Faculty Voices
Remembering The Phillipian, Freedom, and Fat Louie by Jeff Strong ’78 Working on The Phillipian in the mid-1970s was fun and exhausting. Finding reporters, chasing stories, editing copy, typesetting, cutting, waxing, and pasting up the paper every week took so much energy and time that we barely slept. All-nighters, fueled by coffee and NoDoz, were the norm, and the basement of Evans Hall was the staff’s true home on campus. But the rewards were there, both large and small— from the occasional recognition and appreciation of classmates and teachers to the tightly parsed praise (or, more often, on-point criticism) from Phillipian advisor Tom Lyons to the hinted-at “automatic” admission to Harvard for the editor in chief. To me, however, the absolute best part of The Phillipian was the most executional: The trip to print the paper every week at the Harvard Crimson.
Remember, this was a different time and place—when students of legal age (18) could drink at the student pub in the basement of the Andover Inn, when a Compugraphic typesetting machine could be used to produce both a front-page news story and a credible fake ID card for slightly underage students, and when The Phillipian’s operating budget easily covered a weekly Chinese dinner at Yenching—including a few technically illicit beers—in Harvard Square. So the culmination of each week’s seemingly Herculean effort to put together the paper involved helping produce the aluminum printing plates, watching Louie load them into the press, seeing the first few issues come off the press, and then heading off to a late dinner filled with typical teen conversation. A couple of hours later, we’d load the bundled papers into the designated driver’s car and head back to PA. I still remember shivering and dozing off to WCOZ-FM in Latin instructor Carl Krumpe’s kid’s old, unheated Saab, my stomach full of General Tso’s chicken and Tsingtao, and slowly waking up to the newly released live version of “Free Bird” as we drove down Main Street on the way to Evans Hall. Now, every time I hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” I am transported back to the chilly winter of 1977, and I wonder how my fellow Phillipian editors are doing and why Mr. Krumpe never got the heater fixed in his kid’s rickety Saab. The Crimson is still around, although Fat Louie is long gone, and Saabs have become increasingly rare, but Lynyrd Skynyrd still goes on the road occasionally. Last year, when I toured Harvard with my college-applicant son, we had lunch at Yenching, and I thought back to all those Phillipian nights in Cambridge. I ordered General Tso’s chicken and a Tsingtao and smiled. That time, however, I didn’t get carded.
Faculty illustrations by Frances Pitochelli McCormick
Joel Jacob Instructor, Mathematics At most liberal arts schools, limited connections exist between mathematics and other fields. In my high school and college education, the offerings for “applied” mathematics courses meant taking a computer science, physics, or statistics class. Here at Andover, the educators at the Addison Gallery and the Peabody Museum opened my eyes to other possibilities. My students build real-world connections between mathematics, art, and history; their mathematics education is a vehicle for connecting them to our campus, our school’s history, and the material-rich troves in our institutions. These opportunities are as abstract and rigorous as a course that purely teaches proof writing, logical reasoning, and equation solving in the traditional classroom. However, I would argue that students build deeper and stronger connections to math when they are learning experientially. Can they hold an artifact and articulate a mathematical argument in context? Can they explain the importance of a mathematical principle using the tools and space around them? If the answer is a resounding “yes,” then those students are one step closer to becoming tinkerers and innovators instead of mere doers.
Andover | Winter 2015
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Creativity & Innovation
To a tightly scheduled PA student, this weekly excursion felt like freedom. It involved a day student with a car; two or three other Phillipian editors/reporters; the grumpy but lovable Louie (“Fat Louie” to us, behind his ample back), who ran the printing press at the Crimson; an inexpensive meal at a restaurant in Cambridge; and a post-midnight drive back to a sleeping Andover campus.
We asked 11 faculty members about inspiration, creativity, and innovation. Here’s what they had to say.