For the Greater Good
TRICIA MCCARTHY Tricia, who teaches English and is head of the Middle School, volunteered right after her college graduation as a teacher in Belize, when “it was far from the vacation paradise it is now,” she says. “I fell in love with the kids who were so hungry for knowledge that their families would forego one dinner a week to be able to afford tuition and school supplies.” When Tricia returned she worked for a development company as the manager of a prominent Boston Harbor marina, where the perks included enjoying fancy lunches on visiting yachts and hobnobbing with captains and crews from around the world. But education continued to call her. She began teaching, advising, and assuming duties including serving as Humanities department chair and
PETER BRADLEY Math teacher Peter Bradley’s parents were teachers, as were many of his other relatives, but he was “determined to avoid the family business,” he says. After graduating from college with a degree in accounting and spending three summers working in the Mariner Program at Mystic Seaport, Peter found himself in the Seaport’s school program during the autumn of 1980. One fall day Bob Duncan arrived from Fenn, chaperoning a group of students. Over coffee one evening, Bob asked Peter what he was going to do with his life, and the latter told him he wasn’t sure he wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps. Bob looked at Peter and declared, “You should be a teacher.” Peter listened, he said, “and the rest is history.” This is his twentysecond year at Fenn.
“I fell in love with the kids who were so hungry for knowledge that their families would forego one dinner a week to be able to afford tuition and school supplies.” Director of Student Affairs at the Brimmer and May School. At the same time she worked on a master’s degree in counseling and spent a month at the Klingenstein Center’s Summer Institute at Columbia University. In 1999 she joined the Fenn faculty, where lunch is at tables filled with chattering adolescents devouring curly fries and pizza and where she hobnobs with her Middle School colleagues, organizing such events as the seventh grade trip to Washington, D.C. She’d have it no other way.