NMH Magazine, Fall 2018

NMH Magazine Northfield Mount Hermon FA L L 2 01 8

THE SOUND OF HISTORY

24 NMH Magazine FALL 2018 Volume 20, Number 1

Editor Jennifer Sutton P’14, ’21 Design Lilly Pereira www.aldeia.design Class Notes Editor Kris Halpin Class Notes Design Harry van Baaren P’16, ’18, ’21 Print Production Pam Lierle P’17 Contributors Tekla McInerney Susan Pasternack Emily Harrison Weir Director of Communications Sharon LaBella-Lindale P’17, ’20 Head of School Charles A. Tierney III P’16, ’19, ’20 Chief Advancement Officer Allyson L. Goodwin ’83, P’12, ’14 Archivist Peter H. Weis ’78, P’13 NMH Magazine Northfield Mount Hermon One Lamplighter Way Mount Hermon, MA 01354 413-498-3247 Fax 413-498-3021 nmhmagazine@nmhschool.org Class Notes nmhnotes@nmhschool.org Address Changes Northfield Mount Hermon Advancement Services Norton House One Lamplighter Way Mount Hermon, MA 01354 413-498-3300 addressupdates@nmhschool.org Northfield Mount Hermon publishes NMH Magazine (USPS074-860) two times a year in fall and spring. Printed by Lane Press, Burlington, VT 05402

Margaret Honey ’74 on the roof of the New York Hall of Science, where she is CEO.

CO NTENTS

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F E AT U R E S

18 Hearing History

A century after World War I ended, NMH honors alumni who served.

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24 Design. Make. Play.

That’s how we learn, says educator and museum director Margaret Honey ’74.

30 Math Whiz2

Mona Zhang ’19 is motivated. Her teacher and mentor Abby Ross is, too.

36 The Ultimate Game David Gessner ’79 pens a love letter to his favorite sport on its 50th anniversary.

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DE PARTME NTS

ON THE COVER Music teacher Steve BathoryPeeler and Megan Pei Ying Liao ’19 in NMH’s Memorial Grove.

PHOTO: CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY TABLE OF CONTENTS PHOTOS: ANDREW KELLY (LEFT), CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY (TOP), COUR TESY OF DAVID GESSNER (BOTTOM)

2 5 6 8 14 16 17 42 47 96 97

Postcard Leading Lines Connect Lamplighter Way In Class First Person A Conversation With ...

Alumni Hall Class Notes History Lesson Giving Back

A SNA P SH OT FROM CAM PUS

Superfans At a girls’ varsity volleyball game this fall, several high-energy fans in the bleachers caught the eye of photographer Glenn Minshall. “I think this moment captured us celebrating a big hit,” says Marcel Awori ’20 (bottom right). As the team dug deep, came from behind, and finished strong with a win against Loomis Chaffee, the small but supportive crowd went wild. “It was an amazing moment of pure pride that I felt for my peers on the volleyball court,” says Khamari Culcleasure ’20 (bottom center). Clockwise from top: Olisa Tasie-Amadi ’20 (in dark cap), Mickey Ameris ’19, Awori, Culcleasure, Jack Molloy ’21, Minka Soumah ’19, and Zach Dekker ’21.

PHOTO: GLENN MINSHALL

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A SNAP SHOT FR OM CAMPUS

POSTCARD

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you.

It’s thanks to

NMH students are going out into the world with a strong sense of humanity and purpose.

Your NMH Fund gift allows the school to offer a rigorous academic program where questions are valued as much as knowledge and where honor and integrity matter.

Our faculty are teaching NMH students the intricacies of history and literature, real-world applications for math, and the mind-blowing power of computer science.

What better way to change the world. Transform lives. Give to the NMH Fund. nmhschool.org/give

BY CHARLES A . T IE RN EY III, HEAD OF S CHOOL

LEADING LINES

Becoming Stakeholders

NMH expects a lot from its students. They expect a lot from their school.

As the first week of school drew to a close in early September, I sat down to dessert with a dozen members of the class of 2019. I had invited them to Ford Cottage for a specific reason: I wanted to take stock. This is a crossroads year for Northfield Mount Hermon, as we prepare to welcome a new head of school. While I will meet with many alumni and parents in the coming months — and I trust you all will have much to say — it also feels appropriate and necessary to ask current students, NMH’s primary reason for being, what they are thinking.

And so my dessert guests, all leaders on campus in one way or another, reported in. Yes, they were stressing over college applications, yet classes had gotten off to a good start. They were excited to pursue new ventures during their senior year. They were energized by the chemistry on their sports teams. The vibe on campus, they said, felt good.

Some shared that they felt old. At 17 or 18, these seniors are still kids, but as they welcomed the new ninth graders that first week of school, they wondered to themselves: Did we ever look that young? Did we have the same deer-in-the-headlights look? I assured them that they most definitely did.

They registered feeling older beneath the surface, too. They talked about responsibility, how they want to inspire and reassure younger students just as older students once inspired and reassured them.

They talked about the responsibility they feel to NMH itself, the institution. They are thinking about the legacy they will leave behind. They want to strengthen their dorm communities and clubs and affinity groups this year, in order to help people live fuller, more balanced lives on campus. They want to model, in their own ways, NMH’s mission of acting

with humanity and purpose. They want more say in developing campus policies that affect their daily lives. They also want the school to practice what it preaches and be as inclusive as possible when it comes to different worldviews and voices.

In other words, they have become stakeholders.

Contributors. They no longer reside just in intake or consumer mode. They are giving back, and pushing back, asking NMH to live up to its potential, not just for them this year as they approach adulthood, but for all the students who come after them.

As we sat around the table and the dessert disappeared, I asked them to characterize, in a word or a phrase, what they value about their NMH experience. At the top of the list, not surprisingly, were the school’s excellent academics and the opportunity to work with teachers who truly love what they are teaching. Another word that stood out to me was “perspective” — as in learning how to recognize what you have, what others have, and how those two things are connected. And, finally, there was this: “NMH makes you uncomfortable, in a good way,” one student said. Being pushed to do what’s unfamiliar and difficult “has made me a better person,” the student said.

I am so grateful for my time with these wise and lively students. It inspired me to meet with more of their classmates around the table in Ford Cottage throughout the year. Their thoughtful questions and reflections can serve as guideposts for the school, just as yours do. All of us at NMH can gain perspective through learning, dialogue, debate, and shared meals, and we can push each other in good, productive ways. It can make us better people, and an even more remarkable school. [NMH]

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CONNECT

KEEP IT UP The topics covered in the Spring 2018 edition of NMH Magazine were the most expansive in tenor that I can recall. The snapshot from Spain, for example, renewed my interest and attracted my attention.

As a former Wall Street lawyer who spent more than three decades traveling the world doing deals as a hired gun for a federal agency, I thought the piece by Caleb Daniloff ’88 about fellow alumnus Jason Matthews ’69 was spot on. We need to see more pieces about our popular, accomplished alumni in future issues. I am a Matthews fan, having spent a good deal of time in Eastern Europe, doing deals in Russia, Hungary, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and the former Yugoslavia.

Finally, there were parting comments from our departed head, but little discussion about the kind of individual who will lead NMH into the future. As a law school lecturer, I recently read James E. Ryan’s new book, Wait, What?, an expansion of his Harvard Graduate School of Education commencement speech that went viral on the internet.

Find [a head] who has read that book, given it meaningful thought, and asked the questions the book proposes we consider.

Keep up the good work.

Thatcher A. Stone ’73 Charlottesville, Virginia

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SOCIAL

@NMHSchool

The #NMHfarm welcomed new faculty members this year with a meal served right on the farm. From the blueberry-basil lemonade to the ice cream with rhubarb sauce, all the ingredients were produced on the NMH campus or sourced nearby.

@NMHSchool Seho Myung ’18 was victorious last spring after answering a question correctly at Friday Night Trivia. #NMHlife #trivia

New students got an enthusiastic welcome to Hubbard (Cottage 4) from resident leaders Annika Voorheis ’20 and Ayleen Cameron ’20. #backtoschool

PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL, COURTESY OF NMH ARCHIVES AND CARA HOLMES ’12.

NMH Farm Products

L ET T E RS/ EMA IL /S OC IA L M E DIA

@NMHSchool When the call went out to alumni on Facebook to share photos of #vintageNMH apparel and gear, Cara Holmes ’12 and her JV lax T-shirt got the unofficial farthest-away award: Neko Harbour, Antarctica.

Download an order form at www.nmhschool.org/studentlife/farm-program/order-farm-products or return a copy of this order form, along with a check payable to Northfield Mount Hermon, to: Farm Program, NMH, One Lamplighter Way, Mount Hermon, MA 01354.

Please attach mailing instructions to your order.

All prices include shipping. Please note: The minimum order for each mailing address is $25.

Students returning to NMH this fall drove onto campus through similar gates, but with a vastly different view. #oldschool

Name Address (please, no P.O. boxes) City

State

Zip

❑ day ❑ evening

Telephone

MAPLE PRODUCTS

QUANTITY

Maple cream

$15

Half pint syrup (Grade A)

$14

Pint syrup (Grade A)

$23

Quart syrup (Grade A)

$34

Half gallon syrup (Grade A)

$53

Pure maple sugar candy (One box contains two 1-oz. maple leaves)

$4

FRUIT PRODUCTS Strawberry jam (8 oz.)

GET IN TOUCH Let us know what you think. Correspondence will be edited for length, clarity, and grammar, and should pertain to magazine content. All views expressed belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies and positions of NMH. Reach us at nmhmagazine@nmhschool.org.

$9

Strawberry jam (12 oz.)

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Raspberry jam (8 oz.)

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Raspberry jam (12 oz.)

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TOTAL

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LAMPLIGHTER WAY

A Collaborative Leader “Thankful.” “Excited.” That was how Brian H. Hargrove described his reaction at being named NMH’s 12th head of school last month.

“To follow in the footsteps of visionaries, educational leaders, and gifted teachers in serving NMH is incredibly humbling,” he says. “I am honored, but more important, I am committed to serving the school with the kind of devotion, optimism, and love that has shaped it for nearly 140 years.”

The NMH Board of Trustees announced Hargrove’s appointment on Oct. 1, following a national search that began in February. Hargrove will officially become head of school on campus on July 1, 2019, and until then, Charles A. Tierney III P’16, ’19, ’20 will continue to serve as head. In July 2019, Tierney will resume his post as associate head of school.

Hargrove will come to NMH from Mercersburg Academy, a coed boarding and day school in Pennsylvania with about 440 students, where he currently works as assistant head of school for advancement and communications.

“What you see is what you get,” Hargrove told faculty and staff during a campus visit in September, explaining his transparent approach to leadership.

His educational philosophy is equally straightforward. “I believe we can change the world through education,” he says. “Our world needs citizens endowed with the qualities we nurture in our students. As we succeed, I believe

NMH Magazine

PHOTO: GLENN MINSHALL

Brian Hargrove Is NMH’s Next Head of School.

B Y EMILY HARRISO N W E IR

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STORIES/N EWS FROM CAMPUS

“Few schools succeed in holding to their ‘true north’ in the way that NMH has. It’s unique. It’s powerful.” we make a very real difference in the world.”

“In Brian, we have found a leader for our entire community,” says Mariah Draper Calagione ’89, P’18, ’20, chair of the NMH Board of Trustees. “He understands and appreciates the strong culture of NMH; he embodies not only excellence but also NMH’s mission of humanity and purpose; and he’s a collaborative leader who brings people together. He’s a positive, solution-oriented person.”

When Hargrove and his wife, Linda, a lawyer, toured the campus and met with NMH community members, they both “felt pulled in with each successive step,” Hargrove says.

“The natural beauty of the campus is awe-inspiring, yet it is no match for the people. Linda and I connected with the heart-felt nature of the community. It’s clear that NMH is a fulfilling place to live and work, and that students and adults alike love the school and believe in its mission.”

Hargrove is ready to make that mission his own. “Head, heart, and hand — these words resonate deeply with me,” he says. “Few schools succeed in holding to their ‘true north’ in the way NMH has. It’s unique. It’s powerful. And it must be leveraged further as we live our mission.”

Over the past two decades, Hargrove has held leadership roles

3 0 S QUA RES Students in a 2017 Painting I class worked together on this multi-panel homage to a piece by the artist Janet Fish titled “Raspberries, Nasturtiums, and Goldfish.”

in both education and the private sector. He began his advancement career at Gettysburg College, his undergraduate alma mater, and raised $110 million at St. Mark’s School of Texas before joining the Mercersburg community and leading its $300 million campaign. He holds a master’s degree in school leadership from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from Texas State University.

Even though his new job doesn’t officially begin until

summer, Hargrove says he’s eager to start working on behalf of NMH. “This is an important moment in the life of the school” with “remarkable opportunities” ahead, he says. “We will continue to work with students in ways that are true to our character and, in doing so, we will raise the bar for all schools. How could I not be excited by this bold endeavor?”

Learn more about NMH’s new head at www.nmhschool.org.

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LAMP LIG H T E R WAY

“Jerusalem,” Deconstructed The adjectives “these” and “those” are totally mundane, right? Not exactly words that would foment controversy. This fall, during the first few weeks of school, a ninthgrade Humanities I class decided otherwise.

They were studying NMH’s school song, “Jerusalem,” and comparing the original verses, written by the British poet William Blake in the early 1800s, with the musical version that Hubert Parry created during World War I to rally England’s troops. Blake wrote of “these dark Satanic mills” as a way of calling out the evil he saw in England’s Industrial Revolution and its subsequent pollution and child labor. A century later, Parry changed the reference to “those” Satanic mills, in order to set England apart from its German opponents in battle. When NMH adopted “Jerusalem” as its school

song in 1971, as Northfield and Mount Hermon were merging into a single school, it went with Parry’s version.

Now is the time, today’s ninthgraders say, for NMH to return to using “these” when the song is sung at all-school meetings and special school events. In class, they drafted handwritten notes to Head of School Charlie Tierney arguing their case. They stated that 1) NMH should “stay true to Blake’s original wording”; 2) “these” would be more grammatically consistent (“our clouded hills,” “these Satanic mills,” etc.); and 3) “these” is a better metaphorical fit for NMH because it makes global issues “our problems rather than someone else’s problems that we don’t have to do anything about.”

Lori Veilleux, a religious studies and philosophy teacher whose class wrote the notes to Tierney, says

that even though her 15-year-old students are new to NMH, they recognize that “this is a place where they inherit tradition, but not a place where we do things simply because it’s tradition.” Essentially, she says, her students are “having a conversation about their responsibilities and capabilities as changemakers, not just with their school song but also in the world beyond.

They’re talking about living with humanity and purpose, and how they can make NMH’s song reflect that better.”

In response, Tierney pulled out a pen and exchanged several notes with Veilleux’s class, clearly relishing the old-school epistolary relationship as well as the thoughtfully reasoned arguments. He recently wrote to the students, “I will take up your suggestion for ‘Jerusalem’ with my esteemed colleagues and will reply posthaste.”

Where Legends Play The first Newport Jazz Festival, 64 years ago, featured legends like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Dizzy Gillespie. This year’s festival showcased not only a 21st-century lineup of greats — Christian McBride, Andra Day, Pat Metheny — but also two NMH students: drummer Jacob Smith ’21 (left), who played with a Berklee College of Music ensemble, and Miles Kaming-Thanassi ’19, a trumpet player with the Massachusetts All-State Jazz Ensemble. “The great musicians that you hear millions of stories about, they all played at Newport,” Smith says. “The fact that you get to be a part of it — it’s amazing.”

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PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL

L AM P L IG H T E R WAY

PIT C H P E R F E C T Before goalkeeper María Echezarreta Fernández ’20 stepped into the net for the girls’ varsity soccer team in September, she led Spain’s national team to the Union of European Football Associations U19 championship in July. She earned All-Tournament honors for three shutouts in four games.

FINISHING STRONG Yaraslau Slavikouski ’19 took third for Belarus at the Junior European Wrestling Championships in Rome. He’s the two-time defending New England Champion (195 lbs).

In August, Oliver Drake ’06 pitched a shutout ninth inning in a win for the Minnesota Twins, becoming the first player in Major League Baseball (MLB) history to play for five teams in a single season. He also pitched for the Brewers, Indians, Angels, and Blue Jays during the 2018 season and was profiled by The New York Times.

Faceoff specialist Max Adler ’13 led the Denver Outlaws in defeating the Dallas Rattlers and winning the Major League Lacrosse (MLL) Championship in August.

Inside Lacrosse profiled Adler and noted the “tireless work ethic” that took him to the “highest level of the sport.”

Last April, math teacher and crew coach Taylor Washburn placed 112th in the 2018 Boston Marathon, out of nearly 27,000 runners. He crossed the finish line with a time of 2:38:27 — a 6:03/mile pace.

RE CORD-BREA K I NG RUN Smashing the NMH cross-country 5K course record this fall was Richard Sturtevant ’19, with a time of 15:54, beating the previous record by a whopping 25 seconds (16:19, set by Mohamed Hussein ’14).

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LAMP LIG H T E R WAY

MARIAH CALAGIONE ’89 NAMED NEW BOARD CHAIR The NMH Board of Trustees has elected Mariah Draper Calagione ’89, P’18, ’20 to serve as its chair for the next three years.

Calagione has been an active trustee for seven years, and her NMH roots run deep.

She is the daughter of the late Thomas Draper ’60, a former NMH trustee, and the sister of Thomas Draper Jr. ’94. She and husband Sam Calagione ’88 founded and continue to lead Dogfish Head Brewery, which includes two restaurants and an inn in Rehoboth Beach and Lewes, Delaware.

Calagione says it’s been a productive first few months on the job. “I didn’t exactly come into it during a period of low activity,” she says

wryly, referring to the search for a new head of school that she helped lead during the summer and early fall. That work showed her “how passionate people are in every corner” of NMH, she says.

Calagione’s primary responsibility now is to guide and support Brian Hargrove, who was hired in October as NMH’s 12th head.

The next 12 to 18 months will be “critically important” for NMH, she says. “It takes time for a leader to come into an organization and learn it through and through, so this is actually a big opportunity for the entire NMH community — to do an amazing job onboarding our new head of school.”

Writing Plays, Teaching Students Jared Eberlein, director of NMH’s theater program, had quite a summer. His play Click!

(A Travel Motif ) was one of 10 finalists, out of more than 850 submissions, in the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival in New York City in August. His newest composition, I’ll String Along With You, had a workshop production at the New World Theatre in New Hampshire, where he was playwriting fellow.

Seeing both plays come to life gave Eberlein insights that infused his work with students this fall, especially in his playwriting course. “I tell students that we all start with that horrible first blank page, but also with a wealth of human experience,” he says.

“The convergence of those things is where every play comes from.”

In Click!, two characters wait for a city bus and watch as driver after driver catch sight of them and lock

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Eberlein (second from left) with students in an acting class last fall.

their car doors (“click!”) while stopped at a traffic light.

The two men bond over their shared reality that people’s lives in the U.S. are frighteningly different, depending on the color of their skin.

Working with directors, playwrights, and actors both in

New York and New Hampshire reminded Eberlein that “students need focus and discipline, but they also need space to breathe,” he says. “If we’re jamming theory after theory down their throats, they won’t be able to express themselves any better than when they started.”

PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL

L AM P L IG H T E R WAY

How to Face an Epithet When American-literature teachers assign books by James Baldwin, Mark Twain, or Claudia Rankine, they know there’s a difficult conversation ahead: how to deal with the n-word. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, a history professor at Smith College who specializes in 19th-century U.S. history and race, visited NMH this fall to speak with a group of faculty about tackling the topic. Pryor frames her own scholarly work on the n-word with personal experience; she’s the daughter of the

late comedian Richard Pryor, whose unflinching examinations of racism helped make him a 20th-century icon.

Dr. Pryor was clear: She does not advocate saying the n-word; she advocates talking about the history of the word and its multiple contexts. Teachers who avoid or shut down the discussion when it comes up in the classroom are “reinstituting harm because they’re forcing students to fend for themselves,” she says.

IN THE WOODS

The hundreds of acres surrounding NMH are more than just a beautiful forest. Biology classes do research among the trees; English classes bring their books and journals to the edges of Shadow Lake for reading and reflection; cross-country runners, Nordic skiers, mountain bikers, and hikers take to the trails in every season. Forester Mike Mauri manages the land with one over-arching goal, he says: to keep the native tree population diverse and the forest structure healthy for present and future generations to use.

ILLUSTRATION: JESSICA MCGUIRL; PHOTO: COUR TESY OF SMITH COLLEGE

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IN CLASS

Half of History

What do Abigail Adams, the #MeToo movement, and the Northfield School for Girls have in common?

BY JENNIFER S U T T O N

Early one morning last spring, teacher Chris Edler took her Women’s History class over the Connecticut River for a tour of the former Northfield School for Girls.

NMH Archivist Peter Weis led the group around the campus, stopping first at Round Top, the grassy hill where school founder D.L. Moody and his wife, Emma, are buried.

“Is it disrespectful to take pictures?” one student asked. And then: “Why doesn’t it say ‘husband of Emma?’ on D.L.’s grave when it says ‘wife of D.L.’ on hers?”

Edler nods, as if to say, Bingo!

That century-old disparity between Mr. Moody and Mrs. Moody epitomizes why women’s history classes exist. “We’re at a critical juncture where women are making some incredible strides, but in other ways — no,” Edler says. To understand how slowly society changes, she adds, just look at today’s Fortune 500 leaders; only about 5 percent are female. NMH’s Women’s History course aims not only to examine the past, but also “to show girls and young women that yes, they matter; what they have to say matters.”

Edler kicks things off with Abigail Adams. She has her students read the 1776 letter Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, who was working with the Continental Congress to craft the Declaration of Independence. She advised the

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Founding Fathers to “remember the ladies,” and warned, “We are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

From British writer Mary Wollstonecraft to the 19th-century suffragists Elizabeth Cady-Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, from second-wave feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem to the U.N.’s “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” from the first woman Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the writer bell hooks, Edler and her students explore how women around the globe struggle to find the “voice” that Abigail Adams wrote of.

The class also zooms in and examines what’s right around them — not just Northfield, but also stories about their own lives and families. Edler says, “I want students to get a sense of why they are where they are, why they have the opportunities they have” — in other words, how they fit into the history they’re studying. “The class allowed me to see where issues that I care about stem from,” says Isabel Lewis ’18. Liza Riehs ’18 recognized how Susan B. Anthony’s labor activism in the mid-1800s “helped pave the way so that during my summer job, I am paid the same amount as my male co-workers for doing the same

work.” Amanda Aalto ’18 hadn’t realized that certain rights she takes for granted, like being able to drive, or voting, aren’t universal — alluding to Saudi Arabia, where women couldn’t vote until 2015, or drive until last year.

And a women’s history class today would feel incomplete without considering the #MeToo movement, which exploded a year ago with dozens of accusations of sexual assault leveled against the American film producer Harvey Weinstein. Is the class more relevant now, after a year of women speaking out publicly in the U.S. and around the world about assaults and

Student in NMH’s Women’s History class visit the former Northfield School for Girls.

“ Everything happening now rests on the bedrock of women who came before.”

Teacher: Chris Edler Years at NMH: 28 Other courses: World History (sophomore humanities), U.S. History, Shared Voices (combined American Literature and U.S. History) Education: Bachelor’s degree in American studies, Skidmore; master’s degree in women’s history, Dartmouth Before NMH: Taught history at Williston Northampton School, 1984–89; and at Moorestown Friends School, 1989–90

PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL , MICHAEL DW YER

harassment? Edler says no. “The class is women’s history, not women’s issues,” she points out. “There’s a lot of overlap, but it’s important to remember that everything happening now rests on the bedrock of the women who came before.”

One challenge of the course is how to bring in the other side of the story, or the other voice in the conversation: that of men. Not many boys show up in the classroom. It’s unfortunate, Edler says, and a little puzzling, because the course is not about “berating men.” There were plenty of men, like the journalist, suffragist, and abolitionist William

Lloyd Garrison, who joined women in their fight for equity during the mid-1800s. “We’re simply learning about another part of history,” Edler says, like African American history or immigration history.

A different challenge — a good one — is that the discussion-based class “goes where the students take it.” They might start the day with Betty Friedan and end up talking about the #MeToo movement. Or start with Susan B. Anthony and end up examining how gender and sexism intersect with race and racism.

Or start with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was criticized for her political activism in England, and end up with Gloria Steinem. “I never know what connections they’ll make, and that’s exciting,” Edler says.

In the end, the course is designed to feed students’ desire for change.

Isabel Lewis, for one, envisions a history curriculum in which men and women are equally represented, so “there would be no need for a women’s history class.” Edler says, “I want students to understand that everything women have gone through in the past 200 years has been a fight taken up by ordinary citizens. They can be part of whatever comes next.” [NMH]

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FIRST PERSON

Together, in the Wilderness

The sunrises were stunning. So were the bagels fried in bacon grease.

BY A L BE RT BO O T H ’60

“ This was a tradition, being outdoors with NMH friends.”

Albert Booth, a former NMH trustee, joined the Appalachian Mountain Club when he was 5.

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Any canoeist worth their salt loves a following wind. One spring day on Chesuncook Lake in northern Maine, a favorable wind came up, so the six of us — including three NMH grads — rigged sails with our ponchos, lashed our canoes together, put up a paddle for a main mast, and flew south down the lake. We cut through the water, creating a sizable wake, and arrived at our evening’s campsite several hours early, rested and enthused.

This was a tradition, being outdoors with NMH friends. During the summer after graduation, I worked at the Northfield Conferences with several other recent Northfield and Mount Hermon graduates, and during our off-time, we discussed, among other things, our love of the outdoors.

At the end of that summer, a few of us took a 15-day hike along the Presidential Range in northern New Hampshire. We cooked our meals over fires and stayed, for the most part, in AMC shelters. The following summer, we gathered for a week of hiking in the Franconia Range. The summer after that took us to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario for 11 days of canoeing. After taking a break from the trips to focus on careers and marriages and children, we were back at it again in 2005, and over the years, we’ve taken 12 more trips into the woods. A dozen of us NMH graduates, including our children, have hiked and canoed together on New England’s remote trails and lakes.

Despite our varying degrees of skill, we always managed to fashion a team that did not feud or sulk even though we were often up to 50 miles from civilization. Admittedly, we were not facing life-or-death dangers, but we had to be careful of egos and avoid

in-fighting and personal slights. Plus, at the end of each day, we had to set up camp, scour for firewood, and prepare dinner, and that was after canoeing or hiking 10 to 15 miles. It was easy to feel pushed to the limits.

Amazingly, we found that when we went ashore or reached our campsite, each person, without direction or encouragement, would immediately pick a job to do. There was never any sitting around while others worked. Year after year, we melded a harmonious whole out of a group of strong-willed individuals.

What we had learned at our school about work and being considerate of one another was a significant element in the success of our trips. “Me first” and “I’m better than you” did not exist at Northfield Mount Hermon.

Sadly, our adventures are over now. The truth is that age has caught up with us. We reluctantly have put aside our bagels cooked in bacon grease, four-egg cheese omelets with hash browns, and cowboy coffee. We have stored away our fire-starting skills using flint and a “bird’s nest” of dried moss, cedar bark, and a tree fungus called “chaga.”

Thoreau once wrote that “we need the tonic of wilderness,” and he was correct, but that tonic is much better with longtime friends. Together, our group saw otherworldly sunrises, night skies full of stars, and the northern lights, all of which were as much a reward as conquering a dangerous set of rapids. We breathed in the beauty of the tall conifers and the broad, leafy ash and maples; the sun reflecting brilliantly off the water; the incongruity of a moose swimming across a lake and nearly bumping into our canoes, gazing up at us and wondering, I am sure, what we were doing on her lake.

Gosh, I wish I was back there. [NMH]

PHOTOS: CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY, COURTESY OF ALBERT BOOTH

A CONVERSATION WITH …

Thérèse Collins Director of Financial Aid

Born in Antigua, Collins moved to the United States to attend the City College of New York. After graduating, she tutored children in math, and decided against law school in favor of working in independent schools — as a teacher, admission officer, and eventually, in financial aid.

She recently earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from the University of Pennsylvania.

TURNING POINT I took a college course called “The Psychology of Religion” and was fascinated. I was raised Catholic on a Christian island. Exploring other ideas about faith and God actually made me a better Catholic, and allowed me to have a better sense of myself and the world, which helps me do my job with empathy.

PUZZLES & PEOPLE In financial-aid work, you use your brain in different ways. I like the numbers and calculations. I enjoy looking deeply at tax returns — they’re a puzzle I can solve. But I also like the human side of the job: meeting families, making sure students have what they need.

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS The first is that the money is limitless. We give aid to about 30 percent of our students. Some people see that number as low, but we’re a tuition-driven school, so we have to balance between people who wouldn’t have the opportunity without aid and those who are able to pay. The second is who we fund.

It’s not just families who can’t afford it. We provide

access to talented kids who can contribute to the school community in specific ways — as academic leaders, or to our sports teams or arts programs.

THE HARD PART It’s helping students make the transition to NMH and feel they truly have access to the opportunities here, like music lessons or study-abroad trips. If all your friends are buying an NMH sweatshirt and you only have 50 cents in your pocket, then you feel like an outsider. Increasing the non-tuition aid budget has been a project of mine since I’ve been here.

“I like being the bridge between families and the opportunity that NMH represents.”

of stability. I think about what a difference financial aid made in my own life, and that helps when parents call. I think they see me as someone who understands.

HEAD, HEART I want to have a good reason for everything I do. I take everything back to the mission of the school, and what’s fair to families. I want to make decisions that have heart.

MOST MEANINGFUL I like being the bridge between families and the opportunity that NMH represents. This place can catapult many kids into a good college, a career, and a sense

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Music teacher Steve BathoryPeeler P’20 and Megan Pei Ying Liao ’19 in Memorial Grove.

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PHOTO: CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

A century after World War I came to a grueling and deadly end, NMH remembers alumni who served.

HEARING HISTORY

BY E M I LY H AR R I S O N W EI R

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Lt. William Griffin (left) of Winthrop, Massachusetts, was killed in the Battle of Saint Agnan in France.

Below, Bathory-Peeler in Memorial Grove.

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hen news broke that an armistice had ended World War I, crowds across Europe and America cheered, popped champagne corks, and danced in the streets. But for many at the front, there was only eerie silence when the gunfire ceased on Nov. 11, 1918. Eyewitnesses said weary soldiers doubted that the peace would hold. But it did. Four long years of muddy, bloody battle had cost some nine million lives. Sixty-nine of the dead had attended Mount Hermon.

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At 6 am on Nov. 11, 2018 — exactly one century after the armistice — a small troupe of NMH bagpipers played “The Battle’s Over” in memory of all who lost their lives in the war. They were joining close to 1,000 pipers around the world that day — all playing at 6 am — in the Scottish tune traditionally used to march soldiers back to barracks at the end of the day.

NMH performing arts teacher Steve BathoryPeeler P’20 and his protégée Megan Pei Ying Liao ’19, in full piping regalia, played the tune at NMH’s Memorial Grove. The stand of 69 white pines was planted on Memorial Day 1928 by the graduating seniors to honor “Mount Hermon men who gave the last full measure of devotion,” as a plaque in the nearby chapel states.

The trees have grown from saplings to living sentinels that tower over those who enjoy their cool shade in summer or go there for a quiet moment to ponder the past. Bathory-Peeler has spent time in the grove, set between the head of school’s home and the health center, and says, “it’s very moving to be there.”

Since few on campus were awake at 6 am that Sunday, Nov. 11 — at least until the bagpipers struck up their rousing tune — a second campus gathering took place later that day. Memorial Chapel’s bells tolled once for each of the Mount Hermon dead, and their names were read aloud.

The simple yet powerful bagpipe tribute was especially meaningful, since bagpipers were often the first out of the trenches during World War I. Playing loudly, unarmed pipers were an easy target for enemy fire, and an estimated 500 died that way in the Great War.

NMH’S COMMEMORATION had its origins more than a year ago. In the summer of 2017, BathoryPeeler was studying at the College of Piping in Glasgow, Scotland, when he heard about the worldwide “Battle’s Over” plan. He quickly connected the dots from his own interest in piping to NMH’s Memorial Grove and the plaque in the chapel.

“Clearly this mattered to the school,” he thought.

“We should do something.”

Back at NMH, Bathory-Peeler asked archivist Peter Weis ’78, P’13 about the Mount Hermon men

The simple yet powerful bagpipe tribute was especially meaningful, since bagpipers were often the first out of the trenches during World War I. Playing loudly, they were an easy target for enemy fire, and an estimated 500 died that way in the Great War.

or jobs to become soldiers. Others had helped the war effort as civilians, through the YMCA, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, and as assistants in the War Department in Washington. One archival document counted 1,469 Mount Hermon-connected people who served.

Northfield women also supported the war effort.

Many were nurses or did relief work, according to Weis. Florence Marshall, class of 1895, was head of the Woman’s Bureau of the Red Cross. “When the U.S. entered the war and pledged her men to stand with the Allies … the women of the country were equally pledged,” she wrote in 1918.

who died in the war. Though it was no small feat, Weis unearthed the school files of all 69 men, and those of others who served and survived. Among the academic records were original letters the soldiers had sent to the school.

Bathory-Peeler, who directs NMH’s orchestra, knew that student violinist Mary Wells ’18 was interested in history, and he connected her with Weis. She delved into the World War I files as a workjob project, which dovetailed perfectly with her European history course.

[See sidebar for more about Wells’s experience.] As she read, made notes, and organized, the war became less and less abstract, and she started thinking that recognizing the soldiers’ sacrifice “is our responsibility as students and teachers.”

She saw individual lives emerging in the letters, most of which were addressed to then headmaster Henry Cutler. Harry Fittus operated a transport ship in the English Channel. Paul Beeben drove an ambulance to and from the front lines. Some men who died had been current Mount Hermon students who put their education on hold to enlist in the Army and Navy. Some were alumni who had left college

PHOTOS: COUR TESY OF NMH ARCHIVES, CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

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WELLS FOUND COMMON GROUND with the soldiers she was reading about. “They’d talk about living in Crossley, about being in the chapel, about speakers who came, about Mountain Day,” she says. “This was 100 years ago! It must have been so different, but somehow it’s also the same.”

A few letters from enlistees vividly conveyed the horrors of war. Carroll Hodges wrote of being in several “shows” (battles). “The conditions, by which I mean the weather and mud, were terrible,” he wrote.

“The enemy appeared to have been waiting for this attack, so that no sooner than our barrage started than the Hun laid a heavy barrage on our area.”

Portions of this letter were erased, presumably by a military censor.

Harry Fittus dodged mines as his ship ran troops from Southampton, England, to French ports “in the dark, still hours of the nights.” One letter noted his pride at carrying “so many troops so safely across the seas, especially on uncanny ‘junk boxes’ like this present ship. It is a habit of hers to break down in the danger zone.”

Paul Beeben escaped shelling as he drove his ambulance. “Our work is rather strenuous,” he wrote.

“On the road the other day, I met Cornelius Vanderbilt fixing a car, and in another camp, a millionaire eating beans out of a tin can.”

FRANK L. HOWE, in Belgium

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caption here

“Sometimes things occur which make me wonder if I’ll ever see you all again.”

But most of the letters were surprisingly upbeat.

“In spite of the discomfort, there is a lot of real humor through it all,” Frank L. Howe wrote from Belgium.

“On the road the other day, I met Cornelius Vanderbilt fixing a car, and in another camp, a millionaire eating beans out of a tin can.” Howe also said that he’d met the king of England.

The soldiers often thanked Cutler for their time at Mount Hermon, and asked him to let current students know how much their school experience would benefit them. One soldier wrote, “Whenever any of the [Mount Hermon] boys complain of your strict rules, you may tell them they had better try the Army. The two things in my life that I shall always be proud of is, first, that I am a soldier in my country’s service, and second, that I am a Mount Hermon man.”

While reading the letters, Weis said he was struck by “the love that former students felt for this place.”

That was clear in thank-you notes sent to Cutler after the school mailed a slice of Christmas fruitcake to every Mount Hermon-related serviceman they knew

Sgt. Paul Buck’s thank-you letter to Headmaster Henry Cutler (far left); coverage in The Boston Globe (left); researcher Mary Wells ’18 (below).

of in December 1917. “As usual, you and the School are trying to cheer up us boys who are away from home,” Sgt. Paul Buck wrote. Weis says, “That slice of fruitcake was a Proustian thing that reminded them of the school.”

Wells also noted that it was “obvious how much the school and the students cared about each other.” Buck’s letter continued, “I remember only too well how you did everything possible for our happiness at the School on the Christmas of 1913, when I spent my first Christmas away from home.” In France, surrounded by soldiers and strangers, Buck always managed to find “Hermon boys,” he wrote. “We have always tried to carry the ideals of the school with us, and where ever [sic] we have been, we have tried to do our best to help bring a lasting peace for the entire world.”

It was to commemorate men like Buck that NMH pipers played in Memorial Grove on Nov. 11. Those pine trees stand today in silent tribute, their thick trunks testifying to the many years that have elapsed since the armistice. “Watching the passage of time through the growth of a tree is a powerful experience,” notes Bathory-Peeler.

“If we stop and listen, we can hear history.” [NMH]

IMAGES COUR TESY OF NMH ARCHIVES, PHOTO: MICHAEL DWYER

“These Soldiers Were Once a Lot Like Me.”

BY MARY WELLS ’18 Thank you, Professor Cutler.

That’s what Mount Hermon students who fought in World War I said over and over in letters they wrote to the school and the headmaster in 1917 and 1918.

It was my job to read those letters.

Partway through my senior year, NMH archivist Peter Weis and my music teacher Steve Bathory-Peeler asked me if I was interested in a workjob sorting through the files of the 69 Mount Hermon students who died in the war.

I love history, so to me nothing could beat reading hundreds of first-person war accounts — by people who were once a lot like me. This was the ultimate primary source.

I started working in the library four hours a week, reading through those 69 files, then all the World War I military files, looking for anything interesting — which almost everything was. I especially loved the fruitcake letters. In December 1917, Mount Hermon headmaster Henry Cutler and the dining services staff sent a piece of “West Hall Christmas cake,” aka fruitcake, to all alumni participating in the war overseas. Cutler received almost 50 thank-you letters in return. The nostalgia and gratitude that these students felt for Mount Hermon made me feel grateful to be an NMH student.

The library became a time machine for me. Even though I sometimes struggled to read the students’ beautiful cursive handwriting, I got so entranced that I began to forget how historical the letters were. It was like I was with these young men in Belgium, or France, or even on the home front. One of my teachers asked me if it was weird to hold something that was over 100 years old in my hands. Yes, it was. It was surreal. The traumas that these students faced — I couldn’t believe that bravery like theirs existed.

One student wrote about a horrific night spent moving through trenches, worrying the whole time that it might be the end of his life; another wrote about sailing around the world and the yellow fever that broke out on his ship near South Africa. Many others wrote about their memories of Mount Hermon, such as going sledding with Professor Cutler, and how they longed for that feeling of safety again.

All these letters reminded me how much there is to love about NMH, and how lucky we all are. A bust of Professor Cutler resides in our science building, which is named after him. After seeing how much the World War I Mount Hermon students wanted to thank him, I couldn’t help but start thanking him myself, on my way to class every morning.

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DESIGN. MAKE. PLAY. BY AB IGAIL MEIS EL

That’s the philosophy of the New York Hall of Science and its CEO, Margaret Honey ’74.

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n a desert landscape dotted with tumbleweed and prickly pears, three purple roadrunners, heads crested with feathers, scoot from cactus to cactus. Meanwhile, just feet away, an 18-foot waterfall tumbles down a rocky ledge and flows into a reservoir. Beyond that, above a grassy plain full of wildflowers, butterflies flutter.

These ecosystems and several others stand side by side in the middle of Queens, New York — in a 2,300-square-foot digital installation at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI).

The exhibition, called “Connected Worlds,” is fun and fantastical, with colorful animated images projected onto giant screens, and cutting-edge technologies such as location tracking, gesture sensing, and global environmental and social databases bringing the images to life. It’s also firmly rooted in principles of cognitive science, particularly the study of how people learn by playing — a field that is the passion of NYSCI’s president and CEO, Margaret Honey ’74.

Visitors to NYSCI’s Maker Space and Design Lab (above, left) get busy building. The museum’s “Connected Worlds” exhibit (above, right) is a high-tech, interactive ecology lesson.

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“We want to make science really compelling to young people,” says Honey of NYSCI’s mission. “All our installations and exhibits are designed for students to be problem solvers, not just viewers.”

Last June, for example, a group of fourth graders explored “Connected Worlds,” making each ecosystem literally come alive. They were charged with maintaining the health of each habitat, so they planted virtual seeds by moving their hands in front of the screens, and, with play logs, they diverted water from the waterfall and reservoir into virtual streams that flowed along the floor. Once each landscape had enough water to sustain life, animated animals such

as the roadrunners and butterflies popped up.

Located in Flushing Meadows Park, in the Corona neighborhood in Queens, NYSCI is part contemporary art gallery, part science lab, part design studio, part funhouse.

Honey is its maestro. The museum was built for the 1964 World’s Fair, but it has evolved into an interactive, youth-friendly space focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It houses close to 450 exhibits, workshops, and interactive activities that serve a half million students, teachers, and families each year.

Honey took the NYSCI helm a decade ago, as an expert in the field of learning design — understanding how children absorb and implement new information, and creating activities that allow that learning to happen. With a doctorate

in developmental psychology, she helped pioneer, in the 1980s, the use of digital technologies, like those at work in “Connected Worlds,” to support children’s learning across the STEM disciplines.

At NYSCI, she has overseen more than $50 million in renovations, established new community programs to better connect the museum with its Queens neighborhood, and begun hosting the World Maker Faire New York, a STEM extravaganza that draws roughly 90,000 visitors over the course of a weekend every fall. Honey’s bigpicture vision for NYSCI comes through in a piece she wrote for the Huffington Post several years ago: She believes the U.S. must “broaden participation in STEM for young people in general,” and she cited a startling statistic from

PHOTOS: DAVID HANDSCHUH, COUR TESY OF NYSCI

“WE WANT TO MAKE SCIENCE REALLY COMPELLING TO YOUNG PEOPLE, SO THEY CAN BE PROBLEM SOLVERS, NOT JUST VIEWERS.” the Department of Labor — that 65 percent of today’s schoolchildren will end up in STEM-focused jobs that do not even exist yet. “Students engage most readily with STEM when they get firsthand understanding of how it impacts their lives,” she wrote. The NYSCI is a place where they can do that.

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itting in a big, sunny office filled with books, Honey describes a class she took at NMH more than four decades ago that had nothing to

do with science or math. English teacher Nick Fleck assigned the book Summerhill, about a British boarding school where children make the rules. “It completely captured my imagination,” Honey says.

That idea of self-designed education led her to Hampshire College, where she studied psychology and philosophy — a mélange that underpins her work today. She went on to Columbia for her Ph.D. During graduate school, she took a job with Children’s Television Workshop, which created “Sesame Street” and brought user-friendly

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educational programming to the American public. She was part of the Children’s Computer Workshop division in the early 1980s and developed interactive computer games featuring “Sesame Street” characters. “I was passionate about the nexus of media, learning, and technology,” Honey says.

She shifted her attention to science education in the mid-1980s, when she joined the Center for Children and Technology at Bank Street College of Education in New York. She was part of a team that produced “The Voyage of the Mimi,” a series that aired on PBS and was repackaged and sold to schools. “The show was deeply anchored in math and science,” Honey explains. In it, the crew of a ship called “Mimi” explored the ocean and studied marine life. A young Ben Affleck was one of the lead actors, playing the role of the grandson of the ship’s captain.

Honey began taking “Mimi” into schools to screen rough cuts.

She developed software and a curriculum based on the show; students could play “Mimi” games on computers, and learn about sea creatures and plants in different ocean habitats as they followed the ship around the world in their classrooms. Honey saw from the kids’ reactions and comments that there was something irresistible about learning through playful storytelling. “No teacher could pass up having it in the classroom.

The students not only learned, but became emotionally connected to their learning.”

Honey continued to work as a learning specialist and curriculum developer at Bank Street, then at the global nonprofit Educational Development Center (EDC), where she became widely known for using new digital technologies to help kids learn science and math.

Eventually, she caught the attention of the NYSCI. “I’d never worked in a museum,” Honey says. Yet, in a way, NYSCI was similar to the work Honey had done with the “Mimi” and other projects. Like many experts in learning design, she rejects the

The NYSCI’s teenage docents, called “Explainers” (at right, top), know almost as much about the museum as Honey (right, bottom). The NYSCI’s distinctive home in Queens, New York (below) was originally built for the 1964 World’s Fair.

idea of top-down “instruction” and “delivery” of material from a teacher to students. That’s not a productive means of education, she says. She believes that people — children, especially — need interactive, hands-on activities to help them connect with what they’re learning.

Because of her academic background and connections, Honey has brought vast resources to NYSCI. To create “Connected Worlds,” she assembled a team of consultants that counted among its ranks professors from Columbia’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Yale’s Cognitive Science Department, New York University’s Games for Learning Institute, the MIT Media Lab, and the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

She also expanded the role of NYSCI’s Research, Exhibits, and Program department, a creative team that consists of 60 people, including 12 Ph.D.’s., education specialists, and science educators.

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esides its interactive exhibits, NYSCI has a Design Lab and a Maker Space, where children can experiment and tinker just as scientists and engineers do. They learn about physics by creating pathways on a pegboard with rubber bands and golf spikes, and rolling a ball down them to see in which direction it will head. They build structures out of PVC pipes, design prototypes that solve a problem, and learn how to use tools and write code.

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“NO OTHER SCIENCE CENTER DOES WHAT NYSCI DOES, AND MARGARET LED US HERE.”

Honey is especially proud of NYSCI’s “Explainers” program, in which young-adult docents lead museum tours and give live-science demonstrations to visitors — such as demonstrating how hot-air balloons work by holding an inverted plastic bag over a hot plate and seeing it fill up and lift off. The Explainers program is the “heart and soul” of the institution, Honey says, bringing in youth from neighborhoods around the museum to serve as educators and role models for younger visitors.

Abraham Bautista has worked as an Explainer at NYSCI since 2014, when he was a student at Flushing High School in Queens.

He now studies economics at Hunter College, but still likes his job “floating” among the museum’s learning areas, giving demonstrations and guiding visitors as they play and explore.

“I came here as a child, and I love watching kids at NYSCI learn just like I did. It’s like seeing the next generation of Explainers at work,” he says.

PHOTOS: ANDREW KELLY

The museum has grown more firmly rooted in the local community, even as it draws visitors from across the New York metro area and beyond. Corona, like much of the borough, is known as one of the most international, multilingual areas of New York, and Honey sees it as the bedrock of the museum’s identity. “I love my job,” she says, “but what I’m most proud of is that NYSCI is known as a place that serves a diverse community.”

Honey has overseen the establishment of NYSCI’s preschool and after-school programs, and community events such as a neighborhood “block party” each June. She has also strengthened the bond between NYSCI and neighborhood schools, including the Leonardo Da Vinci Intermediate School 61. Assistant principal Stacey Burgoyne says that NYSCI’s classroom curriculum “has become more relevant than ever for our students.” The museum also offers professional development programs for the school’s teachers, and Burgoyne says that “having NYSCI open its doors after school

to the community affords students and parents the opportunity to experience an extension of the classroom work learners engage in each day.”

Melissa Vail, a co-chair of NYSCI’s board of directors, says, “We used to fight against the challenge of our Corona location because people didn’t want to travel here from other boroughs, especially Manhattan.” Honey changed all that. Now, Vail says, “no other science center does what we do, and Margaret led us here.” [NMH] Abigail Meisel has written for The New York Times and the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught writing at the University of Mississippi.

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Math 2 Whiz A motivated math student and an enthusiastic teacher join forces.

B Y J EN N I F ER S U TTO N

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here are several qualities that Mona Zhang ’19 admires in her math teacher, Abby Ross. The coolest one, perhaps, is that Ross can dream in code. “You know how people can sometimes dream in another language?” Zhang asks. “Abby told me how she could be thinking about a problem, and when she goes to sleep, she sees the code and figures out the solution. She wakes up, and she’s got it.” Zhang sighs. “It’s my goal to dream in code, too.”

The way Zhang is going, that goal seems eminently achievable. Last spring, she completed an independent study with Ross in discrete mathematics — a way of looking at numbers that typically is introduced in college. The two of them embarked on another independent study this fall, in linear algebra, another advanced topic.

“Mona is so self-motivated and driven to learn more,” Ross says.

“She created an independent study because she was excited about problem-solving and didn’t want to wait until college to get to these topics. But even if I had said no to working with her, she would have been learning all of this by herself.

I have no doubt about that.”

Each year, NMH approves about a dozen independent-study proposals. American Sign Language,

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portraiture, differential equations, organic chemistry, Korean language, the literary elements of hip-hop — these independent studies have all proven to be “good opportunities for students to follow their interests and demonstrate their ability to complete high-caliber work,” says Academic Dean Sarah Warren. To get the go-ahead, students must submit an extensive application, be in good academic standing, and have a faculty mentor committed to volunteering their time.

What Zhang wanted to tackle in her independent study isn’t a genre of math like calculus or algebra or geometry. Discrete mathematics is a way of thinking about numbers; it’s based on integers, which are whole and finite numbers, with no fractions. It’s like a digital watch: The time jumps from one number to

the next, with nothing in between.

What Zhang likes about discrete math is that it’s used to solve realworld problems in which things change clearly from one way to another. Google Maps, for example, uses discrete math to figure out which driving routes are most efficient. Zhang says, “I appreciate math as something abstract, but I understand that it doesn’t appeal to everyone, or feel useful to everyone.

Math is much more exciting when it is applied. I see it as a toolbox.”

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hang, a day student, grew up 30 minutes from NMH. Her mother is a professor of

PHOTO, PREVIOUS PAGE: CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Teacher Abby Ross didn’t hesitate to work with Mona Zhang ’19 on independent studies in discrete mathematics and linear algebra.

computer engineering at UMassAmherst and her father is a computer programmer. Quantitative thinking clearly runs in the family, and Zhang took to it at a young age. “It just snapped in my brain and I understood,” she says. Her affection for the subject deepened as she got older, even as the concepts grew more difficult. “Math can be subjective, complex, and tricky,” she says. “That’s what I love so much about it.”

When Zhang went to what she calls a “math-y” camp one summer during middle school, she realized for the first time that there was a world of people like her — a “math community,” she says. As

“I could see Mona was diligent, excited about learning, and curious about different ideas, so I kept going where she wanted to go.”

a ninth grader at NMH, she took Precalculus, a class that typically is for 11th graders. She doubled up her sophomore year with AP Calculus and AP Statistics. Multivariable

PHOTO: MICHAEL DWYER, EQUATIONS COUR TESY OF MONA ZHANG

Calculus followed — that was last fall — and just a few weeks into the school year, she was asking teachers and administrators about doing an independent study in the spring

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“I appreciate math as something abstract, but I understand that it doesn’t feel useful to everyone. Math is much more exciting when it is applied.”

semester. As a kid, Zhang had spent hours working on math problems, so “the idea of working on my own wasn’t strange to me,” she says.

Despite Zhang’s drive, she’s no tunnel-visioned math geek.

She plays field hockey and tennis at NMH, and violin, both in the school orchestra and on her own — she likes to busk on the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts, her hometown. She’s part of NMH’s Rhodes Fellowship Course in Social Entrepreneurship, where she’s developing an initiative to help elementary-school teachers get kids more connected to and enthused about their math work.

Last fall, Ross was Zhang’s multivariable calculus teacher. Ross had just joined the NMH faculty after completing a master’s degree in applied math and data science at the University of Vermont, where she also taught calculus to undergrads. Like Zhang, she had been a math-lover from an early age. A diary she got for Christmas when she was 7 opens with the entry: “I dream of being a math whiz.”

When Zhang asked about doing an independent study together, Ross didn’t hesitate, even though she was only a month into her new

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job. “In class, Mona understood everything immediately, but she was also really good at explaining concepts to her peers. She was helpful in a kind way, not condescending at all.” Zhang had already started to hang around after class, asking about math concepts that went beyond the homework assignments. “I could see she was diligent and excited about learning,” Ross says. “She wanted to keep talking about math. I was like, ‘Great, let’s keep talking.’”

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ach independent study at NMH works differently, depending on the teacher and student. In this case, Zhang found a textbook she wanted to use and Ross mapped a path through it, selecting chapters and problem sets she thought would be most useful.

She threw in additional material that she had done herself in college and grad school, and scholarly papers she had read in math journals. They met twice a week in the dining hall. “Mona would think about the scenarios that I would pose for her, and we’d talk through the work, but it was really selfdirected by her,” Ross says. “She

was curious about different ideas, so I kept going where she wanted to go.”

Zhang’s main project used discrete math to examine how students’ classes could be scheduled at NMH. She developed an algorithm and learned the programming language Python to implement it. The premise was that there is a finite number of NMH students. There are finite — though many — ways to arrange their classes. And there are varying levels of happiness that students feel about the different schedules. Zhang quantified the amount of conflict in each person’s schedule, with the most-requested courses representing the highest conflict. She also quantified the happiness of each student to determine which arrangement of classes would maximize that happiness. She used the conflict and happiness values she generated to create a theoretical model “that optimizes the collective happiness of students by getting them the classes they want.”

Over the course of the semester, Zhang also learned about Catalan numbers, which are a series of numbers that occur in certain counting problems, and combinatorics — proof strategies, number theory, graph theory, binomial coefficients — as well as the programming and coding she needed for her project. Ross was a deft mentor. “I liked how Abby let me do most of the talking,” Zhang says. “It wasn’t, ‘Have you done this? Check. Have you done that? Check.’ It was more like, ‘What have you done over the last two days? And what do you want to do next?’”

Zhang developed a successful algorithm that “optimized the collective happiness” that students felt about their class schedules.

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his fall, Zhang and Ross embarked on a second independent study, in linear algebra. NMH offers the course every other year, and when Zhang couldn’t fit it into her schedule (the irony!), she pushed to do it on her own. Guided

by Ross, she’s blending pieces from the regular course with resources from Ross’s grad-school work as well as online materials published by MIT. It’s a prime example of how independent studies can “enrich and broaden NMH’s curriculum,” says NMH Registrar Jay Ward ’68.

PHOTO: CHATTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

One of Zhang’s overarching goals in studying math is to entice other people to appreciate the subject.

For her Social Entrepreneurship course, which continues from junior to senior year, Zhang is developing a series of kid-friendly word problems that can be used in elementary-school math classrooms anywhere. She’s hoping to test and implement the project this year.

“A lot of word problems out there don’t appeal to kids,” she says — like the classic how-many-apples-canyou-buy-in-the-grocery-store problem. How many kids, she wonders, are actually buying groceries? Why

not offer problems that focus on a kid’s bus ride to school, or the trip to go pick up a younger sibling at day care, or the time it takes to get dressed and eat breakfast in the morning?

“Math problems should be about something kids see in their own lives,” Zhang says. She’s not weighing in on the topics being taught in a classroom, or on the style of an individual teacher. “I want to offer a simple way to get kids who never thought they liked math to see that it can be applicable and relevant in so many ways.” In other words, a toolbox. [NMH]

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THE GAME B Y D AV I D G E S S N E R ’ 7 9

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NMH Magazine

ULTIMATE

Before David Gessner ’79 became a college professor, he played Ultimate Frisbee. More accurately, he lived Ultimate Frisbee, and he documented that life in the 2017 book Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth. This excerpt of Gessner’s book is our way of marking the 50th anniversary of the sport’s invention — which happened, in part, on the Northfield Mount Hermon campus.

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W

e all labor over our big decisions and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year at Harvard, and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse to sign up for crew, resigning myself to four years as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street.

The Frisbee, tossed from one long-haired boy to another, looks like freedom to me. Then I notice that there are several Frisbees flying back and forth between a band of young men, all wearing shorts, with cleats hanging over their shoulders. At the time, I am quite shy, but, uncharacteristically, I cross the street and ask them where they are going. To Ultimate Frisbee practice, it turns out, and I am going with them.

That was the beginning of almost 20 years lost in the world of Ultimate.

If that first long-ago Frisbee looked like freedom, it would lead to a kind of servitude, two decades in lockstep with the growing sport.

Why did I keep coming back? Chasing down a disc, diving or jumping for it, is at the core of the game’s appeal. For many people, myself included, the action proves addictive. During my years playing I was driven by a complicated mix of motives that included ambition, whimsy, love, and vanity, but it wouldn’t be until many years later, when I had hung up my cleats, that I would start to recognize what I missed most about the game.

I missed all the moments when I lost myself completely in it, when pestering thought disappeared and was replaced by a joyful thoughtfulness and a sense of being a strong and wild animal.

Gessner (left) describes Ultimate as a hybrid of soccer, hockey, basketball, and football, but because it is played with an object that’s considered a toy, it hasn’t yet escaped its whimsical origins.

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FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, people created games for the Frisbee. In fact, for a long time those very words — Play Catch, Invent Games — were printed along with the name right on the disc.

One of those games was a form of Frisbee football that sprung up spontaneously at colleges around the country, and one of those colleges was Amherst.

In the summer of 1968, an Amherst student named Jared Kass took the game to Mount Hermon, where he was teaching in a summer program. The game was a hit, played on the large lawn behind the Crossley dorm where Kass was staying, but it likely would have remained a quickly forgotten summer diversion if not for the fact that one of the players who learned the game from Kass was a brash, somewhat loudmouthed but charismatic high school student from New Jersey named Joel Silver.

Later in life, Silver would become famous as the producer of movies like Lethal Weapon and The Matrix.

But what most people don’t know is that he was also the individual most responsible for the invention of Ultimate Frisbee.

It was Silver who brought the game home from his summer stint at Mount Hermon, who taught it to his friends, and who organized a game between his high school’s student council and the school newspaper (he was a member of both) in the spring of 1969.

There was some debate over who deserves the credit, or, depending on your point of view, blame for burdening the sport with the pretentious adjective “Ultimate.”

It is possible that the sport was

PHOTO, PREVIOUS PAGE: STU BERINGER

Harvard undergraduate Gessner (back row, far left) and his team in 1980.

“ called that by some as far back as the Amherst-Mount Hermon days, when Jared Kass declared after making a great catch, “This is the ultimate game.” Future Frisbee scholars will no doubt argue endlessly over this matter of origin, but the point is that, for better or worse, the name stuck.

I KNEW NONE OF THIS when I started. Of course I sensed that throwing so much energy into a game played with a toy, and not, say, studying hard or starting the novel I dreamed of writing was kind of absurd. There were plenty of people, my father included, who I simply decided not to tell what I was spending so much time doing.

During my freshman year I became obsessed with catching — “You are what you catch,” read a note on the wall over my desk — and this obsession ran like a parent stream back to my father. When I was 8 or 9, I loved nothing more than playing football with him on the front lawn of our house in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had been a scrappy high school athlete himself; he threw tight, mean, lefty

spirals, and if they were out of my reach, I would dive for them, often ending up sprawled and cut in the bushes. If the ball tipped off my fingertips, he always said the same thing: “If you can touch it, you can catch it.”

In college, that era of long hair and short shorts, I found a home on the Ultimate field. There was a carnival feel to those weekends in the fall or spring when we would either host tournaments behind Harvard stadium or head out on the road, to UMass-Amherst or SUNY Purchase, or, once a year, as far away as Washington, D.C. On a successful tournament weekend, we could conceivably play 10 to 12 hours of Ultimate, so Sunday evenings meant cramped legs, and Mondays brought general enervation after an entire weekend of running.

It was during this time that the phrase “spirit of the game” — meaning to perform honestly and do what’s right — was written into the rules, and it was officially decided that Ultimate would move forward without referees. The earliest games were unofficiated not due to any lofty ideals but

PHOTOS: ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, COUR TESY OF DAVID GESSNER

I began to bring a Frisbee along wherever I went, throwing it ahead of me when I walked to class, tossing it up in the air and running it down as I jogged along the Charles River. It became part of my identity, my security blanket.”

because there were no refs handy.

But what had been a practical reality was gradually elevated into the lofty position of a code of honor.

Pragmatism begat idealism.

As for me, I tried to play fair but I rolled my eyes at the more pious notion of “spirit.” I was not unidealistic, but the spirit of the game reeked of the perfectibility of man, and I thought it was silly the way it was writ large in the rules as if its origins were biblical. It also neglected one small factor: human nature. I had played enough pickup basketball to know what really happened when players made their own calls.

But with each passing month, Ultimate seemed to have a deeper hold on me. I began to bring a Frisbee along wherever I went, throwing it ahead of me when I walked to class, tossing it up in

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Gessner (left, in white shirt) playing for the Boulder, Colorado, team in Nationals in the mid-1990s. Inset below: Gessner today.

reek of the once-fashionable neoprimitivism of the men’s movement. But there was nothing contrived or literary about the feeling I was after, and I knew it to be real.

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“

I was addicted to the feeling I experienced when I dove through the air and a disc stuck to my hand, or when I jumped high and snatched one out of the air above someone’s head.”

the air and running it down as I jogged along the Charles River.

It became part of my identity, my security blanket.

My father liked to talk a lot about the “real world,” which he clearly believed I did not inhabit.

Who could blame him? As graduation approached, my Harvard roommates worried about which companies to go to work for.

Meanwhile, I’d secretly begun to wonder which of the great Boston Ultimate teams to try out for. By then I’d become completely wrapped up in the lore and the lure of the game, and while I pretended not to be sure, it wasn’t so much a decision as an inevitability that I would continue to play after school.

Why? It was simple, really. I was addicted to that feeling I experienced when I dove through the air and a disc stuck to my hand, or when I jumped high and snatched one out of the air above someone’s head. Playing Ultimate was one of the few times in my young life when I felt potent. Trying to describe it now, I keep coming up with words like “primal” or “tribal,” and I’m afraid this might

IN THE 21ST CENTURY, the sport has changed, exploding with millions of people playing around the world in competitive and corporate leagues, with professional leagues sprouting up in a dozen American cities, and most recently, with official recognition from the International Olympic Committee as a contender sport for the Olympics.

What was long considered preposterous now appears to be coming true: In an age of concussions and corruption in pro sports, this untainted game seems to be realizing its dream of becoming a “real” sport.

Despite a deep craving for legitimacy, there has always been an equally deep ambivalence among Ultimate players about the possibility of the sport becoming more popular.

This was a psychological battle in which I, like so many others, fought on both sides.

Yes, I understood the desire to make the sport bigger. At the same time, a big reason I was hooked on it was because of its wildness. I liked the fact that we refused to grow up, and that the game was really only understood by the band of brothers and sisters within it.

Some longtime players argue that the sport has become too tame, that its success will corrupt it. In my day, we didn’t worry too

NMH Magazine

PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL, COUR TESY OF DAVID GESSNER

much about selling out. It wasn’t even a possibility. When I started playing, Ultimate was barely 10 years old, just emerging from its tangled countercultural roots, with the rules, and even the types of discs we used, still in flux. It never occurred to me as I ran around the fields in my too-short shorts and my too-long hair that I was a part of history. Now I understand that I am like one of those mustached men you see in the black-andwhite pictures of early football teams. One of the men in the leather helmets.

We were the pioneers in uncharted territory, and pioneers know a freedom that later generations will never know. We had the thrill of being first, of making it up as we went along. We were idiots at times. But we were proud and joyful idiots. [NMH] David Gessner is the author of 10 books, chair of the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and editor-inchief of the magazine Ecotone: Reimagining Place.

GOODWILL GAME Last May, the boys’ varsity team won the 2018 New England Prep School Ultimate League (NEPSUL) championship, defeating Concord Academy, Choate, Wooster Academy, and topseeded Hotchkiss all in one day and earning its seventh championship in 13 years.

Such a record should grant the team rock-star status on campus, but that’s not quite the case.

“It’s a matter of culture,” says Sam Stone ’18, one of the captains of the 2018 team. “A lot of people at NMH still view Ultimate as a laid-back lawn sport.” Anyone who watches a game, however, would agree with Stone’s next comment: “It’s super-intense,” he says. “You have to be dedicated to do it.”

Ultimate is different from a lot of other sports, though, at NMH and elsewhere. That’s because of its “spirit of the game” philosophy, which essentially is sportsmanship on steroids. “You’re supporting your team, you’re supporting the integrity of the rules, and you’re supporting your opponent even if it’s a heated competition,” says Amelia Chalfant ’19, a captain of the girls’ varsity team. Players on the field officiate themselves, calling and negotiating fouls. Opposing teams share a camaraderie that would be unimaginable on, say, a hockey rink.

Colton Sy ’18, who captained the boys’ team with Stone and also played varsity soccer and ice hockey at NMH, says, “I’ve never played a sport where after a game, after you beat up on another team 11–0, you sing them a ridiculous song you’ve written.”

Despite Ultimate’s invention on the Crossley lawn in 1968 — at least that’s how one of the origin stories goes — NMH’s official program took shape roughly 30 years ago. Later, science teacher Bob Sidorsky P’98, ’06 ran pickup games on the Northfield campus and took students to coed tournaments. Today, NMH’s single-gender teams compete against both prep schools and area public schools, which are frequently among the top-ranked teams in the eastern U.S. “Our philosophy is to play the hardest teams we can find,” says Mark Yates, who runs the boys’ program.

At NMH, Ultimate resembles rowing, with many participants competing for the first time as ninth and 10th graders. But they get up to speed quickly enough to help win New England championships and go on to play in college. Sy will play at Northeastern University this year, Stone at Wheaton College, and Chloe Chen ’18, another girls’ varsity captain, at Carnegie Mellon. How much did they and their teammates think about the sport’s germination at NMH 50 years ago? Not much, admits Gaelin Kingston ’18, who played four years of Ultimate and soccer at NMH and is now playing both at Wesleyan. But, he says, “there’s something beautiful about playing where the sport has been played the longest.”

—Jennifer Sutton Colton Sy ’18 co-captained NMH’s 2018 NEPSUL championship-winning team.

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ALUMNI HALL

Watson shared his history during a Reunion 2018 “Our Stories” panel discussion.

Cultural Equity Ray Two Hawks Watson ’98 believes minority cultures should play as big a role in Rhode Island’s tourism industry as Newport’s mansions and beaches.

He landed a $300,000 grant to make it happen.

BY NANCY KIR S C H

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In July, on a stretch of grass beside Mashapaug Pond in Providence, Rhode Island, Chief Raymond Two Hawks Watson ’98 conducted a naming ceremony for the Mashapaug Nahagansets, the tribe he has led since 2009. Dressed in buckskin and feathers, he stood on land where Mashapaugs lived for centuries and bestowed traditional names such as Bearclaw and Lady Slipper upon a handful of members.

The ceremony ended with Watson

PHOTO: RUPER T WHITELY

A LUM N I H A L L

inviting everyone to “bust a move” as he led the Eastern Medicine Singers, a group of musicians from different tribes, in drumming and singing that was simultaneously solemn and joyous.

Pomham Sachem, or principal chief, of the Nahagansets is only one of Watson’s jobs. His greater mission is to highlight Rhode Island’s myriad ethnic traditions and make the state a hub for cultural tourism in New England.

In 2016, the Rhode Island Foundation awarded him a $300,000 fellowship to get started. The first person of color to win the prestigious award, Watson bested nearly 200 other applicants with his plan to establish the Providence Cultural Equity Initiative (PCEI), an organization that he believes can mitigate racism, connect communities, and bring income to local residents, businesses, and governments.

Watson modeled PCEI after what he saw during his 2015 honeymoon in Mexico, where he was impressed not only with the contemporary architecture, colonial history, and Aztec culture, but also with “how well the three worked together, showing the past and the present,” he says. He wondered why Rhode Island wasn’t taking the same approach. “Providence has tremendous colonial architecture, and some modern architecture, but we should be tapping into our ethnic heritage, too.”

Armed with his bachelor’s degree in political science and government from Union College, a master’s in community planning from the University of Rhode Island, and nearly a decade as executive director of the Mount

Hope Neighborhood Association in Providence, Watson launched PCEI. The nonprofit asks people to look at their histories and experiences in terms of culture rather than race. An example: English and Irish people are the same race, yet the Irish share a cultural experience with the Narragansett Nation; both were victims of English efforts to enslave and eradicate them. Watson maintains that culture allows individuals to be proud of who they are and not fear others who are different, while race engenders pride but not a tolerance of difference. Focusing on culture can help “do away with false alliances and false divides based on race,” Watson says.

One of PCEI’s initiatives is Living Culture RI, a series of foodand history-focused tours showcasing Rhode Island’s Dominican, Laotian, Native American, and Italian communities, among others. The goal is to expand the way visitors see Rhode Island — to get beyond Newport’s famous mansions and the coastline. The mansions may draw lots of visitors, but “have you thought about the people who built those mansions?”

Watson asks. “When you go to the beaches, are you considering the story of those who used those beaches before Rhode Island [was a state] and where those people are today?”

PCEI also established the Cultural Exchange and Ambassador Program, which connects businesses and nonprofits with minority community leaders. Because Watson and his PCEI colleagues have long-standing relationships with Rhode Island’s different communities of color,

“Ray doesn’t sugarcoat situations.

He has a relentless determination to level the playing field.” they can guide organizations that are eager to collaborate with local ethnic groups, and help them avoid culturally insensitive encounters, which can damage an organization’s reputation. Say a museum invites a Dominican artist from outside Rhode Island to perform locally. If that artist and that museum fail to engage with the local Dominican community, they are “strip mining” the local culture, Watson says. He’s trying to “get people to understand culture and its economic value.”

“Ray doesn’t sugarcoat situations,” says Mike Ritz, executive director of the nonprofit organization Leadership Rhode Island (LRI), where Watson is a frequent speaker. “He speaks bluntly about the challenges experienced by folks who are being marginalized.

He has a relentless determination to level the playing field.”

Building awareness about Rhode Island’s living history and cultural resources is a giant challenge, Watson says — but he is patient. “I’m on a 500-yearplan,” he says. “What I’m starting now,” he says, “I don’t even expect [my 2-year-old daughter’s] grandchildren to finish.”

Nancy Kirsch is a freelance writer in Riverside, Rhode Island.

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A LUMNI H A L L

Ted Borland ’05 in one of his favorite places: midair.

Shred the Gnar, Pay the Bills Look for Ted Borland ’05 online and you’ll find videos of him sliding down stair railings or flying off a jump high into the air and — somehow — gliding for a few seconds across the side of a building before landing. That’s what he calls a day at the office.

As a professional snowboarder, Borland is never not thinking about snowboarding. He promotes gear all over the world for his sponsor, the snowboard manufacturer Lib Tech, and appears in videos and films for the production company Think Thank and Snowboarder Magazine.

He even finds the time to get behind the camera and produce his own videos. “I like being everywhere within the snowboard world,” says Borland.

“I like knowing the industry side of things, I like knowing the behind-thescenes of production ... I like having my hands in every aspect.”

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Borland now lives in Salt Lake City, but he started snowboarding at Mount Snow in southern Vermont, where his dad worked and where NMH students went to ski and ride.

He did an independent study his senior year at NMH in which he recorded his snowboarding exploits and edited the footage into a short film. A few years later, he realized he’d found his career.

“There’s a difference between having the dream and doing it,” he says. “I started getting connections and realized I could actually make this a job.

Like it could actually be possible to pay the bills.”

In 2017, Lib Tech gave Borland a custom “pro board,” hiring him to represent their brand. It’s like a basketball player getting his own line of shoes that people can buy; it demonstrates that Borland has a style and notoriety worth promoting.

A core of that style is accessibility.

Rather than going the route of competitive snowboarding, where only the most elite get access to major brand endorsements, Borland instead chose to star in and produce films that can be watched by anyone. He is particularly proud of the videos that feature stunts in urban settings — the ones that inspire viewers to say, “Hey, I want to try that,” and then walk out the door and do it. That kind of video was a motivator for Borland when he was growing up. The goal is to be “super into creativity and coming up with new ideas on how to snowboard,” he says. Recently, Borland could be seen riding along huge outdoor staircases and flipping off ledges in the full-length film “Pepper,” produced by Snowboarder Magazine.

In the winter he’s chasing snowstorms and promoting snowboarding brands all over the U.S. and Canada as well as in Russia, Japan, and Europe, like “a moving billboard,” he says. In summer, Borland visits snowboarding camps in Oregon and Canada — where he once worked building terrain parks — to hang out with kids. In September, he returns home to Utah and runs The BoneZone, a pre-season training park at Brighton Mountain Resort near Salt Lake City.

Borland designs and builds the park’s log and steel obstacles, which attract up to 300 boarders a day throughout the fall.

It’s all in pursuit of his main goal, “which is to be able to snowboard all the time,” he says. He’s got no plan to stop anytime soon, even as he hits his 30s, the age when pro athletes might look at their future with unease. “It’s always been hard to make a true living off being a snowboarder, so that has given me extra drive to do more,” he says. “I like the fact that I’m not just getting handed a bunch of money. I like earning my place.” — Zoe Licata ’15

PHOTO: SCOTTY ARNOLD

Secure your future . . . and the future of NMH. A LUM N I H A L L

Rooms Fit for Royalty

BY ZOE LIC ATA ’15

“It’s one of the most glamorous rooms in New York,” says architecture and design critic Wendy Moonan ’64. She’s talking about an over-thetop private art gallery on the Upper East Side with elaborately pedimented ceilings, black and white marble floors, and a nine-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a Roman emperor.

The gallery is one of 113 luxurious spaces that make up her new book, New York Splendor: The City’s Most Memorable Rooms. Moonan spent two and a half years compiling the 320-page book, but it’s actually a culmination of 30 years of her work as a writer and editor at The New York Times, Town and Country, House and Garden, and Architectural Digest. All the relationships Moonan built with photographers, architects, homeowners, and designers became the foundation for New York Splendor. “In a way, the book is a social history of decorating,” she says.

Moonan started her journalism career covering hard news in New Jersey after studying political science at Wellesley and interning on Capitol Hill for a year. But her interest in design — and the overwhelming lack of women she observed in the political world — steered her in a new journalistic direction.

Moonan began reporting on a wide array of decorating styles, and her years of discovery and experience are evident in her book. Besides the soaring ceilings, ornate chandeliers, and antiques, there’s also a stark, deconstructionist dining room with colorful stripes inspired by a Mondrian painting, and a brightly lit subterranean basketball court.

“I really wanted to show a wide range of interiors,” says Moonan.

“One of the things that makes New York so interesting is that everything is OK. Each designer has their own aesthetic, and each owner has their unique collection of art and artifacts.”

What’s consistent in New York Splendor is that every room is exceedingly eye-catching. “You have a few senses working at the same time — emotional, visual, tactile,” Moonan says. “The rooms encourage you to go through [their] layers and see how the effect was built up.” She writes in her author’s note that each room is “all about imagination; they invoke a sense of wonder. It’s something you feel in your bones.”

Zoe Licata is a senior at Emerson College, majoring in journalism.

IMAGE: COUR TESY OF RIZZOLI NEW YORK

A charitable gift annuity gives you: Fixed lifelong payments • Favorable annuity rates • Tax benefits • A gratifying legacy •

SAMPLE RATES BASED ON A SINGLE LIFE CGA*

AGE

68

73

78

83

RATE

5.3%

5.9%

6.8%

7.9%

*Rates displayed are for illustrative purposes only.

For details: nmhschool.org/plannedgiving Jeff Leyden ’80, P’14 Director of Planned Giving 413-498-3299 · jleyden@nmhschool.org Sue Clough P’06, ’08 Senior Associate Director of Planned Giving 413-498-3084 · sclough@nmhschool.org FA L L 2 0 1 8

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A LUMNI H A L L

’18 REUNION

ALUMNI AWARDS

LAMPLIGHTER AWARD Willem “Will” Lange ’53 Beverly “Bev” Bolton Leyden ’53

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE AWARD David Bennett Goldman ’83

Ride and Wrestle Reunion 2018 included the now-annual 30-mile “Pie Ride” (above), as well as a footrace, rowing on the Connecticut River, and the induction of the 1968 wrestling team into NMH’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Margaret van Baaren P’16, ’18, ’21

YOUNG ALUMNI AWARD Lucien “Luke” Shulman ’03

ALUMNI CITATIONS Pamela Beam ’68 David Hickernell ’68 Amy Lyman ’93 Carol Waaser ’63 Peter Weis ’78, P’13 Augustus “Gus” White ’53

for NMH, including funds for the Class of 1968 Leadership Remembrance Scholarship.

NMH Magazine

WILLIAM H. MORROW AWARD

John Stone ’58

$4,095,000

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Kelli King-Jackson ’93 Ellen Watson Payzant ’58

JOSIE RIGBY SPIRIT AWARD

50TH REUNION Members of the class of 1968 raised more than

THOUSAND ARROWS CHALLENGE 2018 Because 1,000 alumni in classes ending in 3 and 8 made a gift to the NMH Fund by the last day of Reunion Weekend, a group of trustees who were celebrating their own reunions contributed $114,000.

COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD

NEW ALUMNI COUNCIL MEMBERS Andrew Ness ’04 Vice President Current city: New York, NY Profession: Aerospace and industrial products consultant Education: Columbia University

PHOTOS: GLENN MINSHALL, COUR TESY OF NMH ARCHIVES

Andrew Taylor ’09 Young Alumni Committee Co-chair Current city: Tucson, AZ Profession: Videographer, Andrew Taylor Productions Education: Arizona State University

STORIES/N EWS FROM OFF-CAMPUS

CLASS NOTES

PREPARING TO TRAMP Winter activities at the Northfield Inn circa 1910

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B Y PET ER W EI S ’ 7 8 , P’ 1 3

HISTORY LESSON

Signed, Harry Truman The Bible that once belonged to Mount Hermon student William Henry Jackson lies under glass in the NMH Archives. With good reason: There’s nothing else like it in the world.

Its flyleaf pages contain an extraordinary collection of autographs: seven U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman; British prime minister Winston Churchill; Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the first lady of the Republic of China; General Douglas MacArthur; the prince of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). And those are just some of the grandest names.

Jackson came to Mount Hermon from London when he was in his late 20s and already preparing for the ministry. Attached to no particular class and with no aspirations of graduating, he nevertheless was awarded this Bagster Polyglot Bible at the school’s fifth Commencement, in 1891, for “excellence in notes on Bible lectures.” The prize was signed by headmaster Henry F. Cutler.

Jackson appears to have sought out other prominent attendees at the ceremony; the signatures of school founder D.L. Moody, his wife, Emma, and Moody’s musical partner, Ira Sankey, appear directly below Cutler’s.

We don’t know when Jackson started asking other well-known figures to sign his Bible. It may have been as late as 1911, when Jackson, by now the pastor of the Reformed Church in Oyster Bay, New York, invited one of his congregants, President Theodore Roosevelt, to add his name. We do know that Jackson’s wife continued to seek signatures for her husband’s prized possession after his death in 1925.

In 1986, Jackson’s daughter, then 90, offered the Bible to NMH.

P H O T O : C H AT T M A N P H O T O G R A P H Y

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The Bible of William Henry Jackson is signed by Truman, Winston Churchill, both Presidents Roosevelt, and other world leaders.

GIVING BACK

Nearly 40 Years and Counting Dr. James “Jim” and Miriam “Mimi” Niederman P’78 HOME: Bethany, Connecticut PROFESSION: Jim is a retired physician and epidemiologist at the Yale University School of Medicine (his research identified the EpsteinBarr virus as the cause of infectious mononucleosis). Mimi has served on the boards of several community organizations and was an original member of the Connecticut Mental Health Center Foundation.

WOW FACTOR: They first gave to NMH in 1979 and have done so nearly every year since.

WHAT MOTIVATES THEM: Their daughter, Dr. Caroline “Carrie” N. Niederman ’78, who served for decades on the NMH Alumni Council, including two terms as president, and is now an NMH trustee.

WHAT INSPIRED THEIR FIRST GIFT: At Carrie’s old school, she was deemed “not college material.” At NMH, she “was happy, she did well, and when she graduated, she was well on her way.”

BEST NMH MOMENT : When Carrie was accepted to her top-choice college on their 25th wedding anniversary.

NMH SOUVENIR: After graduation, their daughter’s roommate left a plant behind in the dorm, and it went home with the Niedermans. Thanks to Jim’s green thumb, the plant is still thriving 40 years later.

WHAT THEY HOPE FOR: That NMH will always “educate the whole student.”

— Tara Jackson P’21

nmhschool.org/support-nmh

PHOTO: GALE ZUCKER

NMH

Magazine

One Lamplighter Way Mount Hermon, MA 01354

THE VIEW FROM 60,000 FEET The Connecticut River, as seen from the high-altitude balloon that was launched last May by students in NMH’s Science Club.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE NMH SCIENCE CLUB