The Exeter Bulletin, spring 2014

S P R ING 2 0 1 4 The Exeter Bulletin

Harkness Beyond the Oval

• How schools are using our philosophy

Spring 2014

• Retirees who still make time for teaching • Table Talk with Pepin Gelardi ’01

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Around the Table

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Contents

Principal Thomas E.Hassan ’56,’66,’70,’06(Hon.);P’11 Director of Communications Robin Giampa Editor Karen Ingraham Staff Writers Mike Catano, Alice Gray, Nicole Pellaton, Famebridge Witherspoon

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Features 22 | REDEFINING RETIREMENT Emeriti faculty members who are staying in the classroom

By Daneet Steffens ’82

Class Notes Editor Janice M. Reiter Editorial Assistant Susan Goraczkowski Creative Director/Design David Nelson, Nelson Design Contributing Editors Edouard L. Desrochers Karen Stewart Communications Advisory Committee Daniel G. Brown ’82, Robert C. Burtman ’74, Dorinda Elliott ’76, Alison Freeland ’72, Keith Johnson ’52, Yvonne M. Lopez ’93 TRUSTEES President G. Thompson Hutton ’73 Vice President Eunice Johnson Panetta ’84 Wole C. Coaxum ’88, Flobelle Burden Davis ’87, Marc C. de La Bruyère ’77, Walter C. Donovan ’81, John A. Downer ’75, Mark A. Edwards ’78, Jonathan W. Galassi ’67, David E. Goel ’89,Thomas E. Hassan, Jennifer P. Holleran ’86, David R. Horn ’85, William K. Rawson ’71, Kerry Landreth Reed ’91, Dr. Nina D. Russell ’82, J. Douglas Smith ’83, Della Spring ’79, Morgan C. Sze ’83, and Remy White Trafelet ’88 The Exeter Bulletin (ISSN No. 0195-0207) is published four times each year: fall, winter, spring, and summer, by Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter NH 03833-2460, 603-772-4311.

Periodicals postage paid at Exeter, NH, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA by Cummings Printing.

The Exeter Bulletin is printed on recycled paper and sent free of charge to alumni, parents, grandparents, friends, and educational institutions by Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH. Communications may be addressed to the editor; email bulletin@exeter.edu.

Copyright 2014 by the Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.

ISSN-0195-0207 Postmasters: Send address changes to: Phillips Exeter Academy, Records Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833-2460.

28 | AN OVAL FROM A TRAPEZOID Teachers share how they shape Harkness in their schools

By Katherine Towler

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32 | THE SEEDS OF REBELLION Rhode Island ‘rebel’ Thomas Wilson Dorr’s Exeter experience

By Erik J. Chaput

Departments 4 Around the Table: Q&A with English Instructor Willie Perdomo, national art award winners, spring break travels, Assembly Hall speakers, and more.

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10 Table Talk with Pepin Gelardi ’01 16 Exoniana: Share your senior traditions with us!

19 Exonians in Review: Revolutionary by Alex Myers ’96 34 Big Red’s Biggest Fans: Employees Support Athletes on and off the Field. Plus, winter sports roundup.

38 Connections: News and Notes from the Alumni Community 40 Profiles: Clif McFeely ’67, Julie Livingston ’84, and Charles Cushing ’06 and Noah Ready-Campbell ’06 104 Finis Origine Pendet: Wednesdays at the Piano– Adjunct Music Instructor Klaus Goetze remembered Compiled by Dick Mathisen ’62

10 Visit Exeter on the web at www.exeter.edu.

Email us at bulletin@exeter.edu.

THE EXETER BULLETIN IS PRINTED ON PAPER WITH 10% POST-CONSUMER CONTENT, USING SOY-BASED INKS.

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE CUTLER

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The View from Here

A Colorful Interlude On April 1, a hint of spring greets students after assembly—providing a welcome burst of red and a warm-up to the summer months ahead. —Photo by Cheryl Senter

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Around theTable

What’s new and notable at the Academy

Harkness Outside of Exeter

By Principal Thomas E. Hassan ’56, ’66, ’70, ’06 (Hon.); P’11

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uring the past 25 years, I have experienced many discussions around a Harkness table. And in

DAMIAN STROHMEYER

that time, I’ve come to realize that Harkness is a gift and a philosophy, but it’s not a table. The richness of conversation, its impact on how we act and react to the world around us, isn’t dependent on furniture. It hinges, rather, on the curiosity, energy and engagement of the people in the room.

You may have read recently about the trending popularity of the “flipped classroom” or of “student-centered learning,” and how those models are gaining traction and achieving good results, particularly at the college level. In articles like “The Condensed Classroom,” which appeared in The Atlantic last summer, we are introduced to teachers who use technology to deliver lectures outside of class, so that they can instead dedicate regular meeting times to active group dialogue or one-on-one sessions with students.

Other teachers utilize smaller class sizes to encourage and foster robust exchanges among students. These “new” concepts are not new for Exeter, rooted as they are in the same philosophy of preparation followed by active participation that has guided learning here for more than eight decades.

As Exonians, you know the power of Harkness, but what you may not know about is the impact this pedagogy has on teachers and students around the country, in both public and independent schools.

In the pages that follow, you’ll see how Exeter’s summer professional development conferences have inspired attending teachers, who return to their classrooms with a newfound appreciation for studentcentered learning (page 28). In many cases, 12 students per class isn’t feasible, nor is a table large enough to seat 25, but these teachers and their schools have found a way to mold Harkness to work with the resources they have.

On page 22, Daneet Steffens ’82 profiles five of our wonderful emeriti faculty who believe so deeply in how we teach that—like many of their colleagues—they simply can’t seem to retire in full. In the article, Emeritus English Instructor David Weber says, “The thing that I most value about Exeter is that it is a functional intellectual community. There’s another whole level to teaching and learning here.” Emeritus History Instructor Andy Hertig ’57 references the “perpetual voyage of discovery” that is precisely what we mean the Exeter experience to be.

In the fall 2013 issue, we shared other exciting news about Harkness outside of Exeter. Teachers and administrators from the Noble Network of Charter Schools in Chicago visited our campus in 2011 and were so inspired by our innovative teaching method that plans are now underway to open a new, Harkness-centered charter school in Chicago in the fall of 2014. This is the first collaboration of its kind for Exeter, and I’m excited to see where it may lead us in the future.

This spring, I am glad to be back once again at the Harkness table to teach Math 130, an indulgence I allow myself each year. I’m reminded of the importance of how we do what we do as educators, and how deeply this impacts our students. Exonians don’t just learn math around my table. They learn confidence, respect and verbal acuity that will carry them through a lifetime. Now, more than ever, a growing body of students outside of Exeter is learning those skills as well.

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Studs Terkel’s Working Takes the Mainstage

CHERYL SENTER

In February, a student cast and crew of more than 70 put on a musical based on Studs Terkel’s book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. With ensemble support, 26 actors portrayed the perspectives of everyday people in America, from high-powered executives to stay-at-home mothers.

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Around the Table

Faculty Spotlight Q&A WITH PRIZE-WINNING POET WILLIE PERDOMO Compiled by Karen Ingraham

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n March, Penguin Books published English Instructor Willie Perdomo’s third collection of poetry, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon. Perdomo, who began teaching at the Academy last fall, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a former recipient of the Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia, and a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow.

His first collection of poems, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, is a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. His second book, Smoking Lovely, won a PEN Beyond Margins Award.

Perdomo, a native of New York City who relocated to Exeter with his wife and son, recently sat down to discuss his new book, as well as the inspiration he finds in Harkness teaching.

Q: What prompted you to come to Exeter?

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Q: What has surprised you in terms of teaching at Exeter?

Well, I was kind of blindsided by how smart and talented my students are! I get really excited when I encounter a good personal narrative from a student. I’m always quick to share it or talk about it with my colleagues. It reinforces the feeling that I’m in the right place. It inspires me when I see good writing from young people or when a student who doesn’t say much at the table writes a narrative that is daring and explosive.

I also enjoy that moment when I see Harkness unfold in terms of the inquiry and dialogue that transpires at the table; how a close reading starts to unravel and gets unpacked. I have always put a high value on the notion that students should constantly try to explore ideas, to take risks with their ideas, to understand that when discussing literature, there’s no right or wrong; there’s limitless space to navigate for interpretation.

MIKE CATANO

PEA English Instructor Willie Perdomo’s third poetry collection was published this spring.

As a teacher, Exeter’s immediate appeal was the personal narrative as a source for both storytelling and literary analysis, and how it segues into the personal essay. The bonus was the Harkness table—the idea that students are responsible for their learning, for their analysis, and that instructors are not at the center of that experience. That’s very refreshing.

One of the things I really enjoy about teaching at Exeter is the collaboration and collegiality amongst the English faculty. Lesson plans and writing prompts are shared. Letters are respected and literature is taken seriously.

Poets, essayists, novelists and biographers are celebrated, invited to lecture, and the library has a whole room dedicated to poets. If you love writing, if you love teaching, if you love learning, if you love reading, then Exeter becomes an ideal environment to teach English.

Around the Table

Q: What advice do you give students about their writing?

First, I think it’s important to affirm your narrative instinct. Second, you can’t write in a vacuum. Writing’s most trustworthy partner is reading. The other piece of advice is to proofread and be patient in the revision process.Take a moment after you finish a passage to see what cliché can be cleaned up with better description or figurative language; how your narrative voice is reflected in your commentary. The kids have 50 minutes of homework per class, five hours total, so it’s hard to tell them, “Look, if you want to improve your narrative/analytical skills, you have to read extensively,” but I tell them that anyway! The idea of using literature as a model and as a path toward selfknowledge never grows old.

Q: What is the origin story of your latest book, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon?

The primary origin is my love of music. I grew up at the peak of the Latin salsa music era in New York City, so it was always in the background. My mother is the one who has really given me that love of music. When she shares tales about that era, she works herself into such an emotional recall that she starts to dance! She starts to exhibit the passion and exuberance of that specific memory. The book is a tribute to her recollection.

The sub-origin is my uncle who played professionally with The Cesta All-Stars, a ’70s descarga group.

I never met my uncle, but I have always felt a close connection with him and to this day I can’t tell you why. I was in grad school when the germ for the book started—in terms of the actual writing process. As a prompt, I simply posed a question to my [dead] uncle: ‘What was it like that night you recorded with The Cesta All-Stars?’ And the book just exploded; Shorty Bon Bon’s voice poured out in streams. When I told [English Instructor] Todd Hearon about this moment, he suggested that I might’ve conjured my uncle’s legacy.

And that’s what it was: a visitation that I was more than willing to honor.

I also wanted to try to play with different forms like partial sonnets—free-verse poems in conversational units with varying structures—and most importantly, I wanted to play with different voices. It was almost as if

I was inside of a jam session, and there was more than one person playing. I was inspired by the ability of music to inform memory and to ignite all those unarticulated feelings. I felt as if I was a child again, in a social club, or in a living room with my musician uncles who just finished rehearsing and I had fallen asleep while the music set up residence in my unconscious.

It was a love letter to all the music that I grew up with, that took me a long time to appreciate, and that now I can’t go a day without listening to.

Q: How does Shorty Bon Bon differ from your two previous collections?

In terms of sonic scope, the book is broader. In terms of historical context, I think it’s more specific. There is a certain eagerness that younger writers have, and sometimes that eagerness goes unmediated. The biggest difference I think is how much patience I had with the book.

As a younger writer, I didn’t have as much. A lot of the poems in Shorty Bon Bon have never been read out loud, whereas the poems in my previous collections had been and probably suffered as a result. These poems were written in a more meditative kind of context as opposed to a public performer/audience context.

Q: What writers or works were influential in your writing of Shorty Bon Bon?

One of my colleagues in the English Department, Matt Miller, who is also a poet, just shared a Chinese proverb with me that says, “He who reads 100 poets sounds like 100 poets; he who reads 1,000 poets sounds like himself.” And I’m hoping there are a thousand poets in Shorty Bon Bon. There were some poets and sources that I always kept within reach: Berryman’s The Dream Songs; Dante’s Inferno; Audre Lorde’s Undersong; some ’60s poetry from the Guajana school, which was founded at the University of Puerto Rico. I became a Derek Walcott fan. I started reading for pleasure, the way one might listen to music. One of the things that struck me about reading Inferno was that while Dante is guided through a netherworld there are some figures that he gets to converse with, who are dead, but there are some who are able to actually talk back.That really struck me as a conceit for Shorty Bon Bon—that somehow my uncle could be both guide and interlocutor. I can only say that it was great to hear his voice.

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Around the Table

In the Assembly Hall A S A M P L I N G O F S P E A K E R S W H O C A M E TO C A M P U S December 10: Nicco Mele Author, Internet pioneer, political strategist

A leading forecaster of business, politics and culture, Nicco Mele examined at assembly the effect of social media following the Boston Marathon bombing, citing it as an example of the “unintended consequences of radical connectivity.”The author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath shared his concerns about the power of media and its impact on society. “[After the bombing] I was relieved to have social media . . . it was a moment when people who were touched by this tragedy could use the Internet to be a part of what was going on,” he told students. “It was also a moment when people decided they wanted to help find the terrible people who did this thing. So there was an online investigation . . . and it ended up identifying the wrong guys.”

After assembly, Mele—who was named one of Esquire magazine’s “Best & Brightest” in America in 2003—explained that he hopes students ultimately exercise integrity when using technology. “There’s a coming chaos if they don’t figure this out,” he said.

December 13: Peter Georgescu ’57 Chairman emeritus of Young & Rubicam Inc., author

Peter Georgescu ’57, author of The Constant Choice: An Everyday Journey from Evil Toward Good, delivered the Robert H. Mundheim Class of 1950 Lecture during assembly. Georgescu spoke about the origins and effects of goodness and the possible causes of evil.

He told of how, at age 9, he was sent with his brother and grandmother to a labor camp during the Stalin Communist regime in Romania. For the next five years, Georgescu saw violence, cruelty and death. His six-day, 12-hour routine consisted of cleaning sewers and digging holes.

Help from three strangers transformed his life. Ohio Congresswoman Frances Bolton, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and PEA Principal William Saltonstall ’24 each contributed to him being freed from the camp, reunited with his parents in America, and enrolled at Exeter.

Ultimately, Georgescu became head of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s leading marketing and communications firms.

Having a deeper understanding of evil, he suggested, empowers us to control such instinctual feelings. “We are better than that,” he said. “We are also caring, compassionate, loving people ….”

Believing that the underlying purpose for mankind is to move the human condition toward good, he added, “True leaders will connect with people’s heads and hearts ….”

Read a review of Georgescu’s book, written by former Trustee Melissa Orlov ’77, at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

January 7: Linda Hill Harvard Business School professor, author

Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, champions two passions: economic development and using business to help improve lives.

Both require leadership, the kind she encouraged Exeter students to pursue during a recent assembly.

Hill—who co-authored Being the Boss:The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader and authored Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership—believes great leaders are made, not born. “Despite what many think, research has found that leadership is an acquired skill that requires lots of hard work,” she said.

A consultant and executive educator for such global companies as IBM, General Electric, and Mitsubishi, Hill said time spent with managers from Pixar taught her the philosophy,“Everybody has a slice of genius. And the role of a leader is to figure out what [your] slice is and [decide] how to amplify and leverage it for the collective good.”

After assembly, Hill visited two Ethics of the Marketplace classes, discussing more specific situations from her board and consulting experience with students who had read her article, “Exercising Moral Courage.”

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Around the Table

January 17: Lorene Cary Author, activist

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Lorene Cary energized the Exeter community with her keynote address titled “Radical MLK,” in which she focused on King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written the same year as the famous speech.

Finding love is “the radical underpinning of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ ” said Cary, whose keynote initiated a day of workshops designed to honor the teachings of the slain civil rights leader. “What’s radical is the ability of love—divine love—to undergird our attempts to face stubborn anger and stubborn injustice.”

Cary spoke about King’s ability to deal with what he referred to as “corroding hatred” by integrating the experience of racial injustice into his life, and continuing to fight for justice without violence or bitterness.“I know how it feels when someone looks at me and does not see my whole humanity,” said Cary, who acknowledged her own personal challenges “sublimating the rage.”

She added, “What was hard was to integrate that experience into my life, take that experience, and figure out how to go back into the world and use it.”

January 21: Hedrick Smith New York Times editor, PBS correspondent, author

Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy Award-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, author of Who Stole the American Dream?, is enlisting members of the millennial generation to help “fix what’s broken about America.”

“We’re in deep trouble in this country . . . and we need a new generation of agitators. I believe in your generation,” he said during a recent assembly. Smith, a former New York Times reporter and editor, described Martin Luther King Jr. and participants in other social movements during King’s era as agents of change. “That is leadership,” he said, “and the leadership for that change, in a lot of places, came from students.”

Smith noted examples of Exeter’s social change: Principal William Saltonstall’s appointment of Ralph Lovshin as the Academy’s first Catholic faculty member and PEA minority adviser James Montford’s 1989 hunger strike that spurred the Academy to honor MLK Day. Alice Ju ’14, who co-introduced Smith, said, “I was inspired by his message of doing something about the problems we see despite our youth, and not waiting around for change to come,” adding that she was struck by his ability to connect Exonians with national issues.

February 4: Claudio Cambon ’85 Documentary photographer, translator, artist

Claudio Cambon ’85 first photographed the profession of ship breaking in Bangladesh in 1998.

For the next five months, local breakers dismantled an American merchant ship, turning parts into tools and instruments.

“I was interested in the scale of the work, the relationship between man and ship,” Cambon said during assembly, where he shared stark images of men laboring against steel. “Much of the dismantling is completed by hand. The work is difficult and labor conditions are dangerous.” On his website, Cambon describes the process as “a point of commencement, because the ship provided many materials necessary to their country’s struggle to create a modern existence for itself. The death of one man’s livelihood became the birth of another’s.” (www.claudiocambon.com.)

Cambon later returned to Bangladesh on a Fulbright Scholarship to photograph everyday life and teach at the Asian University for Women, Read more about the first international, residential university for underprivileged women, these speakers’ founded by Kamal Ahmad ’83. For 10 months, Cambon traveled throughvisits at www. out the country, recording traditions and festivals in areas where more exeter.edu/bulletin. than 40 ethnicities have coexisted for hundreds of years. “Photographs define the spaces between words,” he told students.

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Around the Table

Engineering for Tomorrow TA B L E TA L K W I T H P E P I N G E L A R D I ’ 0 1

By Sarah Zobel

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FRED CARLSON

ommon wisdom says there are artists and there are engineers, right-brainers and left-, and never the twain shall meet. But Pepin Gelardi ’01, a partner and head of product design strategy at Manhattan-based Tomorrow Lab, disagrees.

Gelardi and his colleagues have established a hardware development company where all of the employees are trained in both engineering and design. It’s a combination that has resulted in products at the forward edge of technology that provide solutions to current issues in the virtual and real world.

“We work on hardware,” Gelardi says. “You can create important products that are software-based; but if you really want to effect change, you have to realize that although we might spend 50 percent of our time online, we definitely spend 100 percent of our time in the physical world. Our opportunities to make things that make people’s lives better have to start with their physical experiences.”

Several of the products Tomorrow Lab has developed are practical applications for such experiences.

AdhereTech, for instance, is a Web-connected pill bottle that sends electronic dosage reminders to the user; the Buca Boot is an upgraded bike basket with the security of a car trunk; Windowfarms is a vertical urban-farming project for apartment windows; and eProvenance Global Tracker is used by wine importers to track shipments globally and transmit their humidity levels and temperatures while in transit (www.tomorrow-lab.com/product-development).

The company’s other inventions are more exploratory by nature: an indoor solar charger that uses ambient light; Inversion Goggles, which flip the user’s point of view; and Poplolly, an edible music player that transmits music wirelessly through a lollypop, eliminating the need for speakers or headphones.

“We learn about technology and design through play,” Gelardi says. So while the Poplolly might not be a billion-dollar opportunity, “it’s still a product that could exist and become a small business,” he says.

“New technology significantly democratizes development and means that small- and medium-sized companies can start making physical things again.”

That kind of thinking landed Gelardi and his partners on the cover of the February issue of Entrepreneur, as part of a feature on top technology innovators.

When a client, either a startup or an established company, approaches Tomorrow Lab to ask it to develop hardware, Gelardi says every solution must “be feasible, desirable, viable and usable.” At the same time, one can’t always pass on the projects that elicit the sheer pleasure of experimentation—to wit, a physical app that will tell you the weather through touch (www.tomorrow-lab.com/lab2).

Gelardi says his product-design aesthetic is “in my DNA. I don’t say that as a metaphor. I think it’s coded in.” His father, a mechanical and manufacturing engineer, and uncle, who received a Fulbright Scholarship in design, founded Shape Global Technology, a Maine-based manufacturer of media storage devices and other plastic injection-molded products. Add in a sister who is a creative director at Refinery29 and cousins who are artists, designers and engineers, and Gelardi says it was inevitable that he would merge artistry and engineering within his own work.

Raised in Cape Porpoise, ME, a scenic spit of land “Technologies will allow us to have a just outside Kennebunkport that Gelardi describes as “an inspiring and beautiful place to grow up,” he was greater sense of awareness rather than nevertheless drawn to Exeter. “It’s an amazing place to become additional distractions.” be a nerd—full of calm and focus.

“I have always been interested in the concept of learning from my peers,” he adds, noting that this approach has been key to his development both personally and professionally.

“When you get into the real world, there’s no person who knows everything,” he says. “It’s all about discovery, and working with one another to get to a place of understanding and new knowledge creation.”

Exeter’s science curriculum was one initial draw for Gelardi, who describes the overall access to “great teachers, bright classmates and quality tools” as “formative.” Two architecture classes with Art Instructor Nick Dawson helped spur Gelardi’s design interests and provided him with a solid base in technical drawing and model making. Outside of class, he created logos and posters for various clubs, as well as campaign posters for a classmate and a series of Exeter/Andover propaganda pieces.

After Exeter, Gelardi attended Columbia and majored in mechanical engineering, collaborating on student projects such as SMILEE, a land mine-detecting and -marking robot that won the school’s Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Competition.

After graduation and an internship at Procter & Gamble, Gelardi enrolled in Milan, Italy’s Scuola Politecnica di Design, where he earned a master’s degree in industrial design. Students there undertook their own Harkness-style approach to learning, spending time together after classes teaching one another computer programs and design techniques. Gelardi says he learned as much about materials, colors and practice techniques from other students as he did in class.

Gelardi’s yen for collaborative discovery is evident in his artistic pursuits. He co-founded Nuit Blanche New York, where he served as director of design.The organization creates large, urban nighttime outdoor art interventions through projection, installations and performances. Gelardi is also an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s 35 Claver. He creates modular installations with his wife, Teresa Herrmann, whom he met at Columbia. They are currently working on an inflatable, floating Mylar parade.

At Tomorrow Lab, Gelardi and his colleagues are in the midst of creating a “braintrust network,” adding to their team of six while establishing a niche. He’s long been a proponent of open-source hardware—a kind of communal approach to hardware development—but says that as of now, though the potential is huge, it’s yet to be fully realized.

“Through design, we’re refining the vision for the future,” he says. “We’re going to change the way we consume things.Technologies will allow us to have a greater sense of awareness rather than become additional distractions.We’re excited to be here at the beginning of the next hardware revolution.”

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Around the Table

Campus Life at a Glance Snapshots from winter term

Students present the upcoming MLK Day program at a preview assembly.

Valentine’s Day surprises were waiting for Amanda Zhou ’15 and other students in the mailroom.

A web of cotton candy envelopes Jonathan Regenold ’15 during ESSO’s annual Kids Karnival.

Meshach Peters ’14 participates in the Democracy of Sound (Exeter) Club’s “sonic intervention” in Fisher Theater, where students performed music throughout the building as their audience roamed freely.

Kaitlyn Tonra ’16 and Tan Nazer ’16 enjoy a warm respite from winter’s chill during the International Tea, held in February.

A wave of support for Big Red at the Exeter/Andover winter pep rally.

PHOTOGRAPHS CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CONNOR BLOOM ’15, ERIC KWON ’14 (2), CONNOR BLOOM (2), MIKE CATANO

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Around the Table

Trustee Roundup

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n late January, the Academy’s Trustees held their winter meeting on campus.

The Trustees discussed the exciting progress of Exeter’s Performing Arts Initiative, which will provide the teaching and performance spaces essential to the Academy’s vibrant music, theater and dance programs. New performing arts facilities are the Academy’s top fundraising project at this time, and we have made substantial progress in securing support for an addition to the current music building, which will include a recital hall and teaching spaces, and a new performance center for theater and dance. Our engagement in the coming year with architects and the town of Exeter will provide clarity about where the new theater and dance building will be located.

At this time of year, the Trustees also set tuition for the following academic year. The Trustees agreed on a 1.9 percent increase for 2014-15, smaller than at many of our peer schools.

The Trustees heard from the Institutional Advancement team about very encouraging fundraising efforts to date, thanks in part to two successful drives for The Exeter Fund around the Exeter/Andover fall athletic events and during a week of giving in December. This portion of the meeting concluded with the Trustees approving the nominees for the Founder’s Day and John Phillips awards. In May, David Bohn ’57; P’81, P’84, P’90 will receive the Founder’s Day Award for his incredible devotion to our school. In October, Milton Heath Jr. ’45 will receive the John Phillips Award, which honors an Exeter graduate for contributions to the welfare of community, country and humanity. Heath will be recognized for his lifetime commitment to and leadership in environmental efforts and legislation.

Chief of Planning and Facilities Roger Wakeman P’09, P’11 updated the Trustees on a number of projects underway, including the final year of the steam pipe reconstruction, as well as extensive renovations of Elm Street Dining Hall and Webster Hall dormitory’s interior. In addition, it was announced that an anonymous gift has been received for a new fitness center for Academy students and adults.The center will be on the ground level of Thompson Gymnasium, and the renovation of that space will begin this fall, with an expected opening in spring 2015. It was also noted that an on-campus committee is studying the use of the Thompson Cage as it relates to future athletic programming needs.

The Trustees and the Principal’s Staff dedicated time to strategic planning, which is critical for the long-range direction and long-term success of Exeter. The issues the Academy faces are complex and the stakes are high, but the group continues to be inspired by a common vision of what makes Exeter distinct and a shared desire to look boldly toward the future.

Opportunities to connect with both adults and students are especially meaningful to the Trustees.At the winter meeting they shadowed teachers and met with students about a range of topics, including the college search process.The Trustees also met with staff and faculty members on the Equity and Diversity Advisory Committee, which is finalizing action plans grown out of community discussions over the past two years. The Trustees are grateful for the warm welcome extended to them during a frigid winter visit, and they look forward to their next campus meeting in May.

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National Art Award Winners A record-setting number of Exeter students have been selected as national medalists for the 2014 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, an annual program recognizing creative young artists and writers that began in 1923. Seven Exonians were awarded gold or silver for their artworks and one prep, Carissa Chen, will receive the American Visions Medal for her drawing, Widowed—named “Best of Show” in New Hampshire.The students have been invited to attend a ceremony in New York City in June to formally accept their medals.

Chen’s piece and works by PEA’s national gold medalists appear on this page. Silver medalists include Katie McCarthy ’14, Christine Hu ’17 and Linh Tran ’14.View a slideshow of all the works at www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.

These Exonians are among the more than 50 art students who won regional Scholastic Art Awards this year, marking another first in terms of how many Exonians were honored at the state level for their impressive creativity.

Widowed by Carissa Chen ’17 (Drawing)

Metal Mesh Penny Loafer by Owen Duke ’16 (Fashion)

Lionel by Kaci Kus ’14 (Painting)

Slinky by Weilin Chan ’14 (Photography) 14

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Perspective–Dow Barn by Millicent Dunstan ’15 (Drawing)

Around the Table

Field Notes from Around the World Each year during the March break, a number of students and faculty members embark on Academy-sponsored trips designed to expand their knowledge of professions, cultures or skills that only off-campus experiential learning can provide.

Los Angeles

Rome, Italy

Purpose: To meet Exeter alumni working in movie and television production and learn about those professions and the industry. # of students: 15 Seven students received financial aid.

Quote: “Never before could I imagine so easily interact[ing] with figures at the heart of the entertainment industry and learn[ing] in such an upfront and open fashion. The alumni function at the end served as an effective means of communicating with alumni on what we learned and the greatness of study tours such as this one…. To study all parts of the industry's logistics in such an intimate manner and then be able to understand them was extremely beneficial, and I am forever grateful to Exeter for providing [such] opportunities….”

—David Kiger ’14

Purpose: To immerse classics students in the historic settings of their Latin readings and the origins of Western languages. # of students: 16 The trip is funded by the Behr Fund.

Quote: “The air was clear and cool, so was my head. On our approach, the city rose up like lines of sloping bricks over the hills. The slopes were from exposure to the elements, and the bricks were almost worn down to gravel. But we could imagine that this city was HERE….We really saw color tile mosaics and heard the roar of gladiatorial combat in our minds.

Something about walking through an ancient city is like deep meditation.”

—Ho Jung Kim ’14

China Southern Utah’s Canyonlands Purpose: To participate in a National Outdoor Leadership School program in the Colorado Plateau and learn about wilderness travel skills. # of students: 10 Seven students received financial aid.

Quote: “There’s an immense value to learning off-campus with my fellow Exonians. Before the trip, I didn’t know any of the people who were going.

Now, they’re some of my really good friends. Living out in the desert for two weeks makes some strong bonds that just can’t be made here on campus…. I definitely returned to campus with a new perspective on my world.”

—Spencer Burleigh ’16

Purpose: To study the environmental and social implications of mass migration from the countryside to urban environments through collaborative co-learning. # of students: 6 # of faculty: 6 Three students received financial aid.

Quote: “I traced my index finger along one of the small circular holes in the [Great Wall], through which an archer would have shot arrows over two thousand years ago. Along the circle I traced, and as I did so I tried to think of the Han dynasty archer and the Fúwùyuán who served our lunch and the flower vendor with the rotting teeth as all parts of a continuous timeline. These three people, along with the mountain’s soil and the “blue enchantress” roses, all belonged to China and to the records of its history, and were therefore linked by this common ground. When I considered them, however, I found myself unable to trace from one to the other, blocked by their contrasts of sparseness versus glamour, and paralyzed, even, by the thought of China’s vastness…. So then, what is China? In a sense, I embarked on my 10-day trip to answer this very question. I returned home with not one, but a collection of answers, and the knowledge that one could take a thousand trips to China and bring from each a unique piece for the collection.”

—Rachel Sachs ’15

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Exoniana D O YO U R E M E M B E R ?

Answers to the Winter 2014 issue:

Exonian responses suggest the costumed lion mascot may have made its first appearance in 1959, with no confirmed sightings again until 1964-65. Several alums also identified their classmates. Thank you to everyone for contributing remembrances of the lion mascot’s storied past.

Our winners are: Steve Menge ’60; P’95, P’97, Half Moon Bay, CA,

who received PEA leather luggage tags.

“The picture (A, opposite page) was taken in November 1959 in the Cage just prior to the E/A 16

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JOHN HURLEY

One alum’s response to the winter 2014 issue’s “Exoniana” references the long-standing tradition of kilt-wearing by four-year seniors during Exeter/Andover weekend.That got us thinking about what other traditions have evolved over the years that only seniors can partake in. Another alum, for instance, once wrote in with the news that only seniors should walk under the Front Street archway near Peabody Hall. Is this still in practice? What other senior traditions, privileges or honors did you enjoy that we can share with the community?

Both written anecdotes and photos are welcome, and there will be two prizes awarded at random from the responses received.

Email us at Exoniana@exeter.edu. Or, send your responses to Exoniana, c/o The Exeter Bulletin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Communications Office, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833. Entries may be edited for length and clarity.

football game. A bunch of us were standing around and somehow a lion suit appeared. I got in it.The picture shows me (only some clown who would go to Duke would put on such a garb) in the suit along with Steve Clay ’60 (who went to Princeton) on the left and [Martin] ‘Hop’ Potter ’60 (my upper year roommate, who went to Dartmouth) in the middle.

“This picture appeared in the 1960 PEAN. What it doesn’t show, but the PEAN does, is an extended photo (above) next to it showing me in the lion suit along with an always enthusiastic Eddie Hoopes ’61 (an upper who was on the golf team with me) leading the Exeter banner, followed by the band and the

Around the Table

A

B

student body, across the Plimpton Playing Fields from the direction of the Cage to the stadium. It really shows the importance of the lion on that day. Now you know the rest of the story.”

Dr. Nimmi Menachery Trapasso ’94, Wayland, MA, who received PEA leather luggage tags.

“I had to laugh when I saw the picture on page 16 of the [winter] Bulletin. That’s me! A bunch of other Exonians sent me texts to let me know as well. I think I can identify everyone: Nimmi Menachery Trapasso ’94 (me), the lion (I think it was Scott Mitchell ’94?), Liz Gray ’94 and Veronica Ortiz ’94. Looking forward to our 20th reunion.”

The Kilt Brigade

I instantly recognized the photograph at the top of the page, which is from the fall 1993 Exeter/Andover football game, (photo C) when I was a senior.

The picture shows, from left: Nimmi Menachery Trapasso ’94, Liz Gray ’94 and Veronica Ortiz ’94, and if I’m not mistaken, I think that’s Tatsu Yamato ’94 in the costume. Back then, you had to be a four-year senior in order to have the privilege of cheering on the sidelines in a field hockey kilt, which, at the time, seemed only fair to me (a four-year senior), but now I wonder if that restriction isn’t maybe a bit obnoxious? Youth.

Lauren Waterman ’94 Brooklyn, NY A New Lion Named Phil

I was a cheerleader during the 1964-65 school year. The cheerleaders decided that we needed a mascot, in part due to the graduation of the previous year’s irreplaceable landmark mascot, Benny Faulkner ’64. Somehow, the wife of History Instructor Charles Trout (deceased), known to us only as Mrs. Trout, agreed to make a lion costume based on certain PEA iconography. The fabulous result is what you see driving a go-kart in photo B (above) on page 16 of the winter 2014 Exeter Bulletin.

I claim to be the one who named the lion “Phil.” The first occupant of the costume was my roommate, Tom McKay ’65.

That may be him on the go-kart.

After Tom’s retirement, the cheerleaders persuaded Pete Andrews ’65 to step in. Pete has since referred to the costume as a limited-edition uniform; that may be Pete on the go-kart on page 16. The go-kart was that of some fac brat, whose father had foolhardily loaned it to the cheerleaders. Both Tom and Pete deserve great credit for enduring the discomfort of wearing the limited-vision, chicken wireframed headgear. They can probably tell you which one of them is at the wheel.

Peter Taliaferro ’65 Parkton, MD A Confirmed Sighting

I believe that Phil the Lion in the spring of 1965 was none other than one of the greatest basketball players ever at the Academy: Pete Andrews ’65, who chose a postgraduate year at Exeter over joining Lew Alcindor’s freshman class and team at UCLA. Back in my screenwriting days of the late ’80s/early ’90s, Peter and I shared an agent in Hollywood with Alan Beattie ’67.

Reg Marshall ’67 Charlottesville,VA No Lions, Tigers or Bears

I played football at Exeter for four seasons: 1955-58.

We had cheerleaders, but nobody “donned fur suits and large, lion heads,” not even for Exeter’s best football team ever (1957). Nor did I ever see a demoniclooking ‘lion rampant’ anywhere at Exeter. We were not lions, nor tigers, nor bears….We had to wait to C go to college to become that—or drop out of the Academy to attend a public high school somewhere that was so inclined.

R. H.Van Fossen Jr. ’59; P’80, P’83 Decorah, IA Lion in Hiding

Maybe I just wasn’t very observant, but as a member of the class of 1961, I don’t remember seeing the lion at all, either in costume at a football game, on a flag, sports uniform or anywhere else. I only became aware of the lion in subsequent years, seeing it in the Bulletin and Exeter correspondence. Does anyone else from my era remember the lion? It may have been around since the early 1900s, but I’m sure it became much more prevalent after 1961.

Burt Bryan ’61 Westport, MA

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Around the Table

Non Sibi in a Minute Examples of goodness and service in the Exeter community

Margaret Zhu ’15 Of the many community-related activities Margaret Zhu ’15 has participated in since coming to Exeter last year, helping the Admissions Office is one of her favorites.

“I love being a tour guide,” she says. “The school has given me so much, I just want to give back. It’s a way to engage ourselves, to make our school more of a community, a home away from home.”

Zhu, a native of Macau, China, who immigrated with her family to the U.S. when she was 9, is also a member of Exeter Social Service Organization’s Chinese Culture Club. In February, she partnered with the Lamont Gallery and a local artist to host a calligraphy station during the Lunar New Year celebration to demonstrate the beauty and artistry of the Chinese language.

As head of the Chess Club, Zhu is now preparing for PEA’s second tournament on May 9. She is also co-head of the Daniel Webster Debate Society and ESSO’s Peer Tutoring Club, and is a member of the Student Council.

Ted Probert, Institutional Advancement A lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, Director of Institutional Advancement Ted Probert P’12 will serve for a third consecutive summer as strategic outreach director for the Marine Corps’ Summer Leadership and Character Development Academy in Quantico,VA. The SLCDA expects to host 150 high school juniors and seniors on a military base, where the students will participate in team-building activities, leadership and ethics skills workshops, community service, and physical fitness classes for one week.

Students also receive college counseling and an introduction to officer-training opportunities.

“While it started out as a recruiting objective, the larger focus is to provide students with an exposure to what’s available to them for education and service to our country, while [prompting] them to think in ways that hold them accountable for their actions,” says Probert, who has served two tours of duty during his 21-year military career.

Mark Trafton, Modern Languages Spanish Instructor Mark Trafton’s love of the ocean and concern for local ecology has led to more than 20 years of volunteer work, providing students with opportunities to participate in regional environmental stewardship.

In the early ’90s,Trafton P’06, P’12 began bringing a group of students and other PEA community members to area shorelines every month to remove trash, plastic recyclables and dirty diapers.

The group officially adopted Odiorne Point State Park in Rye, NH, and Trafton was later approached by the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation to partner on cleanup projects at other sites, including a stretch of Seabrook Beach that he and students continue to keep clean.

In 2012,Trafton accepted an assignment from the New Hampshire Department of Transportation to maintain a two-mile area on Route 108 in Stratham, NH. “This gives students a sense of duty and responsibility,” he says. “These days, we see a lot less beverage containers and trash. But the trash still has to be picked up; it doesn’t magically disappear.”

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Exonians in Review

Fighting for Freedom R E V O L U T I O N A RY , B Y A L E X M Y E R S ’ 9 6 A review by Kimberley McLeod ’05

I

n his debut novel, Revolutionary, Alex Myers uses his-

torical fiction to weave an intricate story that confronts colonial oppression and masterfully pushes the boundaries around gender identity.

Set during the American Revolution, the book tells the story of Deborah Sampson, a young woman who runs away from home in 1782 and disguises herself as a man, “Robert,” so that she can enlist in the Continental Army.

With her hair cut and her chest bound, Sampson serves as a soldier for more than a year and must survive the emotional and physical toll her transformation takes. Based on the life of a distant relative of the author, Revolutionary not only sheds light on the challenges women faced during this time, but also draws poignant parallels to Myers’ personal story.

In the late ’90s, Myers came out as transgender while attending Exeter and transitioned during his senior year.

He was the first openly trans student at the Academy— what he describes as a “watershed moment” for the institution.

“Exeter was a great place to come out,” he shares. “By and large, the school was hugely supportive of me.”

Later, while he was completing his MFA in fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Myers was encouraged to write about something he was going to love.“I thought,‘What could I be interested in for years and years?’” he explains. “I almost immediately said, ‘Deborah Sampson’s story’—in part because I’ve known it for so long.

It was deeply internalized.”

Many of Myers’ experiences as a trans person infor med Revolutionary; for instance, public moments of “passing.” One incident at Exeter stands out. During a school assembly, students were asked to impersonate Elvis Presley. Myers, who happened to do an impressive Elvis impersonation back then, got on stage. When he left, the lead singer of the band performing said, “He was pretty good.”

“I thought, ‘Yes! Thank you!’ ” Myers recounts. “I had just been affirmed as a guy. I tried to put that into Revolutionary—little things like that from my life filtered into the fiction.”

A similar moment happens in the novel after Sampson disguises herself as “Robert.” She comes across a farmer whose cart is stuck in the mud. He asks, “Hey lad, can you help me out?”With that validation, Sampson feels she can pull off her new identity.

In his first book, Alex Myers ’96 imagines life through the eyes of a woman who fought as a man during the American Revolution.

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Exonians in Review

Careful not to conflate the two stories, Myers did not want to impose his worldview on Sampson or assume she was transgender and felt what he had felt during his transition. While his trans identity and family ties to Sampson were what drew him to the story, he had to place himself outside of her narrative.

“I think her reasons were different than mine,” Myers says. “She wanted to get away from where she lived. She wanted to be independent—to work for herself and live by her own ideals.

“That’s really why I think she started to disguise herself as a man—for her own personal liberty.”

Alumni are urged to advise the Exonians in Review editor of their own publications, recordings, films, etc., in any field, and those of classmates. Whenever possible, authors and composers are encouraged to send one copy of their books and original copies of articles to Edouard Desrochers ’45, ’62 (Hon.); P’94, P’97, the editor of Exonians in Review, Phillips Exeter Academy, 20 Main Street, Exeter, NH 03833.

ALUMNI 1939—Alan G. James, editor.

The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913, by Henry James. (University of Virginia Press, 2012) 1945—Thomas B. Ragle

[Lee Bramble, pseudonym].

Take This Song: Poems in Pursuit of Meaning. (Small Pond Press, 2013) 1955—Richard Bevis. Wan-

derjahr: An Odyssey of Sorts.

(FriesenPress, 2013)

“She couldn’t do any of that as a woman.

That’s really why I think she started to disguise herself as a man—for her own personal liberty. And that was not what was at stake with me. The only way [for Deborah] to be free was to be a man. It’s a subtle difference but a significant one when it comes down to gender identity.”

What’s at stake for our modern-day struggle for equal rights might not be so different.Sampson’s story reminds us of the cyclical nature of progress, Myers suggests, citing the fact that although Sampson became the first traveling female lecturer in America (she even gave lectures in drag) after the war, 10 years later she wouldn’t have been allowed to.

“There was this very brief window where women’s rights expanded and contracted again,” Myers says. “As disheartening as it is to know that these things flourish and then fade, it’s important we recognize that though we might make gains now and lose them, we will be able to make them again.”

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1955—John M. Saul. The Tale

Told in All Lands:The Heavens as Blueprint for Civilization. (Êditions Édite, 2013) 1960—Charles D. Kirkpatrick II. Kirkpatrick’s Invest-

ment and Trading Strategies: Tools and Techniques for Profitable Trend Following. (FT Press, 2013) 1961—Stuart Rawlings.

Explorations,Volume One [memoir]. (Sierra Dreams Press, 2013) 1962—Myron Magnet. The Founders at Home:The Building of America, 1735–1817. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013) 1963—Richard B. Hoffman [deceased]. Hold You in the

Light: Poems. (Birch Brook Impressions, 2014)

—Weathering Wilderness: Poems. (Birch Brook Press, 2013) 1963—David C. Rice and Robin G. Pulich, illustrator.

Why We Bird. (Golden Gate Audubon Society, 2013) 1964—Russell McGuirk, edi-

tor. Light Car Patrols 1916–19: War and Exploration in Egypt and Libya with the Model T Ford,

by Claud Williams. (Silphium Press, 2014) 1965—Frank W. Eld [as F.W. Eld]. Finnish Log Construction – The Art:The Story of Finnish Log Construction in America [Finlandia University]. (North Wind Books, 2013) 1965—Charlie Smith. Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems.

(W.W. Norton & Co., 2014) 1966—Gil Bettman. Directing the Camera: How Professional Directors Use a Moving Camera to Energize Their Films. (Michael Wiese Productions, 2014)

1966—Peter Hayes. My

—and others. Voices of Earth

1994—Ernesto J. Sanchez.

Lady of the Bog: An ArcheoForensic Mystery. (The Permanent Press, 2014)

and Air:Works for Chorus [CD].

(Navona Records, 2013)

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act Deskbook. (American Bar Association, 2014)

1979—Kevin Boileau.

Abject Poverty. (EPIS Publishing Co., 2013) —Manifesto on Solidarity:

Ethics for a New World [Volume 1]. (EPIS Publishing Co., 2013) 1983—Wendi Goldsmith

and others. Bioengineering Case Studies: Sustainable Stream Bank and Slope Stabilization. (Springer, 2014) 1966—Don P. Stuart [Spar-

row Hart, pseudonym].

Letters to the River: A Guide to a Dream Worth Living.

(CreateSpace, 2013) 1967—Jonathan M. Ray.

Gorham, Bridgton and Beyond: The Personal Maine Narrative of Jonathan M. Ray. (CreateSpace, 2014) 1968—John Katzenbach.

Red 1-2-3. (Mysterious Press, 2014) 1976—Frank Daykin.

Questions Remain: (new poems 2012/2013).

(CreateSpace, 2014) 1978—Kathleen JamesChakraborty. Architecture

since 1400. (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

1984—Greg Kostraba, piano, and others. Works for horn, piano & violin, by Trio Quelque Chose [CD].

(Kickshaw Records, 2013) 1985—Stephen T. Bobick.

Fleeting Time: Lyrical Piano Pieces [CD]. (Privately produced, 2013) 1990—Jon Bonné. The New

California Wine: A Guide to the Producers and Wines Behind a Revolution in Taste. (Ten Speed Press, 2013)

1994—Brian Staveley. The Emperor’s Blades [Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, Book 1]. (Tor Books, 2014) BRIEFLY NOTED 1961—Geoffrey Craig.

“The Courtship of Irma Zimmerman.” [fiction] IN Calliope. (no. 141, fall 2013) 1962—Daniel F. Melia.

“Jeopardy! and American Exceptionalism.” [chapter] IN Jeopardy! and Philosophy: What is Knowledge in the Form of a Question? [Edited

by Shaun P.Young. Philosophical foreword by Ken Jennings]. (Open Court/Carus, 2012) 1968—Richard L. Wise.

“A Crisis of Investor Confidence: Corporate Governance and the Imbalance of Power.” IN Advances in Financial Economics, edited

by Kose John, Anil K. Makhija and Stephen P. Ferris. (v. 16, 217-256, Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., 2013)

1992—Andrew Yang. Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America.

(HarperBusiness, 2014)

1983—Wendi Goldsmith

and others. “Engineering Infrastructure for the PostKatrina Future.” IN Army Engineer. (SeptemberOctober 2013) —“Welcoming the Water: Hardscape and Green Measures Offer Solutions.”

IN Architecture Boston. (winter 2013) 1991—Deborah E. Kopald. “ ‘The Conference on Corporate Interference with Science and Health’: Fracking, Food and Wireless: genesis, rationale, and results.” IN Reviews on Environmental Health. (v. 28, no. 4, 145-158, December 2013) FACULTY/EMERITI Sami Atif and Karen Geary. “Harkness Math.” IN

Independent Teacher [NAIS]. (v. 11, no. 1, fall 2013) Dolores Kendrick. “Rome:

the Eternal City: an Homage to 2013 Year of Italian Culture.” [poem] IN Next Stop: Italy. (Charta, 2012) Willie Perdomo. The Essen-

tial Hits of Shorty Bon Bon: Poems. (Penguin Books, 2014)

1978—Alexandra Ottaway. Tetrahedron

Dreams, featuring New York Virtuoso Singers/Harold Rosenbaum, conductor [CD]. (Navona Records, 2014)

with a Universal Set in which the Singleton Function is a Set.” [abridged] IN Logique et Analyse. (National Centre for Logical Investigation, 2014)

1978—Kenneth J. Sheridan

[as Flash Sheridan]. “A Variant of Church’s Set Theory

David Weber. “The Claim of the Personal: Narratives and Reflections in a Time of Exposition.” IN Independent School [NAIS]. (v. 73, no. 2, winter 2014)

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Redefining Emeriti faculty members who are staying in the classroom

By Daneet Steffens ’82 Photographs by Damian Strohmeyer

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H

ow do you retire gracefully to pursue your passions when you’re already doing what you love? For Exeter’s emeriti faculty, sometimes it’s possible to have both:

extra time to dally leisurely in breakfast nooks, sail, read and ski, while still participating in Academy life. And the situation is mutually beneficial: Retired faculty who continue to teach offer Exeter a wealth of knowledge and expertise.

For David Weber, Joyce Kemp, Jim Samiljan, Andy Hertig and Barbara Eggers, the opportunity to teach part-time postretirement proved too good to resist. All have long-standing relationships with the Academy, have participated in Exeter’s groundbreaking transformations and hold an unyielding respect for their students and colleagues. Though they’ve gladly used their reduced teaching schedules to incorporate extracurricular interests, all five share a common appreciation: Retirement from Exeter is best when certain ties can be retained.

“I live just a mile from the school,” explains David Weber ’71, ’74, ’83 (Hon.); P’92, a mainstay of the English Department since 1970 who retired in 2008. “I’m inevitably on campus a lot, and I very much prefer the feeling of being a utility infielder on the current roster to being an antique or a ghost. Teaching part-time gives me natural occasions to refresh relationships with colleagues.

Retirement Also, even though they are stressed about colleges, the students continue to be interested in what they’re doing so it’s a kick to work with them. Now that I can do that with a manageable time commitment, it’s great. I can do something that I tremendously enjoy without being killed off by it.”

Jim Samiljan P’85; P’90, who retired in 2012 after 45 years of teaching Spanish, leapt at the chance to maintain a partial classroom presence. “I enjoyed the teaching as much as ever, but I needed to slow down,” he says, noting that a full-time post includes coaching, dormitory and committee duties. “But the kids are amazing: they’re bright, they’re motivated, they’re funny. It’s always been a pleasure.” His part-time role represents “the

History Instructor Barbara Eggers (above) continues to oversee PEA’s Washington Intern Program.

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“I have the time to give them more help.... I am a very happy employee.”

Math Instructor Joyce Kemp has taught in the Academy Building since 1985.

essence of pure teaching. It’s delightful. And there’s a whole new generation of kids [who] haven’t heard my old stale jokes.”

Samiljan, named the Robert W. Kesler ’47 (Hon.) Distinguished Professor by Exeter, was tapped by the Modern Languages Department when courses became oversubscribed. “There’s a real need for part-time and adjunct teachers,” he explains. “Enrollment levels change each term so it can be tricky determining staffing needs, especially with sabbaticals, maternity leaves and teachers taking on administrative jobs. It’s a challenge to find people who can jump in—sometimes at the last minute—who are already familiar with the standards of the school, the texts we use and the Harkness method.”

Exeter’s emeriti faculty, Samiljan observes, offer a much-needed supply of expertise, experience and established acclimatization.

Joyce Kemp ’87, ’89 (Hon.); P’88, P’90, who taught in public schools for 20 years before joining Exeter’s Math Department in 1985, agrees. At 65, she took the opportunity to teach part-time for a year or so preretirement: “It gave me time to realize that this was better for me. I was much happier.” She continued her part-time schedule after retiring two years ago, happy to maintain her connection with “a place that really does value experience.The department benefits because it gives them flexibility in hiring and they save in training and in supervision. Those of us who have done this, we’re ready to go on day one.” And, she hopes, students get something from the fact that she loves her subject, loves teaching. “Now that I’m only teaching two classes—and I’m probably working 75 percent of a whole job even though it’s technically 40 percent—I have the time to give them more help, I’m available at more times during the day, I prepare better. I am,” she says with a winning grin, “a very happy employee.”

Barbara Eggers ’66 (Hon.); P’89, P’91, who arrived as a pickup history teacher in 1983 from the University of New Hampshire’s graduate program, also downshifted to part-time prior to retiring last June. “I decided to ease into retirement,” she says, “and the school is very generous about that.” She stayed on board when the department realized it had a staffing need in her modern Japan specialty; more notably, her ongoing relation-

ship with the Academy enables her to sustain her longtime involvement with its 10-week spring Washington Intern Program, which she has managed for the last five years. “I do everything from finding the offices to placing the students to helping select the students,” she explains. “There’s also a weekly seminar with alums involved with public policy, and over the last several springs I’ve gotten to know them really well. Now I can just call them and say, ‘Hey, we’re in town again. Do you think you can come speak sometime?’ ” Bonus for Exeter: Eggers has already agreed to manage the program next year.

Like Kemp and Eggers, Andy Hertig ’57; ’31, ’69 (Hon.); P’83, P’86, P’88 had a parttime “tapering off ” schedule pre-retirement, reluctant to completely let go of what he likens to a perpetual voyage of discovery alongside excellent colleagues and outstanding students. “I’ve been teaching for 45 years,” he says. “People often wonder how you can do the same thing for so long—or what appears to be the same thing—but teaching at Exeter was a perfect fit. It’s true that if you’re teaching an American history survey course you’re covering the same events, but history looks different to each generation, so it’s always new. And you never know when you go into a class what the chemistry of that group will be.You have to discover what it is and then try to make it go in a profitable direction. You don’t know what impact you have at the time—you don’t know whether the students learned anything or whether they remembered anything—but they come back and tell you about what made a difference. It’s a very enjoyable and challenging experience.”

In his newly established spare time, Hertig, a widower who remarried in 2009 and relishes a blended family of seven children and 13 grandchildren, has incorporated elements of Exeter into his extracurricular life by running study groups for adults, based on his Middle Eastern history courses. “I’ve taken parts of that and offered it as five or six weekly sessions for adults,” he says.“They read 30 or 40 pages, and then we meet and discuss it.”

So how does the Harkness method translate outside Exeter? “Well, this is a voluntary thing they’re doing—there’s no grading. They don’t always come to every session and you can’t depend on them having done the reading. Of course,” Hertig says with a laugh, “you can’t always depend on the students having done the reading, either. But the

English Instructor David Weber sits in Phillips Church, where he attends the weekly meditations.

“I very much prefer the feeling of being a utility infielder ... to being an antique or a ghost.”

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History Instructor Andy Hertig ’57 began teaching at PEA 11 years after graduating from the school.

“. . . history looks different to each generation, so it’s always new.”

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adults … it’s harder to get them to talk to each other, to get them into a conversation.

They tend to try to address my open-ended questions directly to me. On the other hand, I don’t feel the obligation that I do with students who we’re trying to train to read and think and write more critically. I’m willing to give the adults more answers; I like students to do more work figuring things out for themselves.”

In addition to his study groups, Hertig, who received the 1959 Independence Foundation Professorship during his full-time tenure, has also been traveling extensively, listing trips to Israel, Alaska and Costa Rica, and a cruise along the Rhine.

Unsurprisingly, travel and families figure largely in the emeriti faculty’s retirement experiences. From Eggers’ gardening, immersion in daily newspapers and experimentation with ebooks (she recently downloaded I Am Malala), to Kemp’s jaunts to Ireland and London, three-week visit to her Utah-based son (“We normally only got to go for a week or 10 days”) and extra reading time (Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories), to Samiljan’s sailing adventures with his younger son, the emeriti faculty are stretching underused muscles with palpable pleasure.

Weber is involved in fiscal reform in New Hampshire; he’s working to keep his family farm from becoming “one more residential subdivision”; and he’s reading Roland Merullo ’71 and Chang-Rae Lee ’83, whose essay “Coming Home Again” Weber teaches every chance he gets. He’s continued to edit and critique manuscripts for former students, a canny way of channeling the teaching-as-coaching that he’s always loved: “Harkness is the great icon of the school, and when it’s going well, it’s totally magical. But for me, individual conferencing has always been the most powerful part of my teaching.”

He admits this schedule doesn’t leave much time for birding and kayaking; on the other hand, he knew that he “didn’t want to be a beach person in retirement.”

Weber also contributes to Exeter’s meditations program, one of the major developments of the Academy’s writing curriculum. “When I came to Exeter,” the 1981 Independence Foundation Professor says, “there was a strong commitment at the ninth-grade level to do detail description as a fundamental technique; there were a lot

of exercises in place to reinforce that. Over time, there’s been a crystallization of the idea that we can do that through narrative writing rather than through set pieces like ‘Go describe the outside of your dorm.’ Students learn about the power and the thematic relevance of detail through telling stories that matter to them, so we start with personal narrative writing much earlier and there’s an arc of increasing complexity—in form as well as in ideas—that we encourage as students mature. The last required assignment now for seniors is to write a meditation which is typically eight to 10 pages and includes reflection as well as description, dialogue and narrative writing.”

That evolution is just one of Exeter’s many developments, from the introduction of coeducation and the semester-to-trimester shift, to department-specific adaptations.

“The changes starting with coeducation in 1970,” notes Samiljan, “were all positive.

When I arrived in 1967, Exeter was an all-boys school and, in a social sense, a pretty grim place. It’s a much happier experience for kids today.” Students are accessing a broader liberal arts curriculum, and “much more is required of them. The distributed requirements are much greater, there are many more extracurricular activities and almost all the kids participate in some kind of community service.”

The coeducational change extended to women faculty, too. “Principal [Stephen] Kurtz began that effort,” Eggers says, “and Principal [Kendra Stearns] O’Donnell kept it moving forward. One of her leadership efforts was to help us be more understanding and accepting as a school and community in the realm of diversity—gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. She really moved the school toward more openness and acceptance of the gay community, first by discussions among the faculty and then with speakers and panel discussions for the whole school, often with our gay alums. Her interest and energy for inclusion has definitely made the school a better place for all of us.”

“When I arrived,” Kemp adds, “there was a committee to enhance the status of women, which says something about the status of women at the time.Women feel more valued now and there are a lot more female role models who are teaching, coaching and in administration. It has had an enormous effect. We’ve (continued on page 101)

“... there’s a whole new generation of kids [who] haven’t heard my old, stale jokes.”

Modern Languages Instructor Jim Samiljan believes a sense of humor is an important quality for teachers.

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Oval Trapezoid An

from a

ohnothon Sauer, a mathematics teacher at William Mason High

School in Mason, OH, has created a Harkness classroom without a Harkness table. With 25 to 30 students in his public school classes, he wouldn’t be able to find a table large enough, even if a Harkness-style discussion could work with a group this size, which he knows it couldn’t. Despite these less-than-ideal conditions, Sauer has found creative ways to make his classes more student-centered, and to give the kids a much more active role to play in learning math.

Sauer was introduced to the idea of Harkness teaching by his former dissertation director, whose son attended a school that had adopted the Harkness method. She suggested Sauer visit the Academy’s website to learn more. “I had heard of Exeter, but I didn’t know much about the school, and had never heard of the Harkness method,” Sauer says. “When I went on the website, it hit me that this was exactly what we were looking for.”

Edward Harkness made his groundbreaking gift to Phillips Exeter in 1930 with the aim of changing, in his words, “the whole educational system in our secondary schools.” He wanted to do away with rote teaching and learning, with students sitting in rows listening to an instructor give a lecture. When administrators and teachers at Exeter presented him with a plan that merely tinkered with educational norms without revolutionizing them, he sent them back to the drawing board and urged them to think in terms of small classes and a “conference” approach.

Harkness wanted to see a new way of teaching and learning at Exeter, and he accomplished this, but he had larger aspirations. It was his hope that the innovations introduced around the oval tables at Exeter would spread. Today that hope is being realized, in part, through the seven on-campus summer teacher conferences that Exeter offers to teachers who travel from across the United States and from countries around the globe for professional development.

Last year, 360 teachers from 209 schools attended the conferences. They represented

Teachers share how they shape Harkness in their schools

By Katherine Towler Illustration by Dave Cutler

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139 independent schools, 70 public schools and 16 countries, including Australia, China, Paraguay and Turkey.

Sauer is one of those who has come to Exeter in search of new ideas. He attended the Anja S. Greer Conference on Mathematics, Science and Technology in 2012 and says the experience has transformed both his approach to teaching and the physical layout of his classroom.

When he attended the summer conference at Exeter, Sauer had already begun experimenting with a Harkness approach at William Mason. Now he was able to see the Harkness classroom in action. “It was great to see what a class with a 12-to-1 ratio looked like,” he recalls. In his group, led by Exeter Mathematics Instructor Jeff Ibbotson P’17, the conference attendees met around a Harkness table for a class that modeled how instruction occurs at Exeter. “I got a lot out of watching Jeff and how he handled discussion, the questioning techniques he used and the patience he displayed,” Sauer says.

Students in William Mason’s precalculus class meet in groups of eight around each of four islands made from small tables joined together. They work on problem sets and put the results on a whiteboard visible to the entire class while Sauer circulates from group to group. A student in each group is chosen as the scribe for the day. The scribe takes notes and keeps track of who has contributed to the discussion. At the end of class, Sauer snaps a photo of each group’s notes with his tablet.

“Teaching this way is not more work; it’s just very different work,” Sauer says. “I’m still ‘on’ all the time, as I am in a lec“Teaching this way is ture format, but instead of delivering prepared material, I’m not more work; it’s just responding to the way the students are interpreting the material. I get a lot more feedback about individual students and a very different work.” better feel for where the class is as a whole.”

Sauer returned from Exeter with new insights into how to make student-centered classes work in a public school setting with larger numbers. “In my 23 years of teaching, no one had ever discussed teaching this way with me,” he adds. “The conference energized me. To see the Harkness method done correctly, and to see that teaching really can happen this way, was the confirmation I needed.”

The Anja S. Greer Conference on Mathematics, Science and Technology has been offered every year since 1985 and is the oldest of the summer conferences.The Exeter Humanities Institute will be in its 15th year this summer, and the Rex A. McGuinn Conference on Shakespeare will be meeting for the eighth year. More recently introduced are the Biology Institute at Exeter, the Writers’Workshop and the Astronomy Conference.

A math class at Offered for the first time in 2013, the Exeter Diversity Institute is the newest summer conference.

William Mason High The conferences run for a week in June. Although many attendees are interested in learning more about the School, in Mason, OH. Harkness method, this is a secondary focus for most of the conferences, which emphasize best practices and innovations of various kinds in the different fields. The Humanities Institute is the only conference devoted specifically to implementing a student-centered, discussion-based approach to education.

Other conferences, while introducing attendees to the Harkness classroom, provide material on such topics as applications of technology in education and new strategies for teaching writing.

Patricia George, an English teacher at William Mason High School, was inspired by Sauer’s experience at Exeter and attended the Writers’ Workshop in 2013. She hopes to return for the Humanities Institute or the Shakespeare Conference. Although she found the Writers’ Workshop valuable and is a convert to the Harkness concept, George encountered some challenges in applying what she observed at Exeter in her senior English classes. With 30 to 33 students in a class at varying levels, from Advanced Placement track to those with learning disabilities, she has discovered that a completely open-ended discussion does not yield the best results.

“You can’t have a Harkness discussion with 33 students,” George says. “But with seven or eight in a group, I found that many of them would hang back and let one student take the lead.

I was refereeing too much. So I made the groups smaller and defined the discussion more closely.”

George divides her students into eight groups with four in each group and provides them with discussion questions to keep them focused. In the past, she did much more lecturing than she does now, and she is excit30

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ed about the shift she has seen come about as she has taken on a different role.

A social science “It’s easy for students in a traditional classroom to skate. For me as an instructor that’s frustrating because I class at the Ransom want them to engage with the literature,” she notes. “After adopting this approach on a daily basis, I have found Everglades School that my students are much more able to articulate a thoughtful response to the questions I give them. But I in Miami, FL. had to feel my way to making this work in a public school with a much bigger class.”

The summer conferences are designed with high school teachers in mind, but middle school and even elementary teachers have attended and found them beneficial. Katie Leshinsky, a science teacher for seventh- and eighth-graders at Harbor Day School in Corona del Mar, CA, attended the Biology Institute in 2011 while a colleague from her school attended the Mathematics, Science and Technology Conference. On their way to the airport to return home, the two called their school’s principal and asked for Harkness tables.

Leshinsky now has a large, rectangular table in her classroom, which she refers to as a “modified Harkness table.” “When you walk into a Harkness classroom at Exeter, no one is hiding,” Leshinsky says of the immediate appeal the idea had for her. “Everyone is visible and participating in the discussion. This kind of engagement is especially important at the middle school level.”

Harbor Day is an independent school for kindergarten through eighth grade.The middle school classes average 16 students.This has “I love it. ... We’re around made adopting a more student-centered model easier, although as with any change that asks people to radically shift perspective, it was a ‘think’ table, not in a not without a period of adjustment. Leshinsky explains, “It was a sterile classroom.” challenge at first getting the students to understand that I wasn’t going to lecture. I wanted to know what they thought. It was a transition to get the students to think differently and to ask questions.”

Leshinsky says she has been completely won over despite any growing pains: “I love it. I can’t imagine going back to traditional teaching. We’re around a ‘think’ table, not in a sterile classroom. Their neighbors around the table keep the students up to speed. It’s a less intimidating atmosphere.They’re looking at each other, not all staring at the teacher.”

With 23 attendees last year, the Biology Institute is one of the smaller conferences. The Mathematics, Science and Technology Conference averages close to 200 participants and the Humanities Institute 70. The size of the Biology Institute was one of the features that made it such a success for Leshinsky. “It’s so small, you become like a little family.You really get to know your peers,” she says.“The Exeter conferences are like a think tank.You have teachers who teach a variety of subjects. They share teaching methods, ideas and stories.”

Leshinsky returned for the institute in 2012 and ’13, and plans to enroll again this summer. She and her colleague in the Mathematics Department brought their enthusiasm back to Harbor Day, and as a result, all three (continued on page 102) faculty members in the Language Arts Department attended SPRING 2014

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The Seeds of Rebellion Rhode Island ‘rebel’ Thomas Wilson Dorr’s Exeter experience

By Erik J. Chaput

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PRIVATE COLLECTION OF RUSSELL J. DESIMONE

In 1824, several months after he graduated from Harvard College,Thomas Wilson Dorr (1805–54), the son of a prominent Providence, RI, merchant, entered into a philosophical debate with his younger brother Allen (1808–89). The Dorr brothers debated whether a crime committed for the greater good of the citizenry was justifiable. Allen was in his final year of study at the Academy, his brother’s alma mater. Allen wanted to debate the question with the members of the Golden Branch Literary Society, a secret society that Thomas had helped to found six years earlier. A person “might indeed be arraigned and perhaps condemned before a civil tribunal” for trying to “enforce the will of his Creator,” wrote Allen, but he would not “suffer” for “any crime morally imputable to him.” Twenty years later, Thomas received a unique opportunity to put this theory to the test.

In the spring of 1842, he led an armed rebellion to change Rhode Island’s archaic form of government. His goal was to implement the People’s Constitution, a document that he believed had been ratified by the majority of white male voters in an extralegal plebiscite held in late December 1841. The stringent property qualifications for voting, which stemmed from the state’s continued use of the 1663 colonial charter, were removed in the People’s Constitution. The sitting legislative assembly, however, never authorized nor accepted the vote on this constitution.

For Thomas, the signing of the 1776 Declaration of Independence meant that the right to revolution was “an inherent right of the people, which they could at all times peacefully exercise.” The Jeffersonian right of revolution—the right to make the world new again—was one of Thomas’ bedrock moral principles. As Allen perceptively noted, the “course of conduct which a person pursues may be considered the result of his strongest passion or principle.” Thomas’ opponents were equally as passionate: His two other younger brothers, Sullivan Jr. and Henry, both condemned his actions in the spring of 1842. William P. Blodgett of Providence, Allen’s closest friend while a student at Exeter, belonged to a militia unit that hunted Thomas in late June 1842. The problem Thomas faced was that the “civil tribunal” that Allen had talked about two decades before not only condemned him but also went to great lengths to capture and kill him.

Thomas’ parents, Sullivan and Lydia (Allen) Dorr, had always hoped that their oldest son would use his considerable education to do great things. In the 1830s, it seemed that he was embarking on a legal career that would rival that of his hero and fellow Exeter alumnus Daniel Webster, class of 1796. Thomas’ parents surely did not envision that their oldest son’s name would ever be connected with a rebellion. In 1842, they were likely reminded of Allen’s urgings in the 1820s that Thomas should join the priesthood, because most of the Protestant clergy in Providence during the rebellion wanted to see Thomas’ “head on a pike,” as one clergyman put it.

In the seven years I’ve spent researching Thomas’ life, I’ve always known that his time at Phillips Exeter Academy was vitally important. “I have the pleasure to state to you that your son . . . is a Youth of promising character and scholarship and highly worthy of my commendation,” wrote Hosea Hildreth, a beloved teacher at the

Academy, to Sullivan in December 1818. After graduating from the Latin Grammar School in Providence in 1817, Thomas spent two years at Exeter, an institution that was well known within the extended Dorr family. Many of the children of Sullivan’s brothers attended the Academy. Zachariah and Crawford Allen, prominent textile manufacturers and the Dorr brothers’ maternal uncles, also benefited from their time at Exeter.

The liberal arts education that Thomas and Allen received at Exeter provided them with the genteel qualities required to become societal leaders. In 1838, Thomas wrote a moving tribute to Benjamin Abbot, the “venerable preceptor” during his time at Exeter.The Academy was honoring Abbot for a half-century of service. The “important, useful, and liberal profession of the teacher of the young” ensured the success of “republican government,” according to Thomas. At Exeter,Thomas learned what “republican government” meant—what it meant to break free from prejudices and parochialism and to make disinterested judgments for the common good.

After the completion of Thomas' first year, Principal Abbot recommended to Sullivan that Thomas spend an extra year in order to better prepare for the “higher” standard of “excellence” at Harvard. “I cannot, my dear Sir, close this hasty letter without congratulating you on the prospect of having your son to gratify all the reasonable wishes of a fond parent.”

A 19th-century Exeter Education

In the massive correspondence files (over 2,000 items) at the John Hay Library in Providence, there are more than 20 letters from Allen to Thomas.These letters shed light on the early histories of Exeter and Harvard, where Thomas later studied. In the 1820s, the tuition at Exeter was in the range of $12 per year.

Since there were no dormitories, the Dorr brothers lodged with town residents. Evidence suggests that Thomas and Allen spent time in the home of former Gov. John Taylor Gilman. Allen often referred to life at the Academy as “tranquil.” He loved the snow and was thrilled when he could go sledding and ice-skating with his friends. Allen wrote frequently to Thomas, asking him to send books and to pose questions that he could debate.

At Harvard, Thomas was tutored by Exeter alumnus George Bancroft, class of 1811. Thomas encouraged his younger brother Sullivan Jr. to attend Bancroft’s Round Hill School in western Massachusetts. John Paul Robinson, Thomas’ classmate at Exeter, would later be at the center of a “rebellion” at Harvard in 1823 that led to the expulsion of half the class. Thomas was put on a “black list” by his rebellious peers because he often sided with Harvard’s administration. In November 1822, Allen was happy to report to Thomas that the Academy was “in a very flourishing state,” free from the seemingly constant turmoil in Cambridge.

There were “as many large scholars as ever” at Exeter, and “I believe more attention is generally paid to study than heretofore,” wrote Allen.

This is not to say that the Exeter students did not behave like teenagers. In one letter Allen reported that three students met up with some “young town men” and after “getting high,” presumably a reference to drinking, “broke down the grave-yard fence and broke open several doors.” After their antics at the Winter Street Cemetery, the boys then proceeded to assault a man on the street, “demanding his money.” After being “scolded” by the pre-

ceptor, the boys “cleared off ” and went to Boston “with an intent to go to sea.”

At the time of the Dorr brothers’ attendance, the curriculum at Exeter was divided into two departments or tracts—English and College Preparatory. Thomas was slotted into the College Preparatory tract. Allen was on the English tract. His letters indicate that he took courses in geometry, logic, economics, science and history. Allen spent many hours reading the recent works of

At Exeter, Thomas learned ... what it meant to make disinterested judgments for the common good.

English philosophers William Paley and Thomas Brown. Allen and Thomas both studied Roman history, particularly the lives of Cicero and Cato. The “hopes and wishes of both men were concentrated in one grand point—the public good,” wrote Allen to Thomas as he prepared to serve as a judge during an upcoming exhibition. Allen also debated the characters of Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington.

Exeter’s curriculum instilled in Thomas a belief that he could rise above the political fray and competing party interests to discern the interests of the common good.Though they grew up in a lavish mansion on Benefit Street in Providence, the Dorr brothers frequently railed against what Allen called the “domination of the rich.” Thomas conceived of his actions in 1841–42 as a way to curtail the influence of the “money-power.” He wanted to drive the money changers from the temple; however, when his attempt to reform Rhode Island’s government collapsed, the money changers drove him right out of the state.

After his short-lived rebellion ended in June 1842, Thomas lived in exile in New Hampshire for more than a year. He returned to Providence in late 1843. In June 1844, he was condemned by Rhode Island’s highest court for committing treason against the state.Though he wallowed in the state prison in Providence for exactly 12 months,Thomas never wavered in his belief that he was morally right. As he sat alone in his dark, damp cell, his correspondence with his younger brother Allen from 20 years before was likely never far from his mind.

Erik J. Chaput (Ph.D., Syracuse University) teaches American history at The Lawrenceville School and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. For more on Thomas Wilson Dorr and the 1842 rebellion that bears his name, see Chaput’s new book, The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (University Press of Kansas, 2013).The author dedicates this article to Donald B. Cole ’49, emeritus dean of faculty and Robert Shaw White Professor of History at Exeter.

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Sports

Big Red’s Biggest Fans E M P L OY E E S S U P P O RT AT H L E T E S O N A N D O F F T H E F I E L D

By Mike Catano

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or the small band of employees in Facilities Management who maintain the Academy’s 33 acres of grass and its synthetic stadium turf, as well as the tennis courts, cross-country trail system, outdoor track and indoor athletic facilities, the job begins with the work itself but often leads to meaningful, lasting connections with teams, coaches and individual athletes.

Meet two men who—like many of their colleagues—not only invest the time and dedication to ensure PEA’s facilities are superior but also go “the extra mile” to encourage and support the athletes as active members in the Academy’s community.

Keith Humphrey

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MIKE CATANO

Keith Humphrey and co-workers Roger Carbonneau and Ralph LaRose collectively have about 85 years of groundskeeping service at PEA. “We’ve been doing this job a long time,” says Humphrey, who has been at the Academy for 26 years. “I feel the coaches have confidence in us and that we can meet their needs and those of the athletes.”

Despite the challenges of maintaining grass fields and other surfaces through stretches of uncooperative New England weather, the things Humphrey loves about his job are many and varied—from helping to create a new soccer or lacrosse field to the precision of painting lines on the fields to assembling new equipment during the off-season.

His eyes light up, however, when he talks about a favorite tradition. “I really enjoy the annual E/A fall bonfire,” Humphrey says.“It’s a lot of labor to construct a mountain of wood into a design that falls safely inward. It takes a full “I like to write day to build it with materials we’ve been saving during the year, [but] it’s great motivational messages in to see Principal Hassan and all the students come out and torch it up to enthusiastic cheers and hoots. It’s one of the few times you enjoy your work going the dirt behind home plate up in flames.” for the JV baseball team.”

Each athletic season presents hurdles for Humphrey and the grounds crew, particularly springtime. “We try to do whatever we can to be one step ahead,” he says.“When the fields clear of snow, we get right out there and start grooming, drying out the baseball and softball fields, and measuring out and lining the lacrosse fields for the boys and girls.”

But he doesn’t stop there.“I like to write motivational messages in the dirt behind home plate for the JV baseball team,” Humphrey explains,“such as,‘You have to depend on yourself. You’re the only one standing in the batter’s box.’Through the years, I’ve watched teams read the message and then huddle behind the plate to get fired up before the game.

“On Saturdays, I’ll go from varsity to JV baseball, on to the track meet before heading over to the lacrosse teams.The kids enjoy that someone took the time to watch them play and see what they’ve accomplished.”

MIKE CATANO

Track athletes appreciated Humphrey’s extra touch this past winter when he spraypainted a large message about beating Andover onto the Field House dirt floor, accompanied by a large boot. “Coach [Hilary] Coder called me out to stand beside the boot,” Humphrey says. “Then upstairs along the track, she lined up her athletes, who started cheering and clapping. I really appreciated that moment.”

Humphrey’s student connections extend back through the years. When the class of ’93 recently returned to campus for its 20-year reunion, he stopped by to reminisce: “It was great to see them all again. I told them stories about things they did here that they sometimes don’t remember. I recalled with Tarek Masoud [’93] about a JV wrestling tournament at Northfield Mount Hermon School when I drove the van and he won a medal. ‘I can’t believe you remember that,’ he said. I had fun refreshing their memories.”

Rory Early

Over his 18-year tenure at the Academy, Rory Early’s responsibilities have expanded from custodial to his current role as a supervisory custodian. Last fall, he was happy to add an athletic assignment as the Academy’s varsity football defensive backs/wide receivers coach.

“I can go from doing something complex in the custodial space such as stripping and waxing a wood floor to breaking down film for one of our football players,” says Early, who grew up in Exeter and later attended Dillard University in New Orleans. “I’m a small part of educating our students, which includes exposing them to a diversity of perspectives. Now that I’m helping to coach, I know some of my philosophies and those of my previous coaches are added to the mix.”

“There’s really nothing A varsity basketball coach at nearby Berwick Academy, in Maine, for the I wouldn’t do for students past four years with a longer history of coaching experience in public schools and recreation departments, Early has been an informal mentor to here to make their PEA athletes for many years. “I’ve always gravitated to the athletes at PEA experience a positive one.” because I can speak ‘athletic,’ ” he says.“That always broke the ice. I love how these kids compete.”

Although he can be found working anywhere on campus, Early has a particular focus on keeping the Love Gymnasium primed for the various competitions it hosts. Early trains and supervises the four custodians assigned to the gym, and he’s a familiar face to any athlete or coach as he makes his daily building inspections.

“I’m able to talk about hitting with a female softball player, or help correct a kid’s basketball shot in the gym,” he says. “The rewarding part is that most kids really appreciate what I have to say.

“These students are remarkable,” Early continues. “Coming off a difficult winter, I would say 95 percent of the students who walked up the gym ramp while I was shoveling said, ‘Thank you!’ as they passed.”

Like any good coach or mentor, Early sees the big picture:“Harkness is about more than teaching facts; it’s about teaching life lessons. I think coaches see the fields and courts as extensions of the classroom. … When I’m asked questions by young students, they almost become an extension of my family. They’ve made coming to work for the last 18 years worthwhile.There’s really nothing I wouldn’t do for students here to make their experience a positive one. After all, this is their home.”

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B

A

Winter Sports

C

D

E

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G ALL PHOTOS BY MIKE CATANO EXCEPT WINTER TRACK (I) BY CONNOR BLOOM ’15.

Sports

(A) Boys Basketball Record: 17-9 New England Champions, Class A

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Head Coach: Jay Tilton Assistant Coaches: Salah Abdo, Rick Brault Captains: Jeb Helmers ’14,Tony Karalekas ’14, JD Slajchert ’14 MVP: JD Slajchert (B) Girls Basketball Record: 20-4 Eight Schools Tournament Champions

Head Coach: Johnny Griffith Assistant Coach: Ellen Gunst Captain: Nicole Heavirland ’14 MVP: 2014 Girls Basketball Team (C) Boys Ice Hockey Record: 23-5-3 Qualified for the New England semifinals

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Head Coach: Dana Barbin Assistant Coaches: Bill Dennehy, Mark Evans Captains: Matt Foley ’14, Patrick Quinn ’14, Cody Rorick ’14 MVPs: Kevin Neiley ’14, Jack Parsons ’14, David White ’14 (D) Girls Ice Hockey Record: 10-12-2

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Head Coach: Melissa Pacific Assistant Coaches: Lee Young ’82, Jason BreMiller Captains: Alexandra Betrus ’14, Alyssa Heinze ’14 MVPs: Allegra Grant ’16, Kirsten Nergaard ’16 (E) Boys Squash Record: 8-8

Head Coach: Fred Brussel Assistant Coach: Stefan Bergill Captains: Nikhil Raman ’14, Philip Shin ’14 MVP: Nikhil Raman

(F) Girls Squash Record: 7-10 New England Champions, Division B

Head Coach: Fred Brussel Assistant Coach: Stefan Bergill Captains: Elle MacAlpine ’14, Madge Tan ’14 MVP: Elizabeth Wei ’15 (G) Boys Swimming and Diving Record: 1-6 in regular season dual meets

Head Coach: Don Mills Captains: JB Baker ’14, Joseph Shepley ’14 MVP: Joseph Shepley (H) Girls Swimming and Diving Record: 5-1 in regular season dual meets

Head Coach: Jean Chase Farnum Captains: Diane Lee ’14, Corinne Noonan ’14 MVP: Hope Logan ’14 (I) Winter Track Record: Boys: 1-0; Girls: 0-1 in regular season dual meets

Head Coach: Hilary Coder Assistant Coaches: Hobart Hardej, Toyin Augustus-Ikwuakor, Brandon Newbould, Francis Ronan Captains:Tyler Courville ’14, Shanae Dixon ’14, Luke Gray ’14, John Kennealy ’14, Asile Patin ’14, Stewart Scott IV ’14 MVPs: Helen Hultin ’14, John Kennealy (J) Wrestling Record: 16-3 2nd at the New England Championships

Head Coach: David Hudson Assistant Coaches: Ethan Shapiro, Ted Davis, Bob Brown Captains: Sean Haggerty ’14, Curran Sullivan ’14, Noah Wright ’14 MVP: Stone Hart ’14

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Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

C L I F M C F E E LY ’ 6 7

Helping At-Risk Youths Succeed

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A graduate of Future 5 with program founder Clif McFeely ’67.

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veryone is familiar with the concept of “six degrees of separation.”

If Clif McFeely ’67 has his way, “the future five” will someday be equally well known. McFeely is the founder and executive director of Future 5, an organization dedicated to helping every high school student in Stamford, CT, realize his or her full potential in life, regardless of family background or income level.

A retired advertising executive, McFeely posits that five is the minimum number of individuals a student needs to interact with in order to successfully realize his goals. As a volunteer with the Big Brothers program for the better part of two decades, McFeely had a front-row seat on the challenges that confronted many of Stamford’s low-income youth. “Mentoring young people for the past 15 years, I’ve seen up close where their pathways led, and it wasn’t always a good place,” McFeely observes ruefully.

When the time came to close his advertising agency, McFeely felt he couldn’t sit idly by when children around him were struggling. So in 2009, he launched a second career as the leader of a nonprofit, which he named Future 5 in honor of the connections he hoped to facilitate for each child. Just five years later, McFeely and his modest staff of three fulltimers and one part-timer—together with an army of dedicated volunteers—have created a crossroads from which Stamford’s at-risk children can go forth, armed with the skills and confidence they need to succeed.

The program is rigorous and requires a serious commitment from student participants. Working with an ever-expanding cohort of businesses in Stamford—including General Electric,Ashforth, Nielsen, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Reuters, Towers Watson and Stamford Hospital—Future 5 staff and volunteers lead students through a series of workshops and programs. These include Here-to-There workshops that aid students in identifying their aspirations and goals and ways to achieve them; Job Prep workshops that help students master the “soft skills” employers expect, such as a strong work ethic, active listening and problem solving; College Prep workshops that guide seniors through the complexities of the college application process; Coach Connections, which facilitate natural relationships between members and a web of volunteer “coaches”; and Community Membership, which exposes members to inspirational guest speakers, field trips and tutoring.

Response to the endeavor has been overwhelming. “We’re currently serving about 107 students, but the need is endless,” McFeely says. “Our goal is to be helping 300 students by 2015, but even that number is too low compared to the needs in Stamford.” The reaction of the students currently in the program has been particularly heartening, McFeely says. “The kids are our best recruiters; we see it every day. Our current members know who needs our programs the most and who will be willing to make the commitment we require.The students tend to be self-selecting; the ones who come to us are usually the ones who have that ‘inner spark’ and who are already looking down the road and thinking about their futures.

“I think of Future 5 as a community rather than an organization,” McFeely says. “One of the most powerful things that we teach kids in our program is the value of belonging to something larger than themselves. Our goal is to connect them—to their community, to coaches, to college, to careers and, most importantly, to themselves. It sounds very simple, but the impact we can make has proved to be eye-opening, for the kids and for us!”

Early results support this. In Stamford, the high school graduation rate is 75.6 percent, and closer to 50 percent among Hispanics and African-Americans. Since 2009, 99 percent of Future 5 participants have graduated from high school and 92 percent have committed to two- or four-year colleges.

—Lori Ferguson S PRING 2014

Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

J U L I E L I V I N G S TO N ’ 8 4

2013 Recipient of MacArthur Fellowship “

I

t was a long and bizarre path,” says Julie Livingston ’84, a professor at Rutgers University.

She’s describing how, after dropping in and out of college and graduate school for 17 years, she became a public-health historian and anthropologist, published two books on caregiving and medicine in Botswana, and was named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow—one of just 24 people to receive a “no-stringsattached,” five-year, $625,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“You get a surprise phone call one day,” Livingston says with a laugh about receiving the news of her fellowship. “It’s like Ed McMahon shows up with a cardboard check, only you didn’t even fill out the Publishers Clearing House form.”

The grants, for which there are no applications or unsolicited nominations, are given annually to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication to their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. Livingston’s grant is in recognition of her research in Botswana, where she observed and documented how people with chronic illnesses, particularly cancer, are cared for and treated.

Livingston’s own experience as an adolescent patient prompted her interest in health, she says,“not from the perspective of someone who wants to become a doctor but from the perspective of someone who’s trying to make sense of, ‘What just happened to me?’ ” Battling such questions interrupted her focus on her education, and she worked as a waitress, baker and line cook while at Tufts University (where she earned her B.A.), Boston University (M.A. and M.P.H.) and Emory University (Ph.D.). She once considered becoming a baker rather than a scholar, reflecting, “I made doughnuts, pies and cakes in the morning and waited tables at night. It was creative, and the things you were making made people happy.”

Undergraduate courses in African history, however, spurred an interest. Livingston hitchhiked across Zimbabwe and Botswana and subsequently attended a summer institute on public health in developing countries. She later returned to Botswana for dissertation research.

Her first book, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (2005), sheds light on how people have historically cared for one another in their homes and how these practices have evolved with political and economic developments, as well as with modern medical treatments.

“I was interested not in the category of the disease but in the experience of being sick,” Livingston explains. She witnessed the

challenges of people with limited resources caring for family members, and “I started to realize that the way I experience pain is a cultural artifact that has assumptions about the ability of the health system to palliate. I came to learn that’s not an expectation everyone is able to hold.”

When Livingston later returned to Botswana, she became intrigued by the country’s first—and only—dedicated oncology ward, and she decided to focus her ethnographic work on how cancer, a growing epidemic in that country, was being treated and the myriad ways it impacted patients, caregivers and society as a whole.

“When I started working in the oncology ward in 2006, ‘cancer’ was a novelty in the country,” she says. “There had long been people with cancer in Botswana, but since it was hard to get diagnosed, the word itself hadn’t crystallized in the popular imagination. It wasn’t something people worried about.” By 2010, that had changed.

Livingston’s multiyear research culminated in the 2012 publication of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology War in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. In that book’s first chapter, she writes “…I present the ward as both a metaphor for and an instantiation of the constellation of bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape early-twenty-first century experience in southern Africa. And as, quite simply, a cancer ward—a powerfully embodied social and existential space.”

Livingston is now focusing her attention on the aftermath of suicide and its web of impact in New York, where she currently lives with her daughter.

—Taline Manassian ’92 SPRING 2014

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Connections

EXONIAN PROFILE

C H A R L E S C U S H I N G ’ 0 6 A N D N OA H R E A DY- C A M P B E L L ’ 0 6

Making Online Resale a Seamless Experience

Charles Cushing '06 and Noah ReadyCampbell '06 stand in Twice's new 25,000square-foot facility in San Francisco.

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f you are reading this, you likely have been schooled in the educational benefits of the Harkness method, but Noah Ready-Campbell ’06 is professional proof of its practical application.

The co-founder and CEO of Twice (liketwice.com), a concierge-style online consignment shop for women’s clothing, regularly draws upon the skills he developed in Exeter’s classrooms in order to build his business—one that has generated $23 million in venture funding since 2012.

“A lot of times, when you get in a room with investors and you’re convincing them to give you money, it very quickly turns into a Harkness-type discussion where they fire questions at you and you have to come up with well-reasoned, data-driven responses,” ReadyCampbell, 25, says. “At the Harkness table, I got used to debating ideas and I also grew up in that sort of household, so it was a very helpful training ground.”

As was Ready-Campbell’s relationship to secondhand clothing as a child.

“My mom joked that I was one of the few third-generation Exeter students also on financial aid,” he says. “I remember getting this amazing-feeling Brooks Brothers shirt from the Salvation Army and it still had the tags on it. It was worth something like a hundred bucks and I got it for 10. It gave me a little more awareness of the secondhand clothing business than the average entrepreneur.”

Connections

From the time Ready-Campbell enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, he knew he wanted to start a tech company. After a short and somewhat disappointing stint at Google, he built a prototype website, bought some Google ads and began raising capital to launch Twice with co-founder Calvin Young.

Overwhelmed by his myriad duties, Ready-Campbell also recruited Exeter classmate and friend Charles Cushing, who had also lived in Knight House.

“He sent me a one-line email,” Cushing says, laughing.All it said was,‘Do you want to work at Twice?’ ” After Exeter, Cushing set his focus on building a career in Asia. He lived in northeast China for a year, teaching English. He attended Tufts, where he earned a degree in quantitative economics with a minor in Chinese. He spent another year and a half in China learning Mandarin, secured a Fulbright scholarship, worked a summer internship with Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong and later went to work for the company.

“It was a big leap, but I think I knew in my gut right away that I had to accept Noah’s offer,” says Cushing, 25, who came on board as director of business development and strategy and now serves as Twice’s general manager. “I wanted to work with Noah again.There wasn’t enough risk in the financial world and I could see where the next few years were going. I knew I was making the right decision.”

Ready-Campbell still remembers when the first box of clothing showed up on his doorstep, letting him know that “this was really happening.” He remembers the first item sold: a green Armani skirt. And he remembers every meeting he’s set up to shepherd the business from “zero to a million to $10 million to hopefully, eventually $100 million.”

Competing in the same space as thredUP,Threadflip, Poshmark and 99dresses, Twice focuses on reselling clothing from mass-market brands such as Banana Republic and Gap, and the average price point on the site is $20.

Women send their like-new clothing directly to Twice for review.The company will make an offer to a seller for the purchase of any resalable items. If the seller accepts, the clothing is measured and professionally photographed before being placed online for sale.The items Twice does not accept are donated to Goodwill.

“The frustrating thing about the traditional thrift store is it offers this huge jumble of stuff; it’s poorly organized; it’s time consuming to go through it all and see what you’re looking for; you have to commute to get there; and those stores are generally dimly lit.They don’t have an inviting or appealing feel to them,” Ready-Campbell says. “With us, you go through size, style, brand and sort. We make it very simple to find what you’re looking for. Convenience is at the core of our customer experience.” Twice, unlike many online resale sites, accepts returns and provides free shipping for them.

Twice recently move into a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in the Mission in San Francisco and supports a workforce of more than 150 people.The long-term plan is to expand into new categories, with handbags the immediate priority.

“After that, we want to expand our scope into kids’ clothing [and] men’s clothing,” Cushing says. “Noah and Calvin have always been excited about the collaborative consumption space, and we think there’s a ton of potential for continued growth here.”

“We want to be in every category,” Ready-Campbell adds. “We believe not just in building the secondhand clothing marketplace, but in creating a vast marketplace that is somewhere between eBay and Amazon.

“I got an email fairly recently from a woman who said that she is married to a minister and they go to a lot weddings and funerals and need to dress nicely but they don’t make much money. She said Twice had totally changed her life because she can get really nice clothing at 70 percent off versus retail.

“I’ve been thinking about that email a lot recently,” Ready-Campbell continues. “It was such a stress reliever for her. She was just so grateful. It feels good to provide someone with that level of satisfaction.”

—Craig Morgan ’84

“We believe . . . in creating a vast marketplace that is somewhere between eBay and Amazon.”

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Redefining Retirement (continued from page 27) also learned better how to respond to students’ needs academically and socially as well as cognitively. We understand learning differences better. We understand socioeconomic differences and cultural differences better. We’re a much kinder, much healthier place to be.”

For Hertig, who arrived at Exeter as an upper in 1955 and returned as a teacher in 1968, coeducation not only brought women to campus and enlarged the school, but it also marked the beginnings of a shift in diversification. “If you look at my yearbook class of 1957, everybody was a white male,” he says. “When you walk around the campus you can see that it’s a different place.”

The semester-to-trimester transformation, Hertig says, was also critical in terms of what the Academy offers its students: “We wanted to have more variety and choice in the curriculum. We particularly wanted to do more with the arts, but with the semester system there were only so many available slots. We weren’t wild about going to a trimester system but we had to do it if we were going to have more courses.” While the change was not without its teething issues—“We were teaching 16-week courses,” Eggers says, “and suddenly that went down to 10 weeks”— it’s provided more flexibility in terms of course offerings, opened the door for more electives, and allowed teachers and students to delve into topics of interest to them in far greater detail.

For Kemp, the other key curriculum shift was within the Mathematics Department. “In 1992 we started writing our own material instead of using textbooks.

We give students a lot more responsibility now, because the materials are very inductive: They have to discover mathematics,” Kemp says. “What they gain is lifelong skills in the heuristics of problem-solving: how to collaborate with others, how to use prior examples, how to draw from the resources available. Those are the skills which will stick with the kids over the longest period, way after the mathematics is gone from their mind.” That transformation took 15 years to complete, but now every course through Multivariable Calculus uses material written by Exeter teachers and is available online for free, an

Exeter-specific change that’s extended far beyond the Academy. “The problem sets are being used all over the country,” Kemp, the John E. and Mary E. Smith Memorial Distinguished Professor, says.

“We get visitors who come because they want to see it in action, so they can adopt it in their school. And we’re learning from them: They’ve had to make changes and they let us know what they’re doing. It’s created a great synergy between Exeter and the rest of the world as far as pedagogy is concerned.”

As far as Kemp is concerned, changes in technology have freed teachers and students to assess problems differently.

“Exeter adopted calculators fairly early,” she says, “and clearly there were things we didn’t have to teach anymore, skills that the calculator did instantly that we didn’t have to spend hours practicing. We still wanted to teach why things work, we still wanted the students to know where the rules come from, where the techniques come from, but now we could graph any function, anytime. It puts more of a responsibility on us to help the kids to choose the most appropriate software and appropriate times to use it.”

While Hertig perceives certain drawbacks to technology—shrinking attention spans, the distractions of computer games and texting—there’s no doubt that the introduction of the word processor transformed the teaching of writing. “Before, kids had to type a paper,” he says. “If you did major revisions, you spent half the time retyping, which was not particularly educational, just time-consuming. One result is that we put a lot more emphasis on writing papers and doing multiple drafts of them.”

As for research, it’s another no-brainer.

“Before, students were limited to whatever we had in the library—and we had a pretty impressive library for a secondary school. Now we have access to databases that have all kinds of newspapers, periodicals and document collections; it’s easy to use search engines to find stuff. When I was at Exeter, I wrote a term paper on the Middlesex Canal, which ran between Boston and the Merrimack River. It was based primarily on one book and I got a pretty good grade on it.” He laughs. “Now that paper wouldn’t even be accepted.”

Cultural and academic transformative experiences notwithstanding, it’s clear that

for all the emeriti faculty, the Exeter ties that bind most strongly are those to their students and colleagues. “The thing that I most value about Exeter,” confirms Weber, “is that it is a functional intellectual community. There’s another whole level to teaching and learning here. … It’s a community with a lot of energy and a lot of good faith.”

Some teachers, says Samiljan, “are burned out by their late 50s.They want to retire and that’s that. Others get better. I’m a far better teacher today than I was 25 years ago. I’ve had my share of mistaken techniques. I know what works; I know what doesn’t. I took 45 years to fine-tune the art of teaching.”

So what advice would he give an incoming teacher? No hesitation there.

“Let the students have fun in class; have a sense of humor. You’ve got to relax and keep their attention. What you want is for the kids to be enthused, to be inspired to go on.Teaching is performance art. Something happens when you go into a classroom: The curtain goes up and you make your entrance. It’s four shows a day. Know your material.”

For Kemp, after stints teaching in innercity Philadelphia, rural Kentucky and Japan and on Cape Cod, Exeter was “a big change, a re-education, a second career.”

She had to relearn a lot of math and she credits former Mathematics Department Chair Anja Greer—“my best friend and mentor”—and Exonian students for helping her find her comfort zone. “I love the Harkness way of teaching,” she says. “It gives you the opportunity to listen to your students and see how they approach things.

That helped me get up to speed.” That invaluable support, which sustained Kemp for three decades, now allows her to contemplate complete retirement. Looking forward to her first schedule-free fall since starting school at the age of 6, Kemp sounds both happy and relieved. “It’s been the best thing for me to realize this in my own time,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to fully retire, but now I think I am. It is,” she adds, “a satisfying feeling.”

Daneet Steffens is a freelance writer currently contributing to The Boston Globe, The Exeter Bulletin, and the U.K.’s Independent on Sunday. She can be found on Twitter @daneetsteffens.

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An Oval from a Trapezoid (continued from page 31) the Humanities Institute in 2013. Chatom Arkin, who teaches sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, was one of them.

Although Harbor Day had already acquired Harkness tables because of that request Leshinsky and her colleague made on the way to the airport, most teachers were not trained in using them. “They were just tables,” Arkin says. “Our classes were still very teacher-directed. Now we’re all trained. I was very excited to return to school this year after going to the institute.”

Arkin breaks his students into groups of four, as he finds that it is difficult to keep everyone accountable and to give everyone time to contribute in a group of 16.

He has also tailored the discussion-based class for middle school students. With seventh-graders, for instance, he will spend one day presenting material and building skills, then the next day asking open-ended questions to generate discussion. “This doesn’t dumb down Harkness at all, but elevates the conversation for middle school students,” he explains.“They have the tools and language for the discussion.”

Arkin has signed up to attend the Diversity Institute at Exeter this year and is looking forward to returning: “It’s so great to be in a room with people who are crazy motivated, especially in June.You do feel invigorated.”

Many of the teachers who attend the summer conferences note that it’s unusual for them to sign up for a professional development course offered by the same entity more than once. Exeter has become the exception, with many participants returning from one summer to the next.

The fact that Exeter offers a variety of topics makes this more attractive, though in some cases teachers attend the same conference multiple times. The Biology Institute, for instance, features a different focus each year so that repeat participants can still benefit from new material.

The Ransom Everglades School in Miami, FL, has made the summer conferences the center of its professional development efforts, sending approximately 30 teachers over the past decade. An independent school with 1,066 students in grades 6 through 12, Ransom Everglades 102

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has adopted a student-centered approach across the curriculum. John King, director of studies, attended the Humanities Institute in 2004 with three other members of the faculty. “That started it all for us,” he says. “We were in.”

Harkness tables would not fit in the classrooms in the school’s humanities building, so Ransom Everglades removed the traditional desks and replaced them with trapezoidal tables that accommodate three students and can be fitted together for a larger group. Classes average 15 to 20 in size, and teachers have the flexibility to arrange students in various configurations for discussion.

King, who teaches history to Upper School students, has six tables in his classroom. Depending on the day and the topic, he may divide students into groups or convene the entire class for a discussion that is largely directed by the students.

The challenge for teachers with this model, King acknowledges, is “relinquishing control.” The changes at Ransom Everglades did not happen overnight, but were introduced gradually. A couple of years after King attended the Humanities Institute, the school brought Exeter faculty to Florida to lead mini-institutes for humanities, math and science teachers.

“The math teachers were the most resistant to trying the Exeter approach, so we brought a math teacher down from Exeter,” King explains. “Our teachers liked what they saw and one signed up for the math conference the following summer. She returned saying it was the best thing she had ever done.”

At first, Ransom Everglades focused only on adopting the new methods in Upper School classes. Over time, however, they saw the benefits this way of teaching might have in the Middle School as well.

Now Ransom Everglades sends all newly hired teachers to a summer conference at Exeter, with four teachers attending the Humanities Institute most years.

King says, “There’s a different etiquette about the conversation in our classrooms now. Students have to learn to make room for everyone at the table. Students are less aggressive in their responses in discussion and more inquisitive. They are learning the skill of participating in a conversation with a shared goal.”

Other schools have seen similar results and discovered creative ways to “do Hark-

ness.” At William Mason in Ohio, for instance, the choir teacher now has students run the sectionals while she rotates from one section of the choir to the next.

When students are given more autonomy and control, this school has found, they are more actively engaged in learning.

King concurs:“What has been transformative for us is trying to implement a pedagogy of inquiry. Students drive it instead of everything being driven by the teacher.

It was hard for our students at first. They weren’t used to being at the center of the class. But in the last decade, there’s been a clear shift to teachers being more comfortable with letting students steer the ship and students responding well.”

Jonothon Sauer sees the summer conferences and the support they have given him as the key to what has happened at his school. “In teaching this way, you’re doing something teachers are not trained to do,” he says. “Attending the conference made me feel I wasn’t out here on an island alone.”

Katie Leshinsky agrees, noting, “Usually you might get one or two ideas at a conference.The Exeter conferences have a huge impact. We’re talking about Harkness teaching all the time at our school.”

At Harbor Day, as at the other schools, the teachers who have attended the conferences have become ambassadors for the Harkness method, passing on their enthusiasm and ideas to colleagues. Patricia George will be making a presentation at a department meeting at her school this spring and hopes that her demonstration of what she is doing in her classroom will prompt her colleagues to try it.

“We do professional development to make us better at our profession,” George says. “What could be better than then turning around and helping to make other teachers better?”

This, it seems, is just what Edward Harkness had in mind. He might not have imagined the diversity of today’s teachers or the variety of what the summer conferences offer, but the way these teachers are helping to spread the message of a Harkness education is surely the realization of his dream.

Katherine Towler is a former Bennett Fellow and coeditor, with former Bennett Fellow Ilya Kaminsky, of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith.

Finis (continued from page 104) ipant. My uncomprehending intolerance toward music earlier than Beethoven’s middle period or more modern than early Stravinsky was gradually transmuted as I welcomed Bartok and Bach (Mr. Goetze’s favorite composer, whom I had blithely dismissed at my first lesson as an anti-emotional, mechanical bore) into the company of Beethoven and Brahms in my pantheon.

Hearing other pianists’ compelling performances of the likes of Hindemith and Bartok, and especially singing the Christmas Oratorio, had opened my ears.

I draw inspiration to this day from Mr. Goetze, beyond as well as within the realm of music. Though his formal education ended after the German equivalent of a five-year Exeter, he was as close to being a Renaissance Man as anyone I have known: an adventurous world traveler, a dedicated mountaineer, deeply and broadly read, and a superb linguist, from classical Greek and Latin to Spanish, French, English, of course (perfect through its colorful German accent), and Russian (I will never forget his amusing account of how easy he had first found it to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original, because most of the early chapters featured Russian aristocrats speaking French).

Through his own example and in his teaching, Klaus Goetze set exactingly high standards that went beyond accurate playing into insistence on musical integrity, to playing and sharing music for its own sake and for the better realization of the composer’s vision, and not as a mere vehicle for our own glory. He taught us that winning praise for the composer and the works we played meant more than winning praise for our own virtuosity. Somewhat paradoxically, his strictness was balanced in a way that I find best expressed by the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, author of the literary inspirations for Chopin’s four astounding ballades: “He praised the beauties and forgave the faults.”

From Peter Washburn ’61:

At my lesson one night, perhaps after realizing that I was never going to amount to much as a performer, Mr. Goetze took a different tack. He asked me if I knew what sonata form was. I didn’t. He opened the Clementi sonatina I had been working on,

and, the tip of his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, he wrote in pencil at various places in the music “Exposition,” “Development” and “Recapitulation.”

Mr. Goetze’s heavy but eloquent German accent was a part of his unique character, but it is difficult to capture in words: “Here, in the exposition, we have the first subject,” and he drew a line along a few bars of the opening musical phrase, and then played just the melody line of that phrase on the piano. “And, here,” and he drew another line bracketing a phrase of music a couple of lines into the piece, “is the second subject.” And he played that melody as well.

“And in the development, the first subject and the second subject get taken apart....” And he selected fragments of the two subjects to play, showing how the composer altered them in the “taking apart” process. He continued with this analysis of the piece, showing how, out of two short phrases, the first movement of the piece was constructed. It was a minor revelation. There, in front of me all this time, was this structure that I had been completely unaware of. Why hadn’t I known about that before?

I could see that once the role of the melody’s phrases was elucidated, understanding their contribution to the whole then became part of appreciating the music. I suspect Mr. Goetze could see my wonderment at his explication, and for once, he may have obtained some gratitude of his own from our lesson. Henceforth, while he wasn’t going to foster a prodigy, he could at least claim responsibility for a student’s enlightened understanding of what could happen in a piece of music. I think he may even have stopped gritting his teeth during my lessons.

From Rob Provine ’62:

There was one occasion where he pitted me against Hubert F. Leon ’65 (who later became Garby Leon, as in film), a much better pianist. Both of us played the same [Johann Baptist] Cramer etude: he at a blinding speed, I at a snail’s pace. I got all the right notes, and Garby dropped a couple. Mr. Goetze praised me for my caution.

From John Hagenbuckle ’61:

Mr. Goetze always seemed brisk and full of energy and enthusiasm for his subject and the act of teaching.

I don’t remember him as being tyrannical, but I often felt fear as the time approached for me to demonstrate to him the degree to which I had (or hadn’t!) progressed since our last session.

He was what I then and still now think of as “German to the core”—precise, formal yet witty at times, dedicated to the classic German-speaking composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.

When I told him my favorite composer was Sibelius, he took a bit of a dim view. Shostakovich and Stravinsky fared worse. I rarely could feel much relationship between my late-Romantic and 20th-century favorites and the miniature—but for me maddeningly difficult— pieces he assigned to me. All that struggle just to produce this?

I have smallish hands and short fingers, perhaps why I found some of the crossover fingering exercises to be torture!

Despite my being a poor piano student, I liked “Mr. Gertzer” a lot. I rather held him in awe, I think. Much later, as my musical tastes broadened out substantially, I came to deeply appreciate Mr. G’s Mozart, Schubert and especially Beethoven—particularly the Beethoven piano sonatas and string quartets. On the way, I discovered Artur Schnabel’s 1930s recordings of the Beethoven sonatas, which nourish my musical soul to this day.

In conclusion…

In preparing this article I contacted Klaus Goetze’s son, Rolf ’55, who still lives in the Cambridge, MA, house his father lived in when he was teaching at Exeter. It turns out Klaus’ father was a piano manufacturer in Germany, making “Goetze” pianos that Rolf describes as of “average quality.”

During World War I, the factory was used for making airplanes. After all, both were made of wood and wire (!).

In 1927, 19-year-old Klaus Goetze came to the U.S. He was engaged by Mr. Mason (of the Mason & Hamlin piano company) to come to Boston with an expense account and the idea of marketing the pianos. He began presenting piano recitals and giving music lessons, which led to not only Mr. Goetze’s tenure at Exeter but also to long-term piano instruction at Milton Academy,Wellesley College and the Longy School of Music. He also lectured and performed at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education for 25 years.

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Finis Origine Pendet

Wednesdays at the Piano A D J U N C T M U S I C I N S T RU C T O R K L AU S G O E T Z E R E M E M B E R E D Compiled by Dick Mathisen ’62

K

Most of those Wednesday afternoons, however, Exeter from 1942 to 1966. In addition were spent listening and critiquing…and then to individual lessons, he gave a “piano playing and being critiqued. Although I learned a class” Wednesday afternoons in which he huge amount in Mr. Goetze’s individual lessons, would encourage his students to gather for I learned even more from his piano classes. instruction in what I would call the equivThe most important Wednesday discussions alent of the Harkness method. These classfor me were regarding standards. How do we es had a huge impact on me in my four communicate [to our audiences] when playing years at Exeter, and I suspect Mr. Goetze music? What did Beethoven intend to commualso had a substantial impact on many nicate in that passage? What did pianist [Artur] other students.

Schnabel’s edition [of Beethoven’s sonatas] say Picture Exeter more than 50 years ago. about how it should be played? How did SchnSome 20 to 30 of Mr. Goetze’s students abel himself actually play it? Mr. Goetze had, of would gather on the second floor of Phillips course, heard Schnabel perform.

Church (1959-60) or in the auditorium of When Mr. Goetze died in 1995, I hoped to the Lewis Perry Music Building (1960-62). see some sort of obituary in The Exeter Bulletin. It Mr. Goetze, benevolent dictator, would then call did not appear, however, because he was an adjunct on each student to play after he’d given a short faculty member and not a full-time instructor. So, Klaus Goetze introduction, such as, “Johnnie is a new student this is my small tribute to an Exeter teacher who from Minnesota who has been playing Debussy’s Clair de made a huge impression on me.

Lune for two months.” Then Johnnie played.

For a different perspective, I asked some of Mr. Goetze’s forThat much was easy, for me as a listener although not for mer students and one of PEA’s current piano instructors for their Johnnie! After the last note died, silence. No applause. Students impressions of the man. were then encouraged to articulate their opinions in front of their classmates. Each of us, as a listener, was asked to comment. From Lodowick Crofoot, PEA adjunct music instructor in piano: On the performance, the piece…anything. Ouch!

If you thought Latin class with [Norman] “Hatchie” [Hatch] I have been blessed with a long, fruitful career as an Exeter piano was bad, try to say something constructive in front of the poor instructor thanks to Klaus Goetze, who invited me, about to guy who just played while trying not to sound ridiculous to Mr. emerge from Juilliard with a master’s degree, to substitute for him Goetze or the other students.What does a lowly prep, after all, say during his and Mrs. Goetze’s 1966-67 sabbatical journey, by VW following the performance of a seasoned senior?

Beetle, to Tierra del Fuego. Even if the opportunity had never arisVague generalities, such as “That was great!” didn’t pass muster en for his entrusting me with such responsibility and such an with Mr. Goetze. He would press: “Can you say a little more?” inspiring first teaching position, his four years as my private teacher Or, “Was that all you noticed?” during my college years would by themselves make him one of the Other commentators, at times, became too critical: “Poor most important people in my life. He gave kind encouragement rhythm” or “too slow” or “I didn’t like the piece.” Mr. Goetze and near-perfect guidance (e.g., take Harvard’s course in harmony; might then have offered a mild corrective, about the criteria for play collaborative ensemble music) to an ill-prepared undergraducritiquing a beginner versus critiquing one of the advanced stu- ate whose discovery of music-making as his true calling was condents. Criticism was welcome, but it was expected to be con- sistently frustrated by Harvard’s academic obstacle course.

Inspiring piano classes like those that Dick Mathisen describes structive. And, lest we had forgotten, we would soon be under the same gun—playing and opening ourselves up to criticism so well took place in the Goetzes’ Cambridge home several times a year, with private students and visitors from Milton Academy, from the same person we had just insulted.

On rare occasions, Mr. Goetze played. I remember him offering Wellesley College and (occasionally) Exeter. There were also an extended introduction to one of Beethoven’s late sonatas, Op. memorable home performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and 109, explaining how each variation in the last movement had the Mozart’s Requiem, with instrumentalists and singers filling the same number of measures as the theme, while we shared copies of crowded living room with glorious sound. Music was never a the printed score. And then he played the entire piece for us. The spectator sport to the Goetzes. Everyone at these events, even a mediocre singer like me, was a partic(continued on page 103) next year he did the same with Op. 110. Marvelous education!

The Exeter Bulletin

S PRING 2014

FRED CARLSON

104

laus Goetze P’55, P’57 taught piano at

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