Commonwealth Magazine: Summer 2022

CM Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2022

NEW PERSPECTIVES IN PROBLEM SOLVING Commonwealth Community Innovations in Sustainable Energy, High-School Theater, Public Health, Filmmaking, and Beyond

WHY I MADE IT

BY KYLE ROKE ’22

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he art studio at Commonwealth contains, as any interesting location should, a wide collection of varied objects that I explored at the start of this year. There are, of course, the typical fake fruits carefully placed in a nondescript bowl; a pristine series of vases, pitchers, and other glassware; a human skeleton, maybe from a student who couldn’t keep up in their sketchbook; and a bucket full of seashells of every aesthetic imaginable. All of these were decent options for a still life, but the one object that managed to enrapture me fully was something peculiar for an art studio: a tiny, faded, yellow rubber duck whose lifeless black eyes pleaded with me to make it a regular participant in my drawing projects for the year.

I’ve always found myself drawn to rubber ducks.

Maybe it’s some instinctive response to their helpless yellow stare, maybe I had some potently traumatic incident with one particularly vicious rubber duck in my youth. What I think, though, is that I was imbued with this affinity by my grandfather, a vaguely eccentric Boston College math professor with a fixation on ducks and cattle. His legacy, then, could be effectively honored with a series of duck-focused still-life pieces.

The studio, however, only had one rubber duck, so I couldn’t just draw ducks for an entire school year.

Luckily, there were all the other, more traditional sets of still-life objects, and considering I had just gone a year without taking a drawing class, drawing some combinations of them could give me the opportunity to get back into the visual arts. Moreover, I just kind of liked the idea of contrasting classic still-life scenes with a slightly absurd rubber duck hanging out right in the middle. I wanted to take my drawings seriously,

but not too seriously, in keeping with my grandfather’s humorous but firm attitude toward his work, family, and everything else in between.

I can also attribute my love for mathematics to him. I think of myself, first and foremost, as a math student, a product of math-major parents and a series of other STEM-focused relatives. My grandfather, though, as the progenitor of the whole clan, influenced all of us, both directly and indirectly. When I was still in elementary school, he outlined a proof that the square root of two was irrational for me after I had expressed interest, something that I think catalyzed my interest in higher mathematics. Less directly, I often aspired to be able to understand the linear programming textbooks he had written.

This enjoyment of math, too, feeds back into my artistic process. A lot of the way I approach math is similar to my approach to art; fundamentally, my goal in math is to abstract away as many specific details as possible while retaining the underlying structure.

Likewise, when approaching a new art piece, my primary goal isn’t to capture every minute detail of the objects; such an approach would be patently impractical, and would also be pretty darn difficult. Instead, I try to establish the light over objects as a means of showing their physical structure, an abstraction of real objects that still retains the core shape.

Ultimately, I resigned myself to giving the duck companions, adding the objects that I had passed over at the start of the year to my series of still lives. I could appreciate them, though, as their varied forms provided a number of unique challenges for my art pieces. Across the year, I selected a bevy of shells from their bucket, rearranged plastic fruits into the perfect spots to complement each other in their bowl, set the vases up in a beautifully lit corner, and even returned to the skull of the skeleton.

To each of these scenes, I added my own lightly absurdist touch, the faded yellow duck, between the shells, on top of the largest pear, in front of the vases, and inside the skull’s left eye, abstracting the scenes and the fascinating duck in a way I hope my grandfather could have admired.

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CM

Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 22 Summer 2022

INNOVATION

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hen I arrived at Commonwealth this past summer, I asked Carrie Healy, our Director of Admissions and Financial Aid, to describe to me what we most look for in the students who apply to Commonwealth. In a vast constellation of factors, the trait we most value, she said, is curiosity. We look for the kids who stare at their spoons while eating cereal and wonder why their faces appear upside down. The students who ask, “What about infinity + 1?” The child who sees a sculpture in scrap metal. Once they arrive at Commonwealth, our students’ curiosity is piqued and nurtured every day.

In every discipline, faculty and students ask: Why? Why did Athens lose the Peloponnesian War? Why did Shakespeare choose this particular metaphor? Why are monopolies problematic? But I also hear a lot of “how does it work?” questions: How do you code for loops and streams? How do cells communicate with each other? And I also hear my favorite question: What if?

We have all been living in a more acute phase of “what if” given a global pandemic, climate change, and geopolitical upheaval. That uncertainty can be destabilizing, but it can also spur innovation. Throughout this issue, you’ll read about the spirit of innovation in our featured alumni/ae. Several used their strategic imaginations to promote sustainability; others brought empathic imagination to their efforts to heal from the pandemic’s scars. You’ll read about others whose creative habits of mind take exciting shape in film and theater.

In the pages that follow, you’ll encounter inspiring evidence of our students’ curiosity and its first cousin, creativity, as well. Their questions spurred capstone research projects and artwork in a variety of media. Our faculty provided careful guard rails to help channel that curiosity along feasible routes. They daily press our students for reasoned responses, even while posing the next question. These habits of inquiry form the bedrock of a Commonwealth education and shoot beautiful roots into the future.

Editor-in-Chief Jessica Tomer Editor Catherine Brewster Assistant Editor Claire Jeantheau Contributing Writers Jennifer Borman ’81 Catherine Brewster Claire Jeantheau Kyle Roke ’22 Jessica Tomer Lillien Waller Art and Design Matt Baker Max Cohen ’04 Reilly Grant ’05 Samuel Stuart Hollenshead Adriel Hsu-Flanders ’07 Sam Nieto Photos by Thomas Tony Rinaldo Photography LLC Jessica Tomer 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

Jennifer Borman ’81 Head of School

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CONTENTS

Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2022

Why I Made It

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A rubber duck inspires Kyle Roke ’22 to pay tribute to a relative

A Letter from the Head of School

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Innovation

News of Commonwealth

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Student accomplishments, school happenings, a special faculty tribute, Graduation 2022, and a conversation with the Director of DEI

Commonwealth Behind the Camera

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Three alumni/ae turn a lens on their time in media

The Scale of Sustainability

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Alumni/ae probe complexities of environmental change, from policy to on-the-ground (well, in-the-ground) implementation

How We Heal

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Helping clients cope with trauma, before and after the pandemic

Public Health, Head On

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Jessica François ’10 advocates for structural change in treating mental illness

Building Ephemeral Worlds

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Adventures in set design with math and physics teacher Anna Moss ’06

Making Up for Lost Time

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How our Student Life team has supported our community, particularly our youngest students, through the pandemic

Endless Points of Connection

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Seniors take on multifaceted capstone projects in ceramics, Italian literature, and animation

CWSAA

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Events and updates from the Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association

20 Questions with Jennifer Borman ’81, Head of School

On the cover: Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, owned and operated by Ørsted, where Max Cohen ’04, who snapped this shot, acts as Growth Manager

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Ms. Borman reveals her favorite museums, celebrity doppelganger (sort of), the best gift she’s received, and more

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NEWS | Of Commonwealth

Macbeth

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n March 4 and 5, 2022, the Commonwealth community gathered at the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge for a haunting production of Macbeth, directed by Susan Thompson with assistant director Shanelle Chloe Villegas. The large cast and crew represented almost one-fifth of the student body. Stirring soliloquies, fierce swordplay, and modern touches in the historical set—including piano solos incorporated mid-show by Macbeth himself, Michael Karezin ’22—brought months of students’ textual analysis and research to life for a sold-out house.

Lady Macbeth counsels Macbeth, played by Michael Karezin ’22

Dina Pfeffer ’22 as Lady Macbeth

Commonwealth Gives Back

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uring a turbulent winter, Commonwealth students rallied to do good for others. Bella Wright ’24, inspired by a Project Week collaboration with Boston Health Care for the Homeless, collected cash donations and several boxes of gloves and socks, distributing them directly to people living on the street. Anto Catanzaro ’24, responding to a need driven by the war in Ukraine, gathered donations of medical supplies for the nonprofit Sunflowers of Peace. Even with an urgent twenty-four-hour turnaround before the next supply shipment, students, faculty, and staff filled three large containers to support the relief effort.

Donations for Ukrainians collected by Anto Catanzaro ’24

Diving Into the Art of the Mural

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ver this winter and spring, a vibrant geometric mural took shape at the hands of students in Dive In, our enrichment program for Boston-area middle schoolers from underserved communities. Local illustrator and muralist Rocky Cotard led the project. After students sketched their ideas and completed pre-design tracing on the Commonwealth Mall, painting began in the Cafegymnatorium in February and finally wrapped up in March.

Model Citizens

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ommonwealth’s Model Congress team enjoyed a banner season of post-pandemic competition. Here, seniors Nadia Ali, Brandon Chen, Connor Chaplin, Thomas Fomin, Annie Jones, and Nia Suresh represent the school at the District Court at Harvard Model Congress.

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Artist Rocky Cotard (far left) guides Dive In students in mural making

Spring Musical Accomplishments

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his spring brought a bevy of awards and recognitions for Commonwealth’s musicians. Bassist Andrew Carter ’25 was accepted into the Junior Eastern All-District Music Festival of the Massachusetts Music Educators Association (MMEA), and performed at Boston’s Symphony Hall this spring. Nia Suresh ’22, an oboist, earned her fourth consecutive acceptance to the MMEA’s All-State Music Festival—a terrific capstone for her time with Commonwealth performing arts.

Meanwhile, composer and pianist Charlie Zhong ’25 was an honoree in the 2022 National Young Composers Competition with his piece “Like A Single Star in the Night Sky.” The instrumental work captures (in his words) a “transformation,” zooming outward from the heart of a star until “the shapes and motion that once existed are distorted and forgotten, leaving the star to be just one single pixel swallowed by complete darkness.” As part of the competition, Charlie’s piece was brought to life in April by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.

National Math Competition Qualifiers

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ongratulations to the following Commonwealth students, who earned entry to the American Invitational Mathematics Exam this winter as a result of their strong American Mathematics Competition performance:

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Thomas Du ’24 Will Du ’23 Linda He ’23 Michael Karezin ’22 Kyle Roke ’22 Ilaria Seidel ’22 Henry Stepanyants ’23

Finding Belonging in Affinity Groups Andrew Carter ’25

Nia Suresh ’22

Charlie Zhong ’25

Commonwealth Twitter

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ave you found us on Twitter yet? Follow @commschool for more school news, alumni/ae updates, and other happenings in the world beyond 151 Comm. Ave.

Olivia Wang ’24

Students Excel in Poetic Contests

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tudents filled the library with rhythm and lyrical sounds over back-to-back weeks during our annual Shakespeare and Poetry Out Loud Competitions.

Shakespearean performers Avery Selk ’23 and Rimas Youssef ’25 tied for third place, Margaret Hines ’23 earned second, and Michael Karezin ’22 took first with a comic portrayal of Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. He went on to perform at the English-Speaking Union’s district and state competitions, placing in the top eight students in the latter. In the following week’s competition, Olivia Wang ’24 was selected to represent Commonwealth at Poetry Out Loud’s semifinal round, where she performed “Death Be Not Proud,’’ by John Donne. Grace Pariser ’23 and Sarin Chaimattayompol ’25 were both honored as runners-up for performances that included “Heart Butte, Montana,” by M.L. Smoker and “From Blossoms,” by Li-Young Lee, respectively.

This year, we welcomed Commonwealth School’s first affinity groups. Designed to encourage interactions among people with a shared identity, each affinity group is student-initiated and set up through the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These collective efforts encourage friendship as students discover others who can relate to their experiences.

Such bonds positively impact academic resilience and achievement, as well as general health and wellness.

Sisters, our first affinity group, established by Genevieve Robinson ’24, provides a space for women and non-binary people who identify as Black, African American, or mixed race.

In addition to holding weekly gatherings, Sisters has curated book lists highlighting Black voices for Black History Month and students’ summer reading. Launching new groups like Sisters involves strategic planning, trust building, and regular follow-up.

Because there exists a delicate space between solving systemic issues and supporting marginalized communities, the founding of these student organizations is significant.

Since the creation of Sisters in January, three more affinity groups have been developed in coordination with the Office of DEI: FLI Group, initiated by Mellanie Rodriguez ’25, supports and empowers first-generation college-bound students from low-income communities. “Oy.,” kickstarted by Dina Pfeffer ’22 and Milo Kron ’22, offers an open forum for students whose religious and cultural backgrounds intersect with their Jewish identity. And, most recently, Peyson Bilimoria ’25 and Sarin Chaimattayompol ’25 created the Asian Pacific Peoples Affinity Group in honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Cultural Heritage Month in May, and Anto Catanzaro ’24 formed the Latino Affinity Group. Together, these groups will build on Commonwealth’s promise of community, helping to ensure all students feel welcomed and have places to share their experiences with others.

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FACULTY retirement

Barb

GRANT HISTORY TEACHER

If I weren’t teaching at Commonwealth,” remarked Barbara Grant in 2002, “I’d probably have a job in a rare-book library or a museum.” Instead, twenty-five years ago, she became the first trained historian on our faculty and inaugurated Medieval World History, the core course for tenth graders designed to expand Polly Chatfield’s Renaissance course beyond Europe.

Covering three continents and a thousand years, “Medieval” had no textbook—until Barb used a Hughes Grant to write one.

Barb’s roots are Canadian, but she grew up in Pittsburgh and was one of the first women to enroll at Yale College. As a junior studying abroad, she fell in love with medieval manuscripts; she went on to write a doctoral thesis on interreligious relations in the medieval world. As a teacher, she sought new knowledge no less insatiably than she did as a student.

Besides studying languages from Turkish to Hindi, she has developed courses in the history of India and Japan, modern Islamic societies, and modern East Asia.

Along the way, she taught Latin, served for years as Commonwealth’s librarian, and trusted Commonwealth with her two sons, Reilly ’05 and Alex ’09.

Barb was an irreplaceable role model in the joy she took in the life of the mind. Decades before Commonwealth’s most recent diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, she was introducing students to (in colleague Melissa Glenn Haber’s words) “culture not as the province of the élite, but as the lived experience of all who dwelt in a particular time and place.

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NEWS | Of Commonwealth

Alexander Grant ’09 and Barb Grant; photo by Reilly Grant ’05

“ From freshman fall to senior spring, she was a great advisor and person to talk to. Even when we were quarantined, I always looked forward to our advisor meetings!”

—Alex Krusell ’21 nnn “ I have so many fond memories of meeting with Barb Grant throughout my time at Commonwealth. This was over a decade ago, but I still distinctly remember the times where we’d talk about our mutual love of Psych (the TV show) or she would share her appreciation for Bollywood and typewriters. There were also plenty of serious days, where she’d give me advice about the problems I was having that week, or wisdom for the future. She’s brilliant, thoughtful, and above all, she is kind. I wish her the best for her retirement!”

—Zoe Ovans ’11 nnn

“ I think of Commonwealth as a place that was a home for not only me but also my sons.”

—Barb Grant

“ Barb was incredibly generous with her time, knowledge, and wisdom when I started teaching one section of the Medieval History course that she designed, and for which she even wrote the textbook. And beyond our collaboration in that specific class, she always impressed me with the breadth and depth of her intellectual curiosity. She can talk passionately about a contemporary Indian novel she is teaching, tapestry-making techniques in Flanders, and the Chinese art of the Sung dynasty, all in one lunch sitting. I will miss our random conversations, where we frequently found out we had a new nerdy interest in common. Apart from her intellectual brilliance, Barb was such a hardworking, meticulous planner, a thorough refutation of the stereotype that creative people are messy and absent-minded.

She modeled for generations of Commonwealth students what a real scholar and a committed educator should be.”

—César Pérez, Spanish & Medieval World History Teacher nnn “ The thing I most remember about Ms. Grant [as my advisor] was that she always started from ‘what do you need?’ She offered suggestions with an even smile and an open mind, always met me where I was and seemed genuinely interested in knowing where that was. High school had its fair share of tumult for me and she never seemed ruffled or off put by teenage misadventures like so many other adults around me. As an advisor, she made me feel like there was always a quiet sunny spot for me in her office.

Though I perhaps didn’t take as much advantage of that as I could have, knowing it was there made all the difference.”

—Sarah Stearns ’10

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Class of 2022 Colleges and Universities Barnard College Brandeis University Brown University Carleton College Duke University Harvard College Haverford College Johns Hopkins University Macalester College Massachusetts Institute of Technology Middlebury College New York University Northeastern University Northwestern University Reed College Smith College Tufts University University of California, Berkeley University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Michigan University of Oxford University of Pennsylvania Wellesley College Wesleyan University Williams College 8 CM Summer 2022

Graduation 2022

NEWS | Of Commonwealth

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or the first time since 2019, Commonwealth returned to our traditional venue, First Church in Boston, for graduation this June. Family and friends enjoyed poignant and wonderfully weird remarks from senior speakers Ilaria Seidel ’22 and Thomas Fomin ’22, as well as a transcendent performance from soprano Dina Pfeffer ’22 and oboist Nia Suresh ’22, before spilling into the courtyard for joy-filled photos.

PREVIOUS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Sophia Ying ’22; Miles Kodama ’22, Alex Li ’22, Raphael Yamamoto ’22, Ryan Phan ’22; Ilaria Seidel ’22; Commonwealth Chorus performing at First Church; Ahmed Ali, Nadia Ali ’22, Wudade Mohammed; Catherine Brewster, Elizabeth Aureden, Hannah Jenkins ’22, Sylvia Jenkins, Greg Jenkins, César Pérez; Dina Pfeffer ’22, Nia Suresh ’22; Rebecca Jackman; Annie Jones ’22, Molly Jones ’19 THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Kyle Roke ’22, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81; Thomas Fomin ’22; Brandon Chen ’22, Jennifer Borman; Daria Plotz ’22; Connor Chaplin ’22, Henry Bresnahan ’22, Nadia Ali ’22, Muhammad Abdur-Rahman ’22; Barbara Post ’71, Polly Chatfield P’71, ’79; members of the Class of 2022 jumping for joy—as they should!

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SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS 2022 Through burnished metallic prints, delicate clay creatures, haunting narratives, vintage-inspired photos, and poems designed to rattle a worldview, Commonwealth students capture their surroundings in endlessly creative ways. This year, they captured thirty Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, too.

A small selection of winning writing excerpts and visual art pieces can be found on these pages.

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“SHATTERED,” ELLA MCKEE ’23

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“The spiderwebs of cracks in his wall broke, and he shattered. His walls—constructed of foolish hopes and childish dreams that the world is fixable, the world isn’t that bad, everything will be okay—broke into pieces....

He never should have built the walls in the first place. He should’ve just gotten used to drowning.”

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“THINGS UNSAID,” SOOMIN LEE ’23 “We look at each other for a few moments. I search for anything that will break the silence, signaling the anticipation of some sort of substance. Some flow of conversation. A revelation of something unsaid in a manner of chatter that seems foreign to me, and even more foreign to my father. For what is there to say, really?”

NEWS | Of Commonwealth

“MOST FORGOTTEN,” AVERY SELK ’23

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“No one taught her to stitch up a wound.

A task ten times harder than holding a blade, and with a tool that was a thousand times smaller. No one told her that healing could hurt.”

Gold Key Romen Der Manuelian ’23, “Fences and Nature,” Photography 12 Parth Garg ’23, “Columbus & Dartmouth,” Photography 3 Dina Pfeffer ’22, “A Strange Pastime 1 & 2,” Sculpture 8 Charlee Rivera ’23, “Hancock Lake View,” Photography 11 n

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Silver Key Ben O’Donnell ’23, “ My New Sister,” Photography 2 Dava Sitkoff ’24, “Burnished Memory,” Photography 9 Ben Summey ’24, “Goddess Hidden in the Garden,” Photography 6 Olivia Wang ’24, “Remaking,” Drawing & Illustration n

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Honorable Mention Muhammad Abdur-Rahman ’22, “Reflection,” Photography 10 Michael Karezin ’22, “riflessione,” Photography Kian Park ’23, “Moratorium,” Drawing 5 Ziv Rome-Blech ’24, “Gold Leaf Print of Gettysburg,” Photography 4 Dava Sitkoff ’24, “Retrograded,” Photography 7 Kai Tjia ’22, “Cats in Blues,” Ceramics 1 Bonnie Wang ’25, “Untitled,” Drawing & Illustration* Olivia Wang ’24, “Delirium,” Photography * Individual student entry submitted outside of school n

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WRITING Gold Key Ava Rahman ’23, “Stephen’s Room,” Short Story Avery Selk ’23, “Most Forgotten,” Short Story n

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“NEWSPAPERS,” GRACE PARISER ’23 “You’ve always wanted to write a poem about the way steam rises from sewer grates.

The alliteration sounded romantic, the soft slip of the s, the stubby sentence, but you thought it witless.

That is, until today.”

11 “STEPHEN’S ROOM,” AVA RAHMAN ’23 “She imagined his limbs melting, his body swaying, his arm sweeping languid arcs across the strings, his eyes bright. When the sound grew, he would be possessed by the frenetic frenzy of a madman, the bow clenched in his fist. The song held a key of emotion, what was it? An immense sadness hung on each note, dragging them into wails of agitation.”

Silver Key Soomin Lee ’23, “Reckonings,” Flash Fiction Grace Pariser ’23, “Newspapers,” Poetry Dina Pfeffer ’22, “Long Island Clementines,” Poetry Eve Shapiro ’24, “Even Our Heads Alike,” Personal Essay & Memoir n

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Honorable Mention Alex Choi ’23, “Grief in Three Colors,” Short Story Soomin Lee ’23, “Things Unsaid,” Short Story Ella McKee ’23, “Shattered,” Science Fiction & Fantasy Bianca Mints ’25, “One Step at a Time: Herd Immunity,” Journalism Grace Pariser ’23, “Elephants,” “Trestles,” “On Something I Miss,” “I Watch Piping Plovers and Think of Saul as He Wept for David,” Poetry Dina Pfeffer ’22, “Another Walk,” Poetry Tien Phan ’24, “Case of the Licks,” Humor Dava Sitkoff ’24, “And Now the Stars Were, Too,” Science Fiction & Fantasy n

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

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DIVE IN

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE HEAD

Lisa Palmero McGrath Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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NEWS | Of Commonwealth Lisa (left) with Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81

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t has been a year of transition for Jennifer Borman ’81 and Lisa Palmero McGrath, to put it mildly. A quick recap: Both women joined Commonwealth’s staff in the summer of 2021. Lisa comes by way of Connecticut, with nineteen years of independent-school experience and a uniquely international childhood, growing up in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, behind her. Jennifer is Commonwealth’s first alumna Head of School after leading a school in Rhode Island for fourteen years and working at Brown University for a decade.

Though they meet regularly, Jennifer and Lisa welcomed the opportunity to step back and reflect on a first year spent “trying to get a sense of all the people and traditions and strengths and needs,” Jennifer says. Their shared work in furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion at Commonwealth requires a deep commitment to relationship building (bordering on coalition building), high-level awareness of socioeconomic and demographic trends, and granular familiarity with our community—as they note in the conversation that follows.

You both recently celebrated your first Commonwealth Diversity Day; what was that experience like?

Jennifer Borman: I loved it. I thought the most exciting parts of the day were the sessions students facilitated—I wish I could have gone to all of them. The ones I did attend, like “The Beauty of Islam & Arab Culture,” were so thoughtful and celebratory. I also went to “Your Roots & Commonwealth,” where students asked each other to reflect on their journey from different schools, different communities. It was incredibly moving to see the kids open up with each other.

Students from all kinds of backgrounds talked about feeling intimidated and unsure of themselves here at times, but they also talked about how much they appreciated the support of not only their teachers and advisors but classmates.

Lisa Palmero McGrath: The students were the stars of Diversity Day, and they all really celebrated their peers leading presentations. When I think about standout moments from this year, I think about debriefing with one of the students who presented on Arab culture: she brought in oud [a sacred incense in Islamic countries], and that scent is everywhere in Saudi. It just immediately brought me back. When I told her, we started laughing and talking about home.

Every day is full of moments like that—of things to take in and figure out and absorb. And that’s been really fun.

So often when we talk about DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], we talk about numbers and stats and new words that people can use to describe who they are, how they are, where they are. And, yes, those are a big part of the work.

But it all comes down to relationships.

Why the emphasis on relationship building?

LPM: I’ll tell you a story about my son, Andrew, who’s three, as an example! He did not want to share this toy with his four-year-old cousin, Poppy—so many toys and of course they both want the same toy pot! When we were talking about it later, I said to him, “Can you imagine how different this world would be if countries and neighborhoods shared all their resources?

But you have to start here at home with your cousin!” As it turns out, my sister was listening in the other room, and she started laughing. She goes, “Really, Lisa? Even at home? Even with your three-year-old?” Yeah! Because social justice boils down to relationships and community.

This is why I appreciated our Diversity Day keynote speaker [Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler] and her research on conflict resolution. When you discover and agree on what’s causing conflict in a community, you can try different ways of solving it together. But that takes trust and relationship building. And relationship building is not necessarily about liking each other—although that’s definitely important. It’s about figuring out what respect looks like and how we talk about what we believe.

We will always have a new incoming class, we will always have faculty and staff who are new to our community, and there will always be new ways to help welcome them and help them find their way at Commonwealth.

Can you tell us more about other DEI developments this year?

LPM: I think the affinity group work has been quite profound this year, starting with Sisters [for women and non-binary people who identify as Black, African American, and mixed race], then FLI [first-generation independent-school students from low-income communities], Oy. [for Jewish American and American Jew students who want to talk about spirituality, tradition, and culture], and most recently Asian American and Latinx affinity groups. They are all student driven.

I’ve started affinity groups before, and there are so many unhealthy and painful ways a community can react to them, but that has not been the experience at Commonwealth. It says 13

“ R elationship building is not necessarily about liking each other— although that’s definitely important. It’s about figuring out what respect looks like and how we talk about what we believe.” a lot about our school and about the students who started these groups: It takes courage to make yourself vulnerable and say, “I want to have the space.” And it takes trusting a community to know other students will honor that space and not question why it exists.

JB: It’s part of what Lisa says about building relationships: it’s very hard to move an organization or a school towards change without people wanting to grow in the same direction, and they’re not willing to do that if there’s not trust, credibility, mutual respect, and dialogue. I have been in school leadership long enough to know that you need to plan change carefully and strategically. So it’s been important for me to take the time to understand the Commonwealth of today—what we’re doing well and can build on, and what are the barriers to change. That comes from getting to know people: our students, colleagues, families, alumni/ae, trustees.

But I, too, experience a sense of urgency. Right now [in the midst of hiring], we are aggressively and proactively conducting outreach to make sure all open positions are known to the widest possible spectrum of applicants. But we are still asking ourselves: How can we make our hiring processes more equitable and inclusive? Beyond hiring, how can we continue to build on the success of Dive In and make it even more robust? How can we continue to get to know community organizations that would be good partners in helping us find kids who might want to come to Commonwealth? So on the one hand, we’re taking our time. On the other hand, we’re not just being passive anthropologists.

How might you build on this momentum next year?

JB: I would like us to continue to acknowledge and embrace the diversity we currently have in our community and to learn from the wonderful range of human experience, family background, and identity in our building. And I would like us to continue to ask ourselves: How do we enroll more low-income students? More Black, Asian, Latinx students?

More students who come out of urban public schools who have not had opportunities that many of our students have had? And how do we make sure that this is an academically, culturally, and emotionally welcoming place for them and their families? I think we have progress to make on that front.

Our faculty have been doing meaningful introspection and planning around curriculum and pedagogy, asking in what ways does their discipline speak to different histories, different geographies, different experiences. What do our students need in 2022? How does our curriculum need to adapt and respond to the ways that knowledge is changing and

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the ways the world and Boston itself are changing? That introspection and that planning has been really fruitful, and I hope to continue to create the conditions where it’s part of our ongoing work together.

What are you most looking forward to next year?

LPM: I’m looking forward to familiarity and getting to know people without masks—just being with people in person.

JB: I am with you! Transitioning into a new school in a pandemic has been tricky. Gatherings have been so constrained, and it’s been harder to meet people. But it feels hopeful now, seeing more of our full faces. And I have found this community very welcoming.

LPM: And I’m looking forward to getting to know Boston better. We haven’t even been to the Science Museum or the Children’s Museum yet. I’ve always liked Boston, but I fell in love with it, actually, because of the way the city reacted to the tragedy of the Marathon bombings [in 2013]. I was just wowed by Boston’s resilience and the way everybody banded together.

JB: We continue to need that resilience. When I was a student here, Mr. Merrill [Commonwealth’s founder and first Headmaster] talked a lot about suffering as a part of the human condition. I do think that life will be inevitably difficult at various moments, and we can grow in our ability to cope and in our knowledge of our own growing strength. I wouldn’t say that’s a silver lining to the pandemic—I wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone, especially young people—but I do hope they can take stock of the ways they’ve risen to the challenge.

What, if any, are the silver linings? Is there anything you’d keep from pandemic-era learning?

LPM: Even though I’d prefer to meet in person, I would keep Zoom, because it’s connected me with people I otherwise would never have met.

And like you were saying, Jennifer, the past few years have forced us to grow. I was pushed out of my own comfort zone, both personally and professionally.

JB: Lately I’ve been thinking about how the pandemic is a shared experience. I’m not saying we all experienced the pandemic in the same way. There certainly were huge differences—if you or a loved one were immunocompromised or you lost your job or you had little kids at home or a host of other factors. But I can’t think of anything in my lifetime that we were all collectively a part of, not just in this city or in this country, but all over the world. And I keep thinking there’s something to harvest from that.

LPM: I have to say, I can’t imagine having gone through this transition with any other Head of School. You allow space for there to be questions, to be brave. When I talk about being pushed outside my comfort zones and trying new things, I could do that knowing that you’re behind me as a leader.

JB: Right back at you, Lisa. One of the many attractors for me, coming back to Commonwealth, was the school’s commitment to hiring a senior diversity director and saying, we need this expertise, we need this dedicated energy. It’s not just your work, Lisa. It’s everybody’s work. But it’s really important to have somebody who will help us grow in the directions we want to. The willingness is certainly there. I think this is a place people want to live up to. t

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BY LILLIEN WALLER

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t has never been easier to go “behind the scenes” of our favorite movies and TV programs. But so much of what we believe about life behind the camera diverges from the reality. What’s more, the Commonwealth alumni/ae profiled on the following pages—a director of episodic TV, an independent filmmaker, and a documentary film producer—remind us that “the film and television industry” isn’t the only vehicle through which directors, producers, and writers disseminate content. The game is changing. And so,

slowly but surely, are the players: current technologies offer a broad choice of platforms while an increasing emphasis on inclusion in the industry makes it possible for marginalized voices to begin to have their say.

How did these alumni/ae make their way into a notoriously difficult business while cultivating their own voices? And what does it take to make and sustain this kind of creative work? Director Jesse Peretz ’86 considers the differences between directing feature films and working in the “writer’s medium” of episodic television. Filmmaker Myra Paci ’83 demonstrates that independent filmmaking is about not only what you see but also what you don’t, and gives us a glimpse into the personal challenges that often accompanied her professional accomplishments. And Emmy-winning producer Mikaela Beardsley ’87 shows that research and collaboration can make documentaries deeply satisfying work, but the art of telling true stories still faces its own unique challenges.

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real priority, as people of color, LGBTQ communities, and others are finding greater representation in front of, and behind, the camera. Still, a lot depends on not only providing access to opportunities but also cultivating talent early.

“I think that while it’s important to give voice to a more diverse set of writers and filmmakers, it’s much more important to start looking at entry-level jobs and really making an effort to diversify there. It’s so crucial to give people the opportunities to learn the craft,” Jesse says.

“Things are moving in a fantastic direction, and inclusivity is something we need to keep prioritizing. Besides being the right thing to do—in terms of having a more inclusive industry—it’s just so much more exciting in terms of the kind of stories that audiences can experience.”

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esse Peretz is in a good place. Three weeks after he spoke with CM, Jesse was set to begin production on the first of two episodes he is both directing and executive producing for the upcoming Apple TV+ drama City on Fire. The show is one of a number of projects in recent years that he has helped bring to life—including episodes of The Shrink Next Door, also for Apple TV+; Amazon’s As We See It; HBO’s Girls; Nurse Jackie for Showtime; and comedy-drama series GLOW and Orange is the New Black for Netflix.

We’ve all witnessed television, with its many genres, styles, and platforms, explode over the last twenty years, forever changing what we watch and when, the devices we use, and—with particular thanks to pandemic lockdowns—how much we consume. But the quality and range of the storytelling has also deepened.

Episodic television, Jesse will tell you, is more writer-driven than feature filmmaking. City on Fire, created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, requires the typical tasks of hiring a crew, casting roles, and scouting locations. The difference is collaboration. “We’re making all the creative decisions together, but...it’s really their vision that I’m trying to execute. But I’ve been hired because they like my ideas about how to execute,” Jesse says. “It’s a process of a director and showrunners working together in harmony but with a director understanding that the showrunner has the final say. With features, it really is a director’s medium.”

Before he started in television, Jesse directed several feature films, beginning with First Love, Last Rites (1997) and, most recently, Juliet, Naked (2018). Before that, he spent years directing music videos, his entrée into the business, “waiting to catch a break.” Jesse had previously played bass guitar for alternative rock band The Lemonheads, which he cofounded while still a student at Commonwealth. Even then, he recalls, he knew he wanted to direct. “I was late getting into TV, but once I got it, once I started doing television, I just loved it,” Jesse says.

“TV has gotten great in the last decade or so. Luckily, I’m mostly directing pilots where I’m part of setting up the show from the beginning. I’m really enjoying how much I have become a creative partner with some incredible showrunners of each of the projects. I’m happy with what my career is built on these days and the fun material I get to work on.”

Part and parcel of having such a broad canvas to work on is understanding that, as his possibilities have expanded, so have those of the industry. Inclusion now seems to be less of a buzzword and more of a

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here’s a moment in Adventures in Peterland: A Mystery of Art and Love, Myra Paci’s latest film, in which she holds photo transparencies of breast-cancer cells up to the light, noting that, despite the disease’s ugliness, the distorted red and purple forms nevertheless contain an accidental beauty. The transparencies were taken by her late father, Italian pathologist Piero Paci, who was a good friend of British pathologist and art collector Peter Bullough—the film’s subject and Myra’s “artistic mentor, queer uncle, and heartthrob since childhood.” The scene is poignant, as it references Myra’s own experience surviving breast cancer in her mid-thirties and points toward the film’s themes of loss and the nature of love, betrayal and the constancy of art.

Adventures in Peterland is an experience that lands somewhere within traditional documentary, memoir, and expressionist painting It’s an apt example of Myra’s formal experimentation and a more evolved version of the DIY aesthetic of American indie moviemaking that emerged during the 1990s, when she got her start. It’s also a moving document of disappearance. “The day I graduated from Yale in May of 1988, [my father] felt really sick. And it turned out he had pancreatic cancer,” Myra recalls. “So, in the summer of ’88, I stayed on in New Haven, working at a café and visiting my father and my mother while he was getting treatment. I bought a video camera—it was VHS at that time—and I started videotaping him. I was also videotaping an unhoused former nuclear physics student who had been a customer of mine at the café. I just started making stuff on my own.

And I think my tendency was always pretty experimental.”

BEHIND THE CAMERA

M B e a rd s l e y

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n a world that wanted MTV, Mikaela Beardsley chose public television. She recalls getting her first internship at WGBH a year after graduating from Princeton. “I had a friend from college who was working at WGBH in radio, and she tried to get me an internship there but there was nothing available. But she had a friend who worked in documentaries, and I interned on his project, which was a series on women scientists. The producer just wanted someone to explain the science to her. I pulled out a chemistry textbook, and I went to MIT and talked to people. I thought, ‘This is a job?’” she says. “The revelation was that there’s a job to be had where you get paid to learn. That was the hook for me, and it continues to be the hook for me.”

Mikaela says she has told this story, often to young people, emphasizing the lightbulb moment she had discovering work that suited her interests and her personality. Her story also illustrates the hard work and hustle involved with telling true stories for a living. Western audiences have an almost insatiable appetite for true stories, particularly true crime, and major film studios—whether they are responding to a need or creating it—are more than happy to feed them.

But when Mikaela talks about documentary filmmaking, she is pointing to fact-based truth that asks tough questions on a range of topics that reveal who we have been and who we might become.

Mikaela develops her own projects and produces projects for others.

A twice-nominated Emmy-winner, she has produced more than a dozen nationally broadcast films by directors such as Martin Scorsese, Alex Gibney, and Wim Wenders, among others. She originated and executive produced Half the Sky Movement, a global media project aimed at improving opportunity for women and girls in the developing world and based on the bestselling book by journalist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. She also produced Reporter (2009), which followed Kristof’s work in the Democratic Republic of Congo and played at the Commonwealth School Film Festival. She is currently a producer on a film about climate-change negotiations and another on restorative justice, and is developing a project about local government.

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That tendency continued into graduate school at NYU. Myra’s second-year film, the nineteen-minute Transeltown (1992), attracted the attention of director and performance artist Miranda July, who picked it up for her alternative distribution project for women filmmakers, Joanie 4 Jackie, and recommended it to the Criterion Collection, which now distributes it. Myra’s M.F.A. thesis film, the twenty-nine-minute XXXtasy: Two Days in the Life of a Saint (1992), garnered significant critical attention that would open the door to the world of advertising and production—work she continues today as a principal of SLAP Agency.

Myra’s writing and films have received widespread critical praise, starting with her debut feature. Searching for Paradise (2001) was developed at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting and Directing Labs but failed to get picked up by the Sundance Festival—which she calls “the kiss of death…I thought I was headed for the big time.” Nevertheless, the film had a strong festival run and was distributed on the Sundance Channel, Showtime, and Netflix.

“Losing my father when I was fairly young and then having breast cancer,” she explains, “I think I always knew that in a contest of career over life, I was going to choose life and self-expression and not compromise. I’ve continued to make films. But I call all the shots.” It’s the story of independent filmmaking that we recognize because she and her peers showed it to us. Indie film influenced a generation of filmmakers, artists, and writers, and even now we feel nostalgic for it, from the return of the auteur and way-out-of-no-way budgets to the guerilla production tactics.

Myra knows what it takes to do this kind of work and make something beautiful that still may not find its audience—and she encourages young filmmakers not to give up or be swayed by the obstacles. Because of “technology, access to technology, and consciousness-raising,” at no other time has it been easier to make films independently—though that doesn’t make it easy. But it is, she points out, the next generation’s turn.

“I feel like I’ve had my turn to say my things, and it’s not going to stop me from making my own work,” Myra says. “But there are younger people and women and people of color and trans people who need to get the funding and the space and the place. We shot on 16mm and 35mm. It was really expensive to make movies back then. I don’t care what you shoot your film on—you can shoot it on your smartphone—it doesn’t matter. It’s really about the storytelling.”

“There are more audiences, for sure. I think people are making things that feel less like a textbook come to life and more like a narrative experience. It remains a really good way to learn important things about a topic in a short time. It’s a lot less of a time investment than reading a book. But documentary has always been hard, always been a small bullseye.” By “hard” she means everything from securing access to the film characters to finding financing and distribution to wrangling over content with the institutions that support documentaries—something with which even filmmakers who make studio films have to contend.

Documentaries, however, are more collaborative. “[Documentary filmmaking] tends to be non-hierarchical,” she says.

“The bigger the production, the more money there is for different people to perform different functions, and the more hierarchical things become because you manage all of those resources. When you have fewer resources and fewer people, everybody just does what needs to get done.” 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.

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The Scale of

S

Sustainability

BY CATHERINE BREWSTER

ince 2007, my Reasons for Writing course for seniors has included weeks’ worth of reading on climate science. A sabbatical poking around in the field—a giant Project Week, in effect—strengthened my determination to use that material as a way to say to my students: “The world really is as complicated as we’re always telling you it is.” These alumni/ae career journeys all include some version of this affirmation, as they work to further “sustainability” in all its critical, thorny, fascinating incarnations.

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Cover crop termination field; image courtesy of Adriel Hsu-Flanders ’07

Five Paths

Max Cohen ’04 remembers (as do I) following the long tale of the ultimately doomed Cape Wind project while he was at Commonwealth. Though he says he didn’t consider himself “a particularly sciency person” then, he was curious about both the technology and the opposition to it. Now he works for Ørsted, the Danish company that owns and operates the first offshore wind farm (Block Island) in the U.S., acquiring new leases for wind projects. “States have decided this makes sense; it’s happening,” he says, and offers an analogy for Cape Wind: “It was like Moses. It had to die before the Hebrews could get to Canaan.”

Emmanuelle Humblet ’00 used her degrees in environmental studies and environmental policy as a consultant to airports and universities on sustainability. Seven years ago, wanting more of a hand in such efforts “from the inside,” she landed at Apple, where she now assesses the tech juggernaut’s progress toward its own sustainability goals. One thing she likes about the job, she says, is that she’s continually learning, due to the broad scope of Apple’s environmental efforts—from green chemistry to renewable energy sourcing to the dynamics of recycled material supply chains.

Contaminants like those have been one major driver for Danya (Machnes) McLamb ’02 since the aftermath of a major oil spill in 2010 that shook the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) world. With her career just getting started, she suddenly found herself “advising teams on how to set up plastics-free experiments in the field.” With degrees in chemistry and environmental health, she got a crash course through her work with Industrial Economics, Inc., in how many constituencies were involved just in “doing the science on the results of an oil spill that everybody agrees happened.” Since then, she’s been encouraged that policymakers now have to consider public health as well as economics when they regulate industry yet disheartened by how many laws still “protect capitalism, not health.”

Plant geneticist Joanna Rifkin ’05 is “not a big fan of the current global capitalist system.” They’re accordingly wry about their job in Toronto researching and developing “green walls,” the verdant vertical structures increasingly common in corporate lobbies and malls. Less low-maintenance than they look, the alluring walls come with “a lot of really bizarre and

terrible engineering challenges that people don’t think of.” Mold, for instance, can run rampant and undo the improvements to indoor air quality. But Joanna is working on engineering pothos (Epipremnum aureum, the same tough little plant beloved of Commonwealth Mandarin teacher Rui Shu, profiled in our last issue) that can remove not only CO2 but also volatile organic compounds like chloroform, benzene, and formaldehyde—say, from the air factory workers breathe. Though green walls are “not going to save the world,” says Joanna, the same technology holds promise for vertical indoor farming, “maybe instead of shipping all our salad from California.”

Even before he found himself reading Michael Pollan in my Reasons for Writing course as a senior, Adriel Hsu-Flanders ’07 knew a lot about where salad comes from: “Food was the way I ended up where I am,” he says. Studying anthropology at Reed College led to immersion in Portland’s local-food movement and jobs there and at Siena Farms back in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Like Joanna, he issues a disclaimer about his current job: “I’m not working directly in food justice.” It was, though, a desire for greater impact that led him to Tufts, earning a master’s degree exploring the intersection of agriculture, the food business, and the environment, and then to Indigo Agriculture, where he works with farmers on practices with measurable impact on carbon emissions—carbon credits Indigo can sell on their behalf. Along the way, his expertise and network have expanded from small organic farmers and James Beard award winners to data scientists and growers of commodity crops—“very smart businesspeople” whose actions affect carbon sequestration whether they’re motivated by climate concerns or not.

These Commonwealth graduates share a seriousness of purpose, a vast array of interests, and a healthy sense of irony. Their eyes are wide open as they find their places in a world full of enormous questions: in Danya’s words, “What are our values? Are we going to move to Mars or make it work here?” Emmanuelle observes that corporate challenges often include reducing emissions while increasing sales; she thinks back to Patagonia’s “Don’t buy this jacket; don’t buy what you don’t need” ad campaign in 2011.

“Encouraging customers to purchase fewer products is a laudable approach to sustainability [but] I think it’s unlikely to succeed. An even more impactful approach is demonstrating that it’s possible to reduce emissions while also selling products.”

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Adriel Hsu-Flanders ’07

Complexity

Danya (Machnes) McLamb ’02, with Evi (left) and Benji

Commonwealth may not have been the only incubator for all of these alum careers, but most of them talk about our science curriculum in shaping their path. For Danya, “it all started with Annalee” Salcedo’s chemistry classes, “the first time in my life where I was experiencing what I sort of considered to be my thing.” Emmanuelle’s memories of Commonwealth are dominated by physics teacher Farhad Riahi, late nights studying for biology exams, and being constantly challenged to think critically. Max wrote a Chemistry paper on different power sources for cars, which Rebecca Jackman deemed a B+; years later, reviewing “the grown-up version of that paper, a big report on alternative fuels for buses,” he found himself thinking, “This is kind of a B+ paper. It should have gone into more detail.”

For Max and others, it was sometimes harder in the world outside Commonwealth to know how much detail and rigor were expected. In his first job, Max’s boss chastised him for doing a regression analysis rather than a bar chart (“No one has time for that”). Danya describes simplifying presentations that she knew would be given to clients with less technical background, taking out certain supplementary statistical analysis in anticipation of questions about why a single answer can’t be pinpointed. On the other hand, for Adriel the legitimacy of carbon credits depends on deep dives into numbers: Indigo’s are based not only on models but on soil sampling that’s extensive enough to validate the models’ calculations on how much carbon is stored, with both the cost of sampling and the remaining uncertainty priced into the credits.

Max traces his respect for keeping sight of “the forest and the trees”—essential for forecasting wind capacity for decades ahead—to his history and English as well as STEM courses at Commonwealth.

In his consulting days, he came to realize that “people can be so smart and so good at what they do, but they do get siloed, and the big-picture guy is a job and a skill that requires its own expertise.” Joanna, who double majored in classics and biology at Amherst, compares the genetic puzzle solving they love to both chemistry and Latin. Moreover, “being exposed to so much Latin and Greek so early” impressed on them that even people who lived so long ago “were just people,” and a sense of the vagaries of history informs their thinking about plants.

You can denounce agriculture’s Green Revolution of the 1960s, Joanna points out, only if you don’t remember the fears of global famine at the time. Now, because “a lot of rapacious corporate practices” have given

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Joanna Rifkin ’05

transgenic, aka genetically modified, plants a bad name among people who believe in small-scale organic farming, it’s harder to convey why we shouldn’t close the door to the engineering of crops like salt-tolerant rice. “It would be great if we could grow all our produce on small organic farms, but…”

Scale The question Joanna points to has come up in some form for all five graduates: how big is big enough? Sometimes, big industries, as Adriel puts it, “can move the needle faster” than governments can, and after several years of “selling produce mostly to rich white families and the fanciest restaurants in Boston,” he now sees “the shift coming as agriculture companies acknowledge and internalize currently externalized costs (their carbon footprints), thus driving the price of credits up.” For Max, offshore wind’s numbers are compelling because while it’s more expensive and involves more stakeholders than solar, a project once it’s built can make a big dent in emissions all at once, rather than one rooftop at a time. President Biden’s goal for offshore wind power generation is 30 gigawatts by 2030, which, says Max, “is ultimately up to the states, but that’s around what’s being planned now.” Adjusted for the variability of wind, that’s enough to power 13 million homes.

Joanna majored in biology (despite, they says, struggling with it as a ninth grader at Commonwealth) partly because they had “always been interested in how evolution works.” That seems no less true of Danya, Max, Adriel, and Emmanuelle: Adriel’s work also involves research into alternatives to traditional row agriculture—cover crops and other regenerative practices he knows from his career with small producers.

Max is used to the idea that the wind projects he’s working on now won’t be built until the 2030s. Emmanuelle appreciates the way she now has to spend less time convincing people to care about sustainability than she once did: “Now the conversation is more about how to make a difference.” Both she and Danya talk about how “figuring out why something didn’t work” can be just as interesting as reporting on successes. None are naïve about the challenges of the coming decades of life on Earth, but all seem sure to find them interesting. t Catherine Brewster is an English teacher and twenty-one-year veteran of Commonwealth School.

How We

Heal

BY LILLIEN WALLER

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ow in its third year, the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to mental health crises worldwide—an astounding 25% increase in the global prevalence of depression and anxiety in the first year alone, according to the World Health Organization (March 2022). But when we say pandemic, we inevitably signal a number of crises that parallel, and have been intensified by, this unprecedented public health emergency. Cries of “getting back to normal” often fail to fully articulate the histories and lived experiences of people of color, people within the LGBTQ+ communities, the very poor, and those already living with, or at risk for, mental-health challenges.

CM spoke with three alumni/ae who work in mental health and adjacent spaces to talk about their various practices in psychotherapy, nutrition, and clinical social work. If a common theme emerges, it is that we cannot examine the pandemic and its effects on American life without acknowledging both contemporary and historical contexts, the client and the practitioner, the individual and the collective. Seeking to heal the one, we must consider the many.

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Justice Forward

Anastasia Taketomo Fujii ’02

“I

want a world where every person can exist, empowered in their wholeness. And that can look like a lot of different things: to be able to live free from fear of harm or persecution; to be seen, heard, and felt—holistically respected and equitably valued,” says Anastasia Taketomo Fujii ’02, psychotherapist in private practice and Co-Director of the Kintsugi Therapist Collective (KTC).

Anastasia’s vision for liberation informs their work as a licensed psychotherapist, which began more than a decade ago after doing criminal justice and reproductive justice work with the ACLU and Legal Aid in New York City. They founded KTC with longtime friend and colleague Asher Pandjiris in November 2021 during what should have been, but wasn’t, the final months of the pandemic.

But Anastasia realized their connection to psychotherapy while still a student at Commonwealth, a personal need they described as a need “to be seen in my wholeness”—to find care and support that could help them understand, navigate, and deepen their identity as a queer person of color living with a chronic illness.

By the time they entered college, Anastasia was seeking a career that would enable them to be a resource for people within these various communities. It was a realization that would not only lead to their profession as a psychotherapist but also lay an early foundation for KTC, a virtual community of therapists that offers “embodied and liberatory visions of care and resources” to trans and non-binary, BIPOC, chronically ill, and disabled mental-health providers.

KTC exists to address an ongoing problem in clinical environments: that therapists often lack the critical resources and support they need to be well and sustain themselves as care providers. Many current models of therapy rely on a false dichotomy of the so-called well practitioner who bestows guidance on the sick patient. “So many people are called to do this work,” Anastasia notes, “because of our own experiences of trauma, our own experiences of oppression, of grief, and of loss.”

The collective seeks to create a model of therapy that is queer- and trans-affirming, anti-racism-aligned, and disability justice–forward—and, most of all, a model that is radically relational in its ability to center the well-being and wholeness of both client and clinician. “Many of us [care providers] are now confronted by the need to include ourselves in the equity equation—thinking about capacity limits, realistic expectations, achievable goals, and necessary support and affirmation during a time that is so devastating.”

That devastating time, of course, refers to two years (and counting) of COVID. The pandemic is an ongoing traumatic event that all of us experience but that, for queer and trans folks and folks of color, compounds the existing traumas of violence, oppression, and racism. It’s an evolving and complex dynamic that makes plain an even greater need for

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help that too often can’t be found. “COVID is a layer of trauma on top of all the other layers we all were already living with. There’s just such a need and the resources available are not enough.”

Anastasia observes that it is impossible to fully examine or heal from a trauma that is still happening—at once acknowledging their own capacity limits as well as our need to slow down and be more compassionate to ourselves and others. “The way that I practice as a therapist is to lead with gentleness and with acceptance in a more radical sense of those words and to become more patient—to pause and give pause to moments—to be embodied and in solidarity before taking action.”

The Kintsugi Therapist Collective operates a yearlong program, the Embodied Private Practice Cohort, for discrete cohorts of therapists, offering consultation on each practitioner’s business practices and clinical casework. The long-term plan is programming that can increase access to support and connection for therapists, while providing referrals for prospective clients nationwide. The current cohort, which began the virtual program in April 2022, includes care providers in six states. The next cohort is currently enrolling and expected to begin in September.

Body Positive Naima Sullivan ’98

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ccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pediatric emergency-room visits skyrocketed during the pandemic, with a significant number of these visits related to eating disorders. In particular, adolescent female (12–17) ER visits have doubled since 2019. Increased by stress, anxiety, and depression brought on by the pandemic, such numbers point to a broader crisis in mental health rather than a crisis in diet.

Registered dietitian and culinary instructor Naima Sullivan ’98 is dedicated to addressing the challenges around behavior, body image, and eating habits in her practice at Karuna: Nutrition + Movement, a wellness studio in Norwood, Massachusetts, serving individuals and families.

Karuna offers nutrition counseling, cooking instruction, and movement classes, and Naima helps her clients develop sustainable behaviors around nutrition in a way that is inclusive and body positive yet supportive of individual goals and lifestyles. “I think of it as a collaboration,” Naima says. “I try to meet people where they are to help set goals that they direct so that we’re achieving what they want to achieve. Ultimately, I don’t want nutrition to seem scary and confusing. I hope to help people tune in to their bodies and be able to eat intuitively. When I think of having a healthy relationship with food, I think about internal regulation and being at peace with your body and with food.”

HOW WE HEAL Finding that sense of peace can vary widely from client to client, particularly among children, Naima’s specialty. Issues range from pickiness and stress eating to more complex interference from their parents’ own lifetime relationships with food. “Kids can start to move away from the internal regulation they had as infants—then they’re eating not for themselves but for other people. That’s especially true for kids who are bigger,” she notes. “There tends to be a lot of interference that gets them to eat less, and that can in turn lead to more food preoccupation and, interestingly, more weight gain. There’s a through line with a lot of the adults that I work with who have had traumatic histories with food, whether they were put on diets at a young age or struggled in another way.”

Naima is a former dancer who made a career change to nutrition, spending years in community nutrition settings in New York, including Food Bank for New York City, Cornell Cooperative Extension, and as an HIV nutritionist with Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). It is a background that continues to serve her as she navigates the more intimate challenges that arise within families. One of six dietitians at Karuna, Naima and her colleagues were not spared the explosion of eating disorders during the pandemic, and their clients included people of all genders, races, and ethnicities, as well as both children and adults—the result of a trauma response that made people more hypervigilant about their food and more stressed about “pandemic body,” or unexpected weight gain.

“We tend to think about these things in terms of how quickly we can get to our goal, whatever that might be,” Naima says. “My advice generally is to start with the behaviors. What are things that you can do that feel sustainable and that feel good? I don’t think that nutrition or fitness should be a punishment or grueling or painful.”

And emphasizing health at any size, she says, can be crucial to navigating sustainable behaviors for the long haul. “There’s a growing size acceptance movement, and I think being gentler with each other around our body shapes and sizes becomes an important part of the cultural conversation. We survived a pandemic. If we’re a little bigger for it, we could almost celebrate it, in a way. But it’s really hard for people to think that way. So I think just being kinder to ourselves about what we’ve done to survive is really important.”

Collective Solutions Kate Gilbert ’78

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ot long before the pandemic hit, Kate Gilbert ’78 threw herself into the “deep end.” An anthropologist who had returned to graduate school to earn an M.S.W., Kate launched a second career as a clinical social worker and landed

her first job at North Suffolk Mental Health Association’s Freedom Trail Clinic, providing outpatient mental-health services to individuals and families. “My end of the clinic dealt with people with schizophrenia and serious psychotic disorders who were also homeless,” Kate says. “I knew that I wanted to be in clinical social work. I knew I wanted to do therapy, and I knew I wanted to work with trauma.”

It was during her first year at the clinic that Kate began to deepen her understanding of permanent and intergenerational trauma—the function of one’s personal history of instability as well as social context. But when perpetual lockdowns ended in-person service, Kate began pulling ten-hour workdays conducting teletherapy from her home, which revealed how precarious mental health can be within high-risk groups.

“I worked with a lot of people who were either coming out of prison or going back into prison,” she says. “The clinic had been the place of last resort when people were getting released from the hospital because there were very few permanent beds for people with major psychiatric illness. So I was aware that I was constantly working with people for whom there was not going to be any good old normal to return to.”

Many patients with severe mental health disorders require ongoing, wraparound care. “We saw the people that therapists wouldn’t see in private practice,” Kate says. The move to teletherapy helped those clients lead more independent lives. But Kate saw how they also dealt with multiple traumas that the pandemic had only intensified.

Now in the early stages of building her own practice, Kate notes that her personal experience of the pandemic, as well as world-historical events—like the storming of the Capitol on January 6, Black Lives Matter protests, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—have opened her eyes to different aspects of her own race and class privilege and to the realities of intergenerational trauma of “populations that have been oppressed or subjugated.”

The mental-health professions typically view the individual as the locus of both the disease and the cure. As a clinical social worker for the most challenging populations, and as an anthropologist who has studied global cultures, Kate pushes back against this approach—which belies the significance and impact of collective experience.

“If you look at Ukraine, for example, they’re still dealing with the after-effects of Holodomor [famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932–1933]. And that is evident down to the physicality of the descendants of people who lived through a famine. A collective trauma once endured becomes a collective history that calls us to collective solutions and can be an enormous source of identity and strength for the individual who finds some security and meaning in shared suffering and shared action,” Kate says.

“So when my clients are spinning out of control and suffering within their own particular hell, I always advocate community action, service, volunteerism, and protest because action counteracts the stasis of pain and community engagement counteracts the pain of isolation.” 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.

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PUBLIC HEALTH, HEAD ON

BY CATHERINE BREWSTER

I

f I had come down with COVID in New York City last fall, I know exactly who I would have wanted as a contact tracer: Jessica François ’10, now a graduate student at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. I’ve heard about several Commonwealth graduates working as contact tracers, but Jessica is the one I can imagine actually cheering me up if I’d just tested positive and was, as she said of most people she called, overwhelmed by public-health websites and full of questions.

This cheering up would start with knowing that Jessica knows her stuff. In six years of coordinating hundreds of volunteers at Rosie’s Place in Boston and Sanctuary for Families in New York, she learned her way around landscapes in which nonprofit organizations bear the responsibility for everything from housing to phone service and laundry for women needing to restart their lives. The first women’s shelter in the U.S., Rosie’s Place now functions like a community center, offering everything from ESOL classes to legal assistance to a craft cooperative.

Sanctuary for Families supports survivors of genderbased violence, which Jessica calls an “umbrella term” that has taken the place of the more limited and stigmatizing “battered women.”

Jessica’s expertise includes perspective on different funding structures: while both organizations offer a holistic array of services to the women they serve, Rosie’s Place has relied entirely on private donations since its founding, while Sanctuary for Families uses primarily (60%–70%) public funds for everything from its Economic Empowerment Program to clinical and legal services. At the same time, Jessica says, “city and state governments pull the program in a lot of different directions.” Most of all, she came to feel that it’s “impractical and pretty appalling” to rely on

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nonprofits for such a crushing volume of needs. She saw Columbia’s intense M.P.H. program as a chance “to go upstream and look at prevention: How is it that we are so overburdened? How can we keep individuals out of these situations?”

Like COVID, public-health problems never present themselves in a vacuum, and Jessica was grappling with these questions as a Black woman living in tumultuous times. In the summer of 2020, in particular, she recalls that she and many of her friends in Brooklyn felt both galvanized by the protests and “exhausted by the need for multilateral action. Social inequity and structural racism are so ubiquitous that protest also has to be ubiquitous. We really didn’t know what to do with ourselves.” One outlet: founding Public Assistants, which describes itself as a “mutual aid network, design lab, and resistance hub” that centers queer and BIPOC artists, originally housed in a former laundromat in Crown Heights. Artists, musicians, and an interior designer ripped out moldy acoustical tile and built plywood platforms over the conduits and pipes, started a paid youth residency in mural painting, and got a community garden up and running. They’ve since moved on from that space, with Jessica writing grant proposals and lining up pro-bono legal help along the way. She told me about Public Assistants when I asked what she thinks a better “upstream” might look like—a world in which fewer people have to turn to Sanctuary for Families. When I talked to her via Zoom this March, she was there, giving me a glimpse of a beautiful and quietly humming space.

In other words, Jessica started graduate school already knowing a lot about what she values: “a radical mindset” that also calls for “a lot of experts and a lot of work.” Even as a Commonwealth student, she gave me insight into what one of Public Assistants’ founders calls “radical joy.” In my senior English class, she

Jessica François ’10

“Go upstream and look at prevention: How is it that we are so overburdened? How can we keep [marginalized] individuals out of these situations?”

wrote a compelling account of how much fun it was to grow up on a street in Roxbury where all the kids played together. For another assignment, she argued for maintaining friendships outside Commonwealth, making a case I still refer to when I talk to advisees about keeping up relationships within their own neighborhoods as well as in our little building.

Meanwhile, Jessica says she and Symone Williams ’09 talk all the time about how Commonwealth helped them learn that they love to travel. Through Summer Search and Amigos de las Américas, Jessica spent a summer teaching English in Nicaragua, and she went to the Dominican Republic for a senior project with Sandra Melo ’10, who’d introduced Jessica to Commonwealth. Now, for the upcoming six-month practicum portion of her M.P.H. work, she’s eager to live abroad. There are programs that look exciting in South Africa and Kenya, but her first choice is working on global mental health in Mexico City. She’s been working on bringing back her Spanish via Zoom tutoring once a week: “I want to be fluent.”

Turning thirty this year, plunged into deep and broad core courses alongside many fresh-out-ofcollege classmates, Jessica knows exactly what she wants out of Columbia’s program. “When we talk about gender-based violence, everybody looks at me, but I’m there to learn new things,” delving instead into topics like fast fashion and concentrating in sociomedical sciences. She’s particularly struck by the complementary nature of qualitative and quantitative research. The quantitative approach, she says, “seems harder, but isn’t,” as she noticed particularly when she was introduced to Shannon Malone Gonzalez, the author of a study of how Black mothers in Texas talk to their daughters about the police (“Making It Home: An Intersectional Analysis of the Police Talk,” Gender & Society, Volume: 33 issue: 3, 363-386). For that research, Gonzalez conducted hour-long telephone interviews with each subject and included time for them to ask the author about her own background and experiences with police.

While Jessica is working to master statistics, she suspects (and so do I) that she’ll be “a bigger asset to qualitative studies,” with her interest in the art of asking questions and weighing the harm as well as the benefits to study participants. Looking down the road to her next job, Jessica says, “I would love to be able to create a position that combines research, program planning and implementation, and getting resources allocated to marginalized communities.” The priority in going back to school was to “get my brain working the way I want it to,” in the service of “tackling a problem head on.” t Catherine Brewster is an English teacher and twentyone-year veteran of Commonwealth School.

25

Designing Ephemeral Worlds

T

he first theatrical production Anna Moss ’06 remembers seeing is King Stag, a fantastical dramatic comedy where the titular stags come to life

through puppetry. “They were beautiful,” she says, thinking back to a night twenty-two years ago. “They were on a fly system, so the stags could leap. They would be picked up as if they were dancing, and they would fly back down.”

These days, when not teaching math or physics at Commonwealth, Anna is the one orchestrating flying set pieces—from a 1920s biplane to a pineapple under the sea—as a prolific scenic designer specializing in highschool theater. And she approaches both roles with the same educator’s ethos.

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Theater Kid in Training After King Stag left its impression, Anna became a fixture in after-school theater programs at The Park School in her hometown of Brookline, Massachusetts. “It was just nice to make some friends and have something to do after school,” she says. At around seven or eight years old, she made her debut in “little tiny plays” like The Mitten. A few years later, she enrolled in the school’s summer camp, Creative Arts at Park (CAAP), intrigued, at first, by costume design. But weeks of sewing frills onto aprons for a musical with a chorus of housekeepers soon sapped its allure, and when set designer Mark Buchanan popped his head into the costume shop asking for volunteer painters, Anna was all too happy to oblige. That small request began fifteen years of mentorship and theater-tech training, as Mark worked at both CAAP and The Park School. In Anna’s quest to become a CAAP counselor herself in high school, her set-design experience led her into “every single tech class”: lights, design, crew. She honed her skills working on the camp’s original musicals, like Come as You Are and Midvale Majestic—“not shows that people know, but they’re very fun,” she says. By twenty-seven years old, she was co-head of CAAP’s set department.

Attending New York University meant stepping away from local theater, but once Anna graduated and returned to Boston, she soon found herself working on The Drowsy Chaperone with another CAAP connection, Ezra Flam.

“He needed someone to build an airplane,” Anna says, nonchalant about building an airplane in the way only seasoned set designers can be. She got her first crack at being lead set designer on Ezra’s next show at Brookline High School, The Pajama Game, in 2012. They’ve collaborated on at least one production every year in the decade since, adding to a résumé that already boasts several of Anna’s “bucket list shows,” like Little Shop of Horrors. Turning a 120-square-foot stage into a decrepit downtown and flower shop that could also accommodate ninety-five cast members “was a really fun challenge.” 9 to 5: The Musical was another favorite, with its Mondrian-inspired set (see next page): “I’m very proud of that show,” she says, “because that was intensely not literal. It was just this wall of light boxes and different rectangles and colors in a way to give me a ’70s feel without having to take up any space, because that was also a ninety-person cast.” Chicago “was very simple but really beautiful,” with a red-andgold proscenium and Art Deco accents. And “Shrek was going to be good, but no one ever saw it. Damn you, COVID.”

From Script to Stage For the past nine years, Belmont High School, with its 700-seat auditorium, full scene workshop, and industry-standard light and sound equipment, has been Anna’s homebase. As their Scenic Designer, she’s tackled everything from

Urinetown to Hamlet and, most recently, The SpongeBob Musical, a poppy production as vibrant as the fuschia sea anemone and emerald green kelp waving across the stage. Though technically the Bikini Bottom made famous by the cartoon, Anna’s set is more of an homage. “SpongeBob is a really recognizable IP [intellectual property]. Everyone knows what SpongeBob looks like. And I aggressively did not want to design in the style of SpongeBob,” she says. No flowers in the sky. No black outlines to the set pieces. Rather, Anna designed a world that would be familiar to audiences but distinct enough to be artistically freeing—and feasible for a team of student builders.

“One of my goals is that every show looks different,” she says. “I don’t want shows to be identifiably mine.” Having a recognizable style isn’t inherently bad, she says; it’s just not her, and it’s not conducive to working with students, who should be able to recognize their handiwork on stage. Like her favorite set designer, David Korins (whose Broadway credits include blockbusters Hamilton, Beetlejuice, and Dear Evan Hansen), Anna adapts her sets to the material, taking “a piece of art”—a musical or a play—and translating it for a given audience at a given moment in time. “You are supposed to be some where totally different, transformative,” she says.

“When we did Laramie Project, it was supposed to feel like nowhere in New England, you know? It was supposed to feel big and open and gray and purple and mountainous.

And when you walk in, I want you to immediately feel like, Oh, I’m not in Belmont.”

Anna’s process, at least with Ezra, starts about four months before the show opens, with the two of them “breezing through the script” and bouncing ideas off each other. “We identify what is absolutely necessary,” Anna says, “and then [Ezra] talks through what he’s imagining for the overall look for the show.”

For SpongeBob, he wanted to be “assaulted by colors.” They often share a Pinterest or similar vision board, gathering ideas until their next meeting, when Anna shares her initial sketches with technical director Ian O’Malley. Together they talk about the space in “very broad strokes,” Anna says. “Then I kind of go away and draw a lot,” considering a litany of questions along the way: How would you build that? What’s the look? What’s the feel? Should the color palette be warm, cool, intense? How does it jibe with the costume designer’s vision?

And what does it all mean mathematically?

“Then it’s just build, build, build the idea and edit as you go.”

A Teacher In and Out of the Classroom Anna’s meticulously labeled blueprints ultimately find their way to student builders. They have Ian to help translate, but it’s hard not to see Anna’s work as a math and physics teacher reflected in her approach. “I want

Anna Moss ’06

27

Above: Among Anna’s more memorable sets are 9 to 5 The Musical (left) and Urinetown.

Previous spread: The set for The SpongeBob Musical, staged at Belmont High School in 2022

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everything to be buildable by high schoolers,” she says.

“I want everyone to feel like they’ve got a hand on the ball.”

Though it depends on the classes she teaches in a given year (usually a combination of Geometry, Algebra 2/Precalculus, and Physics 1), her set-design practice seeps into her work at Commonwealth as well. “I do try to bring my outside interests into the classroom when I can, because I think it both humanizes me and allows students to see a little bit of why you might care about this math.” She can introduce parabolas, for instance, via stage lights and mirrors or “talk about pars, which are a parabolic reflector, and why the focus of a parabola when we’re graphing it is where you would put the light bulb in a parabolic mirror.”

Simply being able to draw has been useful in the classroom, too, Anna says. “My diagrams are clear and accurate. And that sounds braggy, but…having clear and accurate diagrams makes a big difference, particularly in Physics I and in Geometry.” Not every student learns spatially, able to imagine the shapes described in their math problems; her drawings help them understand.

“It’s funny, because I don’t think of what I do [in theater] as being all that related to what I do at school,” she says. “I guess I am constantly bringing it in,” as the chief doer-of-trigonometry, amongst other things, on set. (Those portholes don’t become perfectly round by themselves.) But both theater and teaching are “just part of things I enjoy doing,” she says.

Beyond her lessons, Anna is particularly sympathetic as student actors slog through the long rehearsal days leading up to any Commonwealth show. (“Knowing what they’re going through is, I think, a valuable thing.”) And advisees with a penchant for the performing arts benefit from Anna’s deep knowledge of summer programs and local theaters. Of course, she designs sets for Commonwealth productions, too, including The

Cherry Orchard and Our Town. Without a permanent performance space, sets can be particularly challenging at Commonwealth. But that’s part of the fun. “I love seeing Commonwealth shows. I love seeing what they did. And I love that it’s so student-run,” she says. “What they do is remarkable.”

Behind the Scenes Much like the unassuming way she supports her students and colleagues at Commonwealth (managing Project Week and Senior Projects, designing and running trivia nights for admissions events, leading Hancock activities, gamely sitting down for alumni/ae magazine interviews…), Anna doesn’t expect a curtain call or her name in lights. Like most of the people behind the scenes “because they like building stuff,” she does the work for its own sake. But she does wish more people would “read the whole program,” she says. “There’s a ton of people working on these shows.” And it would be nice, once in a while, for theatergoers to buy their tickets because of Aaron Rhyne (projection designer) rather than Aaron Tveit (actor with swooning fanbase).

“Sometimes you should go to theater for things other than the music or the acting,” Anna says. “You’ll see movies for the cinematographer, sometimes, right?

And I don’t think people do that with theater enough.”

When you “divorce yourself from just watching the performance,” you can appreciate the technical problem solving—and the person—behind each cue. t

Making Up for

Lost Time

BY JESSICA TOMER

“M

y middle-school experience was a little weird,” says Milana Zivanovic ’25. She “stopped going into the school building altogether” during the spring of her seventh-grade year.

“For a couple of weeks, maybe even a month, we didn’t have any school while they had to figure out what they were going to do.” The last month “wasn’t real school,” she says, as the community struggled to make sense of Zoom classes and Google Hangouts. “Then I spent the entirety of eighth grade on Zoom.”

It “wasn’t too bad,” Milana insists. She enjoyed some of the independent work and the ability to take breaks (“I mean, I could drink tea whenever I wanted”). But compared to “normal” schooling, there was no contest. “Being in person is so much better than being online, both for learning and also just for social things like talking with friends and meeting new people,” she says. ”It feels more like having real classes, as opposed to just sitting on Zoom listening to a lecture.”

Milana joins a generation of students who spent much of middle school either fully remote or in a hybrid learning environment. They haven’t known “normal” since 2019, the intervening formative school years dominated by the pandemic. At Commonwealth, many of those students had never set foot inside the building before orientation in September of 2021.

Commonwealth teachers and staff knew all that time behind screens, isolated at home, contending with glitchy Internet and Zoom classrooms (if they had them at all) would affect incoming students. As the 2021–2022 academic year got underway, though students were as curious and academically exuberant as ever—and giddy to be together in person—it became more clear: we need to make up for that lost time. The question was how.

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What We’re Doing

H

ow do we help our students recoup at this point in the pandemic?

What is the cumulative impact of these last two years on academics and on the socio-emotional development of students? And what does long-term academic, social, and emotional recovery look like for our students?

So reads the mission statement that has guided faculty and staff from the beginning of the year, and among its chief stewards are Commonwealth’s Student Life team: Joshua Eagle, Psy.D., Dean of Students; Eben Lasker, Psy.D., School Counselor; Rebecca Jackman, Assistant Head of School; Lisa Palmero McGrath, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Don Conolly, Coordinator of Academic Support. As Josh likes to say, Student Life is everything outside academics (though academic support features heavily in their work), and this team has spent the past two years helping students and their families navigate myriad outside-academics challenges, thinking about how to best support them as individuals and systemically.

“It’s almost as if the pandemic accelerated and amplified some things that there were already signs of in our student body before, whether it was relationships to devices or amount they were reading and how they sustained attention,” says Rebecca. “A lot of kids didn’t necessarily have the habits they might have had [pre-pandemic], like how to take the subway, those kinds of things that you start to develop during middle school.” The struggle to attend to tasks—among adults as well as children—post-pandemic has been profound, Josh adds.

Before the pandemic, advisors would regularly check in with students about time management, sleep habits, workload, commuting, social dynamics, digital literacy, and more. Post-pandemic, students needed more than a few gentle reminders about these things. So a repurposed free class period became Commonwealth’s new Process Skills Course for ninth graders, a weekly tutorial covering a wide range of topics: how to develop a midyear-exam study plan, how to use a library—with real, physical books—how to manage time by making it “visible,” amongst other topics. “The Process Skills class is giving us extra support in the areas that we should have learned in eighth grade, but couldn’t,” says Anya Ratanchandani ’25.

Designed to be nimble enough to fill in the gaps teachers observed in the classroom while responding to students’ unique, evolving needs, the course also delved into more esoteric aspects of adolescence. “They go beyond just saying, ‘Well, you need to just not procrastinate,’” Milana says. Rather, the course turned common admonitions (“get more sleep!” “plan ahead!”) into actionable advice through practical tool kits and real-world examples. Both Milana and her classmate Sarah McPeek ’25 liked the rotation of teachers and the variety of material covered. “That way, we’re not just focusing on one subject; we get to hear about time management and how to email teachers and set up meetings,” Sarah says. “I think it’s good that we’re getting to know how to do a lot of these different things.”

For Will Washko ’25, the class on “making time visible” helped him harness the power of his planner. It didn’t hurt that his advisor, history teacher Audrey Budding, taught the lesson and could easily follow up during their weekly meetings: “Did you use the planner? Did you use the planner?” he parrots, not unkindly. “I had not really been using it as much as I should have been!” None of the concepts are foreign to students, though some topics, like how to prep for midyear exams, seemed particularly useful, as Sarah notes: “I think most of the grade, including me, had never really taken a big exam except for maybe the SSAT, so that was really helpful.”

Existing school initiatives undergird these efforts as well: the faculty

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advisor remains the go-to resource for problem solving and support for students and families. (A new advisor training program has also bolstered teachers’ skills.) The role of advisor-as-advocate is particularly on display during quarterly grading meetings, where all teachers and staff reflect on every single student’s progress. More in-depth conversations can and do happen outside these meetings, but the goal is to ensure every teacher has a real sense of how each student is faring inside as well as outside of school. The annual IMPACT training, where students learn basic self-defense and personal safety strategies, has taken on new relevance with students who have spent significant time confined to their houses. And Commonwealth is in its third year of having student class representatives, who liaise with the Student Life team to provide “another way for students to share how they’re doing and what they’re doing,” says Josh.

“The Student Life team has had much more contact with the ninth grade than in any year past,” Eben says. Their work started long before orientation, with Rebecca and Josh meeting with every new family over the summer of 2021, further investing in the school-family partnership that has always been crucial. Even a twenty-minute meeting can pay dividends, Rebecca says, and those meetings “changed and facilitated our relationships with those parents and their knowledge of us and what we do.”

Why We’re Doing It

“E

ighth grade had its big ups and downs with COVID and risk factors,” says Will. “We were masked, even outside sometimes.” Still, he knows he was “incredibly lucky to be in person for almost all of the eighth grade.” It meant more “social experience,” even though he and his fellow students were “sequestered in these six-foot bubbles within classrooms.”

From the beginning of the pandemic, the goal has been to rebuild Commonwealth’s sense of community, the foundation of support that allows students (and teachers) to push themselves in and out of the classroom. After a largely hybrid 2020–2021 school year, the school moved as quickly and safely as possible toward relative normalcy, getting kids out of their homes, off of their screens, and fully in person for the spring of 2021. The following academic year was the closest to “normal” yet, with a return to (some) in-person events, (limited) recess gatherings, and (mostly) all-together assemblies, thanks, in part, to school-wide routine COVID testing and an enviable 98% vaccination rate among students, faculty, and staff.

Research stemming from the earliest days of the pandemic revealed learning loss and declining mental health in students at all ages and grade levels the world over, with the starkest disparities along class and income lines. In their observations about K–12 students in U.S. public schools from mid-March 2020 to mid-April 2021, the federal Office for Civil Rights noted that “nearly all students have experienced some challenges to their mental health and well-being during the pandemic and many have lost access to school-based services and supports, with early research showing disparities based on race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identity, and other factors.’’ According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll, “about half of teens age 14–18 said the pandemic had a negative impact on their academics.”

Among the CDC’s most troubling evidence: suspected suicide attempts among adolescents increased 31 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year, with a more pointed increase—51 percent—amongst girls aged 12–17. School psychologists have seen a sharp increase in demand and in referrals to outside providers. This decline in child and adolescent mental health prompted the American Academy of Pediat-

LOST TIME rics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association to declare a national emergency in October 2021.

This chronic stress has consequences. “We’re all kind of swimming in low-level feelings of fatigue, anxiety, depression, hopelessness,” says School Counselor Eben Lasker. “Collectively, everybody went through this really scary, awful thing.” Only now are we beginning to register the loss. Though “there is just stuff we won’t get back, collectively, culturally,” he adds, we can support our students and each other.

“One of the academic things that I felt was lost [during hybrid learning] was the inspiration,” says Don Conolly, a member of Commonwealth’s history and language departments since 2001. “It’s very hard to teach a kid research paper skills if they’re not excited about the subject and they don’t have someone in front of the room modeling, being a history geek.” All of these recovery efforts exist on a continuum, he says, the goal of which is to move beyond catching up to fostering the holistic and intellectual “life of the mind” core to the Commonwealth experience.

The uptick in “academic intensity” at Commonwealth struck Sarah, though she says she arrived feeling relatively prepared. “It’s been a hard step, but I’ve had the support I need to do it,” she says. “The community has been really good so far, especially with reaching out to teachers when you need help.”

How We’re Preparing for the Future

S

o, are these interventions working? “Process Skills was crucial for some students who hadn’t taken an exam [or] just didn’t know how to set up a schedule,” Josh says. “I know a few students who use the materials and were really thankful that they were given that model.” For Anya, the course helped ease the Commonwealth workload, which is “definitely heavier than middle school, but the

teachers are far more accessible and they genuinely care about how each student is doing and what people are having a hard time with.”

Will hopes the Process Skills course continues so students like him, who wanted more (and more challenging) work over the pandemic, can burnish foundational skills, like knowing when and how to ask for help. (“Don’t be afraid to ask,” Will urges younger students. “Just asking [for help] is probably one of the most important life skills, best to learn early on.”)

Still, like so many facets of the pandemic, the long-term effects of the Process Skills course and other efforts remain to be seen. “It’s planting seeds,” Josh says, and the Student Life team is working on redefining the arc of wellness across all four years at Commonwealth, so students graduate prepared for post-pandemic college and beyond. “With everything that’s happened, we’ve had to ask ourselves, what does it mean to achieve? What does it mean to succeed?” Lisa says. “Even our strongest students, they’re doing really, really well grade-wise, but how are they holding it together as they prepare for the next chapter of their life?”

Right now, Lisa and the Student Life team are thinking about what ninth-grade classes—City of Boston, Word: A History of Discourse, and Health and Community—will look like during the 2022–2023 academic year. “How do we help them to create a social connection with one another? To be successful academically? To exist in the wider world around us?” Rebecca asks. “There are these concentric circles we’re trying to develop for them in that set of classes.” They hope to iterate on the Process Skills Course, too, weaving its tutorials into the Commonwealth curriculum in years to come. And prepare for the future they must. Over the next decade (at least), virtually no student will enroll without having had their education disrupted by the pandemic to some extent. But Commonwealth will be ready. t Jessica Tomer is the Director of Communications at Commonwealth.

31

Endless Points of

CONNECTION

“W

hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” That quote comes to us from John Muir, but it could have been spoken by any of the three Commonwealth seniors who undertook capstone projects this year.

Addie Moore Gerety ’22 found that an animation project in multiple art styles reconfigured her perceptions of media and performance.

Tom Greany ’22 delved into history, chemistry, and politics to analyze the influences of two Italian postwar writers. And the artistic study of mushrooms brought Annie Jones ’22 to the threshold between the fantastical and the ordinary—and between art and science.

Naturally, all three learned along the way that the research process is never static—any project with such scope is bound to evolve once or twice. Or, according to Tom, “four times before I even really started.”

FINDING CHEMISTRY IN FANTASY

The ceramic plate ripples inward from its black rim, like the surface of a pond or a cauldron. A splotch of neon cerulean floats in an emerald glaze. The colors play out over row after row of rings.

The plate is simultaneously dreamlike and organic. It’s a test sample from Annie’s capstone, and she has spent the last year shaping intricately decorated ceramic tiles and other works in miniature. “Each tile will have its own image that will flow together with the others to create one cohesive image, and my main focus is mushrooms,” Annie says. “My goal is to have each tile have so much going on in it, so much variety and color and texture, that you can look all over the image and find something new.”

Why mushrooms? For Annie, the arts have always been “an escape” from the daily routine of high-level academic classes, a place for her to use her hands along with her brain. At Commonwealth, she’s ex-

plored everything from ceramics to printmaking to photography. When designing her capstone, she was drawn to the fungus for its whimsical connotations—like her art classes, they constrast with the everyday.

“The mushrooms are a point between fantasy and reality. They have so many properties. They’re so distinct. They’re found all around. When I’m working with clay, as things go into the kiln, they melt, they warp, and their shapes change. [But] a shape like a mushroom is so distinct that no matter what, it would pretty much be recognizable,” Annie explains.

But the capstone is rooted in chemistry, too. When firing on tiles in the ceramics studio kiln, Annie observed how different combinations of materials react in high heat and experimented with the composition of glazes. She’s loved working with ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey, who is also her instructor for this year’s Science and Art of Materials class, a course focusing on topics like the atomic configurations behind different colors and the composition of clay.

Annie began the capstone with materials and tile layouts, she began the capstone with an expansive wall piece in mind; over time, though, she felt that she had strayed away from what she found compelling about ceramics in the first place. “The repetition of making tile after tile after tile was taking a lot of the joy away from it,” Annie remembers. “The essential part of ceramics that I truly enjoy is the potter’s wheel. So [I’ve been trying] to bring that back a little bit.” Annie’s final piece will feature smaller—but still interconnected—tiles, along with multiple mushroom-shaped pots, allowing her to craft the detailed touches she treasures making.

Annie is uncertain about how her life will change when she begins college at the University of Michigan in the fall. However, she predicts that, just as her ceramic mushroom shapes remain distinct in the kiln, art will maintain a steady presence. “[Ceramics] has its ups and downs,” she says. “But it is a beautiful process, learning how materials work, and how you, as a creator, can manipulate them.”

WRITING AFTER WAR

Annie Jones ’22

32 CM Summer 2022

BY CLAIRE JEANTHEAU

It could be the beginning of a riddle, rather than a line of research: Two works are published in the same year, by authors living in the same city, following one of the most devastating conflicts in world history. Each book is its author’s debut. “There was this kind of weird historical coincidence,” Tom muses. “But it seemed quite important.”

The works in question are If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, the author’s account of surviving Auschwitz, and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, an allegorical collection of prose poems depicting fictional cities and their governance. Tom finished the former during spring break of his junior year, had the latter recommended by English teacher Sasha Eskelund ’92, and then discovered that both were published in 1947 in Turin.

Tom Greany ’22

The similarities continued beyond the surface level, Tom realized. Both writers had an eye for historical comparisons in a time of fascist movements. They used comparable narrative frameworks of a journey through suffering, which, Tom believes, shows their “infatuation with Dante— which makes sense, since they’re Italian writers.” Ultimately, “they’re both broadly concerned with issues of how Italian people dealt with the war.”

To Tom’s surprise, there was little research addressing the connections between the two. So he embarked on writing a scholarly paper of approximately fifty pages comparing the influences on each writer’s narrative purposes and what, exactly, those purposes were. “It would be easy just to say that the difference in intent was because Primo Levi was a Holocaust survivor, and Italo Calvino wasn’t, or because Primo Levi was Jewish and was the voice of Auschwitz,” Tom explains. “But I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, partly because there are a number of documents written by Levi himself that suggests that his inspiration for writing wasn’t actually his survival experiences—that there were [other things] in him that spurred him to write.”

Each writer’s motives, Tom hopes to show, come from a complex web of intellectual interests. He argues that Levi, a chemist, took a scientific and analytical approach to communicating his personal history; Calvino, affected by political movements, constructed fictional histories in Invisible Cities to process the changes happening around him. At one point, the winding route of research took Tom to Italy to examine primary sources at various archives: “It was pretty intimidating…but I got some useful notes there.”

Levi’s and Calvino’s works address long-resonant themes of conflict and history. But Tom sensed a new necessity in his capstone work after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. Another similarity in both authors’ accounts came to the forefront: their insights on how to process living through and acting during a war. “The basic dynamics of power are being repeated again, and again, and again. It’s sad,” Tom reflects.

“There’s a sense that people aren’t being equipped with the basic tools to figure out what they need to do and why. In that sense, it’s been really nice to have the opportunity to get to the bottom of something and understand how it relates to current affairs.”

car that he’s standing behind to film it all. And people don’t really know how to behave in front of the camera...so what ends up happening is a lot of the people he films just act super natural. They don’t notice the camera or alter their behavior.”

The film made her wonder: how attentive are we to the motions of our own bodies through our everyday experiences? A capstone was taking shape. Addie would create her own film that (to borrow her description of Vertov’s work) would act as an “exploration of the mundane.”

Addie’s short multimedia film follows a character modeled after Addie herself, rendered in paintings and drawings. The character’s actions harken back to Vertov’s film, with its subjects “just sitting around having lunch at the beach…or on couches in their home,” but based on quotidian acts from Addie’s own life: putting on socks, brushing teeth, eating an orange.

Addie, a longtime visual artist, enriched her education at Commonwealth with classes like Drawing and Painting and Life Drawing; the capstone, however, marked her first foray into animation. One unexpected inspiration? Experimenting with TikTok during the pandemic: “There’s a stop-motion filter on there that makes it very, very easy to animate. I spent a lot of time in quarantine using that filter on drawings I had made.”

After beginning the project by coloring individual frames in Photoshop—a process that reminded her of the earliest Disney animators’ work—Addie transitioned to using editing apps like ProCreate on her iPad. The resulting film blends hand-drawn and digitally edited art, and Addie credits mentors like art teacher Caleb Colpitts and Director of Facilities and Information Technology Adam Hinterlang for helping her determine how to combine her media.

The meticulous editing process has given Addie time to contemplate the questions underpinning her work. What does it mean to grow up in a society with unprecedented access to filming—to say nothing of digital filters and editing? How does that affect the way we perceive our bodies and the actions—even the simplest ones—that they perform?

“I’ve always been told by our teachers that ‘you need to draw what you think you see,’” Addie remarks. As she recalls scenes in her head and wonders how to animate them, “there’s two versions” of perception, she says, that play out. “There’s a movie montage of getting ready in the morning—splashing water on your face and running out the door. And then there’s the monotony of those kinds of simple moments.” Unlike Vertov’s subjects, captured on film when the camera was a novelty, Addie must grapple with what changes between imagination, reality, and the screen. t Claire Jeantheau is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth.

ANIMATING THE EVERYDAY

Addie was watching a documentary—Man with a Movie Camera, by pioneering Russian director Dziga Vertov—in her History of Film class at Commonwealth. Clips of daily life of citizens in the then–Soviet Union flashed across the screen. She was struck by how Vertov’s subjects interacted with the camera, a revolutionary device at the time of the film’s production in the 1920s. “It’s pre-iPhone, obviously, but also pre-transportable camera,” Addie recalls. “[Vertov’s] got a tripod in the back of a

Addie Moore Gerety ’22

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ALUMNI/AE EVENTS At long last, in-person reunions returned this spring! Alumni/ae from across the ages gathered in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco (with latter events happening as this issue went to press) to reconnect and reminisce. What a gift to be together again—and to see so many familiar faces at 151 Comm Ave. RIGHT: Director of Annual Giving and Alumni/ae Relations Morgan Chalue, Anika Benkov ’12, Corinna Snyder ’82, Jonathan Sapers ’79, Laverne Berry ’67, Hugh Chatfield ’79, Eric Li ’10, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Oliver Entine ’02, Director of Advancement Alisha Elliott ’01 BELOW: Oliver Entine ’02; Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Jonathan Sapers ’79; Corinna Snyder ’82

New York City Reunion IMAGE CREDIT: SAMUEL STUART HOLLENSHEAD RIGHT: Laverne Berry ’67, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81; Eric Li ’10, Oliver Entine ’02

34 CM Summer 2022

Boston Reunion: Classes of 2000–2021 IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTOS BY THOMAS ABOVE: Back Row: Isaac Slavitt ’04, Amanda Hadad ’03, Nick Pittman ’08, Anna Moss ’06, Zach Cloyd (guest of Catriona Blunt), Alex Krusell ’21, Dylan Nelson ’07, Ari Benkov ’12, Maia Driggers ’19, Director of Advancement Alisha Elliott ’01, Rebecca Jackman; Row 2: Audrey Budding, Beau Blinder ’03, Catriona Blunt ’08, Zoe Beatty ’05, Daniel Albert-Rozenberg ’15, Anika Benkov ’12, Wesley Curl ’19, Emi Neuwalder ’21; Row 3: Irene Kaplow ’06, Lee Friedman ’15, Maria Ronchi ’15, Bridget Corcoran ’19, Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Matisse Michalski ’01; Front Row: Theo Paul, Jackson Elliott ’10, Camille Inge ’10, Sam Keezell ’09, Collin Cherubim (guest of Camille Inge)

INSET: Zoe Beatty ’05 LEFT: Camille Inge ’10; Eric Liu ’21, David Hodgkins; Sam Keezell ’09 BELOW: Kate O’Rourke ’20, Sasha Bates ’21; Maria Ronchi ’15, Daniel Albert-Rozenberg ’15; Anika Benkov ’12; Collin Gray ’20

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20 questions with...

Jennifer Borman ’81, Head of School 1. What three words best describe Commonwealth?

11. Coffee or tea?

Inquisitive, engaged, and verbal!

Both. In quantity.

2. What was your favorite Commonwealth class?

12. Scripted or improvised?

No one particular course, but I loved all of the times I left so many classes with my head spinning from a new way of thinking about something.

3. What does your ideal afternoon entail?

A beautiful hike, an engaging book, and an ice cream sundae. Followed by a raucous family dinner and a second ice cream sundae.

4. Whom do you most admire?

I have long admired Charles Merrill [Commonwealth’s founder] and sometimes find myself silently talking to his portrait and asking what he’d make of a particular turn of events. I also admire Pete Seeger [folk singer and activist], who had a joyful way of bringing people together and a moral purity that always escapes most of us.

5. When and how did you first become interested in education as a career?

Life pretty much defeats any script in my experience. Plan carefully and then respond in the moment.

13. What is your favorite museum?

The American Visionary Museum in Baltimore, the ICA in Boston, the Frick in New York City—and maybe whatever the next one is around the corner.

14. What is your favorite mode of transportation?

My feet. I’m still getting used to Boston driving. Ugh.

15. What do you bring to a potluck?

Enthusiasm. And some kind of dessert I’ve never made before because I like the suspense.

16. What was your go-to Boston eatery as a student?

It was an accident. I was offered a teaching job at a school that had an unexpected opening. I was completely surprised by how much I loved it— and still do. It’s endlessly creative and so inspiring to see students grow.

That being said, the best teachers walk around with a semi-permanent feeling of inadequacy: you always feel like it could have been better or you could have reached a particular student in a more impactful way. The same holds for leadership in schools: it’s amazing to create the context for growth and always humbling to know how much more you’d like to do.

The now-defunct Ken’s on Boylston Street, the site of lots of after-school conversations, debriefs, and speculations.

6. What do you find is the biggest misconception about running a school?

19. Who would you want to play you in a movie of your life?

I think people still have a pretty paternalistic, hierarchical idea about the role, and that’s imprinted in our culture’s frame of reference. I am more interested in leading collaboratively and in models of change at the intersections between top-down and bottom-up initiatives.

7. What is your favorite aspect of your work?

The engaged conversations—whether with students, colleagues, trustees, parents, or alumni/ae. I also love the esprit de corps at Commonwealth and the shared sense of commitment and enthusiasm for learning.

8. How do you define success?

I feel like it’s our work and pleasure as humans to be able to frame our own definitions of success and then to continually revisit those definitions.

For me as an educator, my success would be empowering young people so that they have the skills they need to walk through the doors they choose.

9. What are people surprised to learn about you?

I’m not altogether sure. People are too polite to tell me!

10. What book do you wish you had read sooner?

There are more books I wish I’d read later: I might have liked Hardy or Dickens better if they’d found me voluntarily. I’m very grateful to have read a lot of feminist work as a teenager; that’s been a lens that’s really important to my understanding of myself and my possibilities.

36 CM Winter 2022

17. Where do you hope to vacation next?

In a mythical realm, I’d rent a series of month-long Airbnbs around the world and live as a local.

18. What is the best gift you have ever received?

A wonderful education. Truly.

I once got into a long argument with a stranger who was convinced I was the talk show host Ricki Lake and thought my denial was Ricki Lake denying she was Ricki Lake. That soured me on the whole concept of celebrity doppelgangers.

20. What is your motto?

Onward.

Introducing Commonwealth Connect

Introducing

COMMONWEALTH CONNECT Commonwealth’s alumni/ae community has always been eager to connect with, learn from, and support each other—as well as the next generation of Commonwealth students. Commonwealth Connect is the perfect venue for doing just that.

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If you have any questions, please contact Director of Annual Giving and Alumni/ae Relations Morgan Chalue at mchalue@commschool.org

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Farewell, Class of 2022! Left to right, top row: Hannah Grace Jenkins, Elan Peng, Adeline Moore Gerety, Ayla Ladha, Nia Xie Suresh, Zhanqiu Liang, Eitan N. Sengupta; second row: Thomas Greany, Connor Alexander Wang Chaplin, Muhammad Abdur-Rahman, Vivian A. Ye, Sophia Grace Ying, Annie Elizabeth Jones, Nadia Ahmed Ali, Dina Tova Pfeffer, Jamie Kai Givens Tjia; third row: Michael Karezin, Thomas Ferraz Fomin, Daria Plotz, Raphael Antônio Takaki Yamamoto, Ryan Phan, Kyle Roke, Brandon James Chen, Hanming Xiong; bottom row: Christopher Teo Maffucci-Fitanides, Milo Zacks Kron, Henry Bresnahan, Alexander Li, Avery Joseph Mangum, Ilaria Kim Seidel, Miles Matthew Kodama