Student Journalism in 2012: Defining the craft, and learning accountability
Milton graduates beginning in the late 1980s remember looking forward to Friday mornings, when The Milton Paper, Milton’s independent student newspaper, was hot off the press. With a dedicated following and a proud staff, the Paper has always been a strong publication. When Adam Beckman ’12 and Cydney Grannan ’12 became editors-in-chief, they decided to define and meet a new level of quality, while print and online publications in the public domain were busy sorting out this issue for themselves. What should “their public,” Cydney...
read moreInsight, Fall 2012
At the Harkness table today, David Smith and his students in Studies in English and American Literature
read moreNOH8
Advanced Photography student Claire Robertson ’13 turned her lens on fellow students to promote a message of tolerance and inclusion. Claire, a board member of the student group GASP! (Gay and Straight People), says the independent project was inspired by the NOH8 Campaign, a photographic silent protest created by celebrity photographer Adam Bouska in response to the passage of Proposition 8 in California. In the official campaign, various celebrities appear posed with duct tape covering their mouths and “NOH8” written on their cheeks....
read moreAnatomy of a 1212 Performance
As the audience filters out of each 1212 performance, the final scene has yet to unfold. Peter Parisi, performing arts department chair and director, gathers the small cast and crew around him. Together, they absorb the evening’s performance before scattering to collect the congratulations. This moment culminates months of work—planning, auditioning, reading, memorizing, staging and rehearsing. The play that Peter and company staged in February 2012 was Love and Intrigue by Friedrich Von Schiller, a German dramatist and major figure in...
read moreWhy respect your opponent? Teaching sportsmanship must be explicit, coaches find.
Sports idols perform touchdown dances, update Twitter feeds constantly, and are often caught behaving badly off the field. Young athletes connected with social media are engulfed by an athletics culture where civility, respect and general sportsmanship are hard to find. Neither athletes nor coaches can ignore the prevailing tides. In this environment, how do coaches impress student-athletes with the value of fair conduct; respect for oppo nents, teammates and offi cials; winning and losing graciously? How do you make sure athletes practice...
read moreDare to Be True, the Version with Love
I don’t naturally fall into reflective rhythms during the year, and I relish the opportunity summer brings to slow down and reflect. Marlborough, New Hampshire, where my wife Nancy and I have been going since we were 18 years old, is one of those places that actually feels lost in time. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear some particularly apt reflections from the Right Reverend Mark Beckwith, Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. Bishop Beckwith talked about the fundamental balance between truth and love. Love and truth cannot separately...
read moreResuscitating Compromise
by Katie Leeson ’93 “Washington is obsessive.” That was the opening line of a recent NPR story about the capital city’s laser-like focus on the 2010 health-care-reform law. I laughed as I drove up Pennsylvania Avenue, wondering if the reporter could have picked three better words to sum up the city where I’ve lived and worked for the past 12 years. As a health-care lobbyist, I can tell you with absolute certainty that D.C. is flush with obsessive, passionate people seeking to influence policy and shape history. In fact, advocates...
read moreThe Alchemy of Friendship
A progressive idea among friends from the ’5os penetrates students’ lives today. Two weeks after the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, a group of friends met to begin planning their 50th Milton Reunion. From their school days in the ’50s through the turn of the century, they had all ably tended families and careers. Now they struggled with a new, incomprehensible chapter. Ned Felton, the boys’ head monitor in 1952, was sure that these friends could and should organize around an idea. “Ned was sure that we could identify a...
read moreThe Support to Fly: Two Stories of Risk and Its Reward
Starting anything new is at least partly scary. When the people in your new setting look mostly like you, you make some assumptions, consciously or not, about shared experiences. Knowing that you share common ground makes opening up, or making friends, a bit easier. When Ronnell Wilson ’93 and Nafeesah Allen ’02 arrived in Class IV, the School looked much less like the face of America than it does now. Today, 45 percent of our new students self-identify as students of color. Still, most students of color, as well as our international...
read moreFlocking Together
When Andy Ward came to Milton in 1944, the Milton Academy Bird Club had been active for nearly 20 years. The thrill of observing songbirds, hawks, warblers and the shorebirds of New England strengthened friendships that Andy relies on 60 years later. Early encouragement from biology faculty member Pete Morrison drew the group together. He orchestrated weekend birding trips to Newburyport and other areas around Boston. “Bird-watching is widely accepted now, but during our time at Milton, birding was thought to be a little offbeat,” Andy...
read moreFriends Become the Mirror that Middle Schoolers Seek
Sorting out who you are takes time and effort. Nicci King has her finger on the pulse of Middle School life, and she knows her students well. Nicci is Milton’s Middle School counselor. She began at Milton in 2005, and she responds to the needs of students, parents and colleagues as they try to understand adolescent behavior. Nicci helped develop and co-teaches the 360° affective education class, a program that fosters empathy, respect and perseverance in our middle schoolers. It promotes the development of constructive communication,...
read moreHow we stay connected: A survey of students
Have you ever sent a text you regretted? Is a Facebook “friend” a true friend? The Milton Magazine, Milton Paper and Milton Measure put together a single survey of Upper School students about technology, social media and cell phone...
read moreAccording to My Friends
Students parse how friendship flows. Direct answers, to fundamental questions, from Class I–transitioning from Milton to college–and Class IV, working toward friendships that last. Here’s what they said. What is a friend? You can be quiet, relaxed and comfortable around a friend. A friend is trustworthy. Otherwise, you can’t be open. A friend makes you feel good about yourself, but doesn’t necessarily always tell you what you want to hear. You have fun with a friend; he makes you laugh, no matter what you’re doing...
read moreA Fond Farewell Ann Carter 1917–2011
One of my—and Milton’s—oldest and best friends, Ann Carter, died in December in Hanover, New Hampshire. She was the wife of Ad Carter ’32, longtime faculty member and renowned mountaineer. Ann was in her 95th year, yet her death was surprising to those who knew her. She seemed ageless. Her parents lived to 100. I believe that Ann expected to reach or exceed that mark. In her Christmas letter to family and friends, she wrote of her marvelous, active summer at her family’s place on the Cape, surrounded by her offspring, swimming in...
read moreCampus Walls Speak About History
Milton honors friends in many ways. Today’s students frequently find alumni clustered around photographs on a well-traveled hallway, locating an image that unlocks a trove of memories. Not only along hallways, but also in entryways or nooks, and showcased on walls that frame a key public space, Milton celebrates students, alumni, faculty and benefactors dating back to 1798. Many alumni in search of a memory enjoyed meeting Cathie Farrington, director of stewardship, who tended Milton’s collection with great care for many years before...
read moreAn Individual Sport Where Team Culture Is the Winner
In New England, swimming is a winter-season sport. Swimmers come in from the cold, peel off the layers, pull on their suits (still wet from the day before, in some cases), slip into their lanes and push their bodies to exhausting limits. Their motivation comes from their love of the sport, and at Milton it also comes from a supportive and fun team culture that the coaches work hard to foster. Twenty-four years ago, with David Foster (English faculty and, earlier, college counselor), Coach Bob Tyler brought the coed Milton swim team from club...
read moreDaring to be honest
Todd, did you realize that your collar is flying free, like a wing?” my friend asked. I had missed a collar button. We laughed. How many people had noticed my weird look that morning but didn’t want to embarrass me, or embarrass themselves? True friends will clue you in on a missed button, a piece of parsley in your teeth, the occasional need for a Tic Tac or—heaven forbid!—the advice to adjust your zipper altitude. Even these simple comments are not easy to offer or, sometimes, to receive. Respectful, honest friendships, however, help...
read more“Please take care of yourself, and take care of your friends.”
On Wednesday, November 16, our students contemplated the fate of “Todd” and “Amy”—the players in a courtroom drama that had unfolded during assembly. High school students don’t lightly sacrifice their recess period; yet, that morning, second period bled into the precious 15 minutes of free time, and no one even noticed. That morning’s speaker, attorney Brett Sokolow, had appointed our students as the jury of a complicated, real-life case involving college students, alcohol, and a sexual encounter. Presenting the facts of the...
read moreIsabel Chun, Class III, Illustrates a Recently Published Book
Isabel Chun ’14 has illustrated her first published children’s book. Her childhood love of painting ultimately led her to this project. Isabel’s vivid and colorful illustrations appear in The Kwik Adventures of Baxter Brave and Tommy the Salami, the story of a young boy who sets off with his dog from the high-rise buildings of Hong Kong for an around-the-world adventure. Traversing four chapters—The Desert, The Ocean, The Jungle and The Mountains—the duo encounter storms, beautiful landscapes, and a variety of animals that help them...
read moreEliza Byard ’86
Dr. Eliza Byard ’86 is the executive director of the GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization working to ensure safe schools for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. She has over 20 years of experience in nonprofit development and spearheaded the first-ever Ad Council campaign on LGBT issues, ThinkB4YouSpeak. On campus she was hosted by the student group GASP! (Gay and Straight People). “The good news is that when you make the case well, carry the message in a...
read moreDeanne Borshay Liem
For more than 20 years, Deanne Borshay Liem has developed, produced and distributed independent films, including her Emmy Award–nominated personal documentary First Person Plural, which won the grand prize for the best Bay Area documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. For her latest project, Geographies of Kinship: The Korean Adoption Story, Ms. Liem received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She visited campus as the 2011 speaker in the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series. “We’re told, as...
read moreStephen Elliott ’99
Having studied engineering and computer science at Yale, Stephen Elliott ’99 became a commissioned Naval officer and served on the USS Henry M. Jackson, a ballistic missile submarine. He’s enrolled in a dual program at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. After earning his degrees, he plans to work in the clean-technology industry. Stephen was Milton’s 2011 Veterans’ Day Speaker. “Military experience is so different from generation to generation, service to service, individual to individual. However, there’s a...
read moreHeather McGhee ’97
Heather McGhee ’97 is a director at Demos, a multi-issue national organization that combines research, policy and advocacy to influence public debate and catalyze change. She works every day to address economic inequality. As the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Speaker, she urged students to think about difficult economic issues. “The relative privilege that all of us in this room have, compared to the vast majority of Americans, is not a reason to avoid questions of economic inequality—because it makes us uncomfortable, or because of where...
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