19 minute read
Student Reflections: Summer Immersion
Globetrotting
Boys’ Reflections on Their Summer Adventures
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Cádiz, Spain
by ROHIL DHALIWAL, Class II
This June, 23 of my classmates and I went on an immersion trip to Spain for a little over three weeks. Chaperoned first by Sr. Ryan and Srta. Moreta, and later by Sr. Solís and Dr. Guerra, we explored Madrid and Granada, and stayed with host families in the beautiful beachfront city of Cádiz. It being an immersion trip, we all took a language pledge to try our hardest to speak only Spanish for our entire time there, leaving behind anything and everything that could connect us to English and America.
In Cádiz, we met our awesome guides, Juan and Vicky, who had planned an exhilarating three weeks for us. There we attended the Las Esclavas School, where we participated in classes about Cádiz’s culture, history, language, and more. During recess, we interacted with kids of all ages from the school, who were very eager to meet us and ask us interesting questions. (Many of them used the opportunity to test out the English curse words they had learned, and laughed at our startled reactions.) We quickly learned that the people of Cádiz have a very specific accent, called the acento gaditano, which involved pronouncing the “ch” sound as an “sh,” cutting off the ends of words, and many other things that frightened us initially. And while many of us struggled to understand our host parents at first, we quickly adjusted and got much more familiar with their accents.
Thanks to Juan and Vicky, we were able to surf and kayak, attend cooking classes, visit museums, and watch Frankie Lonergan (II) get demolished by “Hercules” in a historically themed gymkhana, or scavenger hunt. (My team did, in fact, win the event and get some cool Cádiz CF jerseys). In our free time, we frequented the many beaches of Cádiz to play soccer and Spikeball, listen to Spanish music, and simply chill.
Our host families were incredibly kind and took us all around Cádiz and even on weekend excursions. Some of us—hungry boys that we are—were concerned about the food, and picky eaters were nervous. The food was, however, delicious and our host families were great cooks. Even the infamously picky Eric Auguste (II) enjoyed the food.
This trip was an incredible learning experience. Most notably, many boys discerned a significant improvement in comprehension ability from when we first arrived to when we left, in addition to an enhancement in speaking the language. We picked up lots of new vocabulary and learned cool (and sometimes vulgar!) phrases from the students at the school. Not only was it a valuable opportunity to travel internationally, but we also had an absolute blast. //
Caen, France
by EDOZIE UMUNNA, Class II
Just be polite and respectful, there’s nothing to worry about. No, but there is a lot to be worried about! What if they can’t understand me? What if I offend them? What if the food is bad? Oh, God, I miss Boston!
These were the thoughts running through my head as I sat in the hotel lobby. Another car pulled into the parking lot. Madame White turned to me and said, “Edozie, je pense que ci, c’est ta famille.” My heart began to race. All the nervous thoughts grew louder in my head. Slowly, three people emerged from the car and walked into the hotel. This was the start of my adventure. This was France.
What followed that initial introduction were nothing but good times: My family was fantastic. Each day I got to do something with them that I enjoyed immensely, from learning how to make French delicacies with my French sister to going out to the bar with my brother. The simplicity of daily life was the real highlight. Luxuries like television and game consoles that we enjoy regularly in the United States were not part of my stay in France; and yet, I didn’t miss them. That sentiment culminates what made home life in France so special: You had everything you needed and made the most out of that. In terms of what we did during the day, there’s simply too much to cover: From lessons at the University of Caen, to visiting neighboring towns, to roaming the streets of the city with classmates, we truly became immersed in French culture. I could go on about different adventures we had over the course of the trip, but I’ll point to one moment of personal growth that was most impactful for me: We were doing a ropes course called accrobranche. I was 50 feet in the air, perched in a tree, locked into a harness, facing a 20-foot-long tightrope walk to the next stage of the course. I was terrified. But there was only one way down: finishing the course. After several minutes spent looking around and trying to conjure up an alternative route back to solid ground, I lifted my trembling leg and took my first step onto the course. Step by step, I made my way to the next stage. That notion—of having the courage to take a step of faith—really defined the trip for me. I’m glad I had the courage to take those steps. //
Eton College, England
by IAN RICHARDSON, Class I
Over the summer, Blair Zhou (I), Eric Ma (I), and I were fortunate to attend the Eton Choral Course—a 10-day program at England’s Eton College, where the country’s most talented singers, ages 16 through 18, go to learn and perform advanced choral repertoire; to participate in singing lessons with some of the nation’s best vocal trainers; and to engage in other informal singing activity with their peers. RL typically sends two or three boys to participate in the program, and we were happy to continue this tradition. There we were taught by the mildly eccentric genius Ralph Allwood, head of the program’s full choir, and backed by an array of talented staff—nearly all of whom had music degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. Led by these teachers, students sang together in a full choir, in smaller “consorts” of fifteen students each, and in informal small groups formed by the students themselves. Performances included the full choir singing at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle (where the last Royal Wedding was), the chapel at King’s College of Cambridge, and the chapel at Eton itself.
We rehearsed for about ten hours every day. Nearly everyone there had spent much of his or her life participating in professional vocal lessons and singing in their local chapel choirs (which, in England, is a large commitment requiring a great ability in singing and sight-reading music). While I’ve spent much of my life around music, I’ve never had the formal vocal training that the other students had. At times, the disparity was daunting: While I was struggling to keep up with difficult new repertoire, many of the other students were able to sing complex pieces at first glance. The ECC choir wasn’t just the best choir I’d ever been in—it was the best choir I’d ever heard in person. While that left me starry-eyed and excited to contribute, frankly, it was terrifying. In the end, though, being immersed among all that talent helped me grow immensely as a musician.
Of the 76 students, only seven were from outside the U.K. (only four Americans, including us three RL boys!). Our peers were fascinated by our cultural differences: vocabulary, school experience, snack foods, political opinion. Nonetheless, every student and teacher at the program was welcoming, warm, and friendly. In such a short time, I made several friends with whom I’m still in contact months later. Amidst a group of people with far more musical experience than I have, I found myself loved and supported—without which, my experience would have been drastically different.
From performances of classical pieces—Magnificat Primi Toni, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Abendlied, by Rheinberger—to jazzy renditions of Bare Necessities (arr. Nicholas Hare) and I Got Rhythm, by Gershwin, the Eton Choral Course was a vibrant, dynamic experience that I will remember for the rest of my life. //
Maru-A-Pula School, Botswana
by LIAM O’CONNOR, Class I
This summer Ian Balaguera (I) and I traveled to the Marua-Pula school (MaP) in Gaborone, Botswana, as exchange students. Upon arriving in Gaborone, we were warmly welcomed by the families of Milit Ranjith and Bogosi Mabaila, whom many students and faculty remember from their time at Roxbury Latin this spring.
During the week we boarded at MaP, attended lessons, and played sports with the other students. Despite some less-thandesirable test scores (a 32 percent on a physics test sticks out in my memory), we enjoyed our lessons. We felt especially engaged in our literature class where we were able to contribute an American perspective on imperialism and racism.
At Maru-a-Pula we quickly became friends with our classmates in the lower sixth form, our fellow boarders, and the other exchange students. In the afternoons, we played soccer, rugby, and—much to the disappointment of Abhinav, our friend and the cricket captain—cricket. MaP was similar to Roxbury Latin in its intensity, although with the Cambridge Curriculum, boarding, and coed environment, it was a very different experience.
We were lucky to have had host families who were willing to take us on weekend trips while we were in Africa. The first weekend we traveled to Victoria Falls on the ZimbabweZambia border and Kasane, Botswana, home to the Chobe game reserve. On the 13-hour drive up, we observed Botswana’s and Zimbabwe’s incredible wildlife, spotting kudus, ostriches, and impala. We had to stop the car twice to avoid being trampled by elephants. The second weekend we traveled to Bogosi’s grandparents’ cattle post outside of Serowe, Botswana, with Bogosi’s family. Bogosi’s grandfather, a retired engineer, showed us around the small community made up of retired people living in the traditional Tswana way. We witnessed the construction of a traditional clay hut like those in which the residents lived; cooked traditional Tswana food over an open flame; and learned how to craft axe handles from a local woodcarver.
During our final week at MaP, the school let us know that a French exchange student’s host family had a connection to Botswana’s First Family, and that we would have dinner with the First Lady of Botswana, Mma. Neo Masisi, that very night. Surprised as we were, the dinner proved to be one of the most memorable parts of the trip. Mma. Atsile, as she is called in Botswana, preached a message of international cooperation and tolerance, praising opportunities for young people to go abroad. The experience was certainly a humbling one— both Ian and I were called out for our lack of knowledge of Southern and Central African languages!—but we were very appreciative of her for spending time with us. It was an honor to represent the school abroad, and I will always cherish the friends we made. //
Writer Arundhathi Subramaniam on the Role of Poetry in Our Lives
“Meaning is just a very small part of language,” began poet Arundhathi Subramaniam in Hall on September 23. “Many of us realize this early on but are encouraged to forget. We are encouraged, instead, to use language as a strictly transactional medium. But there’s rhythm and sound and texture—words have flavor. We forget the sensuous possibilities of language.”
One of India’s most acclaimed poets, Ms. Subramaniam spoke with students and faculty about the possibilities of language; about her own entry into the world of poetry; about her work since; and about the freedom we should all feel to enjoy a poem without the pressure to exact meaning from it.
“You don’t really need to understand a poem,” she said. “Even before you understand it, you’re capable of recognizing it. I remember being asked in school the terribly boring question, ‘What is the poem trying to say?’ This question always filled me with great gloom, because I had this instinctive ability to respond to a poem, but I had no ability to verbalize that response.”
“A poem is not trying to say anything. A poem is just saying it, and that’s all you need to remember. You just need to receive it. You don’t have to try and decode it. You don’t have to try and paraphrase it. You might be inspired one day to go and uncover a poem—peel back layers and dimensions—but it’s not a prerequisite to loving a poem. You just have to allow a poem to happen to you.”
Ms. Subramaniam walked the audience through several defining moments in her life, one being, as she said, her “first emergence into a verbal universe.” “I remember hearing poems in multiple languages—if you grew up in Bombay, you grew up polyglottal, with Hindi and Marathi and Gujarati and Tamar and English. I grew up not really knowing where one language ended and another began.” In her earliest encounters with poetry—nursery rhymes, doggerel—she gathered only fragmentary glimpses of meaning, but she knew, even then, that this is where she wanted to be.
“It seemed to me there existed this somewhat boring world of grownup speech, which I thought of as prose, which was plodding, pedestrian, predictable. I realized there also seemed to be a place where language was startling, unpredictable, dangerous, where language did all kinds of surprising things. It was capable of diving and swooping and soaring. That was poetry.”
Ms. Subramaniam read aloud and contextualized three of her poems:
Where I Live: About Bombay, “the city that I live in, the city
that I love, and the city that I love to hate—a challenging, exasperating, crazy city. Don’t try to understand the poem. Just let the poem happen. This is the way Bombay happens to me.”
To the Welsh Critic Who Doesn’t Find Me Identifiably Indian: “Too often we have voices around us telling us how to belong. One of my pet peeves is a voice that legislates on belonging—telling you how to be yourself, how to be a man or a woman, how to belong to a particular faith, how to belong to a particular culture. This poem was my response to that voice.”
And, finally, Winter, Delhi, 1997, about the last time she saw her grandparents together.
She encouraged boys to read poems out loud: “Taste them on your tongue. If you read a poem on a page and don’t feel the impulse to say it out loud, I think you’ve actually lost something”; and to make poems their own: “Consider why you like it, rather than feeling pressure to articulate what it means. Start with simply reading and allowing yourself to enjoy a poem, and build on that.”
“Poems have an ability to creep up on you and to change your life in very profound ways when you least expect them to,” concluded Ms. Subramaniam. “Hang onto poems. They are frequently a lifeline in ways that you don’t and can’t yet imagine.”
After Hall, Ms. Subramaniam spent a class period with Mr. Lawler’s Class V English students who had read her poetry and came prepared to discuss it with her. Mr. Lawler encouraged the Listen, Look, Read approach as the students made their way through these poems together and with the author, identifying out loud that which resonated with them and why.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is the award-winning author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Widely translated and anthologised, her volume of poetry When God is a Traveller was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. //
A Strong Showing for RL Public Speaking
From left: Avi Attar (I), Teddy Glaeser (III), Daniel Sun-Friedman (II), and Colson Ganthier (II)
On September 29, four students traveled to Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield, MA, to compete in the annual Stoneleigh-Burnham Public Speaking Tournament. Avi Attar (I), Teddy Glaeser (III), Daniel Sun-Friedman (II), and Colson Ganthier (II) comprised this year’s team, securing a second place finish overall in the tournament. Competition events included Interpretive Reading, Impromptu, After Dinner, and Persuasive Speaking.
Senior Avi Attar earned a first-place finish in both Impromptu and After Dinner Speaking. His topics, respectively, were “Necessity is the mother of invention” and “How to rob a bank.”
Roxbury Latin has long been a participant in this tournament and routinely places well among competitor schools. This year RL boys faced students from BB&N, Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Hotchkiss, Northfield Mount Hermon, St. Luke’s, St. Sebastian’s, StoneleighBurnham, Taft, and Winsor. //
Kevin Breel Helps Alleviate the Stigma Surrounding Mental Health
“As you know, we care not only about helping you develop your intellectual passions and pursuits, but also about helping you develop the tools to lead physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy lives,” began Headmaster Brennan, speaking to boys at the year’s opening Health and Wellness Hall. Last year, Roxbury Latin launched a new program for boys aimed at further addressing topics related to health and wellness. This year we will continue that program by bringing to campus individuals who will broach such topics as depression and mental health, addiction, and nutrition. This fall, mental health activist and comedian Kevin Breel spoke not only to students in Hall on September 26, but also to a packed room of Roxbury Latin parents the evening of September 25.
“This conversation, about mental health, has been really personal to me for almost my entire life,” began Mr. Breel. He grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, in a home where his father struggled with depression and addiction. “Growing up in that home, one of the first things that I picked up on as a young boy was that we weren’t supposed to talk about what my father was struggling with. I internalized that it wasn’t to be discussed, because we never talked about it. As a young kid, I’d come home at 2 or 3 on a Wednesday afternoon and find my father passed out, blackout drunk, on the couch. On a Friday night, I would hear a knock at the door and find two Canadian police officers standing at the door to bring my father home from the drunk tank. I thought these experiences were normal, because they were all I knew. No one ever used words like ‘mental health’ or ‘depression,’ ‘addiction’ or ‘alcoholism.’ It was just swept under the rug, and I developed this understanding that this was a secret—something to be ashamed of.”
Mr. Breel went on to discuss the lifeline that his childhood friend, and his friend’s father, afforded him, offering security and a safe haven in an otherwise chaotic family
life. He went on to share how that middle school friend was tragically killed in a car accident, and how the grief of that loss triggered his first experience with his own depression. “I remember thinking, ‘No matter what happens today, if the best thing in the world were to happen to me today, I wouldn’t feel joy. I wouldn’t feel happy.’ I was just numb.”
Because Mr. Breel didn’t have the language to describe what he was going through, he didn’t seek help—he didn’t know help was an option. So, as he says, he got good at pretending. He pretended for four years until one February evening, when he was 17, he sat on his bed with a bottle of pills and wrote a suicide note. In a moment of clarity he realized that he’d literally never told anyone what he was feeling, or what he was struggling with. “I thought, how can I quit on myself if I’ve never tried to help myself?” He talked with his mom the next morning, and she immediately connected him with a professional counselor who—several years later—he still sees today.
“We have this culture that treats physical health as real and important, and mental health as, kind of, made up and not okay to talk about,” Mr. Breel explained. “That’s just incorrect, and silly, and—frankly—dangerous.”
Emboldened by the support he received; his promise to be honest about what he was feeling; and by the news of a tragic teenage suicide in a neighboring area, Mr. Breel decided to share his story—with the knowledge that if he reached and helped even one person struggling as he had, it would be worth it.
“We don’t relate to statistics. We relate to stories. We all have a story, and I’ve learned you only have two choices with that story: You can share it, inviting people into it, or you can be ashamed of it, hide it, put up walls. Either you own your story, or it owns you.”
Mr. Breel’s first public talk about his experience was at a TEDx event for youth in 2013. Today, that video of his talk has garnered more than 4.4 million views. “So often we think, ‘I want to make a difference in someone’s life, but I don’t know how. I’m not qualified. I don’t have a degree. I don’t know the right things to say.’ I’ve realized that maybe it’s not about any of those things. Maybe it’s just about showing up for someone and letting them know that you care about them, that they can talk to you, that you won’t judge them. We all have that ability and opportunity, but we need to start seeing it as a responsibility. I believe that if we change the conversation, we can change our communities, change our culture. Then maybe we can live in a world where there are not a million suicides a year, but because of the conversations we start right here today, there are zero.” Kevin Breel’s honest—and often humorous—take on his experience with depression, and his message of ending the stigma around mental illness, resonates with all kinds of audiences. Deftly combining his mental health activism with his comedy, Mr. Breel has been a guest speaker at Harvard, Yale, and MIT, as well as for Fortune 500 Companies, and even for the Government of Canada. His memoir, Boy Meets Depression, achieved critical acclaim. Mr. Breel has been featured on a wide variety of news outlets including NBC, CBS, The Huffington Post, MTV, CNN, Today, and in The Wall Street Journal. //
