A Tip of the Hat to the Hilltop…

This is the first time in 11 years that I am not on the hilltop at Hackley School in Tarrytown as school begins. I thought about it all day today as I went about responding to the needs and dreams of my new institution, remembering other “first days” in a place where I spent over a quarter of my entire life. I wanted to give a shout-out to anyone from that circle of friends.

I remember in the fall of 1996 that first first day at Hackley. It was hot as blazes. Hotter than Jordan, which I now can say with a great deal of authority! No one helped you figure out what to do in homeroom, nor where attendance was to be dropped off, and I remember trying to find a workable copier the hour before my first class. The copier was hidden in a utility room (natch!), and I soaked my shirt through with perspiration trying to copy the syllabi in that hot room before my first class.

At the end of that first week, my new colleague Phil Gratwick asked me how I liked Hackley so far, especially compared with my previous Charlotte Latin School. “Honestly, Phil, it is like playing with paper dolls—I don’t really know anyone yet, and it all feels like going through the motions of a child’s game. But I will give it time,” I said.

Eleven years ago! And over the course of time I would seize opportunities in Tarrytown that transformed me, both personally and professionally. So much of teaching always feels imperfect, on-the-fly, and mysterious anyway, but on that hilltop, I had the chance to hone my teaching skills, and while it was hard, grinding, difficult work, memory after memory is one of bridge-building. I remember those years as beginning on one shore, with the knowledge and experience and interests of the student, and constantly moving toward broader horizons and deeper ways of understanding the realities of children’s lives.

I don’t think I could have made the leap to Jordan without the Hackley experience.
In 1996-97 I taught Modern European History to students of such diverse backgrounds, and often they would ask why we studied European history, and certainly what does all this Christianity in art, etc. have to do with their world-view. Wow. I had to think about that! When I taught in North Carolina, nearly everyone had internalized the story of Christianity since birth, and every WASP knew exactly why we immersed ourselves in the glories of European history. Explaining to those students why it mattered prepared me to take myself out of a course (and now out of a country) and clarify and reify why a course mattered, and how to think about it as more than just “our collective heritage.”

Over the years I created a dozen courses, stretching those proverbial wings in ways I hardly imagined in 1996. I lead a department of determined history educators. Each step became more adventurous, bolder, and I believe more self-activating for the dozens of students I met.

And those students…there were students in that very first class in September, 1996 that I saw at a wedding of one of those Junior students in my last month at Hackley in 2007. What interests they had, and how they touched my life in that 11-year journey of discovery and surprise.

But in the fall of 1996 I remember talking to friends, friends not on that new-to-me hilltop, and describing the Hackley teacher-student dynamic akin to an old John Ford cowboys-and-Indians western. But in time, that wariness gave way to such trust and value, indeed up to my final class, a community of care and compassion.

I could rattle off the names of students from every year in my 11 years that reinforced why this career decision 20 years ago has been nothing short of magnificent and gratifying.

My partners in that complex journey at Hackley were those colleagues whose dignity and intelligence challenged and inspired me year after year. Those explorer-friends were not the “don’t-smile-until-Christmas” automaton teachers we see in entertainment depictions—these were courageous and imaginative colleagues. Many of us ate together, traveled together, enjoyed a Will and Grace TV-watching club together, cried together, read together, mourned together, celebrated together, and marveled together at our good fortune at alighting on that hilltop in the same era. With these colleagues I celebrated weddings (the hottest one definitely my dear friend Diana’s on a July day that exceeded “Africa hot” I think), celebrated births (most notably my niece and nephew’s!) and marked the passings of parents. Some of these colleagues certainly became the coveted kind of friends-of-the-heart.

The other day, when I got out my Howard Zinn memoir, a bookmark fell to the floor, and a dandy laugh filled me with such warmth. The bookmark is a series of 3 photographs, like the kind you get in an arcade when you and your friends pile into a photo booth to make funny faces. There had been such a photo booth at the bat mitzvah of a 7th grade student in 2005, and my jewel-of-friends Anne Siviglia and Joan Fox and I squeezed into the photo booth to make funny faces for the camera. Remember—this triumvirate of teachers were such venerable educators! Over our laughing and smiling snapshots reads the words, “Best Friends.” How lucky can you get?

These are memories I will wrap myself in when the world is cold.

Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago a century ago, once asked, “How shall we respond to the dreams of youth?” It is a dazzling and elegant question. It is a question to take with us as we plunge again into a teaching year—full of dread and hope, alive to both, living a teacher’s life.

Here’s to you on that faraway hilltop, from a loving friend in Jordan.