Norton Family Center for the Common Good

Exploring and practicing "the best self and the common good" at The Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT.

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Paying it Forward

Last weekend I revisited a delightful older film, Pay it Forward, based on the book written by Catherine Ryan Hyde, with an eye towards developing Freshman Seminar dialogues and activities around the idea of intentional acts of unconditional kindness… what others have come to label as “serial kindness.” 

The trailer for the film features Kevin Spacey in the role of a teacher who challenges his students to consider changing the world. “The realm of possibility rests in each of you,” he proclaims to his skeptical class. Trevor, an endearingly rebellious student, soon presents the idea of paying it forward, but with two caveats: “It has to be big…and it has to be something they (the recipients of the kindness) couldn’t do for themselves.” Here’s the clip:

I suspect that our own students will talk about what the very idea of pay it forward suggests about relationships and human behavior. We often take up the foundational question that Kevin Spacey poses later in this scene, namely, “What do you expect of the world…what does the world expect of you?”, but I hope that we might also examine Trevor’s seductively simple criteria: “It has to be big…and it has to be something they couldn’t do for themselves.” Isn’t “big” a relative term? Can powerful habits of empathetic behavior start “small” yet still be considered worthwhile?  And above all, as an educator, I wonder about the life skills and attributes of mind that we ought to be nurturing and practicing if we are to bring the conceptual power of pay it forward to life: skills of empathetic observation, a commitment to independence of action, and the capacity to subvert one’s ego for the sake of getting “it” done on behalf of others all come to mind, as do the environmental, cultural, economic, and spiritual issues our students must face.

-AF        

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Values and Service

My present infirmity (an Achilles tendon repair) prevented me from laboring in the forests and fields during Community Service Day, an opportunity for freshmen to work to improve our campus and the city of Windsor. While I considered the option of exhorting our young Pelicans to agrarian action from the relative comfort of my knee scooter, the prospect of landing upside down in a garden (or canoe) loomed large. Cooler heads and better judgment prevailed, and early on the 16th I joined a dozen freshmen who shared a will to make a difference from the sitting position. As I would soon learn, they could thoroughly rock the boat even while sitting at my Harkness table!

Only one student was at that moment aware of the Keystone Pipeline decision presently awaiting President Obama’s judgment, a topic that Bill McKibben would later describe at our Convocation as a signature moment for international leadership in environmental advocacy. We spent fully four hours around the table reviewing the dire facts presented in Eaarth. We investigated recent evidence of environmental distress and discussed the personal challenge of finding gratification in “making a difference” amid the global scale and scope of environmental distress. We explored whether we are mired in the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” as we consider the efficacy of our individual actions; if we as a democratic society lack the political will to arrest environmental degradation, what difference can an individual’s voice and action make in altering the trajectory of climate change? We began to suspect that beyond the science and the politics, there something more going on here.

After three hours of investigation, discussion, and debate, before we sequestered ourselves to write our letters of advocacy to President Obama, one student summarized our discussions beautifully. He suggested that regardless of one’s position on climate change in general or the Keystone Pipeline project in particular, we will define ourselves as a species by how we go about environmental remediation and survival. Even if it is too late, as McKibben illustrates, to remove the second “a” from Eaarth, he asked whether it is ever too late to embrace the capacities for moral courage and shared sacrifice which, along with our prodigious consumption, define us as a species. He and his classmates agreed that the more we learn about climate change, the more we learn about our own core values. 

We will stamp and mail our envelopes to the President this week….a good week’s work.  

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Come out to the Boys Soccer game at 7 p.m. on October 19 to support Nothing But Nets, a cause enthusiastically supported by the Norton Family Center for the Common Good (as seen in the video above)!

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The (Political) Environment and Us

My family has a tradition of heading north for Columbus Day weekend. Last year was New Hampshire, but the previous six years—along with this year—have been southern Vermont. On a ride to a favorite hike along the AT/LT, I noticed that the government shutdown had precipitated the closing of quaint, serene Hapgood Pond (pictured below; the link may not work due to the shutdown). Without doubt this is not nearly the most tragic consequence of the impasse in Washington; nonetheless it was unnerving to be reminded of our political dysfunction so far from the capital and so far into the woods. Unnerving, but also necessary: how easily we can toss out an “It’s not my problem” and turn inward to our own lives.

  The greater irony of Hapgood Pond’s closing was not lost on me. Though most of us have felt outraged over the past few weeks at the unusual political calculus of our nation’s elected leadership, we have had a much more difficult time finding the appropriate level of indignation for Washington’s inability to put our natural world ahead of their political bickering and posturing. When an immediate fiscal crisis erupts, we are quick to demand change; however, when the low simmer of environmental change confronts us, we deflect, delay, ignore. Perhaps this difference is what Bill McKibben had in mind when he asked the following questions in Eaarth: “So how did it happen that the threat to our fairly far-off descendants, which required that we heed an alarm and adopt precautionary principles and begin to take measured action lest we have a crisis for future generations, et cetera—how did that suddenly turn into the Arctic melting away, the tropics expanding, the ocean turning acid? How did time dilate, and ‘100 or 200 years from now’ become yesterday?”

This week’s Freshman Seminars will attempt to answer these questions as they pertain to the Loomis community. No one would doubt the relevance of sustainability and environmental awareness to a “common good” curriculum, though some, like our dear representatives in Washington, may not yet sense the urgency and universality of these issues.  Hopefully the conversations surrounding the environment will continue well past this week’s seminars. A smattering of events—including a visit from McKibben himself on October 24—will fill our calendars and challenge our sense of community and collective responsibility. It is my hope that long-range indignation, which moves past the Internet Age’s rapid-fire outrage at the crisis du jour, will help us take more effective action to solve problems that will shape our futures. Hapgood Pond will likely reopen soon, but the natural world it preserves and venerates may become irreversibly closed to us. -EL

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Compromise and the Common Good

My weekend dorm duty offered me a chance to catch up on reading, grading, planning , and writing as well as to share some downtime with my (mostly freshmen) near-neighbors. It was a glorious weekend, of course: perfect fall weather, athletic contests galore, music and Fall Festival merriment in the quad, and the chickens finding new range in the gardens…all after a second week of school that has allowed most of us to find our rhythms yet again. 

Yet there has been no small irony to a week during which the Freshman Seminars focused our attention on the Loomis Chaffee Pledge, our collective commitment “to promote the best self and the common good by living with integrity and by championing a respectful culture.” At this very moment, our government rests on the cusp of a shutdown driven by our leaders’ inability to find an actionable compromise and consensus about our nation’s “common good.” At this very moment, we digest climate scientist Laurence Smith’s words to our community about the dire environmental implications inherent in the choices our students will make as leaders, citizens, consumers, and even as species. At this very moment, my Sunday Times sustains its coverage of the expanded surveillance of Americans that the NSA has undertaken, stating that “the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate.” Discussing “the best self and common good” (as well as the very nature of pledges) during a week like this calls for optimism!    

So at the tail end of this perfect weekend on the Island, I banter with my freshman neighbors in the hope and resolve that we are indeed fully preparing them for life off the Island. Words like “promoting…the common good by living with integrity and by championing a respectful culture” must be fully owned and clearly actionable, since this generation faces issues that would have made my generation blanch.   -AF

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Coffee and Community

When we discuss the idea of "community" with our students, it can be a challenge at times to provide specific, relevant examples. One such example of a community that flat out works is Summit Coffee, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month. Owned and operated by Tim and Brian Helfrich, two Loomis Chaffee alumni, Summit Coffee has been a fixture in the Davidson, NC community for many years. The business goes beyond profit margins and bottom lines to bring people together in lasting and significant ways. As Tim Helfrich pointed out, "One of the buzz words about Summit that has always resonated for me is community. Summit has always been about people and it has always been a space that is shared."

                                 My (not-too-distant?) college days were shaped by my frequent visits to Summit Coffee with friends, professors, and other members of the community. What I did not know at the time was that my concept of community was also being shaped by these visits. Beyond the predictable nostalgia I have for reading page after page on revanchist France or meeting a favorite professor, I think back on what it was about Summit that separated it from other places in town or from your standard Melvillean coffee corporation. There was always a sense of the global and the local at Summit. It was a familiar place that made you feel at home, yet challenged you to pursue the unfamiliar. It valued the science of its small-scale farmers' coffee growing as much as the art on its walls and shelves. It devoted considerable resources to countless charitable movements. In short it was an education in and of itself, and I wish we had more Summits to point us in the right direction.

Happy Anniversary, Summit, and thank you! -EJL

PS There's room in the SNUG for you, I promise!!

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NCCG: Beginnings Again

We’re back! While we’ve been busy here at school and in faraway places, it’s past time to convey some of that excitement through the blogosphere, and I apologize for our relative silence on the airwaves. We pledge to offer consistent posts in the year to come, and Eric and I may engage in a bit of point-counterpoint to spice up the conversation. Anyone reading the paper (or even just sitting with another human being at lunch) would have to agree: there’s a LOT going on! 

The Freshman Seminars in the Common Good are already in session, and a discussion of possible “hot topics” today quickly engaged us in a debate about Matthew Cordle’s dramatic internet confession of his hit-and-run…which itself raises the question of how motive might cloud apparent moral courage. We wondered whether the confession came from a space of heartfelt regret, grief, guilt, and civic-mindedness, or was it a statement calculated to soften an inevitable charge in court? Does the motive for the confession in any way reduce its worth or undo the good that it might serve in dissuading others from drinking and driving? Only Mathew himself truly knows his motive, but it’s worth exploring in what ways our own predispositions and stereotypes might frame our own assessments of this tragic event.

On Friday evening we’ll host our first 2013 Dialogues in the Common Good, and the question of motive and stereotypes will certainly be under discussion yet again. The Trayvon Martin case was decided while we were away, but it has echoed ever since and sustains serious questions about stereotypes, the power of the press, the importance and apparent fragility of due process, and the challenges of reconciling strong emotions with facts. Open, candid discussions on the most difficult topics hone our development as responsible, proactive citizens, and Friday night should be illuminating…and no less difficult than our nation’s own dialogue!

In October we’ll hear the first of our Talks in the Common Good which will be delivered at class meetings across the campus, and of course the school-wide year-long theme of sustainability is virtually synonymous with taking difficult individual action on behalf of a common good. (I’ve just finished reading The Mortal Sea by Jeffrey Bolster, a history of the Atlantic fisheries, which tracks the centuries-old degradation of fishing stocks and, more importantly, shares voices from 500 years ago which warned us of our present travail!)

Syria, sequestration, Senegal, and the Snug….so much more to cover and yet, happily, the year is young. Welcome back, Gentle Reader, and stay tuned!    -AF

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Welcome back!

Welcome back! We're excited to have everyone back this year. Enjoy this wonderful video from the Communications Office. 

-Al and Eric

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Click through here and read a wonderful letter from the editor-in-chief of the Loomis Chaffee World Bulletin on democracy and the common good. Among the many strong articles that follow in this edition are a thoughtful piece on the Half the Sky movement and a heartfelt reflection on Native American history. Keep up the great work! -EJL

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Spring Reflections, Simple Matters

Many of us have been in a contemplative mood of late: a few games and practices have been rained out, several AP exams are behind us, and the ceremonies of the spring are gearing up. The first generation of Freshman Seminars is nearly over, and I find myself pausing this week to do my best Paul Gauguin impression by asking myself where we have been and where we are going. Just as we have asked the freshmen to reflect on which lessons have stayed with them over the course of the first year, I have done my best to carve out time to think back on my own "freshman" year at Loomis Chaffee and in the Norton Center. Some stray thoughts on a warm spring night:

-Flexibility matters. Even when discussing high-minded concepts such as moral courage, privilege, democracy, and sustainability, we must do our fair share of listening, we must resist the urge to pontificate, and we must make every effort to provide our students with windows and mirrors, even if that requires us to leave the comfort of our intellectual homes every now and then. 

-The past matters. From the Founders' time to the classes that took place this afternoon in Founders Hall, this school has offered countless examples of lives lived for our best selves and others. I have been inspired time and time again by my colleagues' sustained and unassuming commitment to this charge. We wrote in this space last October that this way of teaching and learning is in this school's DNA. By mid-May it is even more obvious. 

-The person matters. Before this year I had taught only juniors, seniors, and undergraduates. One of the real joys of my involvement in the center has been the opportunity to teach and to get to know freshmen. Many of them are just now figuring out what kind of people they want to be, and they are brutally honest when they encounter ideas or problems that run counter to that personal development. Yet, for all that conviction and ostensible certainty, they are almost always willing to make space for the possibility that an issue that may be a total snoozefest for them could be the greatest thing ever for the kid to their left or right. Their comfort with the patchwork nature of community has made the seminar's strong moments stronger and weak moments more manageable.

-The whole person matters. It has been an ongoing relief for students and instructors alike that our freshman seminar runs without formal grades or assessments. In my short time in the classroom I have found that grading can threaten those exciting and near sacred moments when students light up with some intellectual breakthrough, wrinkle their brows with concern, or walk away inspired to take action. This course has taken time to make those moments more possible, though they remain all too rare and unpredictable. In the space between it has been a pleasure to recognize a few more names on the NEO playbill, to ask around about a student's prospects at the track league championships, to learn about the newest iPhone games, and to see where the rubber hits the road with all of these noble philosophical concepts we adults throw around. It is no revelation that our students are more than the sum of their GPAs, but it is refreshing nonetheless to guide them along outside of the purely academic context. 

-The online person matters. Because of @smacclintic's unashamed evangelizing I recently converted and joined the camp meeting known as Twitter. Though every tweet and re-tweet is scripted--perhaps dully--to reflect my current thinking on teaching and learning history, I am conscious of the fact that most users of Twitter and other social media write much more freely (and less dully?). There's no changing that, really, but we can still reflect on that approach and its effect on the way we live our non-virtual lives. Or, as this article argues, can it be useful to introduce to our students a "definition of digital citizenship?" 

-The anonymous person matters. As several convocation speakers have pointed out and as recent news from Bangladesh has sadly confirmed, we are compelled to consider how our actions and attitudes affect others whose membership in our communities, however defined, is not always immediately or conveniently evident.  The test of our bystanderism in today's world is not necessarily only our willingness to take action to defend a neighbor or even a stranger in distress, but also our capacity to imagine someone else's difficulty or need, to empathize with them, and to change, drastically or not, the habits and perceived needs that we have developed. 

As we prepare ourselves for the blur of our final month in session, I hope to keep these simple matters in mind. -EJL

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Cultivating

It’s been a very long while since my last post; I could tell you that the crush of classes, coaching, facilitating the continually unfolding Freshman Seminar curriculum, and the otherwise very busy daily life of this place have thwarted my ambition to be a reliable correspondent. Yet I could also honestly tell you that at those moments when I do find the time to roll up my sleeves at the keyboard, I am often flummoxed by unfolding events in our country. Fully processing the disturbing events such as the Boston Marathon tragedy that too-frequently punctuate our national discourse takes time: time to learn about what happened, time to cope and grieve, time to learn of causes and contexts from which to assess a sustained danger or possible opportunities, time to conceive of and enact public policy to enhance the quality of life of our communities.

Last night I watched the broadcast of a cheering crowd, under the mantle of patriotism and chanting “USA”, wildly applaud a fire truck heading back to the barn in Boston. I was as horrified and saddened by the injuries and loss of life there as anyone, but I confess to a sinking feeling when I see our country rise to a celebratory fervor so easily, particularly when it is so slow to address – or even to acknowledge – our much greater underlying problems. I feel uneasy about our appetite for the sensational and transient- the manhunt, the vigil, the capture- as I anticipate the rapidity with which we are inclined to move on. As I read powerful editorials of outrage regarding the outcome of the gun control vote barely four months after Newtown, for example, I ask myself if it was Plato who said, “What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.”      

Through it all, of course, we continue to “cultivate” in very exciting ways here on the Island. Over the last several weeks, those of us engaged in the Freshman Seminars in the Common Good have addressed an array of issues relating to current events: the sources, advantages, and responsibilities of privilege, the power of money, the challenges of sustainability, and the true nature of our democracy. My colleagues are mindful of the serious nature of our Seminar topics and the cumulative effect of these weighty dialogues on our youngest students, yet these are serious times that call for awareness, informed advocacy, and action. Sugar-coating today’s issues and social challenges would only offer our students the same “false positives” that have seduced far too many of our public servants and policy-makers. In our Seminars, we are not cultivating any particular ideology or bias, but rather we are intentionally modeling and honoring the processes of courageous discovery, civil discussion, active listening, and the creation of informed perspective.  Our students most certainly include tomorrow’s public servants and policy-makers, and in teaching and honoring these processes, we are cultivating a better future.      

Happily, my colleagues and I embrace the idea that today’s dire issues and weighty topics lead naturally and directly to the most exciting and uplifting conundrum of all: what will we do with our privilege? How will we employ our greatest assets- specific and broad knowledge, critical thinking skills, and empathy- for the common good? Who do we see making a difference? How do they do so? How did it start? Might I someday have that same stuff? Or, might I already have it, right now, and might it already be a part of who I am?

The material of the contemporary culture may not always be especially inspiring, but the promise of the young students we teach certainly is! -AF

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From today's New England Independent Schools Sustainability Conference... our e-Proctors (http://lcgreen.tumblr.com/) representing the school extremely well! And what a perfect lead-in to our focus on sustainability this week in the Freshmen Seminars. Planned and executed by the e-Proctors themselves, these lessons are certain to leave a strong impression on the freshmen, many of whom are quite green at being green. It should be fun to explore the many and complex connections between sustainability and the common good. -EL

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Two Takes on the First "Dialogue in the Common Good"

First, from Mr. Frei:

Like the aftermath of a 2/$5 Foot-Long Sub Sale, last Friday’s Norton Center for the Common Good “Dialogue” regarding the effect that social media might be having on our sense of community (Social Media and Community: Rivals, Partners, or Uneasy Neighbors) has left me feeling a little queasy. Of course, at my age, I should be wary of redeeming any 2/$5 coupon which takes me too far from CVS, and I should also not expect to be in my comfort zone participating in any dialogue about social media!

The quality and candor of Friday’s discussion was very high in no small measure because the attendees were a self-selecting population of self-aware users/consumers of social media; that fellow in Kravis or up on Batch 3rd who is growing bleary-eyed and mind-numbed in front of his screen was precisely the participant that this particular Dialogue had hoped – but, not surprisingly, failed- to attract. Friday’s participants ‘switched off’ for the moment to think consciously and deeply about the roles that social media and screen lives play in their worlds, and I am heartened by their capacity to ask the hard questions and to recognize the dangers amid the myriad benefits they see in their use of social media.

But for my part, just as that second 2/$5 Chicken Parm Sub is sometimes not enough, the Dialogue raised far more questions than it answered. How can social media participants guard against an unhealthy degree of “personal investment” in their social media identity? How do we manage our prodigious appetites for perfect information, all the time, right now, from everyone who matters to us? Can we cite an “opportunity cost” for the time we spend on social media each day? What are the borders between screen lives and real lives? Do such borders even exist? Is it important that they be delineated and respected, or not? When is too much too much? Is “addiction” to social media too strong of a term? And if it’s not, might an “intervention” comprise a violation of freedom of speech and expression? And while we’re at it, let’s add, “Do fish get thirsty?”

Gentle Reader, it should be obvious that “my questions” reflect my own unease about the toll that I believe social media can take on “community” and even on personal freedom. Of course, none of the tech-savvy, experienced, thoughtful users of social media shared my degree of concern on Friday night, but they did touch on these questions and others with candor and depth, and their degree of self-awareness was most reassuring.

Sadly, though, towards the end, when at one moment I confessed that I did not especially care what my very best friend was doing or thinking about at that moment or on this particular day (even as I counted my friendship with him every bit as dear and important as any friendship in the room), I sensed a palpable exhale in the room…..

“How could you not care to know if you could?”

 What kind of friend are you, Mr. Frei?

What does it take to be a friend in 2013?

  And my own reflections:

Spring break—the tastes of favorite restaurants back home, the smells of the beach, the smiles of new friends made on community service trips, the feel of a new baseball glove, the ding of the intercom on a fifteen-hour flight to India. None of us will experience this well-earned and much-anticipated break in quite the same way, but it is likely that we will all “like”/”friend”/”inbox” with some frequency. And, if we pry ourselves away from Facebook, we may then update Instagram, retweet a friend, post on Tumblr, or, in the case of certain unnamed but not unknown and self-proclaimed “dinosaurs”, write a letter or tap out an email.

Given the many—and certainly not exclusively negative— transformations of community wrought by social media, the students and teachers associated with the Norton Center thought to dedicate Friday’s inaugural “Dialogue in the Common Good” to a discussion of social media and its impact on the Loomis Chaffee community. The conversation, framed by Mr. Frei and PRISM co-president Christin Washington ‘13, flowed freely as over twenty students and faculty shared their experiences with social media and their appreciations of its tremendous power to shape our regard for ourselves and each other. Some contributed sharp critiques of social media and our use of it while others confessed to Facebook abuses in both humorous and heartfelt ways. I was struck most by stories about the pressure many students feel to (over)share on sites like Facebook; many describe the crafting and managing of their online selves as if it were a sixth class or at least an aggravating obligation that infringed upon their free time.

A small solution to this problem, or at least countercultural protest against it, was evident in Founders Lounge last Friday night: when we gather to reflect on our varied, yet common experiences, we tend to walk away with a better sense of where we have been and where we could go. We hope to keep the dialogues going after break, so let us know if there are topics you would love to discuss with other members of the Loomis Chaffee community! -EL

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We hope you'll join us tonight at 7 pm! Here are some of the questions that could come up! 

In your view how does or should social media positively influence the Loomis Chaffee community?

In your view how does social media negatively influence the Loomis Chaffee community? Have you ever gone without social media for a long period of time? If so, how did that affect you? Do we pay enough attention to how social media is affecting our lives and those around us?

How do we react to people being unkind on social media sites?

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Ronald Dworkin, who passed away this week, asked the question "What is a Good Life?" in The New York Review of Books two years ago. He wrote, "We are charged to live well by the bare fact of our existence as self-conscious creatures with lives to lead. We are charged in the way we are charged by the value of anything entrusted to our care. It is important that we live well; not important just to us or to anyone else, but just important." Challenging words and clear connections to our work with Loomis Chaffee students and to next month's Connecticut Forum on "The Meaningful Life."  

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As a part of a class devoted to imagining the "ideal school", students were asked to snap a photo that best signifies the school's mission. The image on the left, a shot of the senior path, conveys the idea that Loomis Chaffee's traditions are reshaped with each successive class. As our friends over at the LC E-BLOG would agree, the photo on the right of one of LC chickens represents the value the school places on student-designed and -run projects. Cool ideas! -EL

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Move over, Ravens--we have more "Champions of the Common Good" from the Loomis Chaffee Log.