ENGLISH TEACHER Lucy Stockdale greets her students at the classroom door with a bowl of numbered PingPong balls. “Hi, how are you?” she asks, holding out the bowl. “Pick a ball, look at the seating chart on the board, and find your spot.” The Ping-Pong balls ensure that the 16 students in her American literature class don’t sit next to the same person every day. This is Stockdale’s first semester teaching on her own, and today she’s tackling Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which her students read for homework the night before. “What did you guys think of this essay?” she asks. She has them free-write for 10 minutes about the reading, then launches them into small-group discussions. Bringing them back together as a class, she asks, “What were your favorite lines?” She points out one of her own: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” In pairs, the students scribble down three of Emerson’s lines that they liked. The pieces of paper get tacked up on the classroom walls, and the students circle the room, checking out everyone else’s choices and drawing stars next to their favorites. If you were to enter the classroom at this moment and take a quick look around, it would be difficult to determine who the teacher is. At 23, in black jeans and a flowy blue shirt, Stockdale is only six years older than her students. Yet as she herds everyone back to their seats, looks over each student’s copy of “Self-Reliance” to make sure they annotated as they read, and explains the writing assignment due the next day, there’s no question who’s running the room.
38 I NMH Magazine
English teacher Lucy Stockdale is halfway through her Penn master’s degree.
Stockdale may be just starting her career, but she is one of a dozen novice teachers at Northfield Mount Hermon who are helping the school stay on the cutting edge of secondary education. In 2012, NMH joined eight other northeastern boarding schools and the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education to start the Penn Residency Master’s in Teaching (PRMT), a two-year program that allows its students — “Penn fellows” — to earn a master’s degree in education while working as boarding-school faculty members. Stockdale just finished her first year. Asking students to free-write off the top of their heads to reflect on a reading, to move around the classroom and engage with one another instead of just with the teacher — those are practices Stockdale learned through the Penn program. They’re not rocket science, but she wouldn’t have picked them up so quickly if she had started her teaching career at another private school, or at NMH six or seven years ago. Instead, she would have simply been handed a