Retiring Faculty
Nan Lee Milton Academy Faculty, 1982–2006
Tony Domizio
An innovator at heart, Tony worked with colleagues from the science and math departments to develop an experiment integrating science and mathematics in the Middle School. They wrote joint math and science exams that involved surreal propositions only a middle schooler would love. This project involved the faculty reaching mutual agreement about common goals in math and science, figuring out how to create interesting experiments and jointly assessing the skills and progress of their shared students. Tony’s life has always involved spirited discussions about the impact of grades on learning and achievement, about high expectations for institutions, about collegiality and accountability. He’s a critical and creative thinker on the move. Next year, Tony and his wife, Lin, can live in the same city, and while it is not yet time to put away the test tubes and beakers, it is a good time to capture that opportunity. We will miss Tony’s yeasty invitations for provocative conversations but will embrace his legacy—creating a rigorous and compelling science learning environment that exploits students’ interest in the world and takes advantage of the latest research.
On the Milton Academy faculty, excellence comes in many forms. There are teachers who inspire with flamboyant personality, teachers who model great conceptual reach, and teachers who demand the most scrupulous attention to detail. From the moment that Nan Lee came to us 24 years ago, her special excellence has been in helping students develop their most reflective, most contemplative selves. Agreeing with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, she has gently but insistently encouraged them to ask the hard questions about human experience. Her talent for such probing has naturally drawn her to kids on the brink of adulthood, and she has done heroic service in junior and senior courses such as Philosophy & Literature and Man & the Natural World—courses in which a journal entry might be as important as a critical essay and a half hour alone in the woods might yield insights to rival those produced by the most heated discussion. We should also remember, however, that Nan has brilliantly served a very different clientele: Middle Schoolers. To use words like
“reflective” and “contemplative” in the same sentence as the phrase “eighth-grade boy” may seem preposterous, but Nan showed repeatedly that even the most hormone-bedeviled wretch can be induced to think. Temperamentally serious herself, she understood Middle School humor and knew how to ride it where she wanted a class to go. As a colleague, Nan was ever ready to share ideas, compare approaches, refine the status quo. She was particularly generous with new members of the department, often nurturing them, guiding them among the pitfalls of the first year or two at Milton, and enabling them to find themselves as teachers. Just the other day, despite the packing left to do, she spent two hours with the young woman we have hired to replace her; and Nicole left with a smile on her face and an optimistic vision of the road ahead. Nan’s years in Hathaway House, which she headed with her husband, Joe, were similarly rich for those under her care. With an empathic sense of what it means to be away from home, Nan and Joe created a home for the girls in their dormitory. They worried
like parents, enjoyed like parents, watched like parents, and strove like parents. Trips to the hospital, discipline cases, academic or emotional rough water were often teachable moments and always compassionate ones. To assume loving responsibility for so many is to insert a siphon deep into one’s own psychic energy reserves, and Nan may sometimes have wondered whether June would come before her tank was dry. But the parting rituals she devised sent off generations of Hathaway girls with the feeling that they belonged to a permanent and precious sisterhood. Nan was not the kind of teacher or dorm head who minds her own store but takes no interest in the neighborhood. She wanted for the School as an institution what she wanted for her students and her boarders—that it never stop trying to become its best self. She bent her efforts especially toward widening Milton’s embrace. As a founding member of the Cultural Diversity Committee in the early 1980s, she reminded us, with that same gentle insistence, that we would benefit both from becoming more various and from attending carefully to how a more various community would work. The coat of many colors that is today’s Milton was sewn by many hands, but we owe Nan our thanks for helping us understand what a beautiful pattern it could be. Nan and Joe will soon be moving into their home on Southern Harbor in North Haven, Maine. It is a quiet place of stones and woods and water—a perfect place for living the life she has modeled for us here. We wish them the deepest joy in it.
Annette Raphel Cathleen Everett
David Smith Chair English Department
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Milton Magazine