Will Layman started teaching at The Field School in 1982. He was hired (twice) by our founder, Elizabeth Ely. Today he is Field’s Director of Institutional Advancement, which is a fancy way of saying that he works with his admissions, development, and communications colleagues to make sure that Field is still around tomorrow.
These are his thoughts on last week’s first-ever Diversity Day.
Last Friday was “Founder’s Day” at Field. Landing just one day after Elizabeth Ely’s birthday, this is a day on which we remember the great teacher who started our school. She conceived of and set in motion the ideas that animate Field to this day—the particular blend of small classes, serious ideas, and personal attention to individual kids that define us and created our mission.
It was also our first “Diversity Day” at Field. And this struck me as particularly appropriate because Elizabeth was the first person in my life to teach me the pointed value of true diversity in a community. Elizabeth was herself a living testament to diversity. She was a Syrian-American woman and daughter of immigrants who started her own business long before this would be common. I started teaching at Field when I was just 21 years old, and she taught me from the start that a great school, to quote Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. She taught me that all kinds of students needed by attention and care—boys and girls, the academically fluent and those who struggled, the most cooperative kids and also who chafed against the structure of things. She taught me that our school community was for a wide variety of people, and that the school was richer for that.
On our first Diversity Day, this message of acceptance and tolerance was everywhere all over again.
The morning speaker, Marc Elliot, was hilarious and gut-wrenching. Born with two conditions that make him decidedly different, a gastrointestinal disease that left him with only four feet of intestines and Tourette Syndrome, Marc described his life as a series of incidents in which he constantly drew negative attention in public. Whether involuntarily blurting out epithets on a bus or making embarrassing noises in public bathrooms, Marc constantly tested the limits of folks’ patience and tolerance. The whole school was gathered in the gym to hear him, and he was cracking us up. But his larger point was devastating.
“People who had never met me would make assumptions about why I was doing these things, assumptions that were wrong. And they would insult me or treat me badly even though they did not understand my problems.” Instead, Marc urged us, we should try to behave with tolerance, to “live and let live” because we should recognize the limits of our understanding of the problems that others face each day. Our differences, he made us feel, need to be understood before we could really know or judge each other.
Afterward, we broke into smaller groups led by student and faculty leaders to talk about and think about our own differences. We worked with a set of eight core cultural identifiers to think about our own identities and gathered to talk about this. What followed, for me, was rather stunning. The fellow teachers in my smallest group were people I have worked with every day for years, but I was invited to learn about them through a different—and highly personal—lens. It changed the way I see them, making them all the richer in my eyes.
After other exercises in small groups and a glorious lunch under sunny skies, the whole school reconvened in the gym to hear two poets perform. As a teacher of Field’s Advanced Writing class who works on the craft of poetry, I am often wary of so-called “slam poets” who simply read their work quickly and emotionally. But these folks were thoughtful and reflective—the writing was good. They used verse to think aloud about their cultural identities (a Jewish man and a black woman with roots in the Caribbean Islands), but they also simply used the imagery and rhythm of language to reach out to all of us. Having Field student Will Meyer DJing in the background made it more complete—and the rap free-styling that followed the show was joyous too.
Before the day continued with basketball games and a dance, we all were greeted by birthday cake in the lobby. Somewhere, the spirit of Elizabeth Ely was blessing the day, at least in my memory. Her lessons live on, for me and inside our school, the school she started and that we all steward into a future that contains all kinds of students, just the way she intended it to.
— Will Layman
