Here are two reflections on that day from participants.  First from Rico, a current senior at Field, then from Anna Rock ’11, currently a freshman at Sarah Lawrence in New York.

RICO
Looking ahead a few months to college, I am trying to prepare myself. I am quite nervous on how this change will effect me, and this Alumni Day eased those nerves. Seeing the familiar faces from years ago was a joy for me. The returning alumni are students I look up to, kids who came from the same place I have, and now have experiences I will soon live through myself. Their words were valuable because I knew they were sincere—they shared with us what is real.

Listening to the stories, I could tell that students don’t have the same college experiences everywhere, but there were common themes. Every last alum mentioned putting in effort, not getting discouraged, or not getting too crazy with your new life. In other words, college freshman have to balance their time wisely. Even the students who are freshmen this year have started to see this, and are now applying it to themselves. This lets me know that everything will be fine, as long as I keep my head straight.

Heading into the final stretch for high school, I have been doing a lot of reflecting. I am glad to see so many alumni return to school to inform the next batch of freshmen. I myself will return to enlighten my other fellow field scholars and spread my experiences so younger students will have a better understanding of what college will be like.

ANNA ROCK
As a college freshman, I’ve learned that very few of my current classmates had an enjoyable time high school. If asked, many would scoff at the invitation to return and heartily guffaw when requested to speak to current students about college life. A sad addition to this crowd are people who had a delightful four years in high school yet are afraid to return and share their feelings and experiences.

Walking through the doors of The Field School as an alum to participate in a discussion about college was easy for me, however. Field graduates are fortunate that their time in high school and middle school is generally something they treasure. Revisiting Field allows us to see friends who are students as well teachers—to share memories and revisit experiences from the school’s close community. These relationships allow the senior-alumni lunch to flow smoothly, in a fashion similar to sharing a family dinner at the end of the day.

Because each senior and alum are familiar with the many unique aspects of Field, it was easy to discuss the advantages and challenges that students encounter when transitioning from high school to college. Some seniors sought colleges that are quite different from Field, and it was interesting to hear the reasons for their choices. The discussion progressed as alumni answered questions about aspects such as schoolwork, professors and athletics.

It was comforting to rejoin the Field community and to be among friends as a new alum. It was a true example of how leaving as a student did not eliminate my place in the Field School family. Rather, it secured my sense of belonging, knowing that Field will always be a part of who I am.

Malikah Goss is Field’s Assistant College Counselor and has also been one of our 11th grade English teachers since 2008. She spends much of the second semester guiding her students through our Transcendentalism Project, a different way of encountering important literature, writing about it, and discovering new ways to think about yourself in relation to the world. Here is Mal’s reflection on a recent addition to an already unique way of learning at Field.

The Transcendentalism Project is a staple of the junior year English curriculum. For over ten years the students have taken eight weeks—the entire third quarter—to read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.  Students write short papers in response to quotes that stand out to them before ultimately creating a project that speaks to their own view of Transcendentalism.

Each year the eleventh grade English teachers try to find new ways to enhance the experience. This has resulted in the incorporation of “Chat n’ Chews “ (optional lunchtime meetings where students from different classes can share their ideas about what they are reading) and the Transcendentalism evening (when students are free to share their projects with their peers, family and the Field faculty). This year we decided to incorporate a field trip early in the project, during which students could commune with nature.

And so, on Tuesday, February 10th, the junior class embarked on a Transcendental trip. The day began with reading a series of quotes from Thoreau, followed by listening to music, to get the students in the right frame of mind. Lastly, we asked the students to give up their cell phones and all other personal technology to be fully present in the day’s activities and not distracted by the outside world. The requirement was, of course, met with a resounding groan, but almost no one pushed back, as though they knew the experience they were about to have would be one to write home about—or at least write a paper about. Once the cell phones were safely tucked away in a secure hiding place, we boarded three Field School buses and set out to Riverbend Park.

The students were split up into six small groups, each rotating through the same three activities: a nature-walk, with complementary writing prompts; building art out of nature; and a solitary meditation time. Each activity was reinforced by a quote from one of the authors the students were reading.

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”  — Emerson

I had volunteered to head up the silent meditation activity, with help from Jarrett Arnold. After the expected shock from teenagers being asked to not only hang out in the woods all day, but to also sit—alone—for forty minutes in silence, the activity began. While many struggled at the beginning, most settled into a groove of journal writing, nature observation or just getting lost in their own thoughts. In response to the time alone, one student said, “I felt incredibly alone. Perhaps alone isn’t the right word because that usually is accompanied by the connotation of loneliness. But I didn’t feel lonely. If anything, I felt more at peace with myself than I have in a long time.”

“I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.”  — Thoreau

Nate Edmunds and Laura Gill headed up the nature-walk, asking students to stop along the way to view and write about their natural surroundings in a new way. Students wrote about trees, leaves, water, and even moss. By the end of the walk, they had taken in the beauty of the park and connected their ideas about nature to Whitman, Thoreau and Dickinson. One student even found that the idea of being in nature pressed up against his want for immediate technological response: “[B]ecause modern technology provides such speedy and extensive dictionary support, our vocabularies are weakened, complacent. We have little incentive to mentally store a word when it is so easy to find a definition online.”

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,     
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,    
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,                                                      
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

—    Whitman  

Finally, Dave Nelson, with assistance from Kate Samuel, led the students through an activity where they utilized their surroundings to create art. This project was inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, an artist who creates art from nature. I heard of houses made of sticks and linked chains made of leaves.  The impermanence of the activity freed some students to push themselves outside their comfort zone; with one good rainfall their artistic experiment would become the sticks and leaves of nature again.

By the time you read this, we English teachers will have read the essays the students wrote about this experience, conferred with them, and moved on to the next part of the project. But what sticks with me, after reading drafts and getting feedback from my classes, is the lack of cynicism and the introspection that enveloped the junior class. Sure, there are some students for whom walking through nature will never be fun, but the overwhelming response to the field trip was positive.

Given the opportunity to sit and consider themselves, the students thought deeply and with purpose about where this project could take them and about their place in this world.

—Malikah Goss

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

Today was the Senior/Young Alumni Lunch, at which recent graduates of Field return to school to talk to our senior class about life after Field—college. We were thrilled to host more than 20 recent alumni, and their shared wisdom was extremely wise and generous. Different alumni brought different and varying points of view, and our seniors asked questions and listened with rapt attention.

Here is a sample of what they heard.

It’s essential to engage with professors outside of class, as they won’t seek you out like Field teachers did, explained Sara Forman ’11 (Boston University). “You don’t need a question or a problem as an ‘excuse’ to visit them during office hours,” added Helen Brown ’11 from Whitman College. “But,” continued Sara, “because you went to Field, you will already know how to talk to them, even if you attend a large university. Even at a larger school, use what you learned at Field to become involved in your classes and with professors.”

Sara talked about sitting in the front row of a 450-student lecture at Boston University, where she gets called on in every class and is known by the professor.  “Use the drive to engage that you learned here at Field and you’ll be fine.”

Michael Brenner ’10, who is at Georgetown University, advised seniors to choose classes not just by the subject matter but also by the reputation of the professors as good teachers.

Tucker Kelleher-Brozost ’11 (Colorado College) encouraged engagement through seeking out writing centers, math centers, or tutors where they are available.

Seniors were cautioned that college requires more work and more reading than high school—but that there would also be more time to get work done. Little is more important during freshman year than time management and learning how to apportion time for social things and for study.

Coleman O’Neill ’10, who plays soccer at Davidson College, noted that the time commitment for college sports is serious, but that it helped them to learn time management and to make new friends. Helen Brown noted, however, that making friends outside the team is equally important.

Some colleges, it was noted, are not that different than Field, with flexibility and individual attention. Most schools, however, will not be lenient at all with deadlines for completing work.

Tucker advised students to realize that they might not get the same grades that they got at Field, but that it was okay. Sara, however, urged students to strive for the same kind of excellence.

Emma Gotbaum ’11, at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, noted that it is important to find a support system at college, as there won’t be a build-in system of grade heads and teachers like at Field. This can be difficult, but it’s important.

Nora Colman ’11, who is at Tulane University, explained the start of freshman year this way. “When you first get to college, it’s like camp. Everyone is excited you are there, and there are continual invitations to join clubs and activities. There are so many free T-shirts. But in a few weeks things get normal, and it sinks in that this is where you’ll be living for the next four years.” She added that it can be “hard to hear about things moving on back at Field. It’s hard to start a new part of your life, and to realize that it’s real.”

Jessica McKinney ’11 reported from Syracuse: “The freedom was hard. No one was telling me to go to class, so sometimes I didn’t. You have to do your homework, but no one forces you.”

Sarah Forman said, “The hardest part for me was coming home. I adjusted to college quickly, loved my classes and my roommate, then I came back home and found that I was in a different place.”

Ed Hickey ’96 went to school in a small town and loved coming home. “When I came back I was a excited to see the pigeons and the monuments.”

Forrest Rilling ’07, who recently graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, made this great point: “There are so many choices at college that you didn’t have in high school, and this was the hardest thing. You have to talk to as many people as you can so you can make good choices about classes, majors, and activities. You have to try to take advantage of as many things as you can, because the real world is not as generous as college.”

Regarding the application process, alumni urged seniors to let adults proofread their essays, but they also recommended that students not worry about being rejected from some schools, particularly during the early decision phase. “I’m glad I was rejected by my early decision school,” Jessica McKinney reported, “because it allowed me to wind up where I truly belong.”

But even fun new toys get old after a while.

That’s why we have completely redesigned the site and will be debuting the new look in January of 2012. It has all the same useful features as the old site (and your current usernames and passwords will not change) but with more practical convenience (such as a more prominent “search” feature), more direct access to up-to-date stories about the school, and a cleaner and easier to read design.

We truly believe the new site design will knock your socks clean to West Virginia.  Here’s a preview of the front page, which will constantly be changing and refreshed from week to week.

In addition, the front page (and other pages too) will feature new video content that describes our amazing school.  Again, a sneak preview is below. Wait for the big announcement of its debut just after the new year!

The People of Color Conference and Student Diversity Leadership Conference were fantastic experiences for the ten teachers and eight students who had the opportunity to travel to Philadelphia last week.  The teachers who were at PoCC had the chance to see a multitude of speakers and performers, to attend workshops about diversity and multiculturalism work in independent schools, and to engage in affinity group work related to their race/ethnicity.

Students (front row) and teachers before the keynote address

The opening keynote speaker for the combined conference was a man named Wes Moore, who spoke about his experience meeting a man with his same name, from the same neighborhood in Baltimore he grew up in, who had a drastically different life path.  Our speaker was a college graduate and Rhodes scholar, while this other man was involved in an armed burglary that resulted in the death of a police officer and his incarceration for life in federal prison.  The impact of his educational opportunities and support from parents, teachers, and friends were highlighted, and his words had a strong impact on all of us. His book about this matter is called The Other Wes Moore.

The end of a long, meaningful day

The students also had a chance to hear from Zohra Sarwari, a Muslim-American woman speaking about her life experiences and what a multicultural America feels like. The student experiences at SDLC were life-changing. They were able to discuss their own backgrounds with 1500 students from around the nation, with activities and small-group sessions that related to eight core social identifiers: race, ethnicity, age, ability, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic class, and religion. They joined with their DC-area peers to facilitate one of those activities to all of the adults from their schools on the last day, which was a powerful way to end a few days of growth and discovery.

— Neil Basu

It rocked!

From the show tunes of Grease to the classic rock of Jimi Hendrix, from the soulfulness of Van Morrison to an African a cappella song, our students were having a great time. The whole gym was pulsing.

Here are some of the sights of the assembly, set to a tune by AC Newman.

Students from every grade gather in the Black Box Theater to share poetry, songs, stories, and more—performed from the stage for an audience that is eager for courage and daring and fun.  The cheers for every performance are sincere and joyous.  The message you get from the community is invariably this: Your voice counts and is heard.  Extraordinary.

Here is a brief video that will give you a too-brief glimpse of what happened last Thursday at Open Mic Night.

And so this week we launched our first-ever wrestling team.

Athletic Director Eric Coles and teacher, librarian and bon vivant man-about-town David Bonner are the coaches.  And the team already looks ready for the challenges of the mat.

The Field athletic program is very mission-centered, focusing on teaching kids how to play, to grow, to work together and to exhibit generosity as much how to win.  So we are not afraid to start something new, even though it may take a while to compete at a high level.

Which brings us to this year’s girls volleyball program.  This amazing team has been building its skills and its camaraderie for years and this was the year when it all came together.  Always laughing and cheering each other on, the team went undefeated in the regular season, winning Field’s first ever volleyball banner.  In the tournament, they went to the final game against rival Oakcrest, losing for the first time all season.

Congratulations to the team and its terrific coaches!

Great things grow from small things—a truth that a school knows very well.  We hope to hear about wrestling victories in the year ahead.  But more important that winning is the sense of growth and learning, the coming together of a team in fun and fitness and creativity.

On October 31st at Field, the fun and music come out.  Here is our Halloween parade and costume contest, accompanied by Wes Lanich’s Middle School Music class.  THRILLER!