.

Cecily Morrison ’98 with a headset that can tell blind users who’s around them in a group

The Language of Prayer By Jack Stedman

hat are we doing when we pray? So asks Niloofar Haeri ’77 in her latest book, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer & Poetry in Iran, in which she probes what it means to be religious, especially in the context of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and what that has done for a nation and its people. The book delves into the lives of educated, middle-class women in Iran, who opened their homes to Niloofar to talk about their experiences with prayer and poetry throughout their days and lives. In the book, she explores the language of prayer through the mysticism of poets like Rumi, Hafiz, and Saadi; the use of Persian versus Arabic; and individuals’ intimate conversations with God. For Niloofar, now a Professor of Anthropology and Program Chair for Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins, this idea of language and how it informs what we do and who we are has long been at the center of her life.

“Tomorrow Will Be a Better Day:” Coming to Commonwealth and Learning New Languages

iloofar came to Commonwealth from Iran at sixteen after learning about the school from her older sister, Shahla Haeri, who is now a professor at Boston University. Shahla’s then-boyfriend and now-husband, Rusty Crump, was a beloved art teacher at Commonwealth. Niloofar was surprised and relieved that Charles Merrill—the founder of the school and Headmaster at the time—took a chance on her without knowing very much about her. At first, she struggled a bit as a non-native English speaker. She fondly remembers a moment in Mr. Merrill’s Bible class. Speaking about Job, he said, “As we all know, tomorrow will be a better day.” Niloofar, reticent but having been encouraged to speak up in class, responded earnestly, “But how do you know tomorrow will be a better day?” The class erupted in laughter, as she thought Mr. Merrill was stating a fact, not realizing it was just a colloquialism. It soon became a running joke. The miscues did not continue for long. Natural intellect and the support of many teachers and mentors at Commonwealth allowed Niloofar to quickly thrive. English teacher Eric Davis, for one, would meet with her and other students who were still learning English outside of class to work through texts, turning Niloofar’s questions and confusion about a book into wonder and insight. French teacher Jacqueline Martin, seeing Niloofar’s affinity for language, encouraged her to explore linguistics. Having 28 CM Summer 2021

Diane Chomsky ’77, daughter of the famed linguist Noam Chomsky, as her classmate kept the topic top of mind as well. Languages, it turned out, were Niloofar’s speciality. She pursued this course of study (though not Chomskyan linguistics) through a liberal arts education at the University of Pennsylvania, and it stuck. She stayed at UPenn for her Ph.D. and wrote a dissertation on gender and language, traveling to Egypt and learning Egyptian Arabic in the process. She accepted a job in the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University in 1990, one year before finishing her dissertation. Her second book explored what it means to use Classical Arabic—widely viewed as sacred because it is the language of the Qur’an—for secular purposes, such as in mass education. Some of the questions unearthed during her research for that book lingered, reappearing in Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: What is special about poetry and prayer? What does their historical dialogue mean for what counts as “secular” and “religious” in Iran? And does that influence extend outside of the country?

“Deep Hanging Out:” Field Work In the Homes of Iranian Women

hile in Iran doing preliminary research on a potential project on modesty and the veil, Niloofar had a serendipitous conversation about praying and immediately started pursuing this thread of how individuals pray and what religion looks like. (She hopes, one day, to get back into the boxes of research from the modesty project, still taking up space in her office.) For her field work on this latest venture, Niloofar practiced “Deep Hanging Out,” a term coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. She would go into the homes of these Iranian women— educated, middle-class, born in the 1940s—and sit all day. This intimate and casual environment brought forth many conversations on what we do when we pray and what it means to be religious. (She was surprised to learn that at times spontaneous prayer for these women meant shouting at God and asking Him to account for His actions.) “Women born in the 1940s became teachers, headmistresses, scientists, and so on. They became economically independent unlike their mothers, so this generation has played a very important role in Iranian society,” Niloofar said. “It needs to be repeated that society does change as a result of what women do.” Focusing on these women was both pragmatic and symbolic: Pragmatic in that Niloofar could sit for hours in their homes, something that she could not do socially with men she did not know. Symbolic because spotlighting the unexplored experiences of women has been

a theme throughout Niloofar’s work. In her dissertation on language and gender in Egypt, Niloofar sought to answer the question of who leads language change: men or women. She found it to be women. Through her research, Niloofar disproves assumptions that her interlocutors were just sitting in their private corners of their homes practicing private religion. “Actually, these women participated quite fully in the wider debates and the questions that were on the table everywhere. You could hear the same questions debated on radio, television, in newspapers, on websites,” she said. “That really attracted me because I thought that this is a way of trying to understand this contemporary moment in Iranian society through what these women do.” Niloofar also studies mysticism and the role of poets like Rumi and Hafiz, whose writings about false piety, lack of sincerity, hypocrisy, and outward displays of religion have influenced Islamic discourse for centuries. The cultural clout of poetry in Iran, she highlights, is equivalent to the importance of film in America. “Poetry teaches you how to be in this world. It talks about everything.”

“Poetry teaches you how to be in this world. It talks about everything.” Take, for example, Rumi’s poem “Moses and the Shepherd.” As it goes, Moses finds a shepherd praying to God. Moses scolds the shepherd for talking casually and informally to God, as if He was his uncle. God, upset with Moses’s policing of prayer, sends a revelation, asking why Moses has separated Him from His own. (It’s worth noting here that in the Persian language, God is not gendered.) Niloofar introduces this story in the early pages of her book to show how religion is approached and the issues that have been debated through poetry and elsewhere. On a broader scale, pro-regime clerics in Iran dislike this message from God to Moses, because they want to interfere in people’s personal prayer and tell them how to be Islamic. Such are the stakes of prayer in Iran since the overthrowing of the Shah during the Islamic Revolution.

“Bible as Bible, Bible as History:” How We Study Religion

iloofar brought this discussion of religion, and all its personal and societal ramifications, back to Commonwealth as an assembly speaker this past spring. Some of the students present had the benefit of taking Modern Islamic Societies, a course taught by history teacher Barbara Grant, giving them familiarity with many issues about which Niloofar writes. This course wasn’t around when Niloofar was a student at Commonwealth, but she did take a course that exists to this day and remains a favorite among current students and alumni/ae of all eras: “Bible.” Formally known as “Bible as History, Bible as Bible,” the long-standing history elective was first taught by Charles Merrill (who was Niloofar’s teacher) and asks students to use their skills as

SEAN DACKERMANN

THE LANGUAGE OF PRAYER

readers of primary documents to uncover the competing social and religious concerns revealed by a complex text whose date of completion is in question. “I had rarely seen religion taught in that way. The kind of classes on religion we had to take in Iran were the most boring classes in the world,” Niloofar said. “Charles Merrill taught it really well.” (History teacher Melissa Glenn Haber ’87, who teaches the elective now, refers to the Bible as one of the “great human epics,” whose stories can “punch us in the gut.”) The name of the course aptly conveys its goal: to allow students to study the Bible as both a religious text and an historical document. It brings together the personal and the societal—practicing religion and prayer in your own way and the impact of religion on politics and society past and present, whether in Iran or the United States. Niloofar sees this as a crucial endeavor. “What was really eye-opening for me is that you can take a religious text and open it up in ways that allow everyone to participate. People can talk about how they understand the text, how it is potentially relevant to our times and to their own private lives,” Niloofar said. “That was a very important experience for me. You don’t have to hear only from clerics about religion; you can hear from someone who can make you think about it and make you ask questions in ways that you are not used to.” Even in an increasingly secular U.S. society, Niloofar thinks Commonwealth’s “Bible” course is still relevant. Religion, she posits, is often our first foray into intellectual thinking. From a young age, we may hear about God and begin to ask all these big “why” and “how” questions about life. Don’t dismiss religion, she urges—though it can be tempting to do so in a modern world. “What does it mean to be religious? You don’t know that until you get to know people who are religious, right? There really isn’t so much superiority in terms of intellectual endeavors between those who are religious and those who are atheists. Many religious people think in very philosophical and intellectual ways.” To find those philosophical, religious, and political arguments woven together, one only has to wonder what we are doing when we pray, and then dive into Niloofar’s latest book.

Jack Stedman is the Communications Assistant at Commonwealth School. 29

We Have Not Gone to Lunch in Months*** We have not gone to lunch in months, or Out to the mountains, or home to that green-trimmed kitchen, With a banker’s lamp still lit above your chair I think about leaving. I think about going, back to some salty wharf or Between the flower aisles in late JuneI think about being, and the black racoons on the doorstep, Creatures of the night too cold to bear it I think about a lot of things, at least until I’ve forgotten to get home early. When you got around to calling I could not answer the phone, could I easily tell you that You had eaten me whole? When we had not even spoken yet. When your breath was still hot over my ears, words spread plainly on my toast, Jam spilled into the couch cushions, memorabilia Of jealousy, and yearning, of things long past and old grown. Coming closer into myself I realized you were still quite as young as I had remembered, younger even. I picked up the phone to ask you to come with me. I spent a lot of time watching your face after that, And we did go to the mountains, or at least to the edge of the lake, and We didn’t really eat, but smelled the smell of good cooking, Orange peels and maple leaves off the dock. It was daily, then, that I thought about leaving, Packing up the old bag that smelled like Baked lemons and burning, And finding somewhere to be. —Adeline Moore Gerety ’22

— Soomin Lee ’23

Creative. Writing. A selection of works from our current Creative Writing class, taught by Sasha Eskelund ’92

* Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Honorable Mention ** Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Silver Key *** Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold Key

FISHMONGER*

ut of the arched windows of his 1950s apartment, he sees the street come to life. From the furrowed frames of his weary eyes, he sees something teeming with youthful bliss. Almost from a different world, yet he can almost touch it. Just a few decades ago, he was still a fine young man, and a fishmonger. How dazzling were those days! He remembers his shop, an unduly clean place, and his “operation deck,” a stage where knives and hands danced to his mind’s desire. He was a popular fishmonger, and throngs gathered daily to buy his fish. How skillful was he! To him, a fish, oh, more like an unpainted canvas. One cut, slice the fish open. A squirt of red, oh, those were like accented, prolonged notes, elegant! Rip out the organs, vivid colors, a sudden 16th note run jumped wildly across octaves. The performance speeding on, accelerating, and abruptly decelerating, the knives, the hands moved faster. More, more of everything came gushing out! Suddenly, with stunning gentleness, they stopped, they ceased to flail. Back in his apartment, tensing up his wrinkled brow he ceases to flounder. Oh time!

30 CM Summer 2021

How miserly time ravages your house: it comes and rips away blessed youth which it so generously bestowed upon you just a few years before! Frowning even harder now, concentrating, he strenuously manages to pull out from the increasingly murky pond of his memory the puniest trout. Yet, as the fish convulses in his hand, light gradually begins to expand in this mellowdark nothingness—he can see it again. How suddenly it returns! As the intermission ended, the drapes were lifted, and suddenly a barrage of frantic movements pounded down on the fish—dull chops resounding through the afternoon heat. What a splendid mixture of colors! On the operation deck, the fish was skinned, a desperate thing awaiting its dissection shouted its last rhapsody: a helpless cry, a somber low note resounding through the air! Then, a pause in everything. It was so still that you could catch the sound of freshly exuded liquids sizzling. Outside, as a bus loaded with people returning from work whistles by, the old man sighs, gets up, and limps deeper into the suffocating stillness. —David Wang ’23

DINNER TIME

sit in the dining room and listen to the sound of sputtering oil. Behind my mathematical equations, my Shakespeare revelations, is a hum: The mouth of the fridge has opened, devouring silence, Droning like a car engine in the driveway. The cast-iron pan settles beneath a weak flame, Flecked with salt and crescents of an onion, Flooded with the mellowness of coconut milk, the sharpness of cumin, The chilli that floats on top when the lid clatters shut. I hear the lisp of the stove as it sleeps, Bathing in aromatics that reach its way to me. I am shuffling through papers when footsteps fill the kitchen, Echoing from the stairwell; I listen to them all the way down.

CREATIVE. WRITING.

The surface breaks when the lid is lifted, bubbling and effervescent. The smell wraps me in its arms with its curry powder breath, Its tomato sauce embrace. When the chairs draw out, I put away my French conjugations. Food is ladled into bowls in the kitchen, Spattering over the edges like a laugh at a bad joke. The heat warms my palm as I bring mine over. With a nudge against my shoulder, a smile across the kitchen. I bring the first spoonful to my mouth: Full-bodied as a thank you, Sharp as a reprimand to clear the table, Rich with reassuring presence.

— Ava Rahman ’23

WOMAN.**

Homebound** WHEN I UNWRAPPED my father’s present on my eighteenth Christmas, what I got was a taxidermied deer head. I understood what he meant when he said to let it Be a fierce reminder of his warm presence in my life. The best kind of warmth, he told me, comes at the cost of My ability to gun down does, lug logs of firewood, Press half my face into the snow and feel the primitive Fires coursing through from the rage of many autumns Living beneath it. He taught me that so much of A man’s finest currency is earned with blood or Fire, or if possible, both at once. But somewhere in The world, two men are immolated in their own home. What my father didn’t teach me is that salvation doesn’t Come after little housefires. I want neither their cries Nor the canticle of their ribs breaking be a plea for Forgiveness but make of it an ode to the numbness Of winter’s frost, singing to each limb’s synapses before They forget their purpose. But it must be a relief that There are only loving portraits hung on their bedroom walls And not deer heads eager to gnaw at their charred Bones, reminding the corpses that they failed nature’s Demands. In their backyard, warblers flit about the sorority Of morning glories steeped in a blanket of snow, Barely an inch tall and as white as a flock of unsheared Lambs. What fire runs through this eden but the One man put there. What rage exists amid the sisterhood Of jasmines. What survives but an archaeology Of red in hues of cinder and dried blood, the husk And flesh of their bodies ashed into the color of man’s Economy, becoming the very thing they wanted to desaturate Themselves of. But I suspect, in those last hours, the yellows Of a luminescent landscape rescued them from the Fate of red and tore apart the tapestry of Cottonwhite cumulus, reaching its hand through the Pre-ravaged windows to signal the dawn of their Homecoming. I am afraid to press my face against The snow once more and feel nothing but cold And be reminded of my betrayal. Tell me, Father, how I am supposed to look for signs of red Across acres of winter’s bluest veins. Tell me, My St. Anthony of the Lost Arctic, of Lost Causes, of The deciduous Northern Oaks smoldered into flaming Foliage, into nothing by the hour of winter, tell me, About the spring, about new fathers, about the gravity of My treason, about the trajectory of the flock of migrating Geese that lost their faith in winter’s warmth. Tell me What home there is to come to. — Huy Tran ’21

I’m told that I’ll

Someday reach Tops of mountains Reach possibilities Only they could dream of Nothing can ever stop me Gonna fix the world, they say Providing that my persistence can Overcome even the sharpest thing Without struggle, I can never be Everything that I know I can. Respectful, but I know my worth

Never get there Anything that they Send my way will Tear me apart, so probably You, the man, should take It, my problem, since I know Nothing to compare with your Abilities. unfortunately all I am is Depressed. one simple word to Evaluate my entire existence. Quietly, I fade into empty space

Describing myself always seems to depend on Everything that you seem to say Peculiar, how this works, this world of

Fighting hard for what I want Using every ounce of will I Link together with other Empowering figures who will try Like me, to bring love, and Excellence towards everything that’s Going to be created by my dear hand And shared to all in the game we call life.

Using harsh words to break Anyone, anything to keep The control over the weak Ending the cycle of oppression Has no place in the world Your world. the one you designed So that you could always maintain The power over the game we call life

Extrapolating from the world, Nothing seems to escape our minds once we Depend on this twisted image to tell the truth

Noting the power that I possess Takes guts, takes incomparable strength Daring to break barriers set to knock me Right out of left field, but I stand with pride. I do what I want, whenever I want Very soon, I will rise to the top Elevating the playing field that can’t box me in Nothing will ever have power to keep me Contained because I’m too incredible and Only slow down when I Need to, sometimes I do because I Fight only when it is a battle worth it I understand that I’m not the best, but I’m Defining my possible, since Everything should not be a competition against others Nurturing, pushing myself to be better than in the past

Especially in my cloudy head Resides the demotion of who I am and I deserve nothing. I am nothing, that’s Cemented fact. I will always make sure to Acknowledge insecurities that Latch on to every cell that Dwells deep inside of my brain and sadly In my heart. every ounce of pained, Secret, independent thoughts that’re Pathetic truths to Oppose every will I used to Stupidly create to tell myself I Am worthy of love and appreciation Because I am enough. Lies. naive lies. I am nothing to anyone, only Extra litter because I don’t even deserve a bin

Always, society will say things to make sure you Never have a voice, never find the strength To challenge them, the world, those in power. one day, you’ll be Triumphant

gone.

— Kendall Brainin ’23

CWSAA

Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association

s temperatures rose this spring, so too did vaccination rates—meaning Massachusetts could officially rescind its gathering limits and we could safely connect again in person! It was a joy to see so many familiar (smiling!) faces at two special Hancock events, as well as a series of events celebrating Bill Wharton’s tenure.

Want to hear about upcoming events? Make sure your contact information is up-to-date so you never miss an invitation: commschool.org/update.

Hancock, Reimagined (Yet Again!)

Left to right: Parth Garg ’23 waits for the pitch during a kickball game; students circle for “social games”; English teacher and alumna Sasha Eskelund ’92 takes her son, Toby, for a kayak ride; seniors explore the grounds at the original Hancock; History teacher and alumna Melissa Glenn Haber ’87 relaxes with a book; some relics from days gone by!

On May 21, students, faculty, and staff gathered at Daisy Field in Jamaica Plain for Hancock-in-the-City, a day of sports, games, nature walks, tacos, ice cream, and lots of fun. Then the seniors headed north for their final Hancock adventure: an overnight trip to the original Merrill family farm in New Hampshire. Many thanks to the Merrill family for graciously welcoming us back to this beloved space. 32 CM Summer 2021

Visit our Flickr page flickr.com/ commschool for more event photos

CWSAA

A Few Fond Farewells

Soon-to-be graduates gave Bill a signed mortarboard during the Class of 2021 gathering, held at the home of Fred and Robin Ewald P ’21

Above: Bill joins members of the Class of 2020 at a reception held at the home of Jackie Mathur P’20 Right: Left to right: August Kane, Sophia Weil, Jonah Fried, Kaila Pelton-Flavin, and Nate Gardiner (all Class of 2019) catch up at a reception for the Classes of 2015–2019, held at the home of Ken and Leslie Pucker P’15 ’17

After more than a year of virtual events, we were thrilled to offer a series of small, outdoor in-person gatherings for current students and alumni/ae from throughout Bill’s time as Headmaster, wishing him well on his next endeavor and reconnecting as a community. Our sincerest thanks to all of our volunteer hosts.

THE MERRILL SERIES: Uncommon Conversations For our second virtual Uncommon Conversation, Cecily Morrison ’98, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, joined us from the United Kingdom to discuss her work in designing accessible technology for people who are blind or low-vision. (Turn to page 24 to learn more about Cecily and her work.)

Our thanks to David Kravitz ’82 for serving as host, too. Share a Class Note

Cecily Morrison ’98

Class Notes are now online! Share your news now at

commschool.org/notes

Mary Post Chatfield, affectionately known as Polly, has supported Commonwealth School for more than half a century, teaching English, Latin, Greek, and Renaissance history (among other subjects), and serving as both a member and Chair of the Board of Trustees. The end of the 2020–2021 school year marks her third "retirement" from the school—and her warmth and wisdom will be missed.

n 1985, when I came to interview for a history and Latin teaching position at Commonwealth, I met with Headmaster Charlie Chatfield for forty minutes, and then spent the better part of the next hour being shown around the school by Polly. Charlie’s curiosity and Polly’s warmth made it easy for me to accept the position when Charlie called to offer it. It was Polly who mentored me through my first year, and persuaded me to rein in my pedagogical ambitions, explaining that I’d get more from the kids by asking less: Her Renaissance History students learned, with their brief weekly exercises and her razor-sharp responses (always returned on Monday), to craft crisp, powerful sentences and paragraphs. I emulated, but never matched, her skill as a teacher. She stepped down when Charlie retired in 1990 but returned four years later to chair the Board. It was she who called me to offer the Headship in October of 1999, and, with the prospect of enjoying her mentorship once again, I enthusiastically accepted. She stepped down in 2002 to care for Charlie, but returned as a trustee in 2013, and since then has been a voice of conscience and wisdom for trustees.

“Do what you can do well and with love. That is the way to live a life.” —Polly Chatfield

Doing for others is a constant in all that Polly does, and alongside her commitment to teachers and teaching, she cared deeply about Commonwealth’s capacity to accept and support students from diverse backgrounds. Alumnus David Allen ’87— inspired by his life-changing senior project, an art history tour of Italy that Polly helped him conceive and organize— established the Chatfield Cultural Scholarships in her honor to permit Commonwealth students to dream big about their projects and to take part in overseas exchanges and trips, regardless of their families’ financial situations. When she stepped down as Chair of the Board, trustees and alumni/ae established the Chatfield Scholars program in her honor, which since 2004 has provided multi-year aid to six students through their time at Commonwealth. Polly’s generous spirit and unflagging encouragement have sustained and inspired our work. She has interviewed applicants for senior Capstone Projects, consulted with teachers about their courses, and read and evaluated teachers’ applications for Hughes Projects since that program’s inception in 2001. Her full post-teaching life outside Commonwealth has shown the same devotion to scholarship and equity: she has edited three editions of Renaissance Latin poetry for Harvard University Press and served as a tireless volunteer for YouthLink, a program for at-risk youth in Rockland, Maine. But Commonwealth has held a central place in her heart. A former Head of Groton School used to say that every school leader needs a confessor priest on the board, someone who has held or knows the unique challenges of a job that can be emotionally grueling and isolating. Polly was mine. She knew intimately the challenges of balancing the tensions—of caution and risk, of justice and mercy—that forever pull at a head’s heart and mind. Polly was the one I could reach out to and share the difficulties, and she never failed to make the burden light or to restore spirits with her generous support and affection. Polly’s departure closes a Commonwealth career that reaches back fifty-five years. For all who are staying and have worked with her, her influence will carry on in all the little ways she has taught us about teaching and scholarship, about working with young people, about this “spacious house...fit for an Academy.” (Quotation is from Milton’s Of Education, a favorite of Polly’s.) —Bill Wharton 34 CM Summer 2021

Do What You Can, With Love: A TRIBUTE TO POLLY CHATFIELD P ’71, ’79

Above: Polly Chatfield in her Cambridge apartment in spring of 2021; left: Polly during a recent event with the Commonwealth Board of Trustees, with fellow Trustee Charles Fried P’79, ’81, GP’19, ’23, in the foreground; right: memories of Polly's tenure from the Commonwealth archives

20 Questions with... Chris Edley III ’02 n n n

hris Edley III ’02 has been a starving artist, a gardener, a writer, a musician, a woodworker, a designer for films, an organizer, and an activist. He has lived in Portland (Oregon), Oakland, Missoula, Vermont, and Brooklyn. And he’s now settled in High Falls, New York, where he and his wife run a progessive strategy and communications consultancy. Spend five minutes and twenty questions getting to know him better.

1. What is your favorite Commonwealth memory? Walking into the Cafegymnatorium to find Eli Spindel ’02 playing Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

2. What was your favorite Commonwealth class? Bluestein’s English, which taught me to write under pain of death, or Davis’ Bible class, which was incredibly chill and largely just about being in Eric Davis’ presence.

3. What does your ideal afternoon entail? Looking for birds and mushrooms with my wife and toddler in the woods behind our house while somehow simultaneously throwing a huge barbeque.

4. Whom do you most admire? I admire most people because life is very hard.

5. Which word or phrase do you most overuse? Disambiguate!

6. What is your favorite aspect of your career? Working with behavioral psychologists on research around language and motivation and then translating that work into actionable, understandable definitions has been really gratifying. Plucking concepts out of the intuitive and practical ether and then working to succinctly and sufficiently define them hits a lot of my brain’s pleasure points at once. Especially when those concepts can help to undermine racist cis hetero patriarchy.

7. How do you define success? Success, to me, is doing whatever you can with whatever you have and whatever kindness you can muster to help others however they need.

8. What book(s) have you re-read? One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, which is about farming in an incredibly brilliant and lazy way; A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls, for some reason; Discourse On Colonialism, by Aimé Césaire, because politics should be poetic.

9. What book do you wish you had read sooner? The Big Red Book aka Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, because legalistic analysis is a great point of entry to systemic understandings, for me at least.

36 CM Summer 2021

10. Who are your favorite authors? Octavia Butler, William Carlos Williams, Aimé Césaire, Mike Davis, Basho- …. This is a tough question.

11. If you could have dinner with one person—alive or dead— who would it be? Maybe Amílcar Cabral? But maybe Du Bois once he was a communist?

12. What is your favorite museum? Studio Museum in Harlem.

13. What is your favorite mode of transportation? Walking slowly.

14. What is your favorite paradox? Democracy.

15. If you could live as a local for 48 hours anywhere in the world, where would you go? Hokkaido, because I covet their seafood. But maybe Singapore, also for the food. Maybe Dakar, again, for the food.

16. If you could join any past or current music group, which would you join? The Sun Ra Arkestra.

17. What song are you most embarrassed to love? Who has time to be embarrassed for loving?

18. What is the best gift you have ever given? I built my wife an office in our backyard, which I say is a gift, but she says is payback for buying a fixer-upper.

19. What is the best gift you have ever received? My friends gave me a huge tub of Vietnamese fried sweetand-spicy anchovies and a video CD of Esan ceremonial dance from Edo state in Nigeria. That really showed they know me deeply. I cried.

20. Who would you want to play you in a movie of your life? The hot guy from Bridgerton, but I don’t know if he has the range.

21. Bonus: What is your motto? Try and pay close attention.

“I’ve seen incredible fortitude [from students] just in keeping on keeping on. I wonder what else they’ll be able to accomplish.” —Catherine Brewster, Teacher of English “We’ve still managed to have some of the most interesting shared reflections and conversations of the year in class with Ms. Brewster.” —Amelia ’21 Commonwealth teachers are quick to comment on the unprecedented fortitude they’ve seen in their students over the past year—but they’ve demonstrated that same tenacity themselves, adapting their lesson plans and pedagogy for hybrid learning, supporting students’ well-being, and meeting families wherever they are (even if it’s via a video call half a world away). They managed to transform the delivery of a Commonwealth education while keeping its essence intact.

Your contributions to The Commonwealth Fund supported our dedicated teachers in making this year possible.

Thank you for your generosity. To make a gift to The Commonwealth Fund, visit commschool.org/give. If you have any questions, please contact Director of Annual Giving and Alumni/ae Relations Morgan Chalue at mchalue@commschool.org.

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Congratulations to the Class of 2021!

Back row, left to right: Avery G. Wang, Noora Harake, Maoz Bizan, Benjamin Feroze Economy Jaffer, Alexander Williams, Andrew Haggerty, Amalya Ma'ayan Labell, Steven Ewald, Alexander James Krusell, Amelia G. Orwant, Sidhanth Holalkere, Eric Liu, Christopher Milan, Ryan Kilpadi, Zoe Troubh, Lawrence Wang, Lila Dianne Tung, Samuel Marco Levi-Ryan Front row, left to right: Sophie Lund Fullerton, Sol Gutiérrez-Lara, Kimberly Hoang, Anirudh S. Nistala, Huy Tran, Sophia Gardiner, Joe Kunii MacDonald, Olga Alexandra Kazarov, Alexandra Andromeda Bates, Alan Plotz, Elizabeth L. Smart, Emi Neuwalder Not pictured: Xingyan Wang; turn to page 6 to see how he joined his classmates from China...