CM Commonwealth School Magazine | Summer 2017
Memories of Hancock Also in this issue: The Capstone Program at Commonwealth Scholastic Art and Writing Award Winners A Tribute to Karen Firestone
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hile these two pieces don’t have much in common, what connects Unrefined and Refined is the layout of the glaze, which is solid on the top and bottom. I did this to draw attention to the patterns they hold in the middle. After throwing Unrefined, I scratched in the texture in the middle of the pot with whatever tools I could get my hands on. Once it was bisque fired, I painted a nutmeg glaze over the texture, let it dry, and slowly wiped it away with a sponge. My inspiration for these two pieces stemmed from the frustration of drawing a blank every time I went to glaze a pot. I never knew what to do, but I think this is some of my most interesting glaze work because the shape of each pot works well with its respective design and colors. Unrefined and Refined each won an Honorable Mention in the Glass and Ceramics category in the 2016 Massachusetts Regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
F ROM T H E H E A DM AST E R
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ny Commonwealth veteran would readily agree that Heraclitus’ dictum, that one cannot step into the same river twice, holds for us. When I succeeded Judith Keenan as Head seventeen years ago, I was still one of the more junior teachers (with only 15 years’ experience). Next year, I’ll be the third most senior member of the faculty (tied for that distinction with Jazz Ensemble Director Mark White). One version of Heraclitus’ adage explains that new waters are ever flowing in: alums who visited this year saw a cohort of teachers in their twenties or early thirties; they found new faces in the classrooms and offices of their old ceramics, English, or physics teachers. They also found our lobbies, passageways, and classrooms subtly reshaped and renewed. While the texts in our English courses are shifting to bring in new and more varied voices, visitors would recognize the careful, slow approach to reading; they would hear Mandarin in some of the language classrooms, and with familiar fluency, our advanced Spanish students perhaps discussing a Peruvian film or a story by Díaz or Alarcón. And if alums attended any of the gatherings we hosted this spring for prospective students who were sorting out their responses to our offers of admission, they would hear Commonwealth students speaking with enthusiasm about English, the arts, math, and physics; about the commitment, energy, and depth of their teachers; and about the lively, talkative, sometimes untidy community that turns out remarkable performances, artwork, writing, and thinking. The turnings and power of this river’s current would be familiar. As we recognize in this issue the ebbing of Judith Siporin’s and Karen Firestone’s service to the School, and sadly note (with a fuller tribute to come in the next issue) Rebecca Folkman’s passing, it’s worth reflecting on what abides even as names and faces flow in and out of Commonwealth.
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The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 12 Summer 2017 Headmaster William D. Wharton Editor Jennifer R. Novak Design Jeanne Abboud Assistant Editor Sasha Watson ’92 Class Notes Editor Carly Reed Advisor Janetta Stringfellow Contributing Writers Elizabeth Bailey ’68 Mary P. Chatfield Mara Dale Alisha Elliot ’01 Sasha Watson ’92
commschool
Bill Wharton Headmaster
commonwealthschool
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 info@ commschool.org. Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar. Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.
Photograph by Alex Dalton ’18
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Contents
Commonwealth School Magazine | Summer 2017
Why I Made It
1
Refined and Unrefined By Deneb Scott ’17
From the Headmaster
2
Memories of Hancock
4
Faculty Profile
10
4
A Q&A with physics teacher Chris Barsi By Mara Dale
Scholastic Art and Writing Award Winners
16
To Karen With Love
18
A tribute to Karen Firestone ’73 By Mary P. Chatfield
Diving Deep
18
28
20
The Capstone Program at Commonwealth By Sasha Watson ’92
The Master Gardener
28
20
A tribute to Judith Siporin
News from CWSAA
31
Class Notes
32
Alumni Perspective: A Matter of Words
36
On the cover: Moose Lake at Camp Winona in Bridgton, Maine. Photo by Devlo Media.
By Elizabeth Bailey ’68
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Memories Cooking breakfast alongside teachers and friends; lounging on the boat dock by the lake; performing in the talent show; swinging to the beat of the Saturday night dance mix. We asked Commonwealth alums to share their favorite memories of Hancock on our alumni/ae Facebook page. Here’s what they had to say.
Building a boat with the science teacher and then launching it. It floated! LAURA GROSSMAN MERNOFF ’78
Getting lost on the back roads of southern New Hampshire while biking to camp, straggling in after dark, and collapsing comatose in the rec room. DAN FILENE ’86
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The fall leaves— they were so yellow and orange! Going for walks with friends. JUDY RAIFFA ’73
Talent shows and cooking for a crowd, including the cooking failures. Because cooking rice for 100 is not the same as rice for four. Also, escaping the dance to gaze at the stars. ANN MACKEY ’81
Capture the flag games, and wild chases through the woods and streams. TANA MARTHA ESTHER PESSO ’70
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Debates in “the pit.” Singing in the field. Walks in the cold from the lower barn to the upper barn. An experimental workshop on how to make the best chocolate chip cookies led by Ladonna France. The winner used 50/50 butter and shortening. I’ve been using it for 30+ years! MARY-HELEN NEWBERGER NSANGOU ’85
Discussing Socialism with Mr. Merrill and reading Ulysses out loud with Ellen Kaplan (and the rest of the school). RYAN KERR ’95
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Field hockey games in front of the barn. Anyone could join in. I remember this 45+ years later because it was just pure fun. OKSANA HOEY ’70
Hosting talent night with my brother, a memorable race from the lower barn, and the iron hoop swing near the pond. ANN MCLELLAN LARDAS ’81
A talent night where the teachers did a sketch imitating the students. SABRINA KIEFER ’84
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1
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Soccer games
Fall 2016
Cookie Coordinator
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Student Day Heads
Songs on the Saturday night dance mix
Canoes
Hancock by the numbers
Buses from school to Camp Winona Gallons of vanilla ice cream served
Meals cooked by students and teachers
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Tree house
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Loons on Moose Pond
Morning activities
8 52 Dozen eggs consumed
Dances and warring mixtapes. Also, Watching North by Northwest projected onto a sheet and, of course, corvée, which included anything from brush clearing to chopping vegetables. MARK M. TOWFIQ ’85
Sleeping on hay bales in the big barn and making music in the fields. JANET KAGAN ’73
Mr. Alden holding a failed pumpkin pie aloft and leading a funeral procession to its burial. ELLA RUTLEDGE ’64
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Q &A WITH PHYSICS TEACHER
CHRIS BARSI By Mara Dale
I
Where were you born, and where did you attend high school?
was born in New York City and grew up in Yonkers. My parents still live in the same house. I commuted to Regis High School in Manhattan, which is similar to Commonwealth in some ways: it’s an academically challenging school in a five-story building in a primarily upscale, residential neighborhood. But it’s run by Jesuits, and it’s not co-ed. (I suspect those are two reasons why some teachers weren’t hesitant to use, let’s say, salty language.) Most of us commuted, so my friends came from all around the Tri-State Area. Continued
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F A C U LT Y PROFILE
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What about college? attended Manhattan College, majoring in electrical engineering. I met my wife Becky in the fall of my freshman year. Sometimes I mention to current seniors that I wasn’t much older than they are now. . . .
All the professors in my department were quirky and personable. They knew us well. I had one older professor who was tough. He had a very serious demeanor, and his tests were very, very hard, but he was a wonderful, kind person. He noticed I was taking an elective math course and took interest in me. We began regularly to discuss the sorts of things scientists think about, and he would point me toward this paper or that author. My senior year, I enrolled in an “independent study” in quantum optics, which consisted of my reading textbooks and then “teaching” him. We worked on problems on the board together (sometimes I was writing with my right hand and erasing with my left). It was a lot of fun. He’s the person who got me to realize that simple questions can lead to big answers.
Could you describe your interests in physics and your experience in graduate school at Princeton and as a post-doc at MIT? My training is technically in electrical engineering, but the distinction between EE and physics is blurry. My main interest was understanding how waves travel and how they could travel if you set things up just right. I spent a good deal of time in graduate school in a lab with the overhead lights off and a bright green laser bouncing off everything. I recorded the different patterns of light as they bounced off a scene. The goal was to figure out ways to get more information: better contrast, finer resolution, etc. My work was quite sensitive to vibration, so I often had to work at night, when fewer people were walking in the hallways. I remember hearing music playing in the background, and it was always the weirdest Pink Floyd songs that came on just as I was starting to feel punchy at dawn. Whenever I hear Echoes, I think of the lab.
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As a postdoc, I stuck with the same general idea but switched colors, from green lasers to red ones. Red scatters nicely through the body (press a red laser pointer against your fingertip to see what I mean); this scattered light has interesting medical applications. Think about replacing x-rays with light. The problem is decoding the way light bounces through the body—it’s like looking at ocean waves to figure out the beach line and ocean floor surface.
What are your goals in teaching a physics class? I hope that students realize that they all have some intuition for physics. Maybe not the math—that comes with struggle—but the concepts. If you play soccer, for example, you know how to kick the ball to make it go where you want. We have a sense of how the natural world works through our own experiences. I think there are some deep connections that any student can appreciate. Science is about looking for and understanding patterns in the natural world. Once in a while, students solve a problem and describe the solution with words like “beautiful” or “elegant.” That’s when they begin to recognize these patterns and appreciate the subject.
“Advising is very interesting, especially when you have multiple meetings in a day. It makes you realize how different each student is. Conversations with my advisees range from Utilitarianism to computer vision to pizza styles.”
Judith [Siporin] gave an interesting Hughes Grant talk about the unfortunate separation between science people and humanities people; I think physics, taught properly, can help bridge that divide. One example is talking about waves with musically inclined people. They just get it because it’s so internal to them. I think there’s a topic like that for everyone.
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How would you characterize your teaching?
it’s I love it when students
Humor’s important, and grades aren’t everything (though they’re not negligible). I let students run with their ideas. For example, in Physics 2, we do a demonstration with a an AA battery, a copper wire wrapped in a loop, and a magnet. With the right geometry, the loop spins— a motor. Francesco [Drake ’16] and Clark [Uhl ’16] permanently borrowed it and eventually used it as the basis for their senior project.
ask questions that I don’t
What are some of your favorite concepts to teach?
immediately know the answer to. Many times, I’ve had to revisit fundamental ideas and their underlying assumptions. Those become my favorites.
I love it when students ask questions that I don’t immediately know the answer to. Many times, I’ve had to revisit fundamental ideas and their underlying assumptions. Those become my favorites.
Anything to say about the kind of thinking physics requires and fosters? Logic is required. There are non-intuitive results, but for the most part things should make sense. I try to emphasize that students should not believe their teachers. (I also qualify that, saying that they might not want to argue with their teachers all the time!) They should question presuppositions, reasoning, and conclusions and speak up when they’re suspicious. It’s useful for them to know that physics teachers don’t have all the answers, and that in fact many answers are not known by anyone.
For students who think physics is in their future, it’s important for them to understand that technical details are important. Modern physics research doesn’t care so much about blocks sliding down ramps. Such examples just provide blueprints for how to analyze something rigorously. Calculations are hard, sometimes requiring many pages. Some people consider that fun, much like creating a painting.
Favorite moments from class? The technical terms for one of the topics we cover, circuits, are very pun-friendly. So far, every time we’ve covered it, the whole class has gotten into it, as if it were a game. I keep a mental note of which class managed to carry on the longest. Here’s an example: “Tomorrow’s topic is potentially more difficult than the current one, so we might resist coming to class, even if it will be conducted more slowly. We have the mental capacity, but we just don’t like being charged with difficult questions, so we might go someplace quiet and meditate (“Ohm”) to insulate ourselves.” (Nobody has ever used the word “electrifying.” They’re all much more creative than that!)
Commonwealth recently received a $50,000 matching fund from the Edward E. Ford Foundation for the construction of a new physics lab. What will it include and make possible? We’re still working out what’s feasible. I’d like to have space for students’ long-term work (Project Weeks or Capstone Projects, for instance), similar to how students use the art studios. Currently, the Robotics Club keeps supplies in a closet in a classroom—they can’t get to them when classes are in session. It would be great to have a corner for them. There are standard high school labs, like observing deviations from free fall or building circuits that perform mathematical operations. We’ll do some of that—with some curve balls; otherwise it gets boring. And certain experiences simply can’t be understood just by thinking about them. If you hold a gyroscope in your hand and then turn your wrist, the gyroscope will “fight” you. It’s a visceral sensation that can be understood only by doing it. Such experiences, which the lab will provide, help build deeper intuition.
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Through my experiences in research labs, I’ve realized that million dollar equipment isn’t always necessary. Last year, several students built their own experiments. Zach Perlo ’16 built an “invisibility cloak” based on a 2014 optics paper and Owen Lynch ’16 built part of an electronic synthesizer. If students are motivated, it’s easy for them to ask questions. We’re looking for ways to encourage that.
Thoughts about being an advisor? Advising is very interesting, especially when you have multiple meetings in a day. It makes you realize how different each student is. Conversations with my advisees range from Utilitarianism to computer vision to pizza styles.
What’s it like to live in New Hampshire and commute to Boston? I usually wake up around 4 a.m., drive 25 minutes to a parkand-ride, and take a bus that drops me off in Copley Square. I travel three to four hours. But I don’t find it particularly burdensome. And the bus is where I do much of my work. I like the physical separation between work and home. In the evening, when I exit the highway, I have to drive along a country road, past farmland and horse stables. It’s not uncommon to see deer or chickens crossing the road. A roost of turkeys and a pack of coyotes live in the woods just outside our home, so they often wake us up—nature’s alarm clock.
What do you do outside of school for pleasure? I have some academic hobbies—economic theory, philosophy, and history. But for the most part, I like being outside. I don’t live far from beaches, forests, or mountains; I try to take advantage when I can. I would love to hike the Appalachian Trail. I’ve been interested in amateur radio (my call sign is AB1QN). I would like to take a road trip across the country either in an RV or on a motorcycle.
Favorite aspect of our school? The building? I like the lack of official rules. People usually don’t follow rules anyway, so my philosophy is live and let live (with common sense). Flexibility is important; I doubt things could work so easily in a larger school. Details, like the woodwork on the banister, give the building extra charm. I remember noticing that one of the balusters looked a little different. I later learned that a pool cue had been used to replace a broken one. And though it’s difficult to wade over them, the student colonies in the hallways make Commonwealth feel like a home. (I remember having a desk in my bedroom that my parents said was for homework, but I rarely used it—my books and papers and I were always sprawled out over the floor or the bed.)
What do you think makes Commonwealth special? Our colleagues are fantastic, but my answer would be the students. They’re hardworking and bright and can be very funny. The artwork, the concerts, the plays, the games . . . . It’s impressive to see them doing what they love and doing it so well.
Chris Barsi joined Commonwealth’s faculty in 2014. He teaches physics and mathematics, advises the Robotics Club, and served as a faculty representative on the Board of Trustees this past year. He and his wife Becky, an art teacher and Chair of the Creative Arts Department at the Derryfield School, live in Exeter, New Hampshire, with their golden retriever Charlie, an extremely popular and beloved addition to Hancock weekends. CM 15
AWARD-WINNING EXPRESSIONS
F
our Commonwealth students won nine awards in the 2016 Massachusetts Regional Scholastic Art and Writing
Awards, including seniors
Shoshana Boardman and Ellie Laabs, whose
work is featured here. Winners were selected from over 15,000 entries in art and nearly
2,500 in writing, and were judged based on three criteria: originality, technical skill, and personal vision.
Shoshana Boardman ’17 u Silver Key, Printmaking,
Trinity Church
u Silver Key, Novel Writing,
Fall
u Gold key, Novel Writing,
The Demon
Ellie Laabs ’17 u Gold Key, Short Story,
“Arthur”
u Gold Key, Poetry,
“Last Night I Stood on a Beach with Walt Whitman”
u Honorable Mention, Poetry,
“To My Daughter:”
Deneb Scott ’17 u Honorable Mention, Glass and Ceramics,
Unrefined
u Honorable Mention, Glass and Ceramics,
Refined
Aly Yanishevsky ’19 u Honorable Mention, Personal Essay/Memoir,
Invincible
Trinity Church by Shoshana Boardman ’17 16 CM
Last Night I Stood on a Beach with Walt Whitman Last night I stood on a beach with Walt Whitman. We gazed up at the stars, remembering how they had looked on the ceiling of the theater, the corners of ragged lined paper, in the photographs of aged astronomers. The realities became interchangeable; the stars we used so long as substitutes, lying with our backs on the cold stage, pretending to feel the vastness of the universe from inside the black-box, became the self-same constellations that glowed, faintly, in the ocean sky. Walt was restless, trousers rolled, walking on the slipping stones, never conceding to sit upon the shaky ground. I asked him if he thought he would die. He rubbed his hands together as if to crush the overbearing darkness with his palms, throwing it with a stone into the ocean. He laughed, and ran to catch the waves before their revolution backward into the deep blue. How is it, I wondered, that one can be so aged and so childlike all at once? He is unafraid to plummet the depths because he does not think he will drown. I looked at him then as I never can myself, criticizing the incongruities, the bumps, the rounded stones of his character, wondering at the antithesis of age. The foam on the waves told me of coexistence, the water and air playing and holding each other together by opposition. Nothing in this world is solid. Walt ran now, up and down the strand, clutching seaweed in his hands like hair pulled from an old woman, the last remnants of someone dear. I was stunned into stillness: driven to the brink of the world, he stared with wide eyes into the ocean, clinging to some uncertain, inevitable end. The stars, too, unsure of their own being, fell out of the sky and caught themselves on his shoulders. He was motionless at last. I saw in the photographic stillness that a poet had led me to the sea to watch him born and dying and dying and born over again. I felt, swept in with the ocean air, my own veins grow cold at the thought of his commencement, lying limp inside my skin as the seaweed still dangling from his small, wrinkled hands.
by Ellie Laabs ’17
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To Karen With Love
BY MARY P. CHATFIELD
“From the time I divided a notebook page down the middle to segment the plusses and minuses of attending a new school, I have consciously gravitated toward analyzing risk.” —Karen Firestone, Even the Odds: Sensible Risk-Taking in Business, Investing, and Life
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t is the first Wednesday of October 2016. Small tables in the library are pushed together to make one huge table able to seat 24 people. More chairs line the walls. Piles of paper— agendas, budgets, reports, name tags—cover the table’s center, while bottles of water and plates of crackers, cheese, and fruit fill a table set against a wall of bookshelves. People start appearing, greeting each other, finding something to eat, choosing a seat. Faculty members giving reports, faculty and student trustees, and late-comers take a seat in the chairs along the walls. Suddenly, Karen Firestone’s voice rises above the hum of conversation and she bangs a gavel. Another Commonwealth School Board of Trustees meeting has begun. But it is not just another meeting. As Karen starts to speak, Headmaster Bill Wharton interrupts to give what he says will be the first of a number of tributes which he plans to make throughout the year; for Karen, who has been Chair of the Board for the last ten years, is planning to step down this spring. Bill praises Karen for her devotion to the School, for her constant support of him, and for her tireless work on the School’s behalf. She fidgets; she wants to get down to business. She hustles the trustees on to the business of approving minutes. There is work to done for the school she cares so much about. How did such a strong, independent, utterly professional, and extraordinarily civic-minded woman come to be Chair of Commonwealth’s Board? I asked her that one morning last December as we sat together in her office at Aureus Asset Management, the company she co-founded in 2005, deep in Boston’s Financial District. To begin with, she says that she was brought up to be independent; her mother and father divorced when she was two, and her mother, a nurse who worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift, left the raising of Karen to her grandparents, who pretty much gave Karen her head. She became “extremely independent” early on, cooking for herself at the age of nine. “I was self-motivated,” she says. “I had every intention of doing well.” Karen’s family lived in Brighton and she went to a public school nearby. A gifted child, she was put into the 5th and 6th grade advanced class, the point of which was to get into Boston Latin School. The students worked hard for their teacher, Ms. Culhane, who Karen describes as “very tough.” “I never worried about myself, because I was tough and I liked to speak my mind,” though that quality often got her into trouble in school. “I was always doing penances,” she admits. “We had lots of training for a very tough test, but all of us got in. And for Girls’ Latin you had to score higher than for Boys’ Latin.”
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Once at Girls’ Latin she had an hour’s commute each way and spent the long ride reading. Of course, being committed, she did well, but found the place “very regimented and oriented towards memorization.” In the afternoons, she rode around Brookline on her bike, evaluating its fancy houses in order to decide which one she would like to live in some day. She became so familiar with certain houses that she felt she knew them as well or better than the realtors who sold them. In the summer of 1970, Karen worked at Camp Y-Ki-Ya, where a fellow councilor, Karen Rutenberg ’73, told her all about her high school experience at a place called Commonwealth School. To Karen it seemed “wildly different” from Girls’ Latin, but also very appealing. She had begun to realize that an all-girls school might not be good for her because girls at that moment in time “weren’t supposed to be competitive.” She visited Commonwealth in the beginning of her sophomore year and found “there wasn’t anything” about the school she didn’t like. Ever the strategist, she calculated the plusses and minuses of attending each school on a single notebook page and resoundingly chose Commonwealth. The School changed her. Because a number of her classmates’ parents were divorced, she didn’t feel she had to explain herself. What surprised her most about the School was that in a very uptight
era, Commonwealth encouraged its students to be irreverent. She liked to listen and learn about people, so she hung out with all types, made friends, accepted every overnight invitation, and went to school parties at the Cambridge houses of academics who, she says, “would actually engage (me) in conversation.” At one of these parties Ken Hughes’ stepfather, Leo Dworsky, talked to her about the stock market and, her interest roused, she went to Charles Merrill and asked him to get her a job at Merrill Lynch. He said he would if she promised never to become a capitalist. She later apologized to Mr. Merrill, because at that time she wasn’t sure what a capitalist was. Karen has praise for many of her Commonwealth teachers, and appreciates the great difference they have made in her life. She credits Charles Chatfield with making her not only a better writer, but also a better reader of finance. Says Karen, “He gave a lot of credit for one’s thoughts and made you feel great.” She was so well-grounded that she “had fun” in Latin; in fact, all learning became fun. “It was hard, too, but I was used to hard.” As though to illustrate this belief, Karen, during her senior year, while carrying a full load of classes and homework, worked at Merrill Lynch after school and took a typing class at night. Not to be outdone, she also started Litter at Your Own Risk, the first of Commonwealth’s many literary magazines. After Commonwealth she attended Harvard, majoring in economics. Her inner capitalist could not be repressed, but she also took classes in any subject she found interesting. “I kept busy,” she says, “and I kept trying to broaden my horizons.” A lover of baseball, she wrote her senior thesis on “The Economics of Baseball,” which she describes as “full of statistical analysis.” After graduation in 1977, she tried to get a job with a baseball team. That didn’t happen, but she did get a job with an agent, and was savvy enough at 27 to present on the economics of the reserve clause. Harvard Business School was a natural next step, and when she graduated in 1983 she joined Fidelity Investments as an assistant fund manager to the legendary Peter Lynch, who ran the flagship Magellan Fund. She was also pregnant with the first of two sets of twins. Karen has a wonderful section in her 2016 book, Even the Odds: Sensible Risk-Taking in Business, Investing, and Life, about encountering the real Ann Landers on a plane while she was pregnant with her second set of twins. Landers identified the key risks involved in adding two more infants to her already wildly busy life, namely giving up her job only to regret it later on. But Karen’s disciplined management of all her responsibilities pulled her through; that and the total support of her husband David. After 22 years at Fidelity, where she was one of only two women who managed large stock funds that invested across all industries, she decided to go out on her own. It was, as she writes, “my opportunity to establish my own brand, independent of Fidelity” and by doing so “to score a victory for women entrepreneurs, particularly those few of us in finance.” The girl who liked things because they were hard had grown to
Headmaster Wharton describes the sheer number of hours Karen has given to Commonwealth as “astounding,” and the amount of money she has saved the School in management fees “almost beyond counting.”
be the woman who took on the most difficult challenges—and succeeded. The success of Aureus Asset Management is attributable to all of the qualities Karen honed as a student—determination, joy in hard work, wide-ranging interests, an analytical imagination, and a generosity of spirit. These are the same qualities she has put at the service of several large nonprofits in Boston, having served, or still serving, on the boards of Deaconess Beth Israel Hospital and the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs of Boston, among others. But ever since the day in 1985 when then Headmaster Charles Chatfield asked her to join the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees, she has been wholeheartedly at the service of Commonwealth. Headmaster Wharton describes the sheer number of hours Karen has given to Commonwealth as “astounding,” and the amount of money she has saved the School in management fees “almost beyond counting.” But the word he came back to over and over again as we talked about Karen’s impact on the school was “devotion.” As Bill put it, “her story is the story Charles Merrill had in mind when he founded Commonwealth. She is an embodiment of what the School hopes its graduates will be.” Dear Karen, all of us—Heads, faculty, staff, trustees past and present, alumni/ae, students, parents past and current, and those who are yet to be part of the School—are deeply grateful that there were more plusses than minuses on that notebook page way back in 1970.
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DIVING DEEP The Capstone Program at Commonwealth
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By Sasha Watson ’92
n the past two years, Commonwealth students and faculty have been treated to a new slate of speakers at our regular Thursday assemblies. One played a video game on a projected screen, while explaining to a rapt audience how he’d conceived of and then built it; another showed startling images by Russian Constructivist photographer Alexander Rodchenko as she told of the utopian political and artistic ideology that drove the artist’s work; and a trio of women sang songs and told stories from Haitian culture, freely mixing Creole with English as they reflected on the meaning of Haitian-American identity. These might sound delightful but not unusual (after all, we always have great assembly speakers) if you don’t know that the presenters were not experts who’d come to visit, but Commonwealth seniors. These end-of-year assemblies culminate a year of independent research, writing, and work by Commonwealth’s Capstone scholars. It’s hard not to wonder, when sitting in the audience, how the Capstone program didn’t come into existence sooner than it did. It was, after all, only in 2014 that the year-long, half-credit research project became a part of the curriculum, allowing up to three seniors each year the opportunity to conduct extensive independent research under the guidance of a faculty mentor. In part, it’s the selectivity of the program that was long anathema to Commonwealth, whose tradition of not offering prizes to students began with Charles Merrill. Headmaster Bill Wharton explains that “the school has always stood for the idea that we want our students to discover the intrinsic rewards of throwing themselves at challenging material and turning out first-rate work—there is a pleasure that comes with figuring out questions of history and math, or of mastering the alto part of a Handel mass.” Because students find those pleasures and rewards in such different areas, and because Commonwealth encourages the development of specific interests, adds Wharton, “prizes kind of miss the point.” But in recent years, some began to wonder if another point wasn’t being missed. As part of the strategic planning process that began in 2012 and ended in 2014, the Board expressed concern that the absence of prizes meant that those looking in—potential applicants and college admissions committees in particular—might not recognize the exceptional quality of student work at Commonwealth. The Board charged a subcommittee, co-chaired by Director of Studies Rebecca Jackman and alumnus A. Max Kohlenberg ’73, with reviewing Commonwealth’s curriculum to ensure that it remained the first-rate program it had always been, and with exploring ways to showcase student work such that its rigor would be obvious to those on the outside. When the members of the subcommittee, including teachers Melissa Glenn Haber, Monica Schilder, Catherine Brewster, and Mara Dale, got to work, they were most drawn to the question of how to help especially motivated students take their interests past what classwork allowed. They reviewed the ways students had taken their own particular interests further and where they found external validation. Many students had, for instance, been semifinalists in
Left: Participants in a dramatic reading of Rachel Tils’ play
the Intel Science Search; had published articles in the The Concord Review, which is devoted to high school history research; or had won prizes from the Massachusetts Regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. The group went on to discuss ways students might pursue deep interests, academic and otherwise, within the school’s curriculum. They eventually arrived at the idea of a Capstone project that would be restricted to just a few seniors, and after discussion with the faculty and the Board, the decision was made to pilot the program with the class of 2015. In the spring of 2014, the faculty solicited its first Capstone proposals from students. Jackman recalls that “the feeling among the faculty was that what would qualify a student to participate would be that they’d demonstrated an ability to work independently, to meet deadlines, and to be reliable.” Because the faculty was not comfortable choosing among students, non-faculty evaluators assessed the proposals. In that first year, Board trustee Polly Chatfield and former teacher Rebecca Folkman read proposals, interviewed students about their plans, and made recommendations to the faculty about whom to select. (Chatfield and former teacher Eric Davis would do the same in 2015.) Chatfield recalls that the students who applied were “what you’d expect of certain Commonwealth students, lapping it up and loving it.” That first round of proposals would result in a one-woman show by Rachel Tils, an academic essay on Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return by Ian Polakiewicz, and a graphic novel on the comics panic of the 1950s by Mehitabel Glenhaber. These three students first met with their mentors in May 2014 to start assembling a reading list, which they would tackle over the summer. This early start, says Jackman, meant that “they came into senior year with some real work done, so that they could enter the season of college applications without the additional pressure of getting a new project off the ground.” Beginning in September, the three students began regular meetings with mentors, and with one another. Together the students discussed upcoming deadlines, initial presentations to the faculty, and, increasingly as the year went on, the work itself. Susan Thompson, Commonwealth’s acting teacher and theatre producer, who has mentored two projects, points out that in these group meetings, the students “learn to critique one another, and to do it across fields. If someone’s performing, another student might ask, ‘So, who are you now?’ which is a basic and important question. Or a layperson might tell the computer programmer, ‘This is gibberish to me, I don’t get it,’ which is also useful.” Students were expected to have a draft of their work written by spring break, at which point it was given to a small group of readers for critique. A final draft was due later in the spring, followed by the presentation to the school. “The later timeline is short once the year gets underway,” notes Jackman. The faculty who have been involved with the program unanimously express the great pleasure they take in helping students to move along their intellectual and creative paths throughout the year. Mara Dale, mentor to Julia Curl ’16, who worked on the study of Alexander Rodchenko, says that “it’s exciting to see the students as independent researchers, and to have the opportunity to kindle their unique intellectual passions.” And the passions of the seven students who have completed Capstones thus far are manifold. CM 21
THE PERFORMERS RACHEL TILS ’15
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he first of the projects Thompson mentored was “The Breach,” a one act, one-woman show by Rachel Tils ’15. The project had its roots in Tils’ junior year U.S. History research paper, for which she’d read early 19th century women’s magazines and women’s diaries and journals as she pursued the question of how post-Civil War women were taught to be women, and how they responded to this teaching. Thompson’s theater program had also been central to Tils throughout her years at Commonwealth, and when she heard about the Capstone, she saw an opportunity to combine her interests in women’s history and theater. So, in the summer before her senior year, Tils jumped back into the research, spending her days at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library on her History of Women in America and at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Thompson met with Tils several times over the summer to talk about how Tils’ research could find its way into a play. She recalls that Tils “knew that she wanted to write a play that would have
a historical basis,” and she began by suggesting that Tils create composite characters rather than anchoring the characters within a limited biographical story. Under Thompson’s guidance, Tils created four characters: a Massachusetts woman based on the historical figure of Lucy Larcom, a highly-educated poet and abolitionist; an actress who wrestles with the question of whether to take the role of a biracial woman in a real play titled “The Octoroon”; a young biracial woman, who struggles to live as an actual octoroon; and a southern Jewish girl. To write the text, Tils used language from the diaries and journals at times, and at others her own words. Her task, recalls Thompson, was “to create a truth while using her own creative liberty to make the story work.” As they worked together, Tils says, Thompson guided her toward additional historical and contemporary figures, including actress Mary Ann Duff, who lived in the 1860s, and the contemporary documentary theater creator Anna Deveare Smith, whose one-woman shows incorporate wide ranges of voices. In the later stages of the project, the two collaborated to make the research into a performance rather than just words to be read. Much of their work, says Thompson, was “transferring an academic language to a sparser, more action-oriented theatrical text.” Tils credits Thompson with helping add movement and gesture: “I was telling the story through my own physicality as well as through dialogue.” At the end of the year, Tils had a complete script for “The Breach,” which she performed for the school. The project didn’t end there, though. Over the summer, Thompson held a series of “teas” at her home, where four student actresses from Commonwealth—Calliope Pina-Parker ’16, Madeline Smith ’16, Ellie Laabs ’17, and Nicole Liu ’17—performed the piece for Tils. Thompson notes that the most vital aspect of the Capstone project isn’t necessarily the final product as it exists at the end of the year, but the prospect of a longer-term interest: “It’s exciting to see something that’s going to be lived for awhile, that it’s opened up a whole area that the student can continue to explore.” Currently a sophomore at Pomona College pursuing a double major in theater and history, Tils says that while she isn’t sure what the future of “The Breach” will be, the play led her toward the interests she is pursuing in and out of class today.
GEUINAH BLAISE ’16
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euinah Blaise ’16 also brought historical research together with performance. She began her senior year, says Thompson, “wanting to do it all: a historical research paper and a performance—but each of those is an ambitious project on its own.” Thus, their work began with the process of narrowing Blaise’s focus. Thompson recalls telling her, “Why don’t we start with you sharing what you know orally.” When the pair met, then, Blaise would tell stories, and she found herself singing songs as she did so. Thompson began to notice that the songs were the anchor of the stories, all of which returned to the triangular formation of Blaise, her mother, and her grandmother. Eventually
The table setting for an afternoon tea featuring a reading of Rachel Tils’ play
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Thompson suggested, “Why don’t you have a looser format based on these three figures that can function as a discovery of Haitian identity.” Blaise recalls this as the pivotal moment in her project. She’d been fixated, she says, on the necessity of completing an academic paper on the history of Haiti, but “when Susan said the best thing I could do would be to capture my own Haitian identity and the identity of my family, it became really personal.” This was, she says, “a life-changing experience that I don’t think I would have had if she hadn’t pushed me toward the artistic side of the project.” The result was a performance in which song and storytelling interweave, with Blaise voicing her own young Haitian-American perspective alongside that of her mother and her grandmother, played by Halima Blackman ’17 and Calliope Pina-Parker ’16. Together, the three debate the value of learning to cook, of making one’s own tea, of the folk remedy lwil maskriti, and more. Haitian creole songs and words filter in and out of the dialogue, making for a rich theatrical experience. In the voices of her three characters, Blaise addresses the history of Haitian occupation and independence as she’d hoped to do in a historical essay, but does so in the voices of family members who remember different periods in the country’s history. She also voices her own frustrations with the culture that her mother and grandmother have passed down to her: when they scold her for burning pasta, and her grandmother tells her she’ll never find a husband if she doesn’t learn to cook, Blaise replies, “Since when is my worth determined by marriage? So sexist!” Her take on things prompts her mother to proclaim at one point, “Sometimes I wonder if I raised an American girl or a Haitian girl!” This question of how much of her identity is Haitian and how much is American, animates the piece, with humorous back and forth between the characters and, of course, the many songs they sing, illustrating the dilemma. At the end, Blaise concludes:
“When I think of Haiti I think strength, resilience, pride, and most of all hope. [. . . ] Where is this hope coming from? Is it from the rubble that still remains from the earthquake six years ago? The smell of burning schools during election season? Or maybe it’s the corrupt joke of a government we call
THE PHILOSOPHER IAN POLAKIEWICZ ’15
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an Polakiewicz ’15 undertook his 27-page essay on the concept of the eternal return in Nietzsche because, he says, “I’d been doing philosophy on my own since early middle school. By the time I got to high school I’d become very interested in Kant, and then I started reading Nietzsche.” Once he’d begun to read the German philosopher, he says, “I realized there was a lot that Nietzsche was saying about metaphysics that rang true to me.” He was particularly struck by the idea of the loss of external meaning, and therefore the loss of the possibility of metaphysics. Also interested in the intersection of existentialism and epistemology, he decided to pursue the eternal return in part to investigate the mysterious idea that events might recur in identical form again and again. Nietzsche articulates this idea in the following fragment from The Gay Science:
What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh. . . must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence . . .Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!”
a democracy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can still feel the sand between my toes, smell the beach from miles away. I can still taste the mangoes. Hear the sounds of the carnival horns and drums as they passed my neighborhood. And louder than ever I can hear the screams of faith and pride from natives. I see Haiti. The good, the bad, the ugly. [. . . ] I’m safe and blessed and [. . . ] I’ve become a bit of a stranger to the place I call home … called home.” Blaise returned to Haiti last summer for the first time since her family left when she was six. It was a moving experience for her, and she took care to write down her responses to seeing the place she called home as a child and that calls to her still. The project does indeed go on, then, says Blaise, who thinks she might major in History at Georgetown, where she recently completed her first year.
Both Conolly and Polakiewicz recall the beginning of the year as a time of feverish reading, with Polakiewicz describing those early stages as a collaborative project: “We were both relatively new to Nietzsche, and we helped to guide each other through it. We were reading and then discussing, reading more.”
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Polakiewicz recalls his initial curiosity about what kind of an idea this might be. Was it, for example, a metaphysical concept or a physical one? Was it intended as salve or provocation? To begin to approach the question, he read widely, both in Nietzsche and in secondary literature addressing the philosopher’s thought. His mentor for the project was History and Classics teacher Don Conolly, who had branched out from his study of ancient philosophy in graduate school into modern philosophy, with a particular interest in Kant and Heidegger. He had read little Nietzsche, but was game to dive in with Polakiewicz. Conolly recalls that Polakiewicz made an extensive reading list and took a course on existentialism during the summer preceding his senior year, and so “came into senior year fully loaded.” In the fall, they both read Walter Kaufmann, the philosopher and translator who was instrumental in rehabilitating Nietzsche after his work had become associated with Nazism, but whose ideas they found less than inspiring. Both recall a turning point when they read Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. Deleuze’s rendering of Nietzsche’s will to power as a metaphysical principle of absolute pluralism—the idea that there is a collection of irreducible forces that compete and combine to make up the world— inspired them to explore Nietzsche’s reading of the Presocratics, his debt to Schopenhauer, and his anticipation of Heidegger’s concept of fundamental ontology. Both Conolly and Polakiewicz recall the beginning of the year as a time of feverish reading, with Polakiewicz describing those early stages as a collaborative project: “We were both relatively new to Nietzsche, and we helped to guide each other through it. We were reading and then discussing, reading more.” Conolly agrees, saying, “I got totally into it. We’d each read a few hundred pages per week, then meet to have these really fun discussions. We were feeding off of each other.” Their meeting times, then, functioned as a tutorial in which they dissected what they’d read and worked to make sense of it together. As spring break grew near, though, they shifted gears. “Eventually they wanted me to write something,” says Polakiewicz, “so I sat down and wrote the paper in a day and a half.” Conolly read it and, in Polakiewicz’s words, “sent it back to me saying, ‘This is great, and you need to clarify a billion things you didn’t explain.’” The two then began a revision of the essay, with Conolly reading and commenting on drafts, while Polakiewicz revised and responded to requests for clarification (“which I don’t like to do,” he added). Conolly, for his part, remembers the revision process as being the richest part of the project: “Some of the best work we did together was my forcing him to unpack his ideas. In doing it, he not only clarified, he had new revelations.” In his paper, Polakiewicz traces the development of the idea of eternal return, moving through the major Nietzschean ideas of master and slave moralities, the will to power, and self-overcoming, and arrives at the conclusion that eternal return can only be understood through Nietzsche’s idea that “truth” is grounded not in some objective reality, but in the values we have adopted. In this view, eternal return is the idea we should adopt if we want to recalibrate our values and so cure “the disease of nihilism.” “Once eternal return is integrated into the self,” writes Polakiewicz near the end of his essay, “the paralysis of nihilism is lifted.” Polakiewicz notes that the project prepared him for the studies he now pursues in his double major in Philosophy and German at Yale. “Nietzsche situated me well in the tradition,” he says. “If you get comfortable reading Nietzsche then there’s almost nothing that can make you uncomfortable.” He plans to spend next year in
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Germany, studying and writing, and from there, he says, “I’d like to bring all of these conceptual tools to the world in a very practical way, so I’ll probably do some grad school in Germany, then go on to law school and into legal academia.” The project could take on new life at Commonwealth, too. Conolly, recalling his work with Polakiewicz muses, “It was so interesting. I’d really like to teach a class on it.”
THE HISTORIANS JULIA CURL ’16
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ulia Curl ’16, now a student at The New School, says that her exploration of the Russian Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko “really wasn’t just a one-year project.” Rather, it grew out of multiple interests she’d developed over the course of her high school career: “In ninth grade, I took a photography class with Rusty [Crump] and got interested in art. Junior year I took Ms. [Audrey] Budding’s Communism class and learned all about Russian Communist history in the 20s and 30s, and then my senior year I took Russian Literature and Art History, so all of that came together in the Capstone.” Her research, guided by Mara Dale, consisted of reading widely in art history, literary theory, and the history and theory of Communism. She recalls a peak moment when she drove to New York to see an exhibit of early Soviet photography at the Jewish Museum that contained many of Rodchenko’s images: “It was amazing to see the exact images I’d been working on!” In her essay, Curl writes about the artistic and cultural liberation that followed in the wake of the October Revolution in 1917, tracing the development of the Constructivist movement and of Rodchenko’s approach to photography, which was guided by his ideal of the creation of a “scientific” art. Curl found that the year-long project yielded real revelations in her understanding of the Constructivist movement, and of art itself: “I realized toward the end of my research and writing that, in spite of the whole Constructivist claim that it was starting art over from the beginning, it was intricately tied in with the history of art, with icons, with Russian history and culture. I realized that no movement is really isolated, no matter what it claims.”
SHOSHANA BOARDMAN ’17
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hoshana Boardman ’17 remembers reading the Book of Ezekiel on her own several years ago, when she took special notice of a section in which the prophet Ezekiel describes a vision of angels: “They had wings and wheels and eyes and one goat leg. I started wondering where all these pieces had come from and why they had stuck around in the tradition for so long.” She began to research other mythological creatures, and then “at one point I just got stuck on demons.” Boardman pursued this interest more deeply in Melissa Glenn Haber’s Bible-as-History/History-as-Bible class, where she completed a final project in which she wrote a novella titled The Demon that
In her research, Boardman examines both the parallels between Zoroastrian and Jewish demons and how demons are treated in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. She also examines Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources for evidence of demons in the medieval period.
went on to win a Gold Key, the top prize in the Massachusetts Regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. It seemed natural, then, that she would choose to continue to investigate the role of demons in religious tradition for her Capstone. After studying the ancient traditions of Judaism and Zoroastrianism in the first semester, she became particularly interested in how demons fit in with Judaism’s strict monotheism. This led her into the study of how Persian influence affected the Israelites, both in the Babylonian exile—when historians agree demons first appear in Jewish literature—and in the diaspora. In her research, Boardman examines both the parallels between Zoroastrian and Jewish demons and how demons are treated in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. She also examines Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources for evidence of demons in the medieval period. As Boardman’s mentor, Glenn Haber has encouraged her to incorporate her own art into her Capstone (Boardman is an accomplished artist who has worked on sketches of demons) to create an illuminated manuscript with her essay as text. While Boardman is considering the idea, she hasn’t made a decision: “There has to be a manuscript before it can be illuminated,” she says wryly.
Fredric Wertham ultimately saw a set of strict regulations placed upon comics by laws that were enforced into the 1970s. As she researched the details of these events, Glenhaber saw a parallel with certain comics of the time, noting that the popular horror and crime genres, so vilified by Wertham and his cohort, often seemed to model the kind of panic Wertham provoked. “I wanted to do a project that would play on the parallels,” says Glenhaber, “and that used the horror and crime genres to tell the story of the comic’s panic.” Her heavily footnoted, twenty-page graphic novel uses text from historical documents and images that effectively mimic Tales from the Crypt-style art. Working with Rusty Crump on the art side and former history teacher Margaret Sabin on the historical side, Glenhaber spent the year conducting research and then writing and drawing her comic. As her work neared completion, her meetings with Crump and Sabin often turned around the questions of whether it made sense both as a historical paper and as a work of art, and the work she needed to do, as she says, “to tweak in both directions.” Glenhaber plans to complete a major in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she recently completed her sophomore year and where her interest in comics has again found its way into school—she’s already taken several classes on the history and form of graphic novels.
THE MAKERS MEHITABEL GLENHABER ’15
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ehitabel Glenhaber ’15 was interested in comics throughout her time at Commonwealth, and while she took many art classes, she didn’t have the opportunity to bring this interest to school. An accomplished student of history (she published two research papers in the The Concord Review while at Commonwealth), when she heard about the new Capstone program, she says, “I was excited because I realized I could actually do comics for school!” Glenhaber was interested in the moral panic that arose in the 1950s, when a general sense that juvenile delinquency was on the rise turned to finger pointing at comics. An anti-comics movement led by
Cover image for Mehitabel Glenhaber’s graphic novel
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The first four pages of Mehitabel Glenhaber’s 20-page graphic novel exploring the anti-comics movement of the 1950s
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Stills from Cole Granof’s video game “Four Sided”
COLE GRANOF ’16
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efore Alex Lew started teaching computer science at Commonwealth in 2015, he was told he’d be a Capstone mentor for a talented computer science student who planned to create a video game. Lew didn’t know quite what to expect, but when he began to communicate with Cole Granof ’16 by email, he realized that Granof had the technical skills to build a complete game, and that it was the finer questions of game design for which he sought guidance. Unlike most other Capstone researchers, Granof’s summer reading list included blogs about game design and YouTube videos of video games. Granof wanted to make a 2D platform game—a game in which a player jumps from one platform to the next in order to advance to increasingly more difficult levels. To create these levels, Granof had to consider every aspect of game creation, including game physics (the interplay of friction, gravity, and collision), gameplay mechanics (systems that determine the complexity of player interaction), and game flow (challenges and rewards that keep players actively engaged). In his final project essay, Granof says that for him “the act of level design was the most fun part of creating the game” because “[a] level designer has the challenge of introducing new mechanics that might be foreign to the player, and then using those mechanics in unexpected and clever ways to create variety within the gameplay.” Granof, who now studies Interactive Media and Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, reflects that, with all of its moving parts, the creation of the game was “an incredibly challenging and complex undertaking,” especially given that he’d never worked on a single project in such a sustained way. He admits that “it felt almost foreign to move forward with the same project for over a year […], every week grappling with new design problems, technical challenges, and aesthetic choices to create something that cohered.” With Lew often providing the prodding he needed to stay with the project, Granof completed his game, called “Four Sided,” and presented it to the school. In order to demonstrate the process of building the game, Granof added a feature that allowed a player to add a new level and invited math teacher Theo Paul to take the reins. Although Paul’s level had many obstacles, much to everyone’s delight, Granof completed it in a matter of moments. CM 27
THE MASTER GARDENER After forty-three years of teaching English and Art History, Judith Siporin retires this June
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udith started her career at Commonwealth as a receptionist in the front office. Since being pressed into service by Charles Merrill after a group of students requested a fiction writing class, Judith has approached the classroom each year with the same trepidation she felt back in 1973. But her modesty has always cloaked an unerring eye, an impatience for any utterance or writing that had a whiff of cant, and firm expectations that leave students knowing that a B in her class is good work indeed. Students and teachers who have worked with Judith speak of her patience; of her quiet, firm refusal to provide answers, and her willingness to take things as far as students are ready to go. Students in her classes sit in silence before a text or painting, allowing, as one colleague has said, “the eyes to do their work of overruling the mind’s impulse to conceptualize and prejudge.” If a class discussion of a Van Gogh painting misses some things, approaching, but not reaching, a full sense of what is going on, Judith will not fill in the blanks—she would rather leave the discussion incomplete than pull students across the finish line. Judith is intent on seeing what her students can find and say, on giving them the sense that they have the intelligence and ability to see for themselves, to become, on their own, “fluent in the idiom” of an author or painter. When you speak with Judith, you know that you have her full attention and that you can give her no less. At any alumni gathering Judith attends I can safely bet that she will be among the last to leave, in a rapidly emptying room, deeply engaged in conversation with a one or two former students or advisees, learning their whole story with the same patient care she gives to a Joyce story or Hamlet. Judith teaches students to read slowly and attentively, and so to see more clearly and deeply what is happening in a text, in a painting, or in life. A decade ago one graduation speaker said simply, “Ms. Siporin taught me how to read.” Judith Siporin, circa 1994
“Ms. Siporin taught me extraordinarily valuable lessons about looking, and about writing: the pleasures of savoring a work of art visually, and of evoking it verbally. I vividly recall an assignment for her class that required me to spend hours at the MFA contemplating Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” That experience—which forced me to slow down, block out distractions, and keenly behold the object in front of me— became a revelation, as did the subsequent process of articulating Gauguin’s vision in words. Ms. Siporin’s lessons are still the foundation of what I do today as an art historian, and at the heart of what I try to teach my own students.” JESSICA MAIER ’92
WILLIAM D. WHARTON
“Judith was my cherished colleague in the English Department for almost 40 years. I learned so much from her! She takes a deliberate, thoughtful approach to everything she does, from teaching and advising to gardening and cooking. She has an extraordinarily discerning eye (I audited her art history class) and great taste (in clothes and shoes as well as paintings). She writes beautifully and is a crackerjack editor (she always improved my writing). Her standards are the highest, and she is generous in helping her students meet them. She has given so much of her time to helping her students write well! Week after week, she will have long one-onone writing conferences, marked by humor, patience, and firmness. In class, her precise, careful questions encourage students to slow down, listen, reflect, and then express themselves fully.” MARY KATE BLUESTEIN
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Kindness is the word that comes to mind first and foremost when I think about Ms. Siporin. During my years at Commonwealth, she was generous with her time and with her help—always. In English, Art History, and as my advisor, she taught me to keep reaching and unpacking, to struggle for a complete picture of a story or a scene, or a phrase, or even a word, and then not to be afraid to undermine it. (These were lessons for life, too.) I vividly remember the poems and books I read with her, and the paintings we looked at. Her passion helped me to develop the ability to be moved by words and details, and I cherish that. Since Commonwealth, she continues to be a thoughtful and steady presence in my life. I am grateful to have been fed by her until I was too full to move, to have been given delicious book after book, and to have been thoroughly listened to. Ms. Siporin, you are a fabulous creature and an absolute legend. Thank you for being my advisor and my friend, and for your relentless kindness. EVA MOONEY ’12
“Being in class with Judith she’d be so curious about what we personally heard in what we read, like therapy, the book became personal, it gave you such a sense of ownership of the material, and also of our own voices. The book became mine, and she’d give it without offering.” HAMISH LINKLATER ’94
“Judith Siporin, a gardener by avocation, lavishes on her flowers all the patient nurturing and gentle persistence that have made her such a special teacher. One cannot be hasty or harsh with plants, nor if you want your students to blossom, can you hurry the process or rap knuckles too many times. Judith’s quiet support and careful insistence on the best a student can do has been the nourishing soil for generations of perceptive readers and fine writers at Commonwealth, just like “mild nights the new morsels of spring.” POLLY CHATFIELD
Ms. Siporin’s warmth and generosity of spirit have greatly influenced me ever since my junior and senior years at Commonwealth. She helped me find my voice and gain confidence in the Language Arts. Vivid memories of her English classes brighten my days still, and it speaks volumes that, after 30 years, she still remembers my love for “God’s Grandeur.” I have spoken of Ms. Siporin often in the days since my time at Commonwealth, and I am delighted that so many other young people have had the chance to blossom under her teaching. Ms. Siporin, you are a very special person, and I am truly honored to have known you. I wish you well always. KIM DICKERSON ’83
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literature and art, and in the life of the mind, inform all that she does—no one reads, say, Joyce, or looks at Ingres in the same way after spending time with her. And her aesthetics don’t stop there. When I think of Judith, I think not only of her teaching; I think also of the eye she brings to her life—the vibrant, harmonious colors of her sweaters, scarves, jewelry, always assembled with an eye toward balance, texture, beauty, and her lovely home. Judith is beautiful, inside and out, and we are all the better for her careful tending of our student flock, and of us. She will be missed in the classroom, but she leaves in her wake a rich legacy—the teachers she has mentored will carry forward her unwavering dedication, love for teaching, and exacting standards for succeeding generations of students.
THANK YOU, JUDITH. MARA DALE
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few years ago I had the pleasure of inhabiting Judith’s office during her sabbatical. I was thrilled—to have an office to myself, of course, but mostly to enjoy being in her space. Her tidy little room, filled with books and art on the walls, reminded me of numerous, always intense conversations with her about the things that matter around here, like a particular student’s well-being, or the best way to help students get to the nub of a text with insight and clarity. I think of how Judith leans in and crinkles her nose before suggesting how to reach a student most effectively. The summer before I was to begin teaching in the English Department at Commonwealth, Judith invited me to the SiporinDavis household in Newton. The afternoon unfolded in a leisurely fashion and offered up a hint of the pleasures awaiting me as a soon-to-be colleague of Judith: she listened carefully, with absolute attention to what I had to say and how I said it, with an open heart and mind; she offered crisp advice and sound counsel, and then gave me a tour of her garden and fed me delicious tea and home-baked goodies. I left feeling nourished, body and soul, convinced that I was in for a bountiful feast. Working alongside Judith has been nothing less. Her guidance, meticulous devotion to her students, and unwavering belief in the importance of clear thinking and incisive, elegant writing inspire me every day. Judith’s English and Art History courses are legendary among our students for a reason: she demands the best from her students and from herself. And her students rise to the occasion because they respect Judith’s refined eye and ear and respond to her unstinting attention to detail. Her whole-hearted pleasure in the aesthetics of
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Judith and her husband Eric Davis
CWSAA
The Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Association
TRISTAN DAVIES
From the President
Alisha Elliott ’01, CWSAA President
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his March, Commonwealth held its first-ever Design Show. The evening, situated in the booming innovation hub of Kendall Square, showcased creations from current and former Commonwealth students, parents, and faculty. Featured pieces included a foot-pedaled sanding machine, an air-pop popcorn maker, furniture for all ages, an acrobatic sports kite, jewelry, ceramics, and so much more. The call for submissions asked for “evidence of the creative process that lead to design solutions.” As I perused the gallery and caught up with old friends, I found myself reflecting on this concept as a greater analogy for the Commonwealth alumni experience. As Commonwealth students, we learned how to synthesize and apply. Our English classes were defined by close reading. We analyzed every word, every comma, every stanza. In History, we gleaned details not from glossy-paged text books, but from primary sources. Even when discussing the theoretical in physics or the fantastical in art, the concepts came alive in our classrooms. Lessons were never passive. Our teachers did not lecture. We were active, eager participants in our own education. Yes, we learned the what—the facts and dates and formulas—but more importantly, we learned the how and the why. We employed creativity in our quest for solutions. Mugs by ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey
Chiaki Kanda ’90, notNeutral, LINO + GINO Deluxe Pour-over Brewing Kit
Navigating the “real world,” no longer as high school students but still as learners and critical thinkers, is a process of constant problem-solving. We may not be pulling out our poetry anthologies on a daily basis, but the skills we developed when studying Dickinson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others, inform how we use and interpret language to interact with the world. The complex formulas and theorems we learned in calculus allow our minds to digest and analyze the data we encounter in our professional lives. The depths of detail our Commonwealth teachers pushed us to explore in History and Ethics compel us to question pundits and pontificators. When our peers fixate on the what, we broaden the conversation to the how and the why. My favorite thing about the collection of pieces featured in the Commonwealth Design Show was the variety. In the months leading up to the show, many asked “What is Design? How will these pieces work in a show together? Why does this make sense?” This exhibit gave us a tiny snapshot of what the evolution of Commonwealth creativity can become. The through line was just that—a quest for solutions that began at Commonwealth. In the pages of CM, you see stages of those journeys from current students, faculty, and alumni/ae. What’s your story?
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ALUMNI/AE PERSPECTIVE
A Matter of Words by Elizabeth Bailey ’68
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y reading life began with cereal boxes, outdoor billboards, and library books, and took place at the breakfast table, on car trips, in my bedroom, and in the bath. One of my first experiences of embarrassment came at age six, walking to the library to return a pink book about a black poodle, the cover waterlogged, pages curled at the corners. But it wasn’t until I reached Commonwealth as a sophomore that reading moved from a zone of comfort to one of meaning and then to one of challenge. In my admissions interview, Charles Merrill asked me to name the last book I read. The Scarlet Letter, it turned out. I don’t remember my youthful analysis of the book, but I do remember his interest in what I had to say. “Wow,” I thought, “my words are important.” Mr. Hughes introduced me to Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, and to The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. I read the poetry of Randall Jarrell and Walker Percy’s novel, The Moviegoer. We gathered in the library each year to hear readings by James Merrill (Charles Merrill’s brother who, I imagine, was the Charles in one of James’ best-known poems, “Charles on Fire”). I discovered medieval history and couldn’t stop talking about Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages. I read The Aeneid with Mr. Alden, the kindest Latin teacher ever. I still think about Mr. Link’s American History class in which we were introduced to Richard Hofstadter’s discussion of populism and anti-intellectualism in American life. Due for a re-read today. I was introduced to contemporary writers like John Updike while being urged to question contemporary values at the same time. English teacher, soccer coach, and education gadfly Mr. Holt tacked to the bulletin board an ad from The New Yorker featuring a Mark Cross crocodile handbag priced at $250. “What do you make of this?” he asked the class. “What does it say about the values in our country?” At Commonwealth, I learned to read with my eyes, and with my values. I read widely, not just the standard fare, but newer books that appealed to adolescent seekers, like Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, first published when I was a junior and assigned to my class the very same year. I did not dissect these books as much as devour them. I read them for enjoyment, for insight into a different experience of life, real or imagined, for the feelings they induced, or for the challenge they posed. I still read much the same way, for the same reasons. Clearly words are still important at Commonwealth. I quote from Bill Wharton’s “Report of the Headmaster to the Board of Trustees” in December 2016: “Charles Merrill spoke on December 1, and in his opening remarks challenged students to think about their education—the books they read, the music they listen to, and artists they love—and its relevance to the important work of defending truth and dignity.” 36 CM
Cyanotype Print by Mary McGing ’17
In a recent post on the AGNI blog, poet Rachel Hadas quotes Robert Frost, who reportedly said at a dinner party in 1960: “Don’t get hysterical, get historical. If they get some sense of historical background, they’ll see how these things happen over and over again.” Commonwealth students are encouraged to reach back into the past through the study of history, and also into the future with the imagination. This matters now more than ever. For me the written word was was first an escape from a difficult childhood and later the tool of my trade as a journalist. When my husband collapsed at Disappointment Cleaver, 2000 feet short of the summit of Mt. Rainier, life changed. My daughter, Julia, 16 at the time, was clipped to her father when he died. She climbed down the mountain alone. Counseled by a friend, I began reading Anna Ahkmatova and Jane Kenyon and more James Merrill. I began to write my own poetry and take workshops at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Poetry had become a safe house for me to sort out my own confusion. The unthinkable happened when Julia, then 20, was killed in the fall of 2005. I returned to poetry and read Robert Pinsky, Phillip Levine, Stanley Kuntz, and Elizabeth Bishop. It wasn’t that poetry made what had happened make sense—nothing could do that—but the finest of the poems, the truest, provided clarity out of the fog I found myself in, and a way forward. Recently, I read God and the Imagination, a book of essays by poet and biographer Paul Mariani. In his opening essay, “Writing the Self,” Mariani notes: “it’s not by bread alone we live. After all, it’s also the word, the right word, the felt word, the sacred word, the words of felt stories, felt poems, words with blood on them. Sometimes they even manage to cut clean through the issues of class and race and gender . . . And sometimes, you learn, they say something that actually matters.” My decision to apply for an MFA in Poetry this month, at age 66, can be traced back to that crocodile purse, to The Country of the Pointed Firs, to The Aeneid, and to those poetry readings in the library with the sounds of traffic coming through windows that opened onto Commonwealth Avenue. I learned that words mattered then, and I am comforted by the fact that students in the lovely brownstone at 151 are still being taught the worth of language today.
COMMONWEALTH FUND The John Hughes Fund for Faculty Development gives Commonwealth teachers an opportunity to explore. Last summer, a Hughes Grant allowed the English Department to read widely among women writers and writers of color, discuss their discoveries, and begin planning a more diversified English curriculum.
“The Hughes Grant provided a space for big-picture thinking; it was invaluable to be able to take a step back from the day-to-day rhythms of the classroom, where you’re reacting to more immediate student concerns, and think more deeply and broadly about what we hope to accomplish. Reading so many new texts with an eye toward integrating them into the curriculum reminded me of how works of literature build on each other, each new voice inviting students to become more nimble and sensitive readers.”
ENGLISH TEACHER RIKITA TYSON
“Thanks to the reading I was able to do last summer, my Autobiography elective includes a number of texts by important writers whose work I hadn’t had time to investigate previously. These unsettling yet beautiful books—including Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric—are determined to find literary forms that can do justice to modes of experience that often go unrepresented in contemporary culture. It’s been a great pleasure to bring these works into the classroom, and share them with my students.”
ENGLISH TEACHER AARON KERNER
To make a gift to The Commonwealth Fund, visit commschool.org/makeagift. To learn more about giving to Commonwealth, contact Carly Reed, Director of Annual Giving and Alumni/ae Relations, at creed@commschool.org.
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Painting by Jean Segaloff
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