CM Commonwealth School Magazine
Also in this issue: A Religious Rebel Thinking as a Way of Life A Model Studies Her Class
Fall 2013
Educating the
Heart Community service at Commonwealth
Why I Made It By Tahmid Rahman ’13
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his untitled painting started off as a gang of demons transporting what looked like a Roman soldier through a fiery tunnel. These demons had friends, who swirled around with large grins and pitchforks. But neither the demons nor the scene seemed right to me. So I asked Larry if he trusted me to start a totally different painting on the same canvas. He told me to “go for it.” What you see is what happened when I did just that. Previously, my paintings aimed for clarity and meticulous detail of the object I was drawing. This time I focused more on the flow and character of the colors I chose. With this group of dark, indiscernible figures marching through a red fog waving banners as if in protest, I tried to evoke some form of emotion in the viewer. Although it’s hard to see in this reproduction, near the top of the painting the red fog starts to disappear and reveal bits of a starry sky. I asked several of my friends to stand in front of the painting, look at it carefully, and tell me how it made them feel. The responses I received ranged from frightened and sorrowful to victorious and triumphant. When I asked particularly about their reaction to the stars, some read them as a sign of hope, but others saw conflict, as the stars were more at ease and peaceful than the rest of the scene. Interestingly enough, the emotions that originally moved me to create the painting included all the ones my friends brought up. In his essay “What is Art?” Tolstoy wrote that “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” I rarely think my paintings are successful, but I am willing to call this one a success; this one, I am willing to call art.
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FROM TH E ED I TO R
The first time I came into the gym after the mid-90s renovations, I eyed the pale oak-paneled walls, looked up at the arched ceiling... and noticed the absence of tomato slices stuck to the skylights. The change, frankly, made me a little uneasy: wasn’t the room where I and so many others had eaten lunch, listened to announcements, played floor hockey, sung with the chorus, and made friends just fine the way it was? Why change it? In a place all about ideas and discussions, having up-to-date surroundings was not so important, I thought. My view of the matter has since evolved. I realize now that how the school “feels”—what it’s like to live in these spaces—has a direct bearing on how the learning happens. Ideas and discussions at Commonwealth may be sophisticated, but they play out in an atmosphere closer to a family home than a college campus. The setting breaks down formal divisions among teachers and students, and helps the intellectual and artistic activity flow from classroom to hallway to lunchroom, outside to the Mall, and back to the classroom. I see the jumble of backpacks in corners and cubby areas as a symbol of minds free to mix and mingle their insights and inspiration, the juxtapositions (now there’s a 10th-grade word) leading often in unexpected directions. And so this summer I happily watched another longtime feature of our school bite the dust. The grey acoustic tiles of the library ceiling have vanished, replaced by white tiles and paint, and new, brighter light fixtures. Faculty meetings perked up right away. Our next major overhaul involves the science classrooms—to make them more flexible and effective for teaching and running labs. More generally, the developing strategic plan for 151 Commonwealth Ave. emphasizes the importance of keeping the school’s signature warmth and comfort while maximizing efficient use of its space to better serve its students and teachers. Preserving the school’s culture is important, as is preserving our historic building, but that doesn’t mean leaving it untouched. Tristan Davies ’83 Director of Communications, Editor tdavies@commschool.org
Issue 5 Fall 2013 Headmaster William D. Wharton Editor Tristan Davies ’83 tdavies@commschool.org (617) 266-7525 ext. 290 Design Jeanne Abboud Associate Editor Rebecca Folkman Class Notes Editor Grayson Palmer Contributing Writers Emily Bullitt ’03 Natalia Carbullido Mara Dale Seth Hanselman ’13 Brent Whelan Special Thanks Jaquelin Harris www.commschool.org/cm www.facebook.com/commschoolalums CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the school or its faculty and students. We welcome your comments and news at commonwealth@commschool.org. Letters may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar. Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.
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CM Commonwealth School Magazine
Contents
Fall 2013
Why I Made It
1
Tahmid Rahman ’13 on the results of an artistic mulligan.
News
7
32
4
Strategic Plan Takes Shape Print it Up! Drama in the Classroom One of the Best Pointing Out Honors
L’Immersion
7
Bob Vollrath, Hancock, and epic pigs.
Educating the Heart
8
8
Brent Whelan recounts the history of community service in the Commonwealth curriculum.
Anything But Moot
16
Nina Pillard ’78, who has shaped Supreme Court cases on gender and equality, finds herself in a political firestorm.
A Religious Rebel
21
Elizabeth Carrier-Ladd ’01: from pierced “bad ass” to pastor.
Thinking as a Way of Life
22
16
Seth Hanselman ’13 examines how imaginative thinking leads to ethical living.
The Alumni/ae Association
24
An exhortation to reunite A note on fundraising for others
Class Notes
25
Perspective: A Model Studies Her Class
32
Cover: Hannah Pucker ’15 washes dishes at the Pine Street Women’s House in Dorchester, where a group of Commonwealth students prepares dinner each month during the school year. On p. 8, former English teacher Brent Whelan recalls, when community service became part of the Commonwealth curriculum and describes how the program’s evolution. Photo: Kathleen Dooher.
What she found at Commonwealth surprised Life Drawing model Natalia Carbullido. CM 3
News commonwea lth
Strategic Plan Takes Shape
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he Commonwealth Board of Trustees discussed a draft strategic plan at their October meeting. The result of some 18 months of study and deliberation by trustees, alumni/ae, parents, faculty, and staff, the plan aims to set the school’s priorities for the next five to 10 years. “We’ve come out of this process with ideas consistent with the school’s culture and that will develop the qualities that make Commonwealth special and different from other independent schools,” said Therese Hendricks P’05, P’07, cochair of the steering committee formed to guide the process. Among the draft’s key points:
One of the
Best
“What She Learned,” a short story by Melanie Abrams ’13, was published in the anthology The Best Teen Writing of 2013. Melanie’s piece received a silver medal in the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards program, which then selected just 69 works to publish out of more than 500 national-award-winning entries.
• The school will remain at 151 Commonwealth Ave. and will continue to enroll 145 to 150 students. • To attract and retain an outstanding and diverse faculty, the school is looking at ways to keep teachers’ salaries competitive, to fund the continuation of Hughes Faculty Projects, to provide long-term funding for faculty sabbaticals, and to strengthen support and evaluation of teachers. • Commonwealth will maintain a first-rate academic program and expand opportunities for students to enjoy an equally fulfilling experience outside the classroom through comprehensive extracurricular and sports and wellness programs. • The chemistry and biology labs will be renovated in the near future to improve the learning environment and also to increase the visibility and appeal of the sciences at Commonwealth. • To advance Charles Merrill’s emphasis on opportunity and accessibility, the school is planning to increase financial aid and fund support for students who receive aid. • Rigorous architectural studies are underway to examine how the building, and the ways we use it, might be improved. The search also continues for additional space in the neighborhood to serve uses that are not well accommodated in the building now. The Board of Trustees will consider the plan again at its December meeting, adopting a working guide for the coming years. If you have questions or suggestions, you are invited to email planning@commschool.org or to contact Headmaster Bill Wharton at bwharton@commschool.org.
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THE SCHOLASTIC ART & WRITING AWARDS PRESENTS
THE BEST TEEN WRITING OF 2013
Print it Up!
A
Zoe Meyers ’14 and John Husson ’13 in last spring’s production of The Green Bird.
Drama
in the Classroom
n Ultimaker three-dimensional printer is the latest addition to Commonwealth’s science labs. Physics teacher Ryan Johnson assembled the machine during the summer; after a couple of shakedown runs it was ready to go. Printing an object begins with a design—many are available online. Items can also be designed from scratch using simple computer-assisted-design software such as Google SketchUp. In a process somewhat similar to inkjet printing, the Ultimaker uses the design as a guide, depositing thin layers of plastic to build the piece from the bottom up. “The original idea was to have something I could use to construct apparatuses for physics experiments,” says Ryan. Once the printer was running, he made a wheeled cart and sections of track for a demonstration of momentum and inertia. As he quickly discovered, students clamored to try projects of their own. “Over the summer, pretty much every student who stopped by wanted to try it out,” he says. “One student made a cell-phone case with moving gears on the back! Very cool.” This fall, Ryan and some of his students started the 3-D Club, for all those interested in learning how to use the printer. “I can’t wait to see what we all come up with.”
Physics teacher Ryan Johnson admires the school’s new Ultimaker, which can “print” three-dimensional objects. Tristan Davies
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heater teacher Susan Thompson contributed a chapter to a new book, Encountering Ensembles, published over the summer by Methuen Drama. Susan wrote about her teacher Jacques Lecoq, who founded a theater school in Paris. “His teaching balanced the freedom of allowing students space to create, to mess up, to work with others, and to recreate with necessary constraints—the lessons students must master. “Lecoq knew that the ideal goal of all teaching is to have the student discover and create what the teacher has yet to imagine, and I use many of Lecoq’s teaching methods in my classes and productions here at Commonwealth,” Susan continued. She described a production last year of Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird that gave her an opportunity to teach about commedia dell’arte: “The style was a constraint, in Lecoq’s sense of the word. It focused the rehearsal process, the warm-ups, and the actions and directions that each scene took. Within that style, however, the students had an enormous degree of freedom.” Through improvisation and technique, the cast blended into an ensemble, a vivid demonstration of the principles Susan wrote about in the book.
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Meriting Recognition This fall 23 seniors were named as National Merit Semifinalists or Commended Students— nearly 70 percent of the class, very much in line with recent years.
Commended Students:
Andrew Barry, Belmont Daniel Benett, Newton Yonah Borns-Weil, Brookline Harry Huchra, Cambridge Eliza Passell, Watertown Jonah Piscitelli, Norfolk Owen Rathbone, Cambridge Feyga Saksonov, Andover
Nayab Ajaz, Cambridge Akinbayo Akinwande, Newton Taeer Bar-Yam, Newton Matthew Costas, Wellesley Céline Delaunay, Marshfield John Deming, Boston Allyson Edwards, Norfolk Gabrielle Farrah, Brookline Thomas MacDonald, Brighton Laura Moraff, Arlington Nathaniel Murphy, Medford Jay Rauch, Watertown Sally Rifkin, Belmont Thornton Uhl, Marblehead Gabriel Weinreb, Newton
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oughly 1.5 million high school students take the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) each year. The top one percent are named as semifinalists—16,000 students nationwide and about 350 in Massachusetts this year. About twice that number are recognized as commended students. Akinbayo Akinwande also was named a semifinalist in the National Achievement Scholarship Program, a national academic competition for African American high-school students. This is the second year in a row that a Commonwealth student has received this honor. Finalists in both competitions will be announced in the spring.
matthew costas ’13
Semifinalists:
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Kathleen Dooher
Faculty Profile: Bob Vollrath
L’Immersion By Mara Dale
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wo images adorn Bob Vollrath’s office door: a New Yorker cartoon skewering college admissions committees, and a drawing of a porcupine, from Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, captioned “le porc-épic.” The cartoon is self-explanatory: Bob served for years as one of Commonwealth’s college counselors. But the postcard? Language play amuses him: translating the French literally, he asks, “Whatever would an ‘epic pig’ be like?” His students reap the benefits of such whimsy. Bob hails from Glenwood, MN, “a peaceful, one-stoplight railroad town” halfway between the Twin Cities and Fargo, ND. Not until junior year at the University of Minnesota did Bob discover his passion for languages. He switched majors from engineering to French and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. Fluent in American Sign Language (perfected during 20 years as a summer camp program director for the disabled and deaf in Lake George, MN), he has also studied German, Latin, Italian, Russian, Ancient Greek, and Mandarin. In his 31 years at Commonwealth, Bob has worked hard to create a French department that immerses students in the language, literature, and culture of both France and the Francophone world. Immersion is also the idea behind Bob’s other main contribution to school life: coordinating Hancock. “Originally, Charles Merrill
wanted to alter the usual discourse of school to help us engage with one another in other ways and words,” Bob recalls. Friends sometimes joke about Bob’s penchant for meticulous planning, but it certainly comes in handy when moving 200 people into the Maine woods for a weekend. “Extraordinarily, the whole thing still works…and often pretty well,” says Bob. After many years of teaching, punctuated by travels and sabbaticals in Europe, northern Africa, North and Central America, and with Commonwealth’s first trip to China, he’s still excited at each rentrée. “I love my colleagues: down-to-earth, intellectually sharp. And I find the kids so much fun, so receptive. I love the talk! Commonwealth’s small size and its enormously talented community make my job endlessly inspiring.” CM 7
Educating the
Heart 8 CM
Kathleen Dooher
Community Service Turns 20 By Brent Whelan
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t’s 4 p.m. on a Tuesday in April, and on the Red Line outbound for Ashmont a small group of Commonwealth students are chatting excitedly. Seven or eight strong including their teacher, they are loaded down with book bags and shopping bags, but their spirits are soaring. They are Commonwealth Cares, on the move. Stepping off at Fields Corner in Dorchester, they find their way down a side street and knock at a remodeled three-story duplex, home to some thirty formerly homeless women who now live together in this shelter run by the Pine Street Inn. The Commonwealth kids have come to cook them dinner.
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An hour after arrival the salad bowls are brimming, the pasta is al dente, the sauce has been carefully seasoned, and mounds of parmesan grated. Kathleen Dooher
The team quickly occupies the two tidy kitchens. This is their sixth dinner this year, and most have been here at least a few times. Knives and cutting boards are distributed and students stake out jobs chopping vegetables for the salad—an all-organic creation with feta and walnuts—or cooking down tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions for the pasta sauce. One student, the dessert coordinator, has gathered baked goods from other students back at school, and is now setting out colorful platters of cookies, brownies, and cupcakes. In the spacious dining room another girl coordinates the table arrangements: each is adorned with a cloth tablecloth and a small vase of flowers. Back in the kitchen, conversation is brisk but the work is focused: an hour after arrival the salad bowls are brimming, the pasta is al dente, the sauce has been carefully seasoned, and mounds of parmesan grated. Slowly the women filter into the dining area, many greeting the Commonwealth kids, whom they have begun to recognize. After serving the guests, the students pass through the food line, fill their plates, and sit down among the residents. Conversation isn’t easy with these women, many suffering from mental illnesses, all battered by hard living, but under the spell of tasty food and youthful company a cheerful, homey atmosphere fills the room. When the kids have washed up and packed up and are heading to the T station, a number of women ask them eagerly when they will be back. They are getting to be friends.
w We cooked pasta, delicious tomato sauce, savory garlic bread, and an awesome salad. Despite the fire alarm going off and one of the kitchens completely filling with smoke, the cooking went smoothly. We had very beautiful flowers with festive ribbons as our centerpieces. As we served our delicious, vegetarian, and organic meal, one woman exclaimed, “You should serve this food in a restaurant.”
w Community service as a formal program came to Commonwealth in 1990 along with its new head of school. Judith Keenan had spent much of her career in politics, but had grown disillusioned with Washington as a venue for social change. In redirecting her efforts to education she often claimed that her intention was to help train a next generation of responsible citizens. That vision meant in part inducing Commonwealth students to discover the parts of the city that lay beyond Newbury Street. And it meant making real connections with the institutions that shape and improve the social environment. Service, in Judith’s lexicon, was a political concept in the broadest sense. Judith’s proposal to institute a service requirement was greeted with some skepticism by the faculty. Larry Geffin, who would become the program’s first director, recalls his colleagues’ unease with the idea of mandatory volunteerism. In the school’s thensomewhat-libertarian tradition, requiring students to do things— attending assemblies, for example—was seen as a heavy-handed failure of reasoned persuasion. But Larry proved more than a match for such sophistries. As he put it, “We wouldn’t leave our children’s intellectual development to chance. Why should we let their social consciences develop like so many wild gourds?” Judith recalls a different sort of opposition that disdained the humble pursuits of service. While other schools were adding to their often well-established traditions of service, the idea of such a 10 CM
program at Commonwealth met a frosty reaction from some of the Commonwealth faculty. Wouldn’t the students do better to spend that time cultivating their minds? Not for nothing had Judith spent decades navigating the waters of senatorial Washington. The strategy she pursued was elegantly Machiavellian: she chose two well-respected students and commissioned them over the summer to research service opportunities around Boston. They produced a thorough and enthusiastic report, which one of them presented to the student body when school resumed—as Judith recalls it, a “personal, impassioned plea” for community service. Clothed in the prestige of a popular and accomplished student, the idea became difficult to oppose. On that basis the community service requirement—70 hours from every sophomore—was launched in the ’92–’93 year under Larry’s direction.
w I spent a lot of time at the Neville Center doing manicures for the residents, and it was one of my favorite things to do. Many residents couldn’t care for their own nails properly, and they would be sharp, filled with dirt, and in danger of being ingrown. It was very moving to see how much a little thing like having their nails done could mean to someone, and help them feel cared for.
*
*
I never learned his story—why he is handicapped and how long he has lived with it. I figured that if he didn’t bring the subject up, it was no business of mine to ask. Anyway, it seemed irrelevant. Somehow, although Michael’s handicap was the reason for my assistance, I hardly thought about it while I worked. To me, I wasn’t helping him because he was handicapped; I was helping him because he wanted help.
The most striking part of the experience is seeing the unaccompanied children. Every meal a few tables are assigned just for children coming alone, many my age or younger. Often they eat seconds or thirds; for many it’s the first food they’ve eaten all day. Volunteering is a great way to help, but the brutal hunger of someone my age changes the way I think much more than the work itself.
* The best part about the job is to hear from someone who has already bought a house. Because of frequent moves I have never lived in a house that my family actually owns. So hearing that some of these poor people actually can live in their own home makes me feel warm. Their thankful language makes me feel I am doing the right thing.
w It would be hardly accurate, though, to claim that service to one’s community sprang full-grown in 1992 from the new head’s socially conscious mind. Charles Merrill after all had founded the school, as he has frequently claimed, to be a sort of antidote to the complacency of the Eisenhower years. Politics and social awareness are very much a part of the school’s narrative, as Mr. Merrill recorded it in his memoir, The Walled Garden. He makes no mention of community service as such, though, in those early decades. On the other hand Commonwealth graduates seem to follow public service careers with uncommon frequency. The school’s publications abound with accounts of public interest lawyers, teachers, public health officers, and other human service professionals. Even without a formal program, social engagement was in the school’s culture. Polly Chatfield, who taught at Commonwealth from 1968 to 1990, recalls that a small stream of seniors spent their March project month volunteering with her daughter at the Frontier Nursing Service, an Appalachian outreach facility in eastern Kentucky. Others joined her sister in Indiantown, FL, at a school for migrant workers. The idea that a project would involve doing something useful for a community “was always there,” she notes, “but not insisted upon.”
w Working at the farm was tiring. I got home exhausted and dirty, and frequently missed my stop on the bus because I had dozed off. That said, it was most certainly worthwhile: I learned a lot about agriculture, and met some people from a little bit different culture, right here in Newton.
* I left that day feeling a little discouraged, but I resolved to keep trying… Afterwards I got a chance to watch a really good reading buddy at work, skillfully keeping the kids both under control and engaged… Now, after volunteering for over a year, I am, I suppose, an ‘experienced reading buddy.’ I’ve been reading mostly with the same girl, so we’ve had the chance to read a chapter book together. This was not something I would have expected to feel like a big milestone, but believe me, it is.
Commonwealth graduates seem to follow public service careers with uncommon frequency. The school’s publications abound with accounts of public interest lawyers, teachers, public health officers, and other human service professionals.
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wendy mechaber
Most remarkable as one scans the lists of projects over the years is the sheer variety and inventiveness of students’ interests as they apply their talents to the service requirement.
(On a recent visit to the home’s website I was startled to see a photo featuring one of my students playing chess with an elderly gentleman.) Services to young children remain popular, and along with ACORN Commonwealth students have been a regular presence for many years at Our Place, a daycare center for homeless children (many of them Spanish speaking) run by the Salvation Army in Cambridge. Haley House, a soup kitchen and community center just down Dartmouth Street in the South End, is another local institution Commonwealth kids have adopted for their service, along with the Women’s Lunch Place and Rosie’s Place. Further afield, the sustainable agriculture movement has led cohorts of kids to the outer suburbs, where they work on farms like the Food Project in Lincoln or Waltham Farms—or in their local community gardens. Most remarkable as one scans the lists of projects over the years is the sheer variety and inventiveness of students’ interests as they apply their talents to the service requirement. Techies design websites for organizations that can’t afford to hire them. Pet lovers work with Save a Dog, a rescue and adoption program. Through Courageous Sailing, our sailors help kids with disabilities learn to navigate, while outdoors types spend summers clearing trails in national forests. With the advent of global programs in the 1990’s service projects have opened up from Costa Rica to Cambodia, though the typical sophomore still does her hours close to home. The aggregate of all these initiatives, forty a year for twenty years, is staggering.
w ACORN is a bilingual program that provides Chinese and English education and care to preschool children. Since I speak both Mandarin and English, this was the perfect stage for me to benefit others using my bilingual abilities […] Though I stayed for only a month, I was lucky enough to witness a kid’s improvement in English. He was a newcomer, and at first spoke only Cantonese. Every day I would point to a toy and ask him in English if he wanted to play with it. Normally he would shake his head shyly… One day, for the first time, the kid willingly said a word to me. To my surprise it was the word bicycle. He wanted to ride the bike.
*
w What did they choose to do, that first cohort of sophomores from the class of ’95, to fulfill the new community service requirement? Some cared for young children at the multi-cultural ACORN center in Chinatown, a connection that has remained strong over many years. One student joined a chorus of teenagers with Down’s syndrome; another volunteered in a soup kitchen. Several students found placements in the political world, working in the offices of state legislators, the Attorney General, and the Massachusetts Legislative Children’s Caucus. Others turned to major advocacy organizations: NOW, the Jewish Community Relations Council, Amnesty International. Some worked for public institutions such as the Museum of Science, the Cambridge Public Library, and Beth Israel hospital. Direct service organizations such as Project Bread, AIDS action and Catholic Charities attracted others. It made an eclectic list. Given the vast array of placements, it would be hard to generalize about how these have evolved. Volunteer work at nursing homes and other elderly service centers has become a staple, including students who help at the school’s Back Bay neighbor, Hale House. 12 CM
If it was raining I would sit inside the dogs’ kennels and cuddle with them. This was my favorite responsibility, since many of the dogs were old or scared, and simply wanted human contact, rather than a play session. It seemed a lot more personal as well, and was especially rewarding since I could come back the next week and see how happy they were when they remembered me.
* Our show had a ’50s theme, making it perfect for nursing homes. We had acrobatics, juggling, and clowning, and the director of Circus Smirkus said it was the best road show ever. Some of the senior citizens were singing along. One woman, Norma, was crying after the show because she said it brought back memories of the best times of her life.
* Spending a handful of hours in a rice field didn’t change the world. It didn’t even change a family’s fate. I didn’t bring any skills to the table (I was taught them instead); I transplanted the crop very slowly; and I messed up quite a few times. But I didn’t intend to raise a country out of poverty. My goal was just to help. My family wanted help in their rice paddies, and I lent a hand.
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One of the recurrent questions the community service program poses is, which community? At first the school’s catalog listed community service under the heading “The School in the City.” Ninth graders would all take a City of Boston course to familiarize themselves with the city and its resources. That in turn would help inform their choices when as sophomores they would choose where to spend their service hours. The program was thought of as an extension of the urban experience that Judith Keenan, a bred-in-the-bone New Yorker, wanted for Commonwealth’s urbane but in many respects sheltered students. The Community Service program’s urban focus was fortified in the first years through the connections the City of Boston course built with two essential urban institutions: City Year and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). As a teacher at the school, when I launched the City of Boston course in 1993, one of my goals was to bring students to the Dudley Triangle in Roxbury, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, where a remarkable grassroots transformation was taking place under the guidance of the DSNI. When I tried to arrange a field trip with the organizers there, I met with an obstacle: they didn’t want visitors coming to observe the ’hood, and they wouldn’t accept honoraria. If we wanted to roll up our sleeves and help, though, that was another story. I arranged for the whole 9th grade to spend a Saturday in October cleaning up an abandoned lot—a weed- and rubbish-strewn dump, the site of future low-cost housing—and in return we got a guided tour of the area, and a spirited lecture about social justice. In subsequent years the DSNI teamed up with City Year, the yearlong service program that began in Boston and grew into AmeriCorps, and our 9th graders joined thousands of other volunteers across the city for the City Year Servathon, a day of urban housekeeping. Commonwealth teams participated in the Servathon for more than a decade. Ninth graders were encouraged but not required to participate, and older students joined in. It remained part of the City of Boston course’s mission not just to study the city but also to change it. A glance at the roster of service projects shows that perhaps half our students today venture into urban neighborhoods in Boston, Cambridge, or Somerville to serve. Over time, though, kids have asserted that their communities are actually their towns or suburban neighborhoods, and service projects in local libraries and agencies joined the list. Larger organizations appear less frequently. Several years ago a requirement was added that at least half the service must involve face-to-face contact with people being served. More recently, the overall requirement has been reduced to 40 hours, largely because volunteer opportunities, widely sought by underemployed young adults, are harder for younger students to find. Though in its first version the program allowed students to distribute their efforts among a variety of activities, it quickly came to require a deeper commitment: service hours must be logged at one, or at most two, service agencies, so that the Commonwealth student becomes a fixture, not a tourist, in that community.
I worked on the mural with teenagers from all around Somerville, most of whom lived in the public housing across the street, so I got to know people who I don’t think I otherwise would have met, and I got to work side by side with them painting the mural.
* I have yet to meet a volunteer there who was not ordered to do community service by the court, so they had some interesting stories. I was surprised by how many people my age and younger there were, and also by how easy it is to get along with criminals. The hardest thing I had to do was listen to painful and sad stories from some of the seniors’ hard lives. Having to comfort and ease such battered people was definitely a huge challenge.
w My personal connection to the community service story began some years before I came to Commonwealth, in a decrepit basement of a church on Bowdoin Street, on the north or “backside” of Beacon Hill. There in the early 1980’s a soup kitchen called Neighborhood Action struggled into existence, and I had cooked many dinners for indigent people there by the time Judith Keenan announced her plans for a service requirement. When I first proposed that Neighborhood Action might become a site for students to work, Judith was less than enthusiastic. She had something more systematic in mind, something more transformative
“Why should we let their social consciences develop like so many wild gourds?”
w I have been volunteering at Drumlin Farm for three years, helping primarily with livestock care, in addition to wildlife care and conservation projects such as vernal pool monitoring. Working in the summers as well as March and January breaks, plus some Saturdays during the school year, I have logged a total of 925 hours of work at Drumlin. CM 13
than a soup kitchen. But as that system would take some time to design, she let me assemble a group of kids and volunteer them to make a dinner—with funds they raised themselves. After several bake sales and raffles and frank shake-downs of students and faculty we had the $150 we needed, and in the fall of 1991 we launched what became a signature Commonwealth event, with hundreds of students serving more than 5,000 dinners to the hungry homeless over the next 20 years. The Neighborhood Action dinners were presided over by a volunteer coordinator named Jack Flaherty, a portly, retired English teacher drawn straight from Dickens. Jack insisted on calling his diners his “guests,” greeted each of them by name at the door, and would abruptly silence any conversation that verged into profanity with a stern look and, if necessary, a reminder that “we don’t use that sort of language in here.” The program became known for its humane, non-institutional hospitality, and even the more timid Commonwealth students soon felt comfortable. Jack had known generations of teenagers at Brookline High and wasn’t at all surprised by the competence of our students, though many others were. As the kids arrived, slung down their book bags and set to work chopping and mixing, other adult volunteers watched nervously. Afterwards, one after another told me, “I never knew teenagers could be so focused, so dedicated”— so untroublesome, they meant to say. But the Commonwealth students had fun. Gossiping, licking the brownie spoon, getting to know each other, the students were simply applying—though none of the outsiders knew it—their Hancock meal job training. And they were awfully good. The casserole we made, a mix of noodles, tomato sauce, sautéed ground beef, and cheddar cheese, became a crowd pleaser. Jack always started the meal with words of welcome, announcements, and a prayer. When he asked me that first time, with a few seconds notice, what he should call our dish, I blurted out “Commonwealth Casserole,” and the name stuck. Hundreds of students rotated through those dinners, though the formula never varied. Jack Flaherty passed on and was replaced by David McCarthy, once a cook, then for many years an alcoholic on the street, and eventually, in recovery, a volunteer. He ran a harderedged program, cowing the guests with his nicotine growl, but he understood the needs of people on the street, and in many ways he brought our students closer to the people they were there to serve. Commonwealth students also did their required service projects at Neighborhood Action, helping give out soup and sandwiches on Sundays, and they always marveled at the variety of people grouped together under the rubric ‘homeless.’ As one wrote: “Many of the down-and-out people who came to us were in fact highly educated.” And another: “I discovered how interesting the individual characters I came across were.”
w Right around 6:30, seeing an entire dining hall packed with people eating away, chatting with the volunteers or the strangers sitting next to them, really makes you feel like you’ve made a difference. Sure, feeding 150 people each week will not give every homeless man in Harvard Square a full belly, but it definitely helps.
* One of the beds I weeded on my very first day was a cabbage bed. The weeds were so high you couldn’t see the cabbage bed at all. When the weeds were cleared away, the cabbages looked so beautiful. 14 CM
* I enjoyed meeting the clothing donors and helping to recycle the clothing they no longer needed. Visiting an old man giving away his late wife’s clothing, the atmosphere seemed to me less like an ending and more like a renewal. Everything was not going to be thrown away but reused.
* Each day we worked sawing wood or digging out boulders, and each night we came back for dinner and a campfire. The work is very physical, involving axes, saws, picks, crowbars, and rock bars (used to lever massive boulders from the ground). We spent the first few days building a bridge across a dangerous section of a cross-country ski and snowmobile trail; then the rest of the time we marked the boundaries of the land owned by the AMC … Each night we would fall asleep to the call of loons.
w In 1996 a new chemistry teacher named Annalee Salcedo arrived at Commonwealth, fresh from a post-college stint with City Year. Annalee breathed community service, and after managing the required part of the program, she started to ask, what then? Shouldn’t service be more of a habit, less of a requirement? Building on the meals we were already cooking at Neighborhood Action, she helped several students launch Commonwealth Cares, our local version of the service umbrella organization Boston Cares. With Annalee’s guidance the students researched a range of possibilities. They launched a second, smaller, meals program. They coordinated the efforts of students who were already doing the Walk for Hunger and the AIDS Walk. Eventually they created a master calendar of service opportunities. Commonwealth Cares (long known informally as Commies Care, to the Headmaster’s chagrin) has become part of the school’s culture, a fixture of greater or lesser prominence in its landscape as the passion for service waxes or wanes. When Frédérique Thiebault-Adjout took the community service reins in 2005, Commonwealth Cares had fallen dormant, though the Neighborhood Action dinners continued. With her nurture the group now meets weekly at lunch, some 20 strong, to plan a program that this past year included not just staging the monthly dinners (along with a dance-a-thon and movie night to raise money for the ingredients) but also a holiday card-making session, a supermarket drive, and a team that participated in the Walk for Hunger. At a year-end wrap-up the kids were bubbling over with ideas for the coming year. The dinners at the Women’s House are still the centerpiece, but could they expand that relationship with other kinds of service? More social time with the women? Live music during dinner preparation? And how can they involve more of the school? More movie nights? Can they find places for students to share their academic skills by tutoring? How to resolve the perpetual dilemma that service seems to appeal more to girls than boys? Maybe some sports-related activities? And what about the environment: are there ways to work with community gardens during the school year? Fueled with celebratory ice cream, the discussion lurches in a dozen directions. It’s not an easy fit in a school schedule that is already fully loaded with academics, arts, and sports. Time and persistence will determine which ideas come to fruition.
w
Students fan out all over the metropolitan area, and meet all sorts of people, many of them persons in need.
w In the Discovery Center I was an exhibit interpreter … I remember going to the Discovery Center when I was younger. It makes science less daunting and more fun to children, and definitely encouraged me in my interests. One of the things the Discovery Center stresses is that the kids should always be the ones to discover the information, and they really can figure it out, especially if they’re guided by the right questions.
* One of the residents, Peter, is a classical pianist. He was very shy and always in his room when I first met him. I learned that one of the few times he came out of his room was to play the grand piano in the library. That week I asked him if he could accompany me on a couple of songs at the upcoming social hour. We practiced the songs (Broadway classics) only a few minutes before the social hour, and I noticed many residents I had never seen before coming into the library to listen. The social hour was a success! After the performance many of them talked to me about how much they had enjoyed the performance—it was very gratifying.
* I loved working at “Our Place” because I have a passion for teaching children. I love seeing children trying to tackle a word I have given them to read and seeing them try again until they succeed. When they have succeeded they smile so hard and sometimes even begin to dance.
As an intentional program community service at Commonwealth is turning twenty this year, and as with most 20-year-olds, one can see a future taking shape, but one can’t be sure where it will go next. So this does seem like an opportune moment to take stock. Was the goal to prod Commonwealth’s students out of their privileged enclave in the Back Bay? If so, it worked: students fan out all over the metropolitan area, and meet all sorts of people, many of them persons in need. Was the idea to make them more informed, more street-wise citizens? This too has happened, to some more than others. Or was the hope that it would make them more compassionate, the sort of people who would go on looking for ways to serve others long after their Calculus and U.S. History were laced with cobwebs? I asked some alumni/ae from the past two decades to tell me about the impact of their community service at Commonwealth on their subsequent lives, and a small number, self-selected, replied. One, a founder of Commonwealth Cares in its second edition, went on to lead service initiatives in his college and beyond; he recently earned an MBA with a focus on corporate social responsibility. Another leader of the group tells me she “works with gardeners growing food for food banks,” a mission she connects to her Neighborhood Action days. One former student notices a link between her 9th grade service project with the Legislative Children’s Caucus and her current career in children’s policy issues. Another student, whose service work with the immigrant support group Centro Presente began in 10th grade and lasted through college, now teaches at a largely Latino school in Oakland—a direct consequence, he says, of the “real-world ‘close reading’” his volunteer work induced. Several graduates found ways to help rebuild in New Orleans after Katrina. At least two alums have gone directly from Commonwealth to spend a year with City Year. Another graduate, who spent a transformative summer building latrines in a Mexican village, is now a young mother with a career and reports that she “struggles to be involved in community service” through her job. As for Annalee Salcedo, after leaving Commonwealth, she went on to manage an extensive service program at the City on a Hill charter school in Boston, and now works at a school whose motto translates as “let us be of service.” What do these anecdotes tell us about the value of Commonwealth’s community service program? Nothing definitive. Several of the service-minded students themselves observe that they were a minority, and expended a lot of energy trying to mobilize their more indifferent classmates. Students acquire the habit of service from many quarters, and the student who chooses to can remain untouched by the school’s service requirement. Still, watching the current crop of young people lovingly put a dinner plate in the hands of a resident at a women’s shelter, or listening to their naïve, irrepressible determination to do even more next year, I can’t help but feel that these service initiatives, all of them, add a dimension to their education that can’t be reproduced in the classroom. Let’s call it moral sensibility. Can it change the world? They think so, and why shouldn’t they?
Brent Whelan taught English at Commonwealth from 1988 until his retirement in 2012. He is at work on a collection of short fiction, and blogs occasionally about politics in the European Union. Since retiring, he has reappeared at Commonwealth as French-exchange chaperone and temporary English teacher.
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Sam Hollenshead
Nina Pillard ’78 has helped to shape many Supreme Court arguments as an attorney and as faculty director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University. Her nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court became tinder in the fight over Senate filibuster rules. 16 CM
J
ust a few blocks from the Supreme Court, in downtown Washington, D.C., on the first floor of the Georgetown University Law Center, there is a scaled-down version of the Court’s hearing room. It may not have the Spanish marble walls but it does have a similar arrangement of white columns and crimson draperies behind a polished wood dais for its justices, a smaller version of the same Seth Thomas clock on the wall, virtually the same carpet, and a similar set of warning lights built into a podium that is exactly the same distance away from the panel as in the actual Court. Eight to ten times a year, Cornelia T.L. “Nina” Pillard ’78 takes a seat on the bench at the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute. With a handful of other lawyers she presides over intense practice sessions conducted for the benefit of attorneys preparing to advocate their cases before the Supreme Court. In the last year, 78 of these moot courts were conducted including one for at least one side of every case that appeared before the court.
General’s office alumni/ae—Democrats and Republicans. “It’s a team effort,” Pillard points out. “There’s engagement with different people across the profession. People collaborate across interest lines, ideological lines.” As an attorney in the Solicitor General’s office during the Clinton administration and then as a tenured faculty member at Georgetown Law, Nina has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court— winning seven of them—and knows first-hand the importance of these practice sessions. She remembers, for example, how her Harvard classmate Miguel Estrada, a regular Institute panelist whose nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court was thwarted by a Democratic filibuster, offered particularly helpful coaching in an arbitration case. For another of her cases, the Institute convened a panel that included now-Chief Justice John Roberts. Students “jazzed” by the practice sessions have been known to camp out on the Supreme Court plaza in the winter cold for a place in line to witness the final argument. “Sometimes, unfortunately,
Anything but Moot Nina Pillard ’78 by Jonathan Sapers ’79
At the Supreme Court, the audience usually consists of members of the public and the press; at the Institute, it’s made up of students, regularly including those from Pillard’s first-year Civil Procedure course, for whom observing the sessions becomes an important look behind the scenes. “Students get to see people at the top of the field at a point in their preparation when they’re struggling,” Pillard says. As the attorneys move from practicing their arguments (being “in role”) to analyzing them, students discover that these legal titans are “mere mortals.” For example, says Nina, they might see “Walter Dellinger, former Solicitor General, with a really hard case, in role, answering questions. And then the in-role part stops and we have a more open-ended discussion. And he’ll say, ‘I can’t solve this. I feel like I’m gonna be up a creek without a paddle here.’” The sessions are set up to reveal advocates’ vulnerability. “Most people argue no more than half an hour in the Supreme Court,” explains Irv Gornstein, a seasoned Supreme Court advocate who is the Institute’s executive director. “Our moot court, however, will go for an hour. And then we’ll have a follow-up discussion for an hour. And so they’ll have gone through two hours of grilling. That’s very hard for anybody to stand up to.” During the discussion period, the moot judges help the advocates refine their arguments, suggesting which lines of reasoning to follow and which to stay away from. The judges are experienced Supreme Court advocates drawn from the Georgetown law faculty, attorneys at D.C. law firms, recent Supreme Court law clerks, and Solicitor
they see people who didn’t take the advice they got,” Nina remarks, “who can’t or don’t recognize its importance. And then the students say, ‘Oh my God, everyone said they were going to get into trouble in that way, and they did.’” *
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Gornstein and Pillard estimate that less than ten percent of the judges in their pool are women; in order to keep the panels diverse, the Institute must ask its female panel judges to serve disproportionately often. Their burden may soon increase if President Barack Obama has his way. On June 4, he nominated Nina and appellate lawyer Patricia Millett, as well as federal judge Robert Wilkins, to fill vacant seats on the 11-member U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The appointment is often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court; four of the current Supreme Court justices have served there. As of this writing, Nina’s nomination has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee but her nomination was one of several blocked by Republicans in the full Senate, precipitating a historic change in that body’s rules on filibustering nominees. Confirmation for Pillard could happen before the end of the year, in as much as three years, or perhaps never, given Republican pique about some of her writings. Sitting as a judge in sessions at the Institute, however, the idea of what it would be like to take on that CM 17
She saw that for plaintiffs, merely getting a chance to have their stories told in court had been cathartic. “Having the process and being heard was a tremendous healing event for them. It was really, really positive.”
At LDF, Nina was assigned to an employment discrimination case against a chemical plant in Kentucky where company policies had perpetuated the segregation of four work units. “If you moved from the black unit to a job in any of the other ones that were higher paid and less dirty and dangerous, you lost your seniority,” she explains. “There were people who had worked 20 years. And they were not going to move and lose all their seniority.” She went on to win the case, but she also saw that for the plaintiffs, merely getting a chance to have their stories told in court had been cathartic. “Having the process and being heard was a tremendous healing event for them. It was really, really positive.” That reverence for the potential of process is something Pillard tries to pass on to her students. “You can drown in process,” she says. Nevertheless, “I think at its best, good process keeps our society together.” *
role professionally has certainly crossed her mind. She knows that she would relish the position, even though it would mean giving up the freedom she enjoys in her academic writings to pursue subjects as varied as gender issues, arbitration, legal process, and torture. While she’s enthusiastic about the possibility of becoming a judge, Nina took anything but a direct route to this moment. When she graduated from Commonwealth in 1978, she thought she might become a physicist, an idea born in the classes taught by Bruce Molay ’71. She decided to take a year before college, and Charles Merrill connected her to the family of Anil and Avinash Deolalikar from the class of 1973, who guided her on a trip through India. She went on to graduate from Yale and worked as a journalist in China. Thinking about “injustice in the world,” she “ambivalently” took the LSATs and got into Harvard. “Law school resonated for me,” she says. “I felt like it absolutely empowered me with tools to analyze and think about things that I already had been thinking about in a much less sophisticated way. It just opened up my brain.” She imagined herself as a civil rights lawyer. In her second year, a charismatic young attorney named Deval Patrick came to campus to conduct interviews for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), an organization whose civil rights legacy dates to its founding under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall. Patrick “was so charming,” Pillard recalls, “everybody wanted to go work for LDF.” After graduating, Pillard clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Louis H. Pollak, who was a member of Marshall’s legal team in the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case. She then began a coveted yearlong fellowship at the ACLU. Two years later, in 1989, she became an LDF assistant counsel, fulfilling her law-school goal. 18 CM
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After five years at LDF, Nina began to yearn for more analytical work. “I had thought that if I was doing Supreme Court litigation, I would have more time to really understand the motivating forces behind the law,” she explains. “I came to the conclusion that my temperament was more in the appeals. I realized I was much more of a writer, a crafter, a legal doctrine person.” She applied to the Solicitor General’s office, where Drew S. Days III, a former LDF staff attorney, was now Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton. “I absolutely value institutions,” she says. “The notion that the government should have good legal representation was something I could get behind.” In 1996, a year and a half into her tenure at the Solicitor General’s office, she got her chance. She was asked to brief a case being brought against the state of Virginia for its exclusion of women from the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), a state-supported military college founded in 1839. There, students submit to an “adversative” method of education, which, as the Supreme Court described it, emphasizes physical hardship, mental stress, lack of privacy, and exacting regulation of behavior. VMI had never admitted women; the state responded to the challenge to its admissions policy by creating the Virginia Women’s Institute for Leadership (VWIL), an all-women’s college that took a much milder approach. At the same time, it disavowed any obligation even to provide that separate opportunity for women, claiming that constitutional equality simply was not violated by offering the unique VMI experience only to men. Pillard and her colleagues won a 7-1 decision, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which declared VWIL unequal to VMI and the state’s justification for excluding women from VMI insufficient. As Justice Ginsburg analyzed the issue for the Court: “a party seeking to uphold government action based on sex must establish an ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ for the classification.” And the justification for the government action “must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation.” Many years later, Elizabeth C. Dobbins, a female graduate of VMI, wrote in the congressional newspaper The Hill that Pillard has “helped bring our nation closer to the goal of full gender equality and has made a difference in my life and the lives of many others.” Even Former VMI Superintendant Josiah Bunting III, who had led the Institute during the years when it fought coeducation all the way to the Supreme Court, recently reflected on his changed view that “our integration of women was VMI’s finest hour.” Writing on Politico, Bunting credits “a dedicated attorney named Nina Pillard who wrote the briefs that convinced the U.S. Supreme Court
White House photo by Chuck Kennedy
to strike down the school’s male-only admissions policy in United States v. Virginia,” as well as the brave women like Dobbins who have shown they could succeed at VMI. During her career, including her three years at the Solicitor General’s office, Pillard has briefed more than 25 cases that variously involved taxes, intellectual property, voting rights, airline deregulation, housing, and torts. She also argued a range of cases before the Court as lead attorney. The work, she says, was “similar to what you get as a judge. As on the court of appeals, whatever comes over the transom is your assignment. In almost every other job, even within the law, you specialize, you have control, and you dig deep. As a judge you don’t have that choice. I have found again and again that I have a surprising appetite for the cold call.” After the Solicitor General’s office, Nina joined the faculty at Georgetown, took a two-year hiatus to serve as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, then began simultaneously building up an academic career and taking on more Supreme Court cases. These included her second landmark gender case, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, which was instrumental in sustaining the Family Medical Leave Act. Pillard joined the case after being approached by the National Partnership for Women and Families on behalf of an employee of the Nevada Department of Human Resources. That employee, William Hibbs, had been denied the full amount of leave to care for his wife. Pillard assembled reams of statistics showing historical patterns of sex-based discrimination by states across the country, which, she argued, justified Congress’s passing the law.
President Obama announcing his nominations of (from left) Robert Wilkins, Pillard, and Patricia Millet to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the Rose Garden on June 4. Four current Supreme Court justices have served on that court.
“Hibbs was my first little window into thinking about workfamily issues as a lawyer and as an academic,” Pillard says. “Chief Justice Rehnquist, of all people, analyzed it by saying. ‘If you give leave only to women, it perpetuates patterns of behavior that are going to continue discrimination against men in areas such as family leave and against women in employment.’” Nina’s concern for both men and women is evident in the connection she draws between decisions such as Hibbs, which extend a law’s benefits, and social currents bucking that progress. Last year, Nina and Georgetown Law colleague Naomi Mezey were CM 19
Quoting a 2007 Emory Law Journal article she wrote, “Our Other Reproductive Choices: Equality in Sex Education, Contraceptive Access, and Work-Family Policy,” he asked whether it was correct to interpret what she’d written as a claim that abstinence-only curricula were unconstitutional. Pillard responded with an affirmation of equality and local control:
“The law recognizes the (gender neutral) parent. It’s the culture and the practice that have taken this nostalgic turn back to reducing parenthood to motherhood.” Why would anyone embrace this kind of rhetoric now? she asks.
Let me say first, I’m a mother. I have two teenaged children, one boy and one girl. And if my children are being taught in sex education, I want both my children to be taught to say no. Not just my daughter. I want my son to be taught that too. The article was very explicit in saying, I don’t see any constitutional objection—justifiable or otherwise— to abstinence-only education that does not rely on and promulgate sex-role stereotypes. The concern I had in the article was with inequalities that might be contrary to a long line of established Supreme Court cases on the equality between men and women. That was the only constitutional concern that I identified in the article. In my view, the front line in virtually every case and the only people who are involved in developing curriculum are the local schools and the parents and the communities.
so put off by emails from the advocacy group Moms Rising that they published an article, “Against the New Maternalism.” Pillard and Mezey included Moms Rising in a trend (everything from “Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizzlies...to countless ‘mommy blogs’”) which, they felt, celebrates women’s strength at the expense of recognizing the increasingly supportive roles men have come to play in households. For Pillard, the trend represents an incongruous retreat from where the law has moved. “The law recognizes the (gender neutral) parent. It’s the culture and the practice that have taken this nostalgic turn back to reducing parenthood to motherhood.” Why would anyone embrace this kind of rhetoric now? she asks. “It’s doubleedged, and it should be used with caution and with an awareness that you’re cementing deeply gendered ideas about what it is to be a parent. That’s troubling, given where we are as families and where we want to be.” Her academic work on gender has been a focus of Republican criticism. During her Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, echoing many conservative bloggers, suggested that her views “may well be considerably outside the mainstream.”
Sam Hollenshead
Nina Pillard’s work with the Georgetown Supreme Court Institute helps to enrich her students’ experience, as lessons from the classroom often play out in the Institute’s moot court sessions.
Despite her passionate stand on these issues, “I didn’t go into my academic career particularly thinking that I was going to do gender stuff,” Nina maintains. Her choice of subject has been governed by the same principle as her legal career, and indeed much of her life: following what interests her as she discovers it. “I do have a fuller record of various kinds of work, which has been examined as part of the nomination and confirmation process. But it also frankly is not a radical record. “I’ve never been in the crosshairs of Democrats vs. Republicans,” she continues. “I’ve never worked on the Hill. I never wrote strategically or networked strategically. I’ve never been involved in any kind of lobbying and I certainly have never been the subject of any polarized debate. There’s something that seems anomalous about passing through the political fire to get to the un-political post” of serving as a federal appeals court judge. Though she admits her free-flowing approach might not have been the best way to prepare for a judicial nomination, she is happy she never circumscribed her work. Rather than a rigid plan, she says what a person needs are the critical-thinking and writing skills she first acquired back at that high school on Commonwealth Avenue, starting in English class with Eric Davis—that and the Commonwealth ethos of “figuring out what makes you tick and how that fits into the world.” Or, as she often finds herself advising students, “Don’t be so concerned about what you should do, be more concerned about what your law degree empowers you to do and what will really make you happy.” What makes this one-time would-be scientist happy has come to include the alchemy of politics and justice, a crucible where idea, principle, institution, and process occasionally combine to produce ingots of common good.
Jonathan Sapers ’79 is a freelance writer in New York City. His most recent articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Scholastic Administrator, Teachers College’s alumni magazine TC Today, and Harvard’s Ed magazine. His most recent short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Eclectica, The Barnstormer, and Raritan.
20 CM
Shane Bevel
a youn g alumna: E li za beth Ca rrier-LA D D ’01
A Religious Rebel by Tristan Davies
P
eople who knew Elizabeth Ladd at Commonwealth may be surprised to learn she became a pastor. “It certainly wasn’t my persona to be this super-religious girl, but I sort of was. I liked to think of myself as a bad-ass who had piercings and tattoos, and cut my hair short, and dyed it pink.” Such self-exploration was just fine, she explains, in a faith where respect for each individual’s spiritual journey is a central tenet. “In my church, we affirmed that it was okay to experiment and figure out who you were.” Elizabeth’s mother is a minister in the United Church of Christ and her father a Unitarian Universalist (UU) lay leader. While some teenagers might rebel against even such liberal religions, Elizabeth became more active, attending UU camps and conferences. At Hampshire College she took some religion courses but graduated with plans to become a filmmaker. Then, after struggling with the decision for a few years, “I said yes to the call to ministry.” She attended Meadville Lombard, a seminary affiliated with the University of Chicago, and took courses at Andover Newton Theological School, where she and her husband, Seth, became a couple.
Elizabeth spent two years as head minister at Hope Church in Tulsa, OK, before the couple moved in August to Muncie, IN, where she coordinates youth programming at the UU church where Seth is the minister. Unitarian churches in conservative Midwest cities often become hubs of progressive political and social activity, so Elizabeth’s “provocative” attitude fits right in. “Part of my ministry is asking hard questions and challenging people’s assumptions. We believe that there’s a unity to the divinity of the universe, even if that divinity is given different names by different people. We challenge the norms of our culture that aren’t in all of our best interests. And there are a lot of those right now.”
Elizabeth Carrier-Ladd at the pulpit of Hope Church in Tulsa, OK. She recalls, “Commonwealth was one of the places I learned a lot about community. That’s what church is: It’s about creating places where you try to live well with other humans.” CM 21
Thinking as
a Way of Life
Seth Hanselman ’13 Photograph by Ian Polakiewicz ’15
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G
oing back to before I knew how to read, in kindergarten, when I marveled over photographs of the broken marble columns and ashen plaster bodies at Pompeii, I was fascinated with history. Nevertheless, I didn’t realize how much I loved history until I came to Commonwealth. Having entered high school with the impression that literature would be my favorite subject, I was quickly surprised when my Ancient History class’s analysis of a Persian sacred text was more intriguing to me than my English class’s parsing of a sonnet (no offense to sonnets). Our school’s history curriculum, which centers on the close reading of primary sources, made it easy for me to imagine the sorrow of a Greek poet’s lament in 9th grade, or a layperson’s yearning for nirvana in the Buddhist colophons we read in Medieval History in 10th grade.
“The unexamined life is a life without imagination, and consequently a far more miserable life”
History, I concluded, was at its core the celebration of the human condition: the small man will hurry through his brief, uneventful (or all-too-eventful) time in the world in a few decades, but two thousand years later a six-year-old boy may marvel at a plaster copy of his remains. A fringe sect may exile itself to the desert to separate from humanity, and a couple thousand years later it will be inadvertently reattached when a Bedouin finds its sacred texts on the soles of his sandals. Personally, I find it hard to conceive of anything more beautiful than this reattachment. Yet how important is this beauty? There’s the rub. My study of history is a pleasure, and a seemingly useless pleasure at that. Most people are far too caught up in the here-and-now to care about the Dead Sea Scrolls or Pompeii—which on close inspection will not yield anything of utility to our present world. There may be a few among you who are now thinking of that famous quotation, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The awful truth is that no one learns from history. Unless humans radically alter their behavior, the historian serves no real use to society except that of the voice in the wilderness. In a discussion I had with my math teacher, Alan Letarte, at the beginning of the year, it became clear that he, too, was a voice in the wilderness. Mr. Letarte does not study mathematics because of its importance to society, but because he thinks there is a beauty to it. Just as I am enthralled by an elegant historical thesis, Mr. Letarte is enthralled by an elegant mathematical proof. So what is the purpose of the professional adorers of the beauty of ideas, if they have any at all? Of all the insightful things that are taught at Commonwealth, this purpose is perhaps the most valuable. In Mr. Wharton’s 9th-grade Language and Ethics class, we read William Golding’s essay, “Thinking as a Hobby.” Commonwealth thinking, however, is not thinking as a hobby: it is thinking as a way of life. As it is my vocation to be amazed by my desired segment of academia, it has also become my vocation to be amazed by all
of life’s intricacies. As a result I can value the manual laborer’s construction of an asphalt road, can appreciate the melody in a blacksmith’s clanging, can be swept away by the sight of the Milky Way on a summer’s night in rural New England, with the sound of ten thousand crickets reminding me of my earthly location. Socrates may have gone too far when he remarked that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (no offense to Socrates), but I will agree that the unexamined life is a life without imagination, and consequently a far more miserable life. Where society benefits most from this examined life is in its creation of the moral imagination. After realizing the humanity of the two thousand-year old plaster-bodied man from Pompeii, it would be absurd for me to deny the humanity of a homeless man by not answering him when he speaks to me. Likewise I could not deny the humanity of the 70,000 victims of the Civil War in Syria after realizing the humanity in the accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust or the First World War. An imaginative thinker creates an ethical thinker. I’ll finish this speech with a parable I learned as a child at Hebrew school. A gentile (no offense to gentiles) once came to the great rabbi Hillel the Elder and mockingly requested that he recite “the whole Torah” while standing on one foot. Hillel promptly said these words: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” When I first heard this story, the Golden Rule was the apparent teaching. Now, after four years of Commonwealth I have a new revelation: following hours upon hours of studying the gargantuan and perplexing tome that is the Torah, a young Hillel is amazed to realize that he understands it through this single ethical maxim. Sometimes it takes the most thorough investigation to come to the simplest truth. It was the simplest, most beautiful truth that I searched for in the pictures of Pompeii, or that Mr. Letarte seeks in a proof. This audacious quest is what Commonwealth encompasses to me. Like mariners, we set sail from our comfortable existences, braving the waves in search of something genuine and new.
Seth originally presented this essay as his senior talk at the art show opening and parent reception in May. He is now in his first year at Carleton College.
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The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association Emily Bullitt ’03, president of the CWSAA
from the president
T
his is an exciting year for my graduating class. Many of us have known each other for more than half our lives, and, even crazier, we have officially been Commonwealth alumni/ae for ten years. We celebrated this occasion with a reunion on a lovely Saturday in June. Twelve of us met up in the Commonwealth library for dinner and drinks, feeling slightly
naughty for eating and drinking outside the cafetorinasium. Some of the attendees I still see regularly, others I had not been in touch with (except via Facebook, of course) since we graduated at the First and Second Church in 2003. A reunion is a funny sort of gathering. It is tempting to fall back into the old friendship patterns, those comfortable circles that make you feel like you never left. The wonderful thing, though, is that none of us are in high school anymore! Ten years out, my classmates are all involved in fascinating and exciting enterprises running the gamut from graduate school to corporate law. It was a treat to hear snippets of what everyone has done in the past decade. When the bells inevitably rang to send us back out into the streets of Boston, none of us were ready to say goodbye. Instead, we made our way to a bar on Newbury St. to continue reminiscences of “Raptor Wars” in Ms. McCleary’s Ancient History class (don’t ask me—I didn’t arrive until 10th grade!) and late night cookies at Hancock. For any of you considering attending a reunion, whether it be your class’s 25th, the January all-school reunion, or an event away from Boston, I highly recommend it. From the physics buff whose genius used to intimidate you to the best friend you lost track of over the years, you may be surprised to see with whom you connect.
Kathleen Dooher
Tristan Davies ’83
cwsaa
A Note on Fundraising for Commonwealth Affiliates From Janetta Stringfellow, director of development
T
echnology has provided many new ways for Commonwealth alumni/ae to connect with and support each other, and for the most part those developments have been very positive. In recent months, however, we have seen a marked increase in requests for the Commonwealth alumni/ae office to help publicize fundraising and promotional campaigns (Kickstarter, political, and otherwise). In response to a request from an alumnus wishing to support his classmate’s political campaign, we recently shared the school’s mailing list. We regret that misstep and any others we’ve made while evaluating what is best for the interests of the school and our alumni/ae body. We now have a policy to guide such requests that seems fair and professional: Commonwealth School only directly promotes the interests of current students of Commonwealth School.
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From now on, we will not provide our mailing list to anyone seeking to raise money or awareness for campaigns, businesses, or causes. We also cannot post such information on our website or social media outlets. Our constituents are welcome to post their own appeals on our alumni/ae Facebook page (www.facebook. com/commschoolalums) or on other social medial outlets associated with the school, or to submit them for the Class Notes section of CM. If you have questions I invite you to contact me at jstringfellow@commschool.org.
A Natalia drawn by Melanie Abrams ’13
perspective
A Model Studies The Artists
larger-than-life-size painting of a woman loomed above me the first time I entered the art room at Commonwealth. Her body simmered in reds, oranges, and golds. Smears of yellow glowed on the woman’s flesh where she had been touched by the clever strokes of a palette knife. Larry Geffin, Commonwealth’s art instructor, told me the virtuoso piece had been crafted by a fifteen-year-old. Since that day two years ago, I have been impressed every time I model in Larry’s Life Drawing class by the students’ skill, focus, and courage. While Larry—who is truly one of the most wonderful teachers I’ve seen—tells the kids how something has been nicely seen, or which lines should take central or supportive roles, or which anatomical structure seems disproportionate to the rest, his students otherwise have full freedom to follow and trust their creative impulse. They may heed Larry’s advice to take advantage of Boston’s “soupy light” on a given day, but choices in medium, composition, and technique are their own. They even choose their model for Project Week, an honor I accepted this past January. An art model’s job is to inspire, to bare not only flesh but also soul—an offering not everyone is open enough to accept. During my week with the students a bond, a sharing of energy and enthusiasm, arose among us, something I rarely encounter even when modeling for college classes. To be candid, the caliber of artwork completed at Commonwealth is frequently higher than I’ve seen elsewhere. I admired how, unencumbered by too much formal training, the students worked intuitively. Indeed, a sophomore boldly finger-painted most of her piece. Two upperclassmen balanced on benches to reach the tops of towering canvases, making sweeping, confident strokes to cover their territory. Each day, through five hours of dramatically changing light quality, difficult perspectives, periodic modifications to the pose, and so on, the focus of these artists never lapsed. They met their challenges without a flinch. The results were magnificent.
By Natalia Carbullido
Natalia Carbullido is an art model based in Boston, with experience in Paris and elsewhere. She is currently working toward a bachelor’s degree with a concentration in writing at Harvard Extension School. She considers collaborating with the students at Commonwealth one of the greatest joys of modeling. As you may have realized, in the first paragraph Natalia is referring to “Resurrection,” the painting by Anna Gruman ’14 that was featured in the Spring 2012 CM.
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“I loved Commonwealth for the sense of mutual esteem between teachers and students. The faculty were entirely present— taking the time to treat each and every student in their classes with earnest respect.” Eli Kohlenberg ’11 with (left to right) his mother Becky Minard, father Max ’73, and brother Nathan ’07.
P
lease contribute to the Annual Fund. When you do, each student and each teacher at 151 Commonwealth Avenue will feel the impact. Providing 11 percent of our annual budget, the Fund relies on sustained yearly support from all our constituents, and at a school this small, every dollar makes a difference.
Our latest financial reports include a list of donors to the school and stories of how those donors have affected the work and lives of our community. You will find all this information at www.commschool.org/annual2013, in the 2012–2013 Annual Report of Giving.
To make a donation, visit www.commschool.org/makeagift. For more information, call Janetta Stringfellow, Director of Development, at 617-266-7525 ext. 293 or email jstringfellow@commschool.org
Commonwealth School 151 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Teachers Bob Vollrath and Claire Hoult share a smile during lunch cleanup in the old kitchen, c. 1994. As Bob recalls, teachers handled the duties twice a year so that seniors could run all-student meetings before Hancock. Read more about Bob’s dedication to Hancock on page 7.
Non-Profit Organization US Postage Paid North Reading, MA Permit No. 140