2004 Opening Faculty Meeting Address
Given on September 7, 2004

by Frank Henry '69
Holder of The 2003-04 Greer Family Distinguished Teaching Chair

The Greer Family Distinguished Teaching Chair, according to the wishes of the Greer family is "the highest Deerfield recognition to which our faculty will aspire each year." I have a quibble about that; one cannot set out to win the Greer Chair. To a number of you I have said that winning the chair is a lot like falling in love. If you go looking for it, love usually proves elusive, but sometimes at the most inconvenient times, it overwhelms you. Somehow during school year 2002-2003, a convergence of students and faculty submitted my name rather than that of a score or more of other likely candidates. That said the best moment of receiving the chair is the announcement itself. It's a complete surprise and yet, not surprisingly, welcome. What follows is a burden; one feels he must justify the award by performing the terms of the chair in an even more demonstrative manner!

The award and this moment remind me mostly of David Byrne's "Once in a Lifetime" in which he asks himself, "How did I get here?" When I graduated from Deerfield in 1969 I never imagined being here now with a family that has known only Deerfield. Heck, when I began teaching in 1982 I never expected that the time would come when Bob McGlynn would not be here. Oddly, McGlynn is here for me now because I can not explain myself and my career except in terms of Bob's favorite philosophical principle: serendipity. What I propose to do is offer a talk in several parts and pray that they will serendipitously cohere. One is not often granted the bully pulpit, and before I am edged off my chair I have a few topics to raise.

The first is an observation on the variety of talks that have been given by Greer Chair winners and speculation about why and so what. The second is to reflect on how I arrived at this point in my life and the power of teachers to affect their students' lives. Finally a sermon-it's meant to make us all feel a little guilty, to recall us to our duty, and to remind us of our power to reform. I always love it when our American Studies' students arrive in early November at Walden and have to face Thoreau's assertion that he "knows of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor...That every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour."

After today we will have a sample of four talks by winners: Andy [Harcourt] and Lee (Magee], who teach science and math, taught a class. Claudia [Lyons] and I, humanities teachers, will have told stories. This limited sample is augmented by my daily life: living in the household I do I spend a lot of time thinking, talking, and sometimes defending the methods, pedagogy, aspirations and standards of a range of disciplines. Are the approaches to Greer talks exemplary of C. P. Snow's two cultures?

An aside: I read C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures at the beginning of the summer imagining that it would help inform my subject. As with so many chestnuts, when I went to the source, I found that the phrase, the cliché even, has been widely divorced from its context. The point of Snow's Rede lecture in 1959 had more to do with his predictions and prescriptions for education and the relations between rich and poor nations than with tensions within the academy. I came away chastened that I have long assumed that I knew what Snow was talking about and found that my understanding was superficial at best.

Let me ask again: Is the approach to Greer talks exemplary of Snow's two cultures? Probably not. Last spring I spent a little time over in the modular [temporary science and technology] classrooms listening to students talk about their research projects in botany and yeast genetics and in the parking lot watching their solar car races. I hope more of us do so this year. I was humbled to hear students talk about DNA and cancer and possible avenues for cures in such familiar terms, ones that rapidly outstripped my recollections from biology in 9th grade. More than anything I came away impressed by watching students who had performed well in my own class using language and describing ideas that were beyond my experience and doing it with facility. We teach remarkable students. Out at the drag strip I watched students play, laugh, and struggle, hilariously I might add, with competition, and I also relearned that our students are just big kids. My own twelve year old would have loved the class and building a car, but our students knew what they were demonstrating with their contraptions. The psychology elective should go over just to observe the correlation between the makeup of teams, the names they gave themselves, the sorts of cars they designed, and their degree of success! After listening to the researchers talk about their work, I observed to Anne Marie White [science faculty] that what they were doing was what a literature student does when she tries to write a paper. She agreed. The problems were the same: audience, organization, proportion, diction, and documentation. In the parking lot, the cars were not much different; the successful cars were those which had kept the object in mind and were designed to be as efficient as possible. Those with digressions or too much ornamentation or too many parts were slow or failed to leave the start. I have read and been frustrated by a lot of student prose and see that colleagues who ask students to present mathematical solutions and summarize experiments and I are all facing the same challenges. What is true for all of us in every classroom is that we work from texts of some sort-we can only assemble and advance from what students give to us in the course of a class.

Reasonably you might ask, "What do you do then?" What is meant by teaching English? The difficulty of teaching a class the way I most want to is that I measure success by the degree to which am silent. I might add, only one or two of these most successful classes may occur in a year and almost always in the spring term. As I said in my own self-evaluation two years ago I am happiest with those classes in which I say nothing because the students have been trained in the business of intellectual discourse over a text they have all read and considered before coming to class. I mostly ask students questions about what they read and often the same sort of questions over and over about different texts until ideally they know how to ask questions themselves, to respond to one another with answers based firmly on examples from the reading, and to do so eagerly. And so for this talk Claudia and I tell stories rather than ask questions or present a parcel of topical material; otherwise there would have been summer reading for everyone. We are all in the business of teaching habits of mind and the habits in demand are the same no matter what classroom a student is in. I believe that Peter Brush, Peter Hindle, Claudia, Lee, Andy, and all of you are trying to lead students to read a text or problem as accurately as possible, to ask questions when the text is unclear, ambiguous, or provocative, and to make critical statements about the text or problem in lucid, compelling language appropriate to the text. Elegant proofs, short stories, explications de texte, research papers, and lab reports all call upon the same fundamental habits of mind and are the principal measures by which we assess students.

How did I end up standing here especially when I never intended it? If you had asked me what I expected to do with my life when I left Deerfield in June 1969, my answer would not have included teaching, marrying a high school math teacher, and having a daughter in the freshman class. Like Jimmy Symington '54 in his [2003] Heritage Award talk-don't worry, Wanda and I are not about to sing--I have to acknowledge Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have met." Robert McGlynn, the muse of Little Brown House, the patron saint of The Deerfield Press, an incomparably popular teacher in his forty two years here--his portrait, an Engelland [Tim], hangs in the faculty lounge of the library--McGlynn beyond all others invited me to become a student, to join the Deerfield family, and finally to become a teacher. But then McGlynn invited everyone to become a student; he himself was a perpetual student. John McPhee, one of McGlynn's closest friends, wrote an introduction to 10 Trial Street, McGlynn's parable about a young scholar with worldly aspirations-I gave more than a moment's thought to using fifteen of my minutes reading it to you as he read it to thirty odd years of schoolboys-McPhee said, "he became, among other things, a student of his students, exposing their innards with rays of humor that went to the bone but cut nothing. He led us up the hill to Joyce and Conrad, and down the other side to meet ourselves. He was prodigal with his talent-that brook he was babbling wherever he might be. It was for anyone. It was for me." Me too. By his example I knew that a life of books, classrooms, and students was sufficient. Peg O'Brien at Trinity College, Dublin, Helen Vendler at Harvard, Nicholas Roe at St. Andrews in Scotland, and at Deerfield Lyn Mattoon radiated intellectual rigor, vigor, and achievement and by their personal, immediate engagement with their students implied that being a teacher was at once satisfying and exhilarating. Once I came back to Deerfield in 1977 to help with an incompletely successful campaign to raise $40 million during double digit inflation and the Iran hostage crisis, Rick Melvoin, David Dunbar, and Mike Cary demonstrated beyond any doubt that a life teaching was far more interesting than working in development because of the volatility and opportunity that came with teaching high school students. In 1982 after I returned to Deerfield to teach, these men became my Klingenstein Seminar. Coffee and cookies were more readily available then than now in the faculty lounge up in the FLB [Frank and Helen Childs Boyden Library], and a regular gathering of young faculty gravitated to it during their free periods. As Melvoin led me through my first experience with American Studies he kept sounding the mantra "Embrace ambiguity," an exhortation that was not followed eagerly or often by all-male classrooms but appealed to me. Dunbar would rearrange furniture to explain the yin and yang of creating and destroying space as it pertained to soccer, but his most important seminar topic was the critical distinction between self-importance and self-worth. I hope I have been faithful to his instruction. And I sometimes think my own curiosity and loyalty to American Studies has deep roots in listening to Michael Cary construct and annually rebuild his legendary class, the state and the individual.

Other mentors: Team teaching has influenced me more than any classes I have taught by myself: all my American Studies partners have made me more reflective as a teacher but especially Tom Heise and Bernie Baker; Tom expected me to undertake a thorough reeducation on topics American since my junior year with Bob Crow; I had to know what I was talking about and I had to know his material nearly as well as he did; Bernie has compelled me to become more self-aware about how and what I teach, what to assess, and what I expect from assessment. And students, and this is almost a grab bag, the ones I reach in and find mostly easily: Charlotte Taylor, Aynsley Reycroft, Sturges Karbon, Alethea Hanneman, and Brett Masters, students who have spoken and written with such clarity and precision I have envied them, have all made McGlynn, O'Brien, Vendler, Mattoon, Melvoin, Dunbar, and Cary right. The students make it worth doing and if I am willing to listen, I learn from the students.

And now, I ascend the pulpit and make one request, admit to one ambition. Those who know me well have already anticipated my homily. One of the serendipitous moments of last June's faculty meetings was the small group discussion of tipping points, social change, and community change. I have a suggestion for community change. First let's move ahead a week or so to the first school meeting. You know that exercise the peer counselors conduct during which each counselor blurts a racial, ethnic, or sexual epithet. The exercise demonstrates what we don't want in our community and to set some rudimentary boundaries about what we judge unacceptable. What if we added a few teachers to the line-up and had them make statements like these: "I don't know any more math than I need to balance my checkbook." "Latin; isn't that a dead language?" "When in the rest of your life are you ever going to use calculus?" "When are you going to teach these kids how to write?" While we are sensitive to the models we set about a social community, we are sometimes reckless of the models we present about our intellectual community. As one who spends time in both the math and the English, history, and philosophy offices, I can attest to the clichés and stereotypifications that are casually, unthinkingly tossed off and have been in classrooms where these sentiments are intoned for an easy laugh. While most tipping points seem to be some sort of increased activity, I would ask that we consider a reduced activity as a possible tipping point. Let's just not make disparaging remarks about disciplines not our own. I started this talk in terms of Talking Heads and find myself sounding like Nancy Reagan. We need to model intellectual tolerance and curiosity. Who has more impact, the talking Barbie who declares math is beyond her or the humanities teacher who complains that term averages are the limit of his facility with mathematics.

Am I guilty of this behavior myself? Unquestionably and it is usually fertilized by envy-I want to be as or more appealing to students than teachers in other disciplines. I know that I envy the teacher for whom students will cut their work for me so that they can follow the call of another teacher's discipline. Wanda's and my most unsatisfactory conversations occur over students we have in common and whom we see in decidedly different ways because of choices the students have made about which discipline to emphasize or even to enjoy more. However, I have come to believe we are teaching the same sorts of principles and simply using different media in which to demonstrate them.

All this reminds me of Jamie Kapteyn's reference last spring at baccalaureate to humility within an institution. He asserted that what many of the traditions at Deerfield require is humility: "What nametags, sit-down meals, the dress code, and our devotion to learning all have in common-is what I consider the greatest lesson of Deerfield Academy; that the first step to strength is humility. That is what Deerfield is all about. And that is what your experience here has taught you over and over." We have common goals in what we do here with students. Whether we teach Algebra I or Advanced Calculus, Biology I or Physics Tutorial, English I or Honors English, French I or V, the aspirations we have for our students are extraordinarily common. Last year I had the opportunity to sit in meetings of the Curriculum Committee and to follow with especial interest the discussion of grading rubrics. While the discussion was heated in the details, what I could not help noticing was that when one looked at the grading rubrics abstractly, a remarkable convergence emerged. For instance, across the disciplines, this is what we said about a B: "Good understanding of the basics, but technique shows rust. Tries too hard to please." "Competent performance in most facets of course with occasional peaks and valleys; dutifully working towards mastery of the material and toward acquiring better tools as an analytical reader and writer." "Clear, coherent argument, adequate thesis, borrows ideas, but amplifies with examples and assessments, sees two sides." "Student shows solid understanding of major concepts and implements major concepts effectively." "Good, solid work. Not honors quality, but overall fine. Fulfills expectations." "Good understanding and solves basic problems routinely." "Comprehensive retention and able to recognize overt references and allusions; able to think metaphorically and symbolically about literature; prose is grammatically flawed in minor details and some punctuation errors; able to make frequent summary remarks and ask clarifying questions." In short, Jamie is right, the first step to strength is humility. Our aspirations are similar. We will set a better intellectual example for our students when we acknowledge and value other disciplines as we value our own. I don't know about all of you, for me that will require some humility, but I have live-in help with this undertaking!

Paradoxically, we are at this moment not quite halfway done with new construction which though it clamors to be recognized as a community building is nonetheless known as the Science, Math, and Technology Center. When students have trouble with poems, I tell them to pay attention first to the nominatives. Mathematics, Science, Technology, Center. Though I don't know how it will happen, I hope the new building does, in fact, fulfill the stated ambition of becoming a community building, a place where all of us feel comfortable, welcome, and even eager to be. Certainly the consolidation of mathematics, science, and technology in a single house promotes the likelihood that more intellectual coherence and integration will occur. Perhaps even interdisciplinary courses will be developed. But I look forward with both eager curiosity and some fear to the completion of that structure. I continue to believe that students remember their teachers more than the space in which they are taught. As I talk to alumni at reunions or listen to graduating seniors, they reminisce about people, not buildings. The genetics yeast class and solar car races didn't need special facilities: students built much of the equipment for the genetics class and the elements of the solar cars were mostly plucked from recycling bins. I remember Peter Hindle demonstrating trigonometric functions to me in 1968 but don't think much about the fact that he did so where students now receive advice about college admission or that Eric has his office where Russ Miller dispensed advice to me about applying to college or that Becky Downing will have an office where Don Mackay interviewed me in the spring of 1967. The spaces change; we remember people. As we approach this building and the realignment of the academic campus from east to west and from various locations to one complex, we must as faculty assert how we want the community to function. Our examples, our social, moral, and intellectual models will endure as valued memories for many of our students. As for the Greer, many of you will enjoy this serendipitous windfall; may you aspire to it only in so far as you aspire to offer the best possible and most self-aware examples of intellectual curiosity, ethical conduct and social consciousness to our students.