7 minute read
alumni profile matt green ’82
matt green ’82
By John Xeller, Alumni Relations Manager/Special Events Coordinator
The 2020-2021 academic year was unlike any other in Rectory’s 100-year history. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world to consider new ways of doing things, and how to educate children despite new and unforeseen challenges became a central issue within the broader health crisis facing our society. Rectory School has dealt with adversity in the past on an institutional level, and few people in the Rectory community could speak more expertly about Rectory’s past challenges and triumphs as well as the issues brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic than Matt Green ’82. His Rectory experience began as the son of former Headmaster, John Green and continued as a student for his ninth-grade year. His familiarity with the pandemic’s effect on schools comes from his current position as Head of School at Falmouth Academy in Massachusetts. Parts of this article are adapted from Matt’s interview with Falmouth’s publication, Centerpiece.
In the early 1980s, Rectory School was at an inflection point. The United States was barely out of a recession, and there was a considerable amount of domestic and international instability. At Rectory, the school was being led by its first non-Bigelow headmaster, and the challenges facing that man, John Green, were steep to say the least. Chief among those challenges were updating and maintaining a campus that was attractive to families considering sending their children and then, enrolling a student body that would fill the dorms and classrooms. The Rectory of today faces some similarly steep challenges, many of which are intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is a fitting time to look back to prior moments of adversity in order to acknowledge the steadfastness of Rectory’s values. Mr. Green shared some thoughts about his Rectory experience and, in particular, how growing up on a boarding school campus prepared him for his current role as head of school.
Though shielded from many of the particulars of independent school management, as most children are, Matt Green had an insider’s perspective on Rectory School during his time on campus. He remembers some of what he calls
“big things” like upgrades to many of the campus buildings. He knew enough to describe his father’s leadership style as “a thrifty approach to school management.” Matt Green recognized then, and appreciates more now, that Rectory was adapting to changing circumstances while he was there, and it took the creative, not to mention dogged efforts, of the adults on campus, led by his father, to ensure the school was able to maintain its commitment to its founding mission. Those same adults who were responsible for the big things going on at Rectory more importantly formed the foundation of the “little things” Matt Green remembers that made his time as a student there so fulfilling.
He reminisced about two distinctly different groups of faculty from his tenure who were united by two critical characteristics. There were the “anchor tenant families” who were settled on campus and likely to remain on faculty more than a year or two. Then, there were the “single masters” who likely took their job on the promise of free housing and work experience with little or no intention of making it a career. It is important to note that Green remembers the names of faculty from both groups so even though many faculty members taught, coached, and lived at Rectory for only one year, they still had ample opportunity to have a memorable influence on their students. The two characteristics that united these two groups, in Green’s eyes, were their incredible work ethic and their unflinching care for each and every student.
Green remembered a faculty who tended to student needs morning, noon, and night. In addition to being teachers and coaches, they were drivers, hygiene monitors, occasional cooks and bakers, conflict mediators, and compassionate ears. Even though he never witnessed the planning in person, Green knows they also found time to plan engaging academic lessons. Much of what he learned remained with him for many years after leaving Rectory’s campus. There was the seventh-grade science project on water power that spanned academic departments when Green and his partner visited Rectory’s woodshop to design water wheels to put their learning into practice. More recently, it was the recall of geographic information related to Sri Lanka with a family friend who was working there–information first learned in Green’s “People of South Asia” course at Rectory. It was the dedication of the adults at Rectory that committed so much of his Rectory experience to memory. That dedication began with his father who, as headmaster, would often, as Green recalled, invite students to “step into his office.” While there was often a reprimand waiting for the invited student, it was always accompanied by a promise of and plan for support aimed at helping the student grow. That feeling of being “cared for” stuck with Green long after his days at Rectory and influenced his own pursuit of a career in education. He said, “We (Rectory students) started caring about what they (faculty) cared about.” It was an early example of how learning and personal growth begin when passionate, caring adults take interest in students.
After leaving Rectory, Green attended Avon Old Farms for secondary school, then enrolled at Tufts University, earning a bachelor’s degree in English, before earning a master’s degree in education at Harvard University. Guided by the principles of compassion and caring learned at Rectory and bolstered by the tools honed at Tufts and Harvard, Green embarked on a 28 year (to date) journey as school teacher and administrator. He has worked at three different independent schools, and as one might imagine given his length of service, Green has seen just about everything imaginable. No matter what the challenge has been, Green relied on the strong foundation of his education to, “recognize, adapt to, find the opportunity in, and ideally mitigate the effects of such instability.” The COVID-19 pandemic forced a total change in perspective on a global level in terms of day-today challenges, and Green’s experience as Head of School at Falmouth Academy during that time shows how important his education has been for helping him set an example of how to maintain academic excellence and care for each person despite previously inconceivable adversity.
When asked how Falmouth Academy has responded to the pandemic, Green pointed out that though the community has experienced the full range of negative emotions in the last year and a half, to this point, they have been “fortunate on so many fronts.” Falmouth was able to operate all school year in person, and for this achievement, Green credited the faculty and students. He lauded teachers who displayed “a sense of shared ownership” and who “adapted quickly and well to both the tools and practice of instructional technology.” No matter what came their way, the faculty kept as their focus the well-being of its students. Green was effusive with praise of the students as well who he said adapted to protocols without much complaint and who also, “found ways to maintain a sense of joy.” At the beginning of the school year, Green told his students they had a choice to “wallow in what school wasn’t” or to “make school the very best it could be,” and he was so pleased that they chose the latter.
When considering the prospects of the 2021-2022 school year, Green anticipated that some aspects of school life would return to pre-pandemic conditions but that a great deal of uncertainty would remain the norm. He acknowledged that students today “are being educated in a time of extraordinary and increasingly destabilizing global change.” He was optimistic, however, that reliance on stalwart values and well-grounded principles would help to provide the stability that students will need. Just as commitment to hard work and care for the individual student by the faculty helped shape his experience at Rectory School, Green now works to instill a belief in a shared vision for the future that is grounded in “teachers who know students one-by-one” and emphasis on certain “constants” such as: “mission, vision, values, and culture.” Matt Green has shown–in the face of great adversity–the type of leadership Rectory School hopes is possible for all its alumni. After feeling cared for on Rectory’s campus, Green has worked his entire professional life to pay forward the hard work and compassion his teachers, coaches, and mentors showed to him. It is likely that this mentality will extend to the next generation of leaders as Green identified his number one goal is “graduating kids who care–about each other, about learning, and about the future.”
As the acute impact of the pandemic begins to subside, may the new ways we have all learned to care for and about each other be one of the lasting, happy outcomes.
