Commonwealth Magazine Summer 2023

It all started the summer before our senior year: we had finished working on the previous senior play, joining as juniors since there weren’t enough seniors to fill the roles. Inspired to take initiative and make our own production for March Break 2023, we began drafting ideas (for example, a production of The Princess Bride). Our main goal was to find characters we personally would like to play, either because we hadn’t played parts like them before or because we thought we would enjoy them. A secondary goal naturally emerged from that: we wanted to see ourselves represented in the characters and themes of the story.

With the deadline for choosing a script approaching, we decided to write our own—preferable because we were discontented with other options, feasible because many of us had creative-writing experience, and convenient because we wanted to avoid the trouble of copyright. We ended up revisiting the script of a short film Margaret created with a group of friends in the summer of 2020. Excited about its Jane Austen–esque

family-dynamics humor and Oscar Wildeian social shenanigans, we set out to adapt TEA (2020) for the stage. The plot quickly evolved: an oblivious mother attempts to match her son, who intends to tell her about his engagement to a young Lord, with a completely uninterested female suitor. Through the process of many light-hearted Zoom meetings and inside jokes, we ended up writing an entirely new script that featured our own twists on characters from the original screenplay, still full of literary and historical references, many of which were informed by our education at Commonwealth.

With TEA we finally had the perfect building ground to create characters that truly complemented the corresponding actor. Theater is typically associated with auditioning for a role, convincing a director that you’re the best at pretending to be someone or something that you’re not. Yet, one of the teachings of nonbinary acting methods (furthered by Boston actors such as Tufts’ Jo Michael Rezes) is that the actor doesn’t leave themself behind

Left to right: Avery Selk ’23, Kerem Pauwels ’23, Margaret Hines ’23 (co-director), and Paris Wu ’24; inset: Jo Axel ’23 (co-director)

when slipping into a role: who they are offstage empowers and is reflected in who they are onstage. That philosophy is something TEA very much reflects.

While theater has a long history of playing with gender, the roots of the practice in Western culture often but not always stem from excluding female actors or replicating socially appropriate depictions of gender and age demographics—for instance, an older actress cast as a young boy or a young male actor cast as a woman. When queerness is explicit in theater, the themes can be dark, often containing important messaging but missing the escapism that drew so many—including, famously, a large number of queer people—to the medium in the first place. TEA strove to play with gender in a joyful and binary-breaking way, portraying different historical perspectives on sexuality and marriage, with plenty of cross-gender casting, and proudly displaying an elderly English woman with glorious facial hair.

Full creative control was an exciting and enticing concept for us and a fully collaborative process. Everyone played a part in design and aesthetics,

from set and prop placement to costuming to hair and makeup. As we were premiering this play, we had no basis for what it should look and sound like outside of our own imaginations, vibrant and detailed as they were. There was something notably different about creating in the real world, beholden to its limitations. Every prop involved a conversation, every costume piece had to balance feasibility and historical realism, and the set was an exercise in a dream becoming a reality in lots of small ways. We found a paisley lavender vest for one specific joke, and we made it through the whole production without breaking our thrifted tea set, arguably one of the more important aspects of an “afternoon tea” set. For the handwritten letters, our tech team wrote out several versions and then actors had to rate their legibility—we had to call in reinforcements for the cursive. We could never quite decide where the piano should go, exactly, but as long as the actors had space to walk beside it, we were content with “in the corner over there.” It was a lovely thing, to create a world of our very own. t

WHY I MADE IT: TEA

BY JO AXEL

’23, MARGARET HINES ’23, KEREM PAUWELS ’23, AND AVERY SELK ’23

I’ve been an educator for more than thirty-five years, long enough to have been present for the introduction of a slew of new technologies, from calculators to SmartBoards, from word processing to Wikipedia. Each inspired both utopian hyperbole as well as moral panic. Children won’t learn to add! Or spell! Or conversely: We’ll all be able to access the most significant information in the blink of an eye and educate ourselves! In most cases, neither the best nor worst case scenarios emerged. These new tools were gradually subsumed into educational practice, and it remains to be seen if we’re becoming deskilled or differently skilled. And I developed a certain amount of skepticism about the transformative powers of technology, unimpressed by the hype and a little deaf to the doomsday prophecies.

Until now. ChatGPT and other forms of natural-language artificial intelligence strike me as truly revolutionary, and we have just begun discussing their ramifications at Commonwealth. Our first concern is academic integrity: how will we keep our students from abusing this tempting, corrupting shortcut, and how can we tell if they have? But the conversation becomes far more complex from there: What might productive uses of AI tools look like at Commonwealth? How are writing and cognition linked? Will we need to strengthen our approaches to editing and vetting if AI is used to create drafts? How might we help students understand the uses and limitations of the technologies that have arrived and those that lie ahead?

In this issue of CM, Catherine Brewster shares her own thoughts on the potential perils of AI and turns to several of our alumni/ae to hear their prognostications (some more encouraging than others). Catherine and I frequently find ourselves grabbing hallway minutes to wrestle with what AI means for our work in the classroom and as a school. All of those conversations are unfinished.

As with all history, change happens before we can make sense of it. That said, Commonwealth is a profoundly deliberative institution, a place where any dilemma is considered from multiple perspectives, including through the long spool of history. The intellectual firepower in our community is as formidable as it ever was, and, just as importantly, we listen to each other with respect and with open minds. I have great confidence in our ability to consider problems and possibilities, and then make wise decisions, however provisional in this changing world.

In the face of dizzying change, I am ever more grateful for pockets of stability and calm. In this issue, we say goodbye to Board of Trustees Chair Therese Hendricks, who has had a steady hand on the tiller. Therese’s incisive intelligence, humane engagement, and deep love for our mission informed every decision she placed before the Board. I am grateful on behalf of our school and am grateful personally for the mentorship and guidance she has shared with me during my first two years as Head. She exemplifies the wise deliberation that we strive to instill in our students.

Jennifer Borman ’81 Head of School

CM

Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine

Issue 24

Summer 2023

Editor-in-Chief

Jessica Tomer

Editor Catherine Brewster

Contributing Writers

Jo Axel ’23

Jennifer Borman ’81

Catherine Brewster

Alisha Elliott ’01

Margaret Hines ’23

Claire Jeantheau

Kerem Pauwels ’23

Avery Selk ’23

Jessica Tomer

Lillien Waller

Contributing Art and Design

Eric Haynes

Claire Jeantheau

Michael Manning Photography

Ciaran Murphy

Tony Rinaldo Photography LLC

Avery Selk ’23

Amy Wike

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 feedback: communications@commschool.org. Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar.

Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.

@commonwealthalumniae

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P’11

Committee in Session

Organizing alliances during the second Greco-Persian War. Initiating global prison reform. Fending off an alien invasion. It was all in a day’s work for the middle-school delegates of COMMUN VIII, our fully student-organized Model UN conference. This year, Moe Frumkin ’23 and Henry Levenson ’24 spearheaded the event as Secretary-General and Junior SecretaryGeneral, with dozens of other Commonwealth students running committees and keeping delegates on their toes with crises. We were also fortunate to have Dr. Peter Abbott, OBE, British Consul General to New England, as an opening speaker to discuss his career in diplomacy.

Commonwealth Robotics’ Sweet Successes

Our Clockwork Mermaids robotics team, mentored by physics teacher Chris Spalding, capped off a year of engineering with a trek to Cape Cod for the Mini Makerfaire VEX Robotics Tournament. There, they qualified

for the semifinal round after eliminating a top-seeded team. Not ones to rest on their laurels, the team immediately sprung into their next project upon returning to Commonwealth: building a candydispensing robot.

Music to Our Ears

It’s always a delight to hear when Mermaids represent Commonwealth at the Massachusetts Music Educators’ Association’s events. Kudos to the following student performers who qualified this year:

All-District Festival

n Andrew Carter ’25 (String Bass)

n Alex Choi ’23 (Bass Vocals)

n Arjun Krishnan ’24 (Bass Vocals)

n Mirai Djuintjer Tebbens Nishioka ’24 (Cello)

n Matthew Weinberg ’26 (Bass Vocals)

Junior All-District Festival

n Ethan Qian-Tsuchida ’26 (Cello)

All-State Festival

n Alex Choi ’23 (Bass Vocals)

Learn more about the Commonwealth choral program of today on page 18.

No Trivial Pursuit

Every rapid-fire Hancock faceoff and lunchtime practice paid off: our Quiz Bowl team of Aaron Li ’24, Aritra Ghosh ’25, Henry Levenson ’24, and Thomas Du ’24, along with alternates

Mirai Djuintjer Tebbens Nishioka ’24 and Peter Dowd ’25, landed a spot in GBH’s

televised High School Quiz Show tournament after acing the qualifying test. While Boston Latin School narrowly bested the team, Commonwealth spectators brought an outpouring of support (including a plethora of handmade signs) to the match—and members are already preparing for next year.

Trading Places: March Trips Return

It was a March three years in the making as Mermaids were able to go abroad over break—and welcome exchange students to Commonwealth—once again. Latinists traveled up and down the Italian coast, marveling at monuments and churches in Rome, the Vatican, and Naples—and over the Ides of March, no less! Spanish students, with the high school IES Zaidín-Vergeles in Granada as their home base, immersed themselves in folk arts and ventured to Madrid and Toledo on day trips. Their new friends from IES returned to Boston with them, where they took in sights like Boston Common and the Mapparium with faculty and treated us to flamenco dance at assembly. We heard from another international guest, too: Takuma Kato, who students from the Class of 2022 met on a postgraduate trip to study education in Japan. Students found many points of comparison with Takuma’s account of life at an all-boys’ school and IES students’ stories of Granada. One experience, however, was shared by all: frustration with T delays.

Linda He ’23 Named Among America’s Top Forty Young Scientists

Inspired by the magnificent images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space telescope, Linda ’23 researched the effects of primordial black holes on exoplanets, earning her a place as a national finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search competition, chosen from more than 1,900 students. For her year-long research project, she customized computer programs to simulate how the forces exerted on exoplanets affect their orbits. (Linda’s exciting year continued when she was selected as a 2023 National Merit Scholarship winner, following a year-long winnowing process among all ~1.5 million 2021 PSAT takers.)

Graduation 2023

The Class of 2023—the last to know the “pre-pandemic” Commonwealth—filled First Church in Boston (both the sanctuary and an overflow space!) with family and friends as they celebrated a graduation four long years in the making. Speakers and performers, including Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Alex Choi ’23, Ayla Denenberg ’23, Romen Der Manuelian ’23, Margaret Hines ’23, Michael Roberson ’23, and Board of Trustees Chair Frederick Ewald P’21, graced the stage, reminding us of the breadth and depth of skill, warmth, wit, and beauty in our community.

THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Zeynep Aksehirli P’23, ’27, Kerem Pauwels ’23, Mir Pauwels ’27, Koen Pauwels P’23, ’27; Rosie Wickline ’23, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81; Nathan Leung, Ben Wang; Margaret Hines ’23, Eric Hines, Ben Hines ’26; English Teacher Catherine Brewster, Michael Roberson ’23; Alex Choi ’23

NEXT PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Naomi Baltazar ’23, Grace Pariser ’23, Soomin Lee ’23, Ava Rahman ’23; Daniel Martin ’23; Audrey Stahl ’23, Aadya Akkipeddi ’23; Ayla Denenberg ’23; Romen Der Manuelian ’23, Linda He ’23; Miles Kodama ’22; Eliza Fried ’23, Charles Fried P’79, ’81, GP’19, ’23, Anne Fried P’79, ’81, GP’19, ’23; Ambika Garg P’23, Ashish Garg P’23, Parth Garg ’23

Class of 2023 Colleges and Universities

Boston College

Bowdoin College

Case Western Reserve University

Colby College

Columbia University

Emory University

Harvard University

Johns Hopkins University

Kenyon College

Lesley University

New York University

Northeastern University

Northwestern University

Pomona College

Rhode Island School of Design

Smith College

Tufts University

University of California, Berkeley

University of Chicago

University of Colorado Boulder

University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Nottingham

University of Pennsylvania

University of Rochester

University of Toronto

Vanderbilt University

Washington University in St. Louis

Whitman College

Williams College

SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS 2023

Meticulous sculptures recreating long-extinct creatures. Rich, low-toned photos as much attuned to darkness as to light. Longform journalism challenging the status quo of addiction treatment. Hyper-specialized pieces dominated the field of Commonwealth’s Scholastic Art & Writing Award winners this year, chosen from more than 260,000 submissions from teens across the country. Explore a sampling of the winning works on these pages and at commschool.org/SAWA2023

“What I Didn’t Tell You After Listening to the Radio”

By Grace Pariser ’23

The evening I walked next to you our shoes slipped in sync and the sand bar shone as it always had in the glazed divots of saltwater, its floor rippled and risen like fossils of ancient beasts trampled tender through footprints.

You were right, the gilded palisades of shale did not splinter and sink into the sea unlike those bright boxes on the radio, stories of whole bedrooms in Pacifica collapsed quietly into the cliff, left unnoticed until morning.

It would be too easy to remind you of all those apples felled fallow in Poughkeepsie, pale perfumes lifted like dawn’s dense dew, fruit ploughed pliable by the ploy of some feverish brute that thrust its sickle into the soil, pressed wrathful grapes to wine, and called itself an angel...

Continued at commschool.org/SAWA2023

ART

Gold Key

n Sophia Seitz-Shewmon ’24, “Moa—A Precious Witness of Lost Worlds,” Sculpture 4

n Bonnie (Xintong) Wang ’25, “When I Reach Far Away,” Drawing & Illustration 2

n Olivia Wang ’24, “Contact,” Photography

Silver Key

n Alec Lazorisak ’25, “Urban Changes,”

Photography 1

n Kian Park ’23, “Evolution,” “Views of a Vacuum,” Drawing & Illustration; “Folding Light,”

Architecture and Industrial Design

n Sophia Seitz-Shewmon ’24, “Unfamiliar Family— Archeotherium,” Sculpture 5

Honorable Mention

n Eliza Lamster ’24, “A Sunrise at Hancock,”

Photography

n Alec Lazorisak ’25, “Forgotten Trauma,”

Photography 3

n Kian Park ’23, “Solace in Solitude,” Drawing & Illustration; “Colossus,” Sculpture

n Dava Sitkoff ’24, “At the Corner,” Photography

n Olivia Wang ’24, “Muzzle, Obscured,” Drawing & Illustration

WRITING

Gold Key

n Grace Pariser ’23, “What I Didn’t Tell You After Listening to the Radio,” Poetry

Silver Key

n Koki Cameron ’26, “The Solution to the Drug Epidemic is Already Here,” Critical Essay

n Sarin Chaimattayompol ’25, “It’s Not About the Green Tea,” Flash Fiction

Honorable Mention

n Anto Catanzaro ’24, “A Guide to Soul-Shattering,” Flash Fiction

n Alex Choi ’23, “Worms in Driftwood,” Flash Fiction; “The Rain as Humanity,” Short Story

n Ella McKee ’23, “The Afterparty,” Short Story

n Grace Pariser ’23, “To Nero, at the Great Fire at Rome,” “Concord,” “Solstice,” Poetry

Note: the Gold Key, Silver Key, and Honorable Mentions are given on a state-wide level.

End of an Era

CELEBRATING THERESE HENDRICKS P’05, ’07 AND HER DECADES-LONG DEDICATION TO THE COMMONWEALTH SCHOOL BOARD OF TRUSTEES

“For many years I have been a colleague of Therese, first as a fellow member of the Board and then under her leadership as Board Chair. We have been through some difficult times, of which COVID was only the last. Therese has always led with grace, delicacy, and excellent judgment. The school is in better shape than I have ever known it. Therese has had the instinct to know when to intervene and when it’s best to let the Head, the faculty, and the staff manage. And trusting in that, everyone in the Commonwealth community has found it natural to seek her judgment and advice. If I needed a lawyer I would like to be her client. Wherever she turns her talents, she will keep Commonwealth in mind and in her affection. We all certainly will keep her in mind most gratefully.”

—Charles Fried P’79, ’81, GP’19, ’23, Trustee

n n n

“As a person and a Board Chair, Therese has been an inspiration to me and a committed gift to Commonwealth. She embodies backbone and heart in just the right amounts at just the right times. In collaboration with each member of the Board, Therese brought tough-mindedness, clear thinking, and direct action. Looking back it’s astounding what she and we accomplished to make the school even stronger and more dynamic. Few may know of the work behind the scenes, the deep thinking, and the careful course charting. We wouldn’t be where we are without her steadfast leadership. Therese, we will miss you!”

—Julia Holloway ’81, Former Trustee

n n n

“Therese’s twenty years of service on the Board, including the last six as Board Chair, was grounded in a devotion to Commonwealth that sprang from having seen what it could do for young people— including her own two children. Interestingly, as Commonwealth’s sixth Board Chair, she was the third who came from the legal profession. There’s an irony that a school whose single purported rule is ‘No rollerskating in the halls’ has had as its chief overseers chairs whose métier is all about statute, structure, and procedure. But since the school’s founding, such guidance has proven invaluable. Therese, who also has training as an engineer, was adept at raising the kinds of linear questions—‘If you do A, shouldn’t we worry that B will happen?’ or ‘If you care about Y, shouldn’t you be doing X?’—that brought clarity and structure to conversations. Before she became Chair, Therese co-chaired our 2014 strategic planning effort and helped build support for the largest facilities renovation and the largest campaign since the school’s founding, both of which proved successful beyond expectations. As Chair, she directed an effort to clarify administrative roles and responsibilities and to appoint an Assistant Head. She also, early in her tenure, pressed us to get the program we would call Dive In up and running within a year. (This was one of those “If-you-care-about-Y” questions.) Few believed that that was a realistic timeline, but she proved right. The building work rejuvenated the school. The administrative restructuring, among other virtues, proved prescient in readying us to deal with the pandemic. Dive In and other efforts positioned us to move steadily and sensibly forward on DEI issues. Therese’s leadership, rooted in her penchant for structure and process, ensured that Jennifer Borman would inherit a thriving school.”

—Bill Wharton P’06, Retired Headmaster

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE HEAD Mónica Schilder Spanish Teacher and Co-director of Dive In Commonwealth

Like our students, teachers bring their whole selves—their passions and pasts—to their work at Commonwealth. Mónica Schilder’s childhood in Peru deeply informs her role as a Spanish teacher and Co-director of Dive In Commonwealth, our academic enrichment program for middle-school students from historically marginalized, under-resourced backgrounds. She has worked to grow Dive In into an ever-more robust pathway for students and families interested in independent schools, while bringing her long-standing commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion to bear. Keep

reading as Mónica and Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 discuss how Dive In is woven into Commonwealth’s mission, the joys of returning to international travel, and not taking our foot off the gas when it comes to DEI.

Before we dive into your work, Mónica, let’s start at the beginning: what led you to Commonwealth?

MS: So I arrived in the U.S. in 2003 to finish my master’s degree. I was also a teaching fellow, and as anyone who’s done that job knows, they make very little money! So I worked part-

time jobs at Simmons [University], I worked at [Boston University], I gave some private classes. And then, somehow, I got an email from Commonwealth—the Spanish department was looking for a sabbatical replacement. The sabbatical replacement turned into seventeen years.

My upbringing connects a lot to my work. DEI wasn’t something I really thought about before I came to Commonwealth. I went to a private school for girls, a British school considered one of the top in Lima. I had a scholarship there—my family is middle working class—and most of the kids who went to this school were very wealthy. It was a shock to face that differ-

ence every day, but you never really thought about it in those terms. You just went to school, feeling very grateful for the opportunity. Growing up, they always told me, “You are so lucky; you have to give it your all.” So, as a student, I was proving that I deserved it every day, year after year. And, you know, it’s like you’re wearing this invisible backpack all the time.

I didn’t see then what I see now: how lucky we [educators] are to be able to bring people from all these different backgrounds to the table and how much richer we are because of them.

What are some of the other lessons you’ve learned about DEI?

MS: One important lesson for me was to think in terms of the individual. Even students coming from a similar background have very different experiences. And you can’t bring students from underrepresented backgrounds here without getting everyone else in the community involved. I’m grateful to see that, little by little, the school has become a place where

DEI is mainstream. It is really important for everyone to be thinking about this work and making sure everyone has a voice—not only on our Diversity Day but through the curriculum, through hiring, through student life, through admissions, through every aspect of what we’re doing here.

JB: Lots of us here share your perspective: we want every student to feel like this is their school, whatever their background, and they should not have that burden of feeling like they have to demonstrate gratitude or work extra hard to show they deserve the opportunity. Each of our students makes our school a more interesting, educational, connected space. But with DEI work, we’re always learning and reflecting: What do I not know? Where do I need to grow?

Where do you see our priorities in terms of DEI work?

JB: We are still absolutely committed to providing full scholarships to students who need them and keeping DEI a budgeting and a

fundraising priority. And two things we have planned for next year are new Algebra I and introductory computer science classes. They’re intentionally designed to give kids more onramps to our curriculum. So that’s exciting, but not the end of the journey.

We have started some really promising work on recruiting both for Dive In and for Commonwealth, breaking out of our bubble, so to speak, to build stronger relationships with community organizations. But we have a long way to go, and we have tons of work to do in terms of recruiting talented, diverse faculty and staff. The wonderful part about working here is people are so committed—and don’t leave very often. But as we all know, when you’re applying to a school, whether you’re a student or a parent, and you see adults who maybe don’t look like you or you’re not sure will understand you, it’s harder to see yourself thriving there, too. And I feel like we would benefit not just on the admissions side but in terms of our collective expertise by having more diverse faculty and staff. We’re diverse in some ways, but there’s lots of room for growth.

Like you, I want to make sure that we continue to ask ourselves the hard questions. We definitely want to keep building on the momentum, and we’re not taking our foot off the gas.

MS: For me, the top priority is the curriculum, especially as we build Dive In as a pipeline to Commonwealth and other independent schools. The learning gaps are so big now. Students need a lot more help and support to get where [pre-pandemic] classes have been. That doesn’t mean that we are going to be less rigorous. We need to continue the dialogue: how do we balance how rigorous we are with keeping kids excited about learning? How do we make sure they’re not exhausted? How do we explain the why of what they’re learning? How do we bring in more voices of color?

That’s why I love Dive In being such a presence in the school. My incredible colleagues feel like they have some ownership of it, like their voices and ideas are welcome. I think the program will become so much stronger and better because of them.

Mónica, you stepped into the role of Dive In’s Director, first, and now Co-director with Rui Shu, our Mandarin teacher. What are some of your goals for the program? How do you see us continuing to learn from and to strengthen Dive In?

MS: In one case [a Dive In grad, now Commonwealth student] came back to teach math to the youngest cohort—to give back in a generous, absolutely altruistic, and just happy way. It would be awesome if we could create that kind of continuity, where all Dive In kids, hopefully, come to Commonwealth and then go back and help the next group.

We’re thinking and talking about how to make this program fun and help students reach their goals of going to an independent school. So we’re trying to be creative. We actually expanded the program to a cohort of sixth graders this year, so we’ll see the impact of the longer runway.

JB: One of the many things that’s been so energizing about working together on this is just the idea that everyone’s incredibly committed. Dive In is still a relatively new program [founded in 2019]. So there are all kinds of opportunities to try something new and then ask, did it work as well as we hoped? What would we do differently? What did kids respond to? What did they most need?

MS: I love that, too. With these small cohorts, it is much easier to adapt as we go along and to learn from our mistakes and to see what works and what doesn’t. So that’s exciting. Change happens more slowly at Commonwealth and other older institutions because we don’t want to mess with what works!

What has stayed the same and what notable changes have you seen over the arc of your seventeen years here?

MS: I think the same values stand. We still want all students to grow in a holistic way. I continue to admire my colleagues and be astonished by how many talents they have. And we truly care about our kids. The whole advising system is about being the advocates for the students, considering their unique stories, where they’re coming from. The most rewarding part is really getting to know my advisees—the kind of people they are becoming, their interests outside and inside the classroom, and their curious, curious minds! [Faculty and staff] all have different styles, because we’re all different people, but we put our students first. I think that’s what makes this place special. And that has not changed at all.

Things that have changed, I think, for the good, are being more open about our limitations and being more frank about things that need to continue to change and not being afraid of having those talks. Now we’re a little bit more humble about the places where we can grow. And that’s what makes the institution a stronger one.

JB: One of the things that hasn’t changed is the strength of the language program here and the options for international travel. I love the shape of our programs, and you have played a monumental role in making them a success— coordinating the trips to Peru and Spain, the exchanges when Spanish kids come here, the logistics for Italy and France. Not only do I see kids click in terms of their language learning, but I feel like that experience of being in a new environment opens their eyes, as they gain a different perspective on what it’s like to be a little bit of an outsider.

Can you talk a bit about the impact of our international travel programs? What’s the most exciting part of broadening our kids’ understanding of the world in this way?

MS: The thing that motivates me the most about these trips is giving our students the opportunity to see each other from a different perspective. They take these trips, and then they start to realize they have a lot more in common than they once thought. They form these relationships and friendships. And when they come back, they have grown so much. I love how in my Spanish class, since the exchange program, they look at each other whenever there’s a new vocabulary word: “Oh, the Spanish kids were saying that all the time; what does it mean?”

“It means this!” Their memories of these tiny little incidents are so precious to them.

And, like you were saying, Jennifer, when you’re in a different country, you make comparisons with your life, and we talk about those differences. For example, in Peru, we talk about the different social classes, and students see them firsthand when we travel from the cities to the mountains. They see how much poverty there is. I think the students deeply appreciate doing these kinds of trips, and I know they understand that not everyone has these kinds of opportunities.

JB: I could see the sadness from the canceled trips during the pandemic—and I can see the sparkle in kids’ eyes returning, now that we can venture forth again. It’s amazing. t

“ One important lesson for me was to think in terms of the individual. Even students coming from a similar background have very different experiences. And you can’t bring students from underrepresented backgrounds here without getting everyone else in the community involved.”

Campaign Co-Chairs José Alvarez P’10, ’12, ’18 and Suzanne McGilvray P’10, ’12, ’18 imparted these simple, powerful words when we launched The Power of a Vision: a Campaign for Commonwealth in the fall of 2018. Named in tribute to Charles Merrill’s founding hopes and dreams for Commonwealth, The Power of a Vision is the largest and most ambitious campaign in the school’s history. And just as our teachers and students go above and beyond in the classroom every day, the Commonwealth community came together to not only reach but exceed the campaign goal.

We set out with a goal of $12.5 million. You—alumni/ae, parents, grandparents, students, faculty, staff, and friends—donated $13.45 million.

TOTAL RAISED $13,450,000

GOAL $12,500,000

STAY TUNED...

Soon we will invite you to a celebration to acknowledge your generosity and recognize your impact.

“...because we know that now, more than ever, the world needs this school.”

THANK YOU for REALIZING a VISION

This campaign supports three essential components of the Commonwealth experience.

THE POWER OF PLACE

Significant renovations to our beloved Back Bay brownstones, including the addition of an elevator, make the school fully accessible to all.

THE POWER OF A TEACHER

Behind our university-caliber classes are universitycaliber faculty. Funds raised for The Power of a Teacher enable Commonwealth to attract and retain our incredible faculty and to provide professional development grants through the Hughes/Wharton Fund for Teachers.

THE POWER OF OPPORTUNITY

Expanded in the fall of 2020 to include dedicated funding for Commonwealth’s work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, gifts designated to The Power of Opportunity create access through financial aid, travel scholarships, and student support.

Following final inspection in the summer of 2016, Charles Merrill was the first passenger on the elevator’s maiden voyage to the fifth floor.

(But don’t worry, alums: some things never change. We still pass the clay up the stairs!)

A Math Geek in

BY CLAIRE JEANTHEAU

“My dad talked to somebody who talked to somebody who knew a graduate student at MIT and said, ‘My son’s doing this in math class at his high school,’” Nick recalls. “And the grad student said, ‘We’re just covering that now.’”

Alongside classmates Colum Amory ’87, Ben Steinberg ’87, and Jeremy Mumford ’87, Nick spent a full semester proving the theorems, which claim that there are some mathematical statements that, although true, nevertheless can’t be proved. To peers, Nick may have seemed bound for the same track in quantitative work as that graduate student. But “they would have been shocked where I ended up,” he laughs. Nick is still tackling complex problems, but as a talent manager in Los Angeles, where the variables are competing projects, artificial intelligence, and even a Netflix star or two. It’s a path that started through a chance senior project—and it requires every ounce of the critical-thinking skills he honed at Commonwealth.

Another Kind of Problem Solving

The day-to-day workings of Nick’s current role at Venture Entertainment Partners are loaded with calculations: determining which actors are the perfect fit for a casting call, synchronizing schedules while accounting for dozens of timetables, searching for alternate opportunities when a client’s television series drifts into hiatus.

One of Nick’s main goals is to match his clients to television pilots with full-series potential—and, in turn, more permanent roles. (Nick works primarily in TV but also has connections in video games and other media projects.) He might work with actors who are entering the industry for the

first time or those looking to build on the momentum of a successful season. Nick has a particular interest in cultivating young talent and spotting emerging actors in college and the workforce. You’ve likely heard of some of Venture’s more established clients, like Finn Wolfhard (of Stranger Things fame) and Michelle Yeoh (most recently winner of the 2023 Best Actress Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once).

Aiding clients means finding not only consistent work but consistent support from others. “It’s about putting the right team around them—making sure that they have the right publicist, entertainment attorney (if they need one), the right agency, and that they have a business manager for their finances,” he says. To stay abreast of acting opportunities, he keeps tabs on the churn of pitches, sequels, spinoffs, and development rumors, too.

Of course, as a Commonwealth alumnus, Nick is no stranger to a demanding workload: “I remember five hours of homework every single night, and everybody thinking that was insane, but that’s what we all did.” The talent industry requires no less dedication. “That’s the thing about talent management: it’s literally management,” Nick comments. “It’s managing every aspect of a client’s career, from helping them get the next job to managing their money to publicity to making sure that we have the right attorney involved in the deal-making process. It’s getting your hands in everything.”

How did Nick travel from mathematician to manager? It began, as many Commonwealth stories do, during a senior project. Scrambling for something to do, Nick and his classmate Colum reached out to the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players, a troupe they remembered from childhood that happened to have an end-of-March performance of The Gondoliers on deck. Nick phoned a Harvard connection (“this was pre-Internet”) and pitched the services of two high-school volunteers. The response was energetic: “They were, like, ‘Free labor? That’s awesome.’” Nick and Colum put set elements together and then put them to work. “Every night when the show would go on, we’d help pull the gondola across the stage with the ropes and pulleys and everything. It was really fun.”

When he started at the University of Pennsylvania that fall as a prospective physics major, Nick wanted to stay involved with—or rather, behind—the theater stage. “I started as a guy in carpentry, putting together sets and building and hammering. Slowly, over the course of a couple of years, I graduated to designing sets and ended up making a bunch for productions.” His major turned from physics

Anyone from Commonwealth’s Class of 1987, Nick Campbell wagers, would remember him first as a “math and science geek.” Who else would undertake a seminar dedicated almost solely to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems?

to theatrical design (a self-created program of study), and his post-graduate plans turned towards entertainment. He landed his first job at a talent agency in New York City.

One cross-country move and numerous clients later, Nick came full circle, delivering a virtual talk on “The Business of Acting and Writing for Film & TV” for Commonwealth’s Project Week in 2020. “It was really my Commonwealth project,” he admits, “that changed the direction of my life.”

The Future of Talent

Nick has found connections between his seemingly disparate interests for years. “In math and physics, you basically are confronted with a problem, and you have to break it down, analyze it, and figure out a solution to it. That helps, I think, throughout your whole life,” he reflects. “Having that background through four years of Commonwealth and four years of Penn helped me look at everything analytically and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we need to do. Here’s the path we have to follow in order to get to where we want to go.’”

Now, though, the entertainment industry faces a development that begs for the insight of a STEM background like Nick’s. Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are flooding digital spaces with everything from automatically generated film scripts to uncanny mimicries of celebrity voices. Is this the end of Hollywood? Not so, Nick thinks.

“People have tried telling AI programs to write screenplays as an experiment, and they’re terrible.” And yet: “We all know that they will get better and better and better.”

Regardless, Nick isn’t afraid of the machines, testing their capabilities with the experimental mindset he sharpened as a once physics–major: “As a layman, I’m still interested in science and math issues.” He subscribed to ChatGPT and tried out computerized art generators. He was even able to trick his coworkers. “I can now type into a computer and make the computer sound like me and say anything. I created a computerized version of my voice and used it to fool some of my colleagues.” While AI discourse often centers on job loss, Nick sees potential for what voice replication, in particular, could do for his clients as they deal with packed schedules. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if, at some point, I license a client’s voice to a video-game company,” he posits, “and the client recites a soundbite of two paragraphs of prose, they feed it into the computer, and then the computer can say whatever it wants in the client’s voice? The client can just lie in bed and not have to go to a studio, but collect a salary and fees.”

In fact, Nick points out, this kind of technology was already being used before AI came to the forefront of the news: “James Earl Jones licensed his voice for Darth Vader—he’s in his nineties, and I’m sure he doesn’t want to keep going into recording booths.” Perhaps one day, he imagines, a screenwriter with a signature style (like Aaron Sorkin, known for his loquacious, politically inflected scripts) could license it as they enter retirement, with AI programs replicating their diction and hallmarks in decades of future works. Nick is mindful of the ethical dimensions of this practice, though, especially regarding a client’s public image: What would the reaction be, he wonders, “if the estate of Elvis Presley decides that they want to license Elvis’s voice to a cigarette commercial?”

Though Nick relishes the speculation, there are no settled answers—and that’s exactly what his Commonwealth education prepared him for. The same drive to cross the disciplines and play with new technologies—as well as to contemplate the creative, legal, and moral issues underlying their use—is not unlike what pushed him to build Gilbert and Sullivan sets many years ago.

“Obviously, Commonwealth teaches you facts, but the overall goal of the school, I think, wasn’t to teach you ‘when did this battle occur,’ but how to go through the rest of your life being able to analyze and come up with your own ideas and continue a life of learning,” Nick says. “I think I do that today; I’m in entertainment, but I still read about business and math and science and politics. And I think that that's true of everyone I know from Commonwealth.” t

Claire Jeantheau is the former Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth.

Sing, Commonwealth!

BY LILLIEN WALLER

Director of Music David Hodgkins conducts Commonwealth’s current Chorus, including students from all grades as well as faculty and staff, with accompanist Valerie Becker at the piano

Do you remember the unnerving quiet of the early days of the pandemic? Aside from a few community-organized primal screams and cow-bell clangs to thank essential workers, a hush fell on the world as we all skittered into lockdown. Live vocal performance was an early, obvious cut. It was often deeply moving to see and hear singers adapt, performing via Zoom and social media, perhaps even an aria from a balcony. Yet, it wasn’t quite the same. We couldn’t gather in auditoriums or music halls. The few live performances executed in the first year took place in largely empty rooms or outside, almost always behind masks. But when voices rise together, making a piece of music written 400 or just twenty years ago feel relevant right now, there is nothing quite like the experience—for singers and audiences alike.

“Singing was very challenging during the pandemic,” recalls mathematics and economics teacher Rob Sherry P’25, a faculty member of Chorale for many years and Chorus since coming to Commonwealth in 2000. “At times, we practiced over Zoom, which was very difficult. We then sang outside in the back alley, even in the winter. It was hard to hear the other parts. We are finally back to normal. But I think that many musically inclined students moved towards instrumental music rather than voice. The orchestra is quite full, but Chorus is still small and working on rebuilding. I am confident that this will happen with time.”

Prior to the pandemic, Commonwealth’s Chorus, a performing arts course as well as a choir, traditionally welcomed thirty to forty student and faculty voices. Chorale, a more intimate auditioned ensemble, welcomed twelve to fifteen students. As of spring 2023, Chorus includes eight students and five faculty, and Chorale has four students. While the numbers for both groups have diminished significantly—due not only to the pandemic but also to students graduating and other factors—the quality of performance and the depth of student experience have not. And if the roster of Chorus and Chorale alumni/ae are any indication, the vocal program continues to serve as a training ground for world-class performers.

“What happened with Chorale is that there’s a student base who have been singing for the last couple of years,” says Director of Music David Hodgkins P’11. “We have two sopranos, an alto, and a bass, and I have been singing tenor. The piano accompanist, Valerie Becker, who has been great through all this, was willing to sing as well, so she has been singing alto. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that I’ve been singing, but that’s not why I’m there.

“What has been interesting, though, is that, despite the smaller number of singers, the level of accomplishment and refinement has not diminished. The quality of the performances has been very moving.”

Making Music

What is most remarkable about Commonwealth’s vocal program during this period is that its repertoire has remained thoughtful, demanding, and wide-ranging. The pandemic brought with it a number of parallel concerns, particularly in the first year,

including civil unrest and social questions around race and racism, equity and fairness, immigration and belonging. David, who has led the Commonwealth music program for more than thirty years and is the artistic director of award-winning adult choruses Coro Allegro in Boston and The New England Classical Singers in Andover, points out that this historical moment has been, in many ways, a rare opportunity to expand and re-imagine what the school’s Chorus and Chorale are capable of.

“I feel as if I know enough repertoire to change things around and make them work,” he notes. “There are many different situations for which you program; you just have to be smart about how you

program. [The pandemic] was also an opportunity to explore different kinds of repertoire. Art can be a real motivating force for change. So, my programming has always had an ear towards diversity. I never called it ‘diversity;’ I just called it ‘interesting programming.’”

In December 2022, Chorale performed “Magnificat Secundi Toni,” a multi-movement, a cappella work by sixteenth-century Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. In the spring of 2023, they performed a number of contemporary pieces, Debussy’s “Trois Chansons” in French, “Border” by Rich Campbell, and “Come Home” by Peter Eldridge, whose lyrics resonate deeply with the present historical moment. “Somehow we were able to make the key structures work,” Hodgkins says, “and we did it without breaks in between the pieces.”

Soprano Dava Sitkoff ’24, who joined Chorus sophomore year and Chorale this school year, speaks poetically about “O Magnum Mysterium,” also by Victoria, and the experience of learning to perform it. “What a beautiful piece. It was the first piece I learned coming into Chorale, which was an intimidating experience on its own. I had heard Chorale sing Renaissance music before and was really mystified by it,” Dava says, noting that the size of Chorale did not lessen the power of the music. “I mean, it’s this tiny little group that the website says ‘all breathe together.’ But I think that genuinely rings true. When Chorale is working together properly, ‘ethereal’ is the only word to describe it. And the first time that I experienced that was in ‘O Magnum Mysterium.’ The piece begins with a single note, and everybody is singing that note at the same time. It was a moment when I felt that, being one of only two sopranos—neither of whom had sung this before—it was worth it. This is why we’re doing this, for this really cool moment.”

“[Chorus] turned out to be pretty much love at first sight—sound? I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about singing with other people, plus it was intellectually demanding and brought me into contact with an entire spectrum of great music that I had never known existed.”

—Luca Antonucci ’10

Like many students in Chorus and Chorale, bass Alex Choi ’23 liked singing before arriving at Commonwealth but didn’t necessarily have a lot of opportunities to do it, especially as his middle school was quite small. He also remembers the pre-pandemic Chorus, but for him, the numbers are the only significant change. He does recall, however, one of his favorite pieces, Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” which the Chorus performed in 2022 for graduation.

“It’s a really, really beautiful song. I’m assuming what Mr. Hodgkins gave us was the original arrangement. I was half-familiar with the tune because I had heard Ella Fitzgerald’s version, which is jazzier without the four-part harmony. But the song itself is a really good mix of being fun to sing and having a nice sound,” says Alex, who, earlier this year, was selected from among hundreds of student singers for the 69th Annual Massachusetts All-State Concert at Boston Symphony Hall. He observes that each song in the Chorus repertoire isn’t just about the song. It takes time and no small amount of trust. “Singing in choruses is a process of refinement. You don’t walk in, nail it, and then leave,” he explains. “Even if you know the music by heart, you still have to work with the other people in the room. You have to blend with the other people. You have to get cues from other people. You’re not going to know everything until you’re in that room and you’ve been working for a while.

“When it comes to concerts at Commonwealth, maybe a week before we perform, I always find myself thinking, ‘This is going to be awful. No one’s together. There are parts we keep messing up. How is this going to turn out right?’” he says, laughing. “But then, you know, you get past the nerves and the awkwardness and you always end up with something that you weren’t expecting. You end up with something good.”

Making Meaning

Tenor Charlie Zhong ’25, who is also a member of Orchestra, was already an accomplished pianist when he arrived at Commonwealth in fall 2021. Chorus wasn’t yet on his radar. In fact, he says, he wasn’t initially interested in singing. Prior to ninth grade, Charlie spent the summer in the Walden School Young Musicians Program for composing, a skill he cultivated during COVID lockdown when he finally started “writing things down.” The mandatory Chorus program at Walden pushed him into vocal performance. “I really enjoyed it,” Charlie says. “So, as school was starting in September, I asked to add Chorus to my schedule, and luckily it met during the two blocks of time I had free. I’ve been in Chorus ever since.”

“The music program at Commonwealth is really advanced; everyone is state of the art,” Charlie says, chuckling. “I mean, the man who directs Coro Allegro—one of the most critically acclaimed choruses in the country—directs us. Mr. Hodgkins is really detailed. He expects every note to be perfect—and it pays off. A lot of what he asks of us, his conducting and rehearsal, is because the music we make in the end is really quite beautiful.”

In 2021, Charlie was a winner of the National Young Composers Challenge. His composition, “Like a Single Star in the Night Sky,” was performed in April of the following year by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. He has since won multiple other accolades for composition, including the 2023 DeKalb Symphony Orchestra Young Composers Competition. His evolving relationship to music is very much shaped by other academic pursuits: his participation in Chorus, yes, but also courses in literature, creative writing, mathematics, and more. “Commonwealth

Caroline Brown ’23, Alice Liang ’22, and Sophia Ying ’22 sing during Commonwealth’s 2022 graduation (otherwise, a largely masked ceremony)

English courses are especially a favorite of mine,” he explains. “I think they contribute a lot to what I do with composition and vice versa. ‘Does this note make sense here, and how does it contribute to the whole picture of the piece?’ How you construct a piece of literature can relate to how you construct a piece of music.”

Charlie’s process raises questions about the origin and cultivation of creativity that may seem beyond the scope of the school’s vocal music program, but not really. Those connections have been researched and confirmed by scientists and psychologists for generations.

“Singing is a vital part of being human,” David says. “A lot of this could be said about the other arts, too. But one of the things music trains you to do is to stay focused for an extended period of time. And [there’s] the linguistic training: we’ve sung in German, French, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and English, so you start to learn about the world in different ways. Fine-listening skills are crucial. How do you tune with the person across the room? How do you count? Because there’s math involved. There’s also an understanding of musical ebb and flow that is a direct result of connecting with one’s breath: you can have four quarter notes in a row, and sometimes people will just sing four quarters in a row. But, in fact, to create a phrase you have to manipulate each of those four quarter notes differently, so that what you’re doing is taking something on a page and bringing it to life. Choruses, orchestras, chamber music, anything—it’s working together. It’s communication and trust that enables you to get on stage and not cower in fear.”

Hodgkins has taught music and music theory at Commonwealth since 1989, including to a number of people who have gone on to make music their vocation. Bass singer and trumpeter Luca Antonucci ’10 sang in Chorus and Chorale, in addition to playing in the jazz band and once in the orchestra. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in orchestral conducting at University of Michigan and credits his professional path to the tremendous sense of community he felt at Commonwealth. He also echoes a common theme: David Hodgkins encouraged him to join Chorus. “It turned out to be pretty much love at first sight—sound? I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about singing with other people, plus it was intellectually demanding and brought me into contact with an entire spectrum of great music that I had never known existed,” Luca says. “It was a great way to meet people and make friends. And the fact that students sang with teachers was truly special in a way I didn’t appreciate at the time. I think it helped contribute to the school’s amazing feeling of community.”

Grammy-nominated mezzo-soprano Julia Cavallaro ’04 has achieved national acclaim since graduating from Commonwealth. She, too, had

no interest in joining Chorus initially, thinking of herself as a classical violinist, not a singer. With the encouragement of other choristers and David Hodgkins, she joined Chorus as a soprano. During her sophomore year winter concert, Chorus performed a Baroque German Christmas cantata, in which Julia sang a short solo movement for the very first time. She loved the experience so much that she later joined Chorale. There was no looking back.

“David Hodgkins imparted to us a sense of reverence and wonder for the beauty of music. He taught us to honor and delight in the experience of singing, and he showed us the power of choral music to move us and our audiences deeply. I am forever grateful that I had a chance to sing in Chorus and Chorale as a student at Commonwealth. I can’t imagine my life today without it.” t

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.

Teacher and longtime Chorus member Rob Sherry P’25 during a recent concert

Benny Jaffer ’21, Xander Seguin ’19, Nathan Le ’20, Muhammad Abdur-Rahman ’22, Eric Zhou ’17, and Linus Glenhaber ’19 perform during the 2018 winter concert

ABOUT THE ART

Using AI-generated art was the obvious choice for this piece. And, oh, the nightmare fodder these tools spit out, and not just because their interpretations of prompts like “photorealistic painting of five people and a cyborg” included grotesquely distorted faces and bodies. Without the addition of words like “diverse,” the people in images generated by DALL-E, ChatGPT’s art-focused counterpoint, defaulted to white ethnicities; even after describing the technologists in this article in detail, including their genders, Alexandra—the only woman (a reality not lost on us)—was often left out of the AI renderings. With Midjourney AI, the DALL-E competitor that conjured up the image you see here, prompts calling for “androids” curiously kept generating only feminine figures, even after specifying they should be androgynous; on the other hand, prompts for “male and female androids” tended to depict male humans and female robots. Like the words generated by ChatGPT and its brethren, these AI images can take your breath away. Sometimes in a horrified gasp. (Ed. Jessica Tomer)

NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL MINDS

A Conversation About (and “with”?) ChatGPT

BY CATHERINE BREWSTER

Dedicated CM readers might recall that, only a few years ago, we covered “Adventures in Artificial Intelligence,” interviewing alumni/ae harnessing AI for projects like tracking populations of endangered zebras and translating movement into sounds blind people can use to “see” the world around them. Simpler times.

Since then, ChatGPT and similar large language models have prompted more existential questions: What is the purpose of writing, of education, of thinking for oneself? What can we outsource, and what should we? Of course, versions of these come up with any technological advance, but none has registered as such a body blow to English teachers since I became one. Every September, I’ve told my seniors, “After high school, you can run away from anything else you’ve had to learn here—math, history, science—but not writing.” Is that still true? Will writing your own sentences become akin to making your own shoes, the domain of eccentrics, preppers, and multinational corporations? Is our prose diet about to be flooded with the equivalent of, as my history colleague Melissa Glenn Haber ’87 put it, high-fructose corn syrup? This simile was perversely comforting, as an example of the kind of thing I don’t think ChatGPT could (yet) come up with.

At class meetings, several juniors made a case for thinking of large language models the

way math teachers think of calculators: “We still teach first graders arithmetic, because if they can’t do it themselves, they won’t be able to understand math when they’re sixteen.” Another, noting that LLMs can only draw on the material they’re trained on, asked indignantly, “Why would you want to write an essay if you’re not going to say something that hasn’t been said before?” A classmate bravely and gently pointed out that, under pressure, even a person who believes in learning for its own sake can still be tempted by a free, fast, and tirelessly on-demand source of passable academic prose.

Unsurprisingly, I continue to look for affirmation from people who already believe that writing is inextricable from thinking—a group that’s probably overrepresented at Commonwealth. But I also asked the following questions of a few avowed technologists among our graduates. Here are their answers, along with ChatGPT’s for good measure.

What’s your reaction to Vanderbilt’s ChatGPT-generated “message of unity” to students after the Michigan State shootings? Students were upset, but will they be five years from now? Should they be?

MARK: “They were right to be upset. It goes to authenticity, in the same way that a handwritten card signals that you really are thinking about someone.”

JAMIE: “Using an auto-generated response for such a serious incident seems inappropriate. It’s crucial to ensure that AI-generated content is contextually relevant and sensitive, especially when dealing with emotionally charged situations.”

ARTHUR: “Statements like that tend to follow a template anyway, so I’m not sure their use of ChatGPT makes all that much of a difference here. I think what really matters is whether the person whose name is on the statement believes it and will stand behind it.”

TAHMID: “I can see that if Vanderbilt becomes dependent on such a tool, that’s a problem. I think a lot depends on what Vanderbilt says to students about using ChatGPT for academic work.” [The Vanderbilt Hustler quotes one student as saying it would be considered cheating, which indeed it would at Commonwealth, but reports no confirmation from the university that it would.]

ALEXANDRA: “Writing something yourself is one signal that you really care about it, so using ChatGPT reads as evidence to the contrary. So I can understand the students’ anger, even if there are lots of other ways writing can be dishonest. Right now, human emotions are out of reach as a heuristic for large language models, but they’ll get there.”

CHATGPT: “As an AI language model, I do not have emotions, but I can provide an objective analysis. The ChatGPT-generated ‘message of unity’ issued by Vanderbilt in response to the Michigan State shootings was an attempt to provide comfort and support to the student body during a difficult time. While some students may have been upset with the impersonal and automated nature of the message, it is important to recognize that the purpose of such a message is to acknowledge the tragedy and express solidarity with the affected community.”

Assuming chatbots will only get better at writing, should students still learn to do it themselves?

MARK: “Yes. The act of writing is developing the thought muscle, arranging thoughts in a convincing way that exposes a reader to a new idea. The principles I learned at Commonwealth—economy, sensitivity to diction—are real skills that, once you develop them, never go away. Yesterday, working with my team on a budget, I spent an hour changing words on every page of a slideshow, because part of a budget is convincing, ultimately, the CEO that your team deserves its cut.”

JAMIE: “Good writing is about clearly expressing and communicating ideas. Even as chatbots improve, students should continue learning to write themselves, as it helps them develop critical-thinking skills, ar-

ticulate their thoughts effectively, and convey complex ideas to others. Writing is not just a mechanical process; it is also a way to enhance understanding and foster creativity.”

TAHMID: “Well, how else would you communicate ideas?! A distinctive writer’s voice is something worth developing. Maybe LLMs will end up raising the quality of ‘average’ writing. Maybe the norm will become using an LLM to generate a first draft, then improving it. But there are so many questions to think through before we can use LLMs in these ways responsibly. For example, I wonder what LLMs will do to originality; already it seems as if a lot of new films and games are just variations on the ones that are already out there. And I wonder if anyone developing LLMs consulted with schools about what they were going to do to education.”

ARTHUR: “The act of turning jumbled words and incoherent thoughts into sentences will be doable by a computer, but when you’re putting something out there, you want it to reflect what you think. Language models do not think; schools still need to teach people to do that. Your first pass at expressing an idea won’t be the best one. Writing isn’t just making sentences. The writing process includes thinking and editing and rearranging until you’ve got the most compelling version.”

ALEXANDRA: “It makes sense for education to concentrate on skills that can’t be automated—and also that, eventually, everything will be automated. At that point, I think writing will become something you won’t have to do but can do if you enjoy it, which I always have, as part of a productive and happy life.” [When I took the position you might expect from an English teacher—that until you can write clearly, you can’t think clearly—she pointed out, “You phrased that in a very binary way. How about thinking of writing as a tool that can help people think better? In the very long term, I think human happiness matters more than the capacity to think and write.”]

CHATGPT: “Yes, students should still learn to write themselves even as chatbots and other AI technologies continue to improve their writing abilities. Writing is a fundamental skill that is essential for communication, critical thinking, and self-expression. While AI tools can help to automate certain tasks and improve efficiency, they cannot replace the creativity, nuance, and personal touch that comes from writing oneself. Learning to write also helps to develop important cognitive skills, such as attention to detail, logical thinking, and effective communication.”

Computer science is thriving at Commonwealth. What do you hope those students aspire to and pay attention to if they’re considering careers in the field?

MARK: “Now that my transformation to full-time manager is complete, I don’t write a line of code. If that’s not where you want to end up, you want the ‘tech track’; some companies are good at letting people alone to just code. But software engineering actually is about people, which a lot of people don’t understand when they start or sometimes ever. You are on a team no matter what; you can write great code, but there’s also a user-experience person, a product manager who’s trying to align what you’re building with the needs of the business and make sure that what you’re building is actually useful.”

JAMIE: “Many students enter computer science classes expecting to learn the skills required to be a good programmer. However, computer science is an academic discipline, while programming is primarily an exercise in applied problem solving. The most interesting projects in computer science often involve interdisciplinary ideas from fields like neurology, genetics, or game theory. And good management and collaboration with colleagues, physical tasks, and deep expertise in areas with little or no data are currently beyond AI’s reach. Humans will continue to play a vital role in these aspects of work.”

TAHMID addressed some of these questions at his recent Commonwealth assembly entitled “Take Your Time”: enjoy the people and experiences you discover as you grow up, and be ready to be surprised by your own interests. Despite this, as both he and I noticed, a lot of the students who were eager to talk to him wanted to know the best path for becoming a software engineer at Google. When we talked, he reflected, “I guess something I didn’t understand until I was maybe a senior at Commonwealth was that when you write essays and lab reports, you’re participating in a discourse with other people, and knowing how to do that well, how to pay attention to the bigger picture and when to zoom in on the granular stuff, is a very underrated skill. The technical part of what I do—writing designs and code—can be automated, but not that.”

ARTHUR , who after college worked as a software engineer at Capital One, says the best aspects of that job were the problem solving and the people on his team. “Working as a software engineer, most of the coding stuff I did, I learned on the job. The first few computer-science courses I took in college were enough to get me started, but after that a lot of it you kind of just pick up as you go. Being able to think through and solve problems—skills that come up in a wide range of disciplines—is really important.” He reflected, “One thing Commonwealth conveys really well is that no matter what you do, you’re part of a society, and your actions affect other people. So whether you end up in computer science or any other field, I hope you use your skills for good.”

ALEXANDRA: “If any current Commonwealth CS students don’t think it’s possible that we could create AI with values other than our own, I hope they’ll get in touch with me!”

CHATGPT: “As an AI language model, I would hope that students who are interested in pursuing a career in computer science would consider the following: As an AI language model, I don’t have hopes, but I can provide an objective answer. For students considering careers in the field of computer science, it is important to aspire to a career that not only provides financial stability but also allows for personal and professional growth. A strong foundation in computer science fundamentals, coupled with the ability to think creatively and problem-solve, will serve them well in any career path they choose. They should also pay attention to the constantly evolving technology landscape and stay upto-date with the latest developments and trends.” t

Catherine Brewster teaches English at Commonwealth.

FIVE TECHNOLOGISTS

MARK TOWFIQ ’85 credits Bruce Molay’s courses at Commonwealth, along with the aunt who gave him a Commodore 64 in eighth grade, for his gradual realization that computer science wasn’t just a hobby but what he enjoyed “more than anything.” With a degree in CS from Princeton, he “drifted into e-commerce and two-sided marketplaces” and led the team that built and launched Walmart.com. Since then, he has become an expert in “modernizing systems to use a digitally native way of thinking,” at various startups, PepsiCo, and now Estée Lauder. He worries about the “Frankenstein’s monster” possibilities of generative AI: “We haven’t built the necessary safeguards to insulate ourselves from potentially disastrous consequences, from criminal uses to the ability to generate misinformation and disinformation at scale. It’s not hard to imagine that leading to a world unmoored from facts and reality, and the collapse of governments, persecution, and mob rule.”

JAMIE MATHESON ’08 earned his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, where he also launched his first startup, Trext. In 2017, he co-founded Carta Healthcare, which uses AI in conjunction with a team of nurses. “The AI system analyzes clinical notes, lab results, device data, and outcome information to suggest answers. Our nurses then verify and complete the process,” he explains. “Our approach is a ‘glassbox’ model, which means all data we present has a clear and traceable source. In contrast, ChatGPT’s suggestions can be difficult to understand due to its occasional hallucinations, making it unsuitable for data abstraction. We also employ a statistical methodology, inter-rater reliability, to assess the quality of AI-generated suggestions compared to nurses working without the software. The AI ultimately helps us build better datasets and, as a result, enhance the quality and consistency of healthcare while reducing its cost.”

TAHMID RAHMAN ’13 didn’t take his first programming course until he was a sophomore at Swarthmore College. He then majored in math and computer science alongside DJ’ing a radio show, playing a lot of Ultimate Frisbee, and coordinating the college writing center. Hired as a software engineer by Google in 2017, he now works for Google Travel in Cambridge. At a Commonwealth assembly in March, he laid out some of the puzzles and tensions around large datasets and privacy, citing Latanya Sweeney’s 1997 success in extracting Governor William Weld’s health records from public data on state employees’ medical information that was, the Governor had assured everyone, anonymized.

ARTHUR MATEOS ’15 devoted himself to learning (among many other things) both French and Mandarin at Commonwealth. Though he majored in math at Princeton, he wrote his senior thesis in linguistics, the field in which he is now working toward a Ph.D. at UCLA. While he says his knowledge of AI, from a summer in a biology lab modeling animal behavior, is outdated—“a couple of generations back from what large language models can do now”—he’s able to explain, as someone who studies human language, what ChatGPT doesn’t understand if it doesn’t recognize as nonsensical a sentence like “What language did they hire someone who speaks?” (that is, a muddled attempt at asking “They hired someone who speaks what language?”). Like Steven Pinker, he’s fascinated by the capacity of ordinary children learning human language to infer such rules from a tiny fraction of the input ChatGPT was trained on. For him, the largest worry about LLMs, “which is not a language question,” is that they’re overseen by for-profit companies who aren’t bound to act in the interest of society: “Being the administrator of the model gives you a lot of power over how it’s trained, what biases are included, and who can use it.”

ALEXANDRA BATES ’21 (known as Sasha at Commonwealth, where she maxed out our STEM offerings from differential equations to relativity) is an undergraduate who spent a gap year working at the Tenenbaum Lab at MIT and with a number of student groups focused on AI safety. Coming out of her freshman year studying math and physics at Columbia, she found herself increasingly preoccupied with the imminence of “human-level AI”—that is to say, both interested in and frightened by what’s known as “the alignment problem.” As Alexandra explained it to me, if we have no plan to shape future AI so that it shares human values, there’s no reason to believe that it will. In that case, “we could all end up enslaved by robot masters. That sounds hyperbolic, but if we don’t program them to care about human flourishing, why would they?”

ABOUT THE ART

Scottish artist Ciaran Murphy created this painting of Rikita, her jester’s motley inspired by “The Ermine Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I. As in most Elizabethan portraits, Rikita holds an item of significance—in this case, a quill—to represent her love of writing.

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BY JESSICA TOMER

his is not a funny article.

Nothing sucks the humor out of a joke like explaining why it’s funny, and the paragraphs that follow do something like that, turning an academic eye on the inner workings of Shakespearean comedy. Why subject you, dear reader, to this joyless exercise? Because, well, comedy don’t get no respect.

“I wish we took comedy more seriously,” says Rikita Tyson. “People think it’s harder to make people cry than to make people laugh. But I think it’s so hard to make people laugh and not to do it in a stupid way. You know, like slipping on a banana peel—although that’s not fair, because slipping on a banana peel actually takes a lot of balletic grace.”

To Rikita, who has taught English at Commonwealth since 2013, comedy can teach us just as much about the human condition as more highbrow fare, sneaking in lessons while slapping a smile on our faces. Her favorite purveyor of those lessons: William Shakespeare.

In a building full of unapologetic Shakespeare nerds, Rikita stands out, the go-to scholar when, say, the theater department needs a dramaturg for Macbeth or when students are desperate to find out how old Hamlet is. “Most people who know me know that I’m a doofus before they know I’m a Shakespeare person,” Rikita says. Still, when they do learn she’s a Shakespearean Scholar, they tend to react with solemnity and (understandable) reverence: “‘Oh, wow, Shakespeare,’ which is always a little bit sad to me,” Rikita says, because “Shakespeare is so much fun! It’s so fun.”

What makes Shakespeare’s comedies comedies, anyway? Seventeenth-century playwright Thomas Hayward would say that Elizabethan comedies begin in turbulence, with some sort of logical impasse (like a noble father saying, “You crazy kids can’t get married!”), and they end in peace (like when the noble father ultimately relents and those crazy kids do, in fact, get married). It’s not that Rikita disagrees with those definitions—they’re just too simple. If she had to define Shakespearean comedy, it would be “plays in which characters figure out how to make the world malleable, and then they change it.” Yes, people will pair off and conflicts will resolve and everything will work out, but it doesn’t happen by magic (mostly). It might, however, happen through “modal verbs,” which convey possibility; e.g., “shall,” “will,” “should,” “would,” “can,” “could,” “might,” “must.” Rikita wrote her dissertation on modal verbs and rhetoric in Shakespeare’s comedies, exploring how they capture “this thing that comedy does, which is move from the world that says, ‘You must do this’ to a world that says, ‘I can do this.’”

You can see this at the beginning of As You Like It, where Orlando has just been told that his brother wants him dead. He doesn’t know what to do and debates running away, becoming some sort of bandit making a “base and boisterous” living on the road. “This I must do, or know not what to do,” Rikita quotes (effortlessly). Then he changes his mind: “Yet this I will not do, do how I can.” “For me, that’s comedy. That’s making the world malleable,” Rikita says.

“People tend to think that comedies just sort of happen, like you go to the forest of Arden, and a comedy breaks out! And I tend to think that it’s the characters who make that happen,” she says. “[They] have to figure out ways to get around those very real obstacles at the beginning of those plays.” Through cunning or force of will, the characters in comedies control their own destinies and forge their own happy endings. “The thing I love about the comedies is that the characters are figuring out how to make those things

happen for themselves,” Rikita says. “I want them to get more credit for that.”

You’ll find similarly motivated characters in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories; Juliet, for instance, certainly tries to change the world; “she just doesn’t have enough people on her side to make it happen,” Rikita notes. Romeo and Juliet actually feels a bit like a comedy to Rikita, she says, “because they live so long in that hope. And they almost make it.”

More—and more successful—hope-filled characters “tend to cluster in the comedies,” and their combined toiling actually leads to change.

“When I’m feeling incredibly grand, I like to say that comedy is a utopian genre,” Rikita says. “Like, if you get enough people together who think that they can change the world, you can actually start changing things. And the characters in the comedies are so full of that hope and that persistence and that willingness, and sometimes they can even overcome death, you know, because they wish for it and they want it so hard.”

Comedy may be utopian, but it isn’t perfect. The obstacles often seem arbitrary, but the characters need something to fight against. “If there’s no darkness, there’s no light—she said dramatically,” Rikita quips. “Comedies are so full of these moments where whatever project is trying to happen might not happen. It might fail, because people are untrustworthy, or they do these terrible things to each other.” Characters in Shakespeare’s comedies do plenty that, to a modern audience, seems wildly out of place in a “funny” show. In Much Ado, Claudio publicly humiliates Hero. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon (himself a faithless partner) vindictively enchants his queen, Titania, so she falls in love with the first creature she sees: an ass. People will rightly say these characters don’t deserve forgiveness, Rikita says. But in the context of the Protestant theology of the time, “nobody deserves forgiveness,” she says. “You can’t earn it. You can only be given it. And so comedy, I think, does that in miniature. Forgiveness feels like such a part of comedy. And so you have to do something that needs to be forgiven for the forgiveness to be an option in the world.”

“ A joke feels like such a complicated, intricate thing with all these moving parts. It ’ d be interesting to see if I could figure out how jokes work. ” t

t

ikita’s love of comedy didn’t start with Shakespeare, and it’s not confined to the Bard.

Jane Austen has a special place in her heart, Monty Python made an early impression on her, and she remembers “the golden age of Comedy Central’s stand-up specials” in high school. Her top sub-genre? “Romantic comedy. Definitely.” She has a soft spot for It Happened One Night, When Harry Met Sally, and My Best Friend’s Wedding The constrained circumstances in these films make the most fertile ground for jokes, Rikita says. Take 2007’s Music and Lyrics, starring Hugh Grant (of course) and Drew Barrymore, playing two songwriters who need to write a hit in twenty-four hours. “If you could write a song together, you could be in a relationship together,” she says. “This makes sense. Go for it.”

Hugh Grant owes a huge debt to Shakespeare, whose proto-romantic comedies, especially As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, set the stage for the romcoms we know and love today, Rikita says. She remembers watching His Girl Friday, the 1940 screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, in one college Shakespeare class after reading Much Ado: “The rat-a-tat-tat of that dialogue was like, Oh, right. It’s the same thing as ‘I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me,’” Rikita remembers. Like Grant and Russell, Much Ado’s Beatrice and Benedick “fight in harmony. They’re using the same language, they’re picking up on each other’s signals, they understand

each other perfectly. That’s why they can fight so well—so they’re going to eventually be able to love really well, too.”

Despite her ability to thoughtfully dissect and reflect on comedies written from the seventeenth century until now, Rikita says she’s still trying to figure comedy out. “I feel like it’s still very slippery and very protean. There’s comedy that feels to me like ‘capital C comedy,’ which is about regeneration and rebirth. And then there’s ‘little c comedy,’ which is comedy that makes you laugh. And those things frequently overlap, but I don’t know that they are entirely the same thing.” Should Ted Lasso and Richard Pryor: Live in Concert and All’s Well That Ends Well be lumped together? “They feel so different to me, but we talk about them as the same thing,” Rikita says. “Are they really related or is this just a weird accident that we decided we’re going to put them in the same bucket?”

But Rikita has zeroed in on some comedy essentials. Start with vulnerability. “You have to be willing to look like a buffoon sometimes to be funny,” she says. “A joke can always go really wrong. You have to be yourself to be willing to be open to that possibility. And if you try to hedge yourself, try to wall yourself off from it, you lose a lot of the funniness.” Next, find and sharpen your rhythm. Then add some unexpected juxtapositions and pile on some pathos, and you’ve got the makings of both big and little “C” comedy.

“Okay, I’m gonna be earnest again,” Rikita says. “I think comedy can teach us about hope. [It] can teach us to laugh at the things that otherwise would overwhelm us. And that can be a really useful thing.” Even though we think of comedy as the thing that makes us laugh, “sometimes that feels like the wrong lens to me, or at least an only partially adequate lens,” she adds. “But I don’t know. Comedy is weird, man.”t

RIKITA ’ S RAPID - FIRE SHAKESPEARE

X MOST UNDERRATED PLAY: “As You Like It. People think it’s just larks and a forest. And I actually think it’s about the human condition and what it takes to be a community.”

X MOST OVERRATED PLAY: “I don’t think any of them are overrated.”

X FAVORITE FILMED PRODUCTION: “Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, because Emma Thompson is still my favorite Beatrice.”

X FAVORITE JOKE: “A joke feels like such a complicated, intricate thing with all these moving parts. It’d be interesting to see if I could figure out how jokes work. Right now my favorite Shakespeare joke is actually from Hamlet. It’s during the graveyard scene where one of the gravediggers says to the other, ‘Who was the first gentleman?’ and his answer is Adam because ‘he was the first that ever bore arms.’ It’s so dumb and I love it so much.”

Jessica Tomer is the Director of Communications at Commonwealth.

Sophia

Seitz-Shewmon ’24

From Ukraine to China to the Pleistocene Era

You will never guess what’s on Sophia’s agenda for a given day. She might be teaching Ukrainian students English literature, settling into genomics research, writing a novel in German, researching the possible musculature of the extinct mesohippus for her next sculpture, puzzling through a theoretical calculus problem set, or creating films depicting everything from tenets of Chinese philosophy to The Hobbit—with characters, sets, and sound effects she crafted herself, of course.

Getting to Know You

What is bringing you joy right now?

Many things. I love learning, and I’m engaging in a variety of projects in art, linguistics, and genetics. So I think the mixture makes me happy.

What is your favorite book (or a book you’ve re-read)?

One of my favorite books is one that has accompanied me from a young age: Die unendliche Geschichte [or The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende]. It’s all about how creativity works in the human mind and how what you think you want and what you actually want are sometimes different.

What was/is your favorite class (at Commonwealth or elsewhere)?

Wow, that is a very difficult question. I like many different subjects— for example, calculus and sciences—but if I really, really had to pick one class, I’d have to say Latin 5 with Mr. Conolly.

Spring, summer, winter, or fall?

Winter in Maine.

Life as a Commonwealth Student (and Beyond)

In the spring of 2022, you started a teaching initiative called Druzhba [“friendship”] for students in Ukraine. What did that entail?

I started off thinking about how I could help peers in Ukraine when the war there started. My mom is a Slavic language linguist and has done research there. I’ve learned a lot about Eastern Europe from her throughout my life. I thought I could really help students, not only through English tutoring but also by offering cultural contact—the friendships that arise out of a summer of learning together.

In summer I taught every weekday: Mondays were English literature, Tuesdays were math and English, Wednesdays were grammar, Thursdays were conversation lesson number one, and Friday were conversation lesson number two. Other Commonwealth students also tutored over the summer; for example, Moe (’23) taught grammar on Wednesdays, and Rihanna (’24) led conversation lessons on Thursdays. During English literature lessons in the summer, I read Pride and Prejudice with them, some New York Times articles, and a bit of Harry Potter. We chose to read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol over the holidays.

Unfortunately the war is still quite present in their part of Ukraine, and they often have problems with power outages and air raids. The students told me it’s really helpful for them to have a friend in America to talk to and share stories with—someone who cares about what is happening in that region. It’s a very valuable experience for me, and I’m really happy that it’s helping them.

How else do you spend your time outside of Commonwealth?

An important way I spend my time is internships. Last summer, one of my internships was with Genomes2People, a collaborative program that conducts empirical research about translating genomics into health. The goal is to start with a person’s genetic makeup to prescribe prophylactic treatment or early-onset care, instead of running behind the symptoms when a disease has already taken hold and is harder to treat. One project I worked on related to sequencing the genomes of newborns. I researched the medications for heritable rare diseases in pediatric patients—a lot of polygenic disorders—as well as the approved medications and those that were currently in trial. I’m very interested in genetics and biology, and G2P spoke specifically to my interest in preventative medicine. Knowing people with heritable medical conditions, I often wonder if anything could have been done for them at an earlier stage. I also got to use my artistic experience with film editing to make a video of all of the G2P trainees introducing themselves.

How do you find time for art amongst your other activities?

What does creativity look and sound like for you?

Video editing actually has really taken off for me since I started my Hobbit art a few years ago. For my first project, I recreated the scene in which Gandalf and Bilbo meet each other. I made a set and the props and the characters; then I filmed it in stop motion and put it together in Final Cut Pro. This software is really useful because it also has high-quality sound editing tools, and I voiced both of those characters and played the music. I wasn’t making it for commercial purposes; it’s just something I’m excited to share. The point was to bring Middle Earth to life, though the video editing was very useful in my G2P internship. The longest artistic project I’ve ever done is a sculpture of a Tolkien dwarf named Thorin Oakenshield; it took seven months from start to finish.

One other kind of art I make is reconstructing extinct animals, like the mesohippus, an ancient horse relative from the Oligocene epoch, and New Zealand’s giant moa. You have to do a lot of imagining. It’s fun to come up with the pattern of the fur or scales or what have you. [See page 9 for examples of Sophia’s award-winning sculptures.]

I always find time for art because it really is like medicine for my mind. While it’s difficult in the sense that you have to concentrate on what you’re doing and sculpt correctly, it’s also very calming.

What was your first impression of Commonwealth, and how has it mapped to your experience?

Commonwealth is full of curiosity and academic possibility. You can take high-level classes and explore subjects in great detail. My teachers support my thinking analytically and wanting to get to the bottom of questions. And when you leave the classroom, you take all of your knowledge with you and then can apply it to different situations in the outside world. I am officially the Commonwealth student who took classes remotely for the longest time, due to the pandemic. My advisor, Mr. Letarte, predicted that I would enjoy Commonwealth in person even more than online, which at the time I could hardly imagine. He was right, though—and I am grateful that I finally fully arrived at Commonwealth in my junior year! t

Following the Family Photography Legacy

Coming from a school with 2,600 students, Charlee ’23 was “shocked” by Commonwealth’s close-knit community when he first arrived. Now, he feels right at home at Commonwealth as a hands-on learner who’s curious about everything. That includes nature photography, which dovetails (no pun intended) with both his budding birdwatching interest and his family’s artistic legacy.

Getting to Know You

What is your favorite book?

All the Light We Cannot See [by Anthony Doerr]. It’s a very beautiful book. It’s historical fiction, set in World War II, and links all these characters and different stories together. You see the characters experience the war and how they cope with it.

What is your favorite Commonwealth class?

Ah, that’s hard; they’re all so great! I think the science classes are really cool, but over the years, I’ve fallen in love with the humanities here. I love English, and right now I’m in an amazing history class about the Bible [Bible-as-History/Bible-as-Bible, with Melissa Glenn Haber ’87]. I think Commonwealth has made me both a STEM and a humanities person.

Charlee Rivera ’23:

What never fails to make you laugh?

Quote of the Week [a long-standing student-produced email roundup of quotes heard around school]. They usually have some funny quotes that I love.

Fall, winter, spring, or summer?

Fall is the best season: the leaves are changing, it’s perfect sweater weather, it’s not too cold and not too hot. It’s just right, like the Goldilocks story of seasons!

Life as a Commonwealth Student (and Beyond)

What was your first impression of Commonwealth, and how has it mapped to your experience?

The small size definitely hit me. I first went to a high school with 2,600 kids, so Commonwealth was so different, and it took me some time to get used to, like the fact that you can run into the same people almost every period. As time went on, I liked how close you could get to everyone and your friends, and it’s nice to bump into people who maybe you don’t have class with but who you talk a lot with during lunch.

When do you most feel connected to our community?

Lunch is a great time; you can always talk and be with your friends. Oh, and I almost forgot about Hancock—man! Hancock is definitely one of those times where you feel like, “Wow, I’m part of this small group of students who all love learning and who are close and look out for each other.”

You’re an avid photographer. When did you first start, and how have you developed your art at Commonwealth?

I started photography at a young age, about eleven. I got access to some cameras, went on YouTube, and watched all the tutorials of photography basics—aperture, shutter speed, ISO—and learned some [Adobe] Lightroom editing. A lot of it was just trial and error and very hands-on. Slowly, I went from automatic into manual mode, and it gave me so much more creative liberty.

I love photography so much because I can capture what I see, like beautiful sunsets or nature around me. That was my thesis project last year: nature photography captured in an urban setting. I live in Revere, which is a city, but in the middle of the city, there’s Belle Isle Marsh, one of the last marshes of the Boston area.

The project started during the pandemic, when I wanted to see more birds; I would put my binoculars on, and I started noticing there are actually a lot of different species that I could see even in my neighborhood, not just sparrows and squirrels. I wanted to pursue that and show how you can find nature, and the beauty of the universe, in your own backyard or in a nearby park, like Belle Isle Marsh. It’s really great to capture the emotion that I’m feeling when I see a sunset or an osprey or a hawk.

You’re not the only artist in your family. Tell us about their history with art. Has their work inspired your photography?

A lot is on my dad’s side; my grandparents, some of my aunts, and my dad have this incredible style of painting. My grandfather was taught by this famous Salvadoran artist named Fernando Llort. A lot of his art is about folk traditions and the countryside—in Spanish, it’s called el campesino —and the farmers and the humble people who work so hard to make a living. It’s about capturing Salvadoran culture. There’s also a more abstract side to it that my grandfather paints, with different themes like colonialism and Mayan mythology.

My family does a lot of landscape painting, and I capture landscapes in photography. With something expansive, like a landscape, the person who’s looking at my art can see a whole scene and how many different things are there, which is also central to my family’s art.

How has Commonwealth colored your plans for the future?

I think Commonwealth has encouraged me to think about what I want in life. I love learning, and this school has made that love even stronger. So I want to always be learning, have my nose in a book, and try many different things.

What’s your advice for prospective students considering Commonwealth?

It’s okay to fail. You have to recognize that, over time, you will get better as a student, and your writing will improve. You just have to be patient. Something that has helped me in the last year is knowing that by being in the present, doing what you have to do every day, you can achieve a lot in the long term.

Anything else you’d like to add?

It’s crazy that I’m going to college soon and that I’m going to leave this incredibly amazing community that has helped me grow academically and as a person, as a student, and as a friend. I’m very grateful for what Commonwealth has done and what Commonwealth has given me.

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“ I started noticing that there are actually a lot of different species I could see even in my neighborhood. I wanted to pursue that and show [with photography] how you can find nature, and the beauty of the universe, in your own backyard or in a nearby park, like Belle Isle Marsh. It’s really great to capture the emotion that I’m feeling when I see a sunset or an osprey or a hawk.”

Juliana Li ’26: A Not-so-Shy Leader

You might be surprised by how outgoing (and “kind of loud!”) Juliana ’26 can be, she says, because she can seem a bit shy around new people. But her already long history of leadership roles pre-Commonwealth corroborates her penchant for stepping up and into the spotlight. This year, she was in her most visible position yet, as one of two representatives for the ninth grade, serving as her classmates’ voice with school administration and cultivating the leadership skills everyone needs—and everyone can have, she adds, if they only listen.

Getting to Know You

What is bringing you joy right now?

I really enjoy drawing in my sketchbook and doing digital art at home. And just relaxing and spending time with my family.

What are your favorite comfort foods?

Honestly, anything my parents make. I really enjoy this soup with dumplings and vegetables my mom makes whenever my brother and I are sick. It just makes you feel good.

When do you feel the most enjoyably challenged?

When I’m faced with a problem—whether it’s homework or pushing my boundaries in class, like trying to share my ideas or just figure out a hard math problem—and I’m able to reach out for help if I need it.

What are people most surprised to learn about you?

If you didn’t know me, I would seem more reserved, because I’m a little shy sometimes. But I’m actually kind of loud when you get to know me!

Life as a Commonwealth Student (and Beyond)

What was your first impression of Commonwealth and how has it mapped to your experience?

I think my first impression was that, well, it’s a very small school and a very tightly knit community of people and also very academically rigorous. My friends here also told me that everyone’s really nice and open to helping you with problems, and they said there’s no busy work. And it’s all been true.

What inspired you to

run for ninth-grade class rep?

Being the person other people can rely on—just being there for people—that’s a value of mine. I also really wanted to expand my knowl-

edge on how to be a good leader. I’ve had leadership positions before, and I find it really enjoyable: I was one of the captains of my volleyball team in eighth grade, I was on the admissions team at my old school, and I’m a junior mentor for Science Club for Girls (we create a place where young girls get to learn about science and, hopefully, come to love it). I was also a captain for an Outdoor Adventures team, which was a good experience because it was different from a sports team but there was still a lot of competition. I think that’s another reason why I wanted to be a student rep: leadership positions are different in their own ways, and I like trying out new things.

What does leadership mean to you?

When you’re a leader, you don’t have to control everything, but you do have to listen to what other people say and then take that into consideration. That’s how you become a good leader, but having that ability is just important in life in general. You can be a leader in the classroom or in your extracurricular activities. I think everyone is a leader in their own way.

How do you spend your time outside of Commonwealth?

I play the flute for the Berklee [City Music] high-school program. (I would take Orchestra at Commonwealth, but I’m already taking two arts [Ceramics, and Drawing and Painting].) And my ice hockey season ended recently. Timing didn’t quite work out for volleyball this year, but I plan on doing a little bit of it outside of school, not on a team. Then there’s Science Club for Girls, and I draw in my free time.

How has your Commonwealth experience colored the way you look at the world? How you plan for your future?

I’ve really enjoyed my time at Commonwealth so far. I think the people are great, and I’ve been really enjoying the work. I’m definitely stepping out of my comfort zone and learning new things, which is always exciting. I don’t think it’s changed how I think about my future, because honestly, I don’t really know what I want to do yet. But I think as I go through my time at Commonwealth, it will end up helping me decide, because there are just so many opportunities. t

A TRIBUTE TO ERIC DAVIS

IMAGES: Michael Manning Photography

There was no shortage of irreverence at the Tribute to Eric Davis held in April—just how he would’ve liked it. Alumni/ae and friends from across generations joined Eric’s wife, beloved long-serving teacher Judith Siporin P’08, and their family to share stories and remember this Commonwealth legend. Watch the event and read the speeches at commschool.org/eric Thank you to all who joined us in person and in spirit.

1. Several speakers and members of Eric’s family make their way to the reception at school following the ceremony

2. Veronica Davis and Sam Davis ’08

3. Kate Bluestein P’90, former faculty

4. Jane Litter Ruoff ’77 and Theo Davis ’90

5. Clarida Martinez ’03 and Judith Siporin

6. Former faculty Brent Whelan P’01, ’03, ’07 and Polly Chatfield with Dr. Debra Poaster P’01, ’03, ’07 (center)

7. Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 (center) with former Heads Judith Keenan and Bill Wharton P’06

CLASSES OF 1978–1984 REUNION

IMAGES: Tony Rinaldo Photography

When a few dedicated members of the Class of 1982 reached out hoping they could plan their own special reunion at school, we were all too happy to oblige.

1. David Altshuler ’82, Kent Williams ’83, and Romana Vysatova ’82

2. David Alpert ’80

3. Michael Graham and Corinna Snyder ’82

4. Lauren Moo ’84 and Ethan Forman ’84

REUNIONS FOR THE CLASSES OF 2013, 2018, AND AUGHTS

IMAGES: Eric Haynes

We will never tire of filling our building to the rafters with Commonwealth graduates, and we did just that in June, when alumni/ae from the aughts, as well as the Classes of 2018 and 2013, joined us for a trio of reunions, mixing and mingling between grades, just like they did in school.

What’s in store for next year? Visit commschool.org/ alumniae to find out!

1. English teacher Catherine Brewster, Ruth Hanna ’13, and Sophie Bucci ’13

2. Max Cohen ’04 and Julia Cavallaro ’04

3. James Sanna ’03

Derin Korman, Photography Teacher

“Idon’t think we spend enough time reflecting on how our images (re)constitute us and others,” says Derin Korman. As Commonwealth’s photography teacher, Mx. Korman brings that same thoughtfulness to every class, helping photographers of all levels sharpen their eyes and critical-thinking skills. Keep reading to get a glimpse of this multifaceted artist, community activist, and transplant from Turkey.

1. What three words best describe Commonwealth?

Engaged, supportive, “smol.”

2. What’s your #1 piece of advice for Commonwealth students? Give your thoughts the space and time to sprout. Put aside the cacophonous demands on your attention and let yourself be bored once a week. Go on a walk long enough to leave your to-dos behind like breadcrumbs, and, with your mental pockets empty, sit and stare at the sky to listen to what comes next.

3. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? “One must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of one’s being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it,” from The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir.

4. What does your ideal afternoon entail? Sitting down with a cup of tea/coffee to wrap up the earlier part of the day before heading out to enjoy a concert or a show to remind me of the world outside our bubbles.

5. If you could teach any class aside from your own, what would it be? Ethics of Images, or maybe, more simply, Graphic Design.

6. Which word or phrase do you most overuse? “Ossify.” Though I must admit that “like” has probably overtaken that race in direct correlation with my time spent with younger students.

7. When and how did you first become interested in photography? In elementary school, Wednesday afternoons had a reserved double block for electives, and when I got to third grade, the school decided to trial a photography instructor. It probably is worth noting here that consumer digital cameras were barely nascent at the time. The trial stuck, quickly turning into spending every weekend photographing and in the darkroom—and in helping teach others as early as fifth grade. Here I am, twenty-five years later.

8. What do you find is the biggest misconception about teaching? That it has to do with having vast textual knowledge of one thing, when it really is about knowledge of learning about that thing, which are largely separate Venn diagrams.

9. What is your favorite aspect of your work? Students come with a wild array of ideas, and I get to help them navigate the maze of artistic processes.

10. How do you define success in your classes?

When students have learned enough to reflect on their learning and when they let curiosity nudge them into the unknown of experiential learning.

11. Cameras on (almost) every phone on (almost) every person: net positive, negative, or neutral for humanity? Negative. I don’t think we spend enough time reflecting on how our images (re)constitute us and others.

12. What are people surprised to learn about you? That I don’t have a preferred brand of camera. Once a week a guy will ask me this and be all cross when I don’t have a spirited answer ready to go.

13. Coffee or tea? Both: black tea to start the day, coffee when I need a boost for a seven-class marathon.

14. Scripted or improvised? Scripted ten times over, so as to make space for improvisation.

15. What do you bring to a potluck? Börek (layered pastry) or Karnıyarık (stuffed eggplants), both made with lentils instead of the traditional meat/cheese fillings.

16. What is the theme song of your life? “Idioteque,” Radiohead

17. What is the best gift you have ever received? I’m a notoriously bad gift recipient.

18. What is your most treasured possession? I’m going to have to go with “nothing.” Migrating across continents a handful of times, you leave a lot behind.

19. What is your favorite mode of transportation? Boats. In Istanbul, ferries lace the two continents together, with tea served in actual glassware.

20. What is your favorite paradox? “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” —Albert Camus

ARE YOU CONNECTED?

Last year, we launched Commonwealth Connect, an online platform where you can connect with fellow alums and current students through networking, mentorships, college intel, and much more. You can help current students by volunteering as a Project Week Mentor, discover other alums in your field, and (re)connect with friends old and new.

So, what will you find when you Connect?

More than 230 (and climbing) alumni/ae, faculty, staff, and students who are eager to be in touch…

…checking in from 35 industries…

…connecting from 7 countries…

…representing 54 * Alumni/ae Classes

…including these top 5 :

1. Healthcare

2. Computer Science

3. Higher Education

4. Law

5. Research

Are you in? Scan below or visit commschool.org/connect to join your peers today.

151 Commonwealth Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02116

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See you soon, Class of 2023: from front to back, first row: Miles McLean, Ava Rahman, Grace Pariser, Naomi Baltazar, Ella McKee, Aadya Akkipeddi, Audrey Stahl, Kerem Pauwels; second row: Ted Carter, Nathan Leung, Jason Li, Rosie Wickline, Soomin Lee, Will Du, Linda He, Adara Trout, Avery Selk, David Wang; third row: Ben Wang, Parth Garg, Margaret Hines, Victor Na, Romen Der Manuelian, Jo Axel, Moe Frumkin, Elias Melcher, Alex Choi, Henry Stepanyants, Peter Luo; back row: James Wu, Ben O’Donnell, Ayla Denenberg, Kendall Brainin, Charles Brainin, Kian Park, Michael Roberson, Penny Orwant, Caroline Brown, Meredith Teague, Eliza Fried, Charlee Rivera, Daniel Martin