Focus, focus. Thank you.

I don’t have a clue what I’m doing up here. For four years I’ve tried to make students the center of my classes, not often with great success, but here the spotlight is unavoidable. Like Sherlock Holmes never solved the case of the missing toilet bowl because he didn’t have anything to go on; that’s how clueless I am. Who’s idea was this, anyway? Holly Allen says she only nominated people she didn’t like. Yea Holly! Maybe I assigned too much writing for math classes, or was too brutal in English (what do you think, Rob?) Maybe non-Euclidean Geometry and implicit differentiation were bad ideas ...

No, I take it back. I take it all back. I’m here because the Senior class asked me to be here. And I may not actually like being here (listen to my voice, watch my hand), but when you respect a group of people as much as I respect the Seniors, you may wonder what you did to deserve their trust, but you do not say no. I feel very honored, very unworthy, and very grateful.

I don’t want to sound presumptuous either, but in a way, I feel like I’m a member of the class of ‘99. I came in with them as freshman faculty four years ago, and it looks like I’m graduating with them tomorrow. Maybe take a little time for myself over the summer to decompress, and then, just like them, plunge into something new, something strange, something unknown.

Four years ago I think Jon Fass took French with Ms Amiry (true, Jon?), but I had the other four year seniors in Spanish 1½. Boy were we all ever freshmen. Remember Mandy Saunders and Joda Blaire? Not to mention Andy Chase. But when the rest of you get out of here tonight I recommend you take a look at the ‘96 yearbook. Chris and Greg were so cute. It almost makes you gag. I don’t think my physical appearance has changed like theirs in that time, but I had even less of a clue back then than I do now. Darrow has grown me as much as it has them.

One of the reasons for this growth is that I have been surrounded by good teachers. It’s one of the perks of working in a boarding school. One of the faculty members who has taught me the most is Dean Plender. I’ll only briefly mention his most important (and hopefully most lasting) contribution to the community. Mr Plender has been math teacher, dorm parent, and Hands-to-Work guy, as well as head of grounds. I think the integration of all these roles in one person has had an impact on us that is as significant as it is subtle. For me this campus is prettier than anything a visitor can see: more than anywhere else I’ve lived, our home is who we are and what we do. This is Dean’s work.

But actually I want to talk about lacrosse. I have no clue about sports, but I’ve been Dean’s assistant coach for four “building” years. Our record for that period is impressive. Of about sixty games we had five wins, and two were technicalities: in one the other team’s refs didn’t show and in another Ben Brody (who was taking care of the book) applied creative goal counting methods to the final score. What amazed me my first year was that even when we were losing 26 to 2 our boys and girls never gave up, never stopped playing ball. And they deserve infinite credit. But unfortunately this year we got to see some really poor coaching in other teams, and it made me realize how important good coaching is. Dean sometimes got upset with kids for “baking a cake”, as he likes to say, not investing enough of their energy, but criticizing a player for not being better simply isn’t part of his vocabulary. Truly great teams, like ours, result from truly great coaches, like Dean.

Faculty are not our only teachers. Quite possibly my two best math students this year were Ari Fraser and Skye Tarleton. Say hi and wave. Ari is very intuitive and seems to understand the details as soon as she’s gotten the broad concept. Skye is more methodical and deductive. She isn’t as quick but she makes even fewer mistakes. They are both brilliant, and they ate Algebra up like breakfast cereal. But one of the real pleasures I’ve discovered as a teacher is watching kids grow in ways you wouldn’t think were directly related to academics. These two have a renowned talent for being loud, and last fall they exercised it almost constantly in class. Nevertheless, over the course of the year they turned it around, becoming calming, supportive influences and doing as much to help their peers understand the material as I did.

Another student who has shown incredible growth over the past four years is Jon Fass. I have always had tremendous respect for Jon. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone so impervious to other people’s idea of cool. He has always been his own person, even when the consequences of not sucking up meant teasing, bullying, and real pain. He is also incredibly honest and open about his feelings. Despite or because of this, four years ago his self-esteem would shatter like glass in a heartbeat. He’s not like that anymore. Jon not only has developed a fine sense of his own worth, he has learned how to unassumingly get others to recognize it in him. The Hand has come out from around the corner and shown us his face. Thank you Jon.

Clark Thomson, the drink-truck guy, is in many ways the diametric opposite of Dean Plender, but often the converse of a great idea is another great idea. Like Dean, he integrates a number of disparate functions: dorm parent, history teacher, coach, musician, and this year, director of instruction. What’s more, with this instruction position, Clark has demonstrated a remarkable ability to integrate administrative values and educational values, which is pretty unusual. For example, he spent a lot of time participating in my classes. After every class at least one of my students got a letter from him that supported his or her contributions and extended the conversation. Clark’s total criteria is the effective education of our kids. It is a shame this isn’t a more widespread quality in U.S. education, but we have it at Darrow, thanks to Clark.

I don’t think there’s anyone at Darrow who doubts that Ms Fecura is over the edge. I was walking down the road one day last year and she bounces up to me and says, “And how are you Mr Gosselink?” And I said something like “Sun sure did come up this-morning” or something. And she said, “Oh, why so glum? You can do better than that!” Then it turned out that a tree had fallen down and totaled her Volvo the night before, explaining why she wasn’t her usual perky self. But that kind of energy has transformed our library from a book cemetery into a cheerful hive of activity, most of it educational. It is exactly what we needed over there. Shouldn’t a school revolve around its library? Linda, you’re a genius.

And how about Kris Lewandowski? The guy gets the idea out of the blue one day that he wants to build a guitar. I supported this: he seemed to think it would be easy, and I figured he’d learn a lot finding out how hard these things can be. So he got a few materials and tools together and disappeared into the fifth floor of Wickersham, coming out a couple weeks later with a finished instrument that looks great and sounds amazing. He certainly educated my concept of the possible.

You’ve already just heard from the last person on my list, the lovely young woman I’ve gotten to sit with this-evening. But I’m not going to talk about any of Monica’s numerous superlative qualities tonight, because for me she represents the person who is particularly special to each of us: our really good friend. And I hope everybody here is thinking of their really good friend. There are those who say Monica is cynical, and they’re wrong, not because she isn’t cynical, but because she’s my friend. So there.

I am passing over some of the people I admire most here, but I’ll resist the urge to list them. Where do you draw the line? I couldn’t do justice to everyone who deserves justice from me, and you wouldn’t want to sit through it if I could. But I chose these people, not because they’re better than anyone else, but because they represent a cross-section of who we are, as I suspect the Seniors chose me to speak tonight.

Now, I recognize that I’m ruining my reputation for brevity. But if you’ll bear with me, this will be the sermon part of my message, the part where I switch from saying how good we are to pointing out what I think we need to improve. It’s where I pretend I do have a clue.

This year at Darrow there has been entirely too much teasing. There has been way too little consideration for the feelings of others. I don’t want parents or others to get the impression that Darrow is unfriendly: I hope and expect you can tell from your reception here and the reports of your children that we do as well as most and better than some. But this year in particular, for reasons that are unclear to me, we did not meet our potential or our tradition. We’ve come a long way in four years, but I can’t help but feel we used to look out for each others’s feelings better back when the Seniors and I were freshmen.

A few months ago the sophomores spent a day encouraging us to focus on women and their contributions to society. A couple class days later we were talking before one of my classes about a girl who was here last year, and how heroic and cool she was. Then somebody in the group said, “Yeah, but I hear she was a skank”. First, she was not ugly. Second, of course, what she looked like had nothing to do with her character. But thirdly, it was a mean statement with no purpose other than to be mean. It was based on the common notion that when you make someone else smaller you become bigger. Which is false. Fourth, nobody there (including me) said anything about the comment until a couple days later, though we could have done so without being mean ourselves.

Faculty, we also have room for improvement. When we ask students to turn down their stereos or pay attention in class, it requires very little extra energy to address them respectfully and explain the reason behind our request every time, instead of some of the time or even most of the time. When we simply order kids around, we make them feel like lesser beings, instead of people like us who may be less far down the road. Now to be frank, the eighteenth time I have to tell kids to focus on academics in study hall I’m liable to be short, even if the eighteenth student is relatively innocent. This may explain our approach, sometimes, but it does not excuse it. We need to provide a better example. Kids really appreciate it (you agree, Fo?), and here’s a little secret for all of us: people more often do what is asked of them when they’re asked nicely and you say please. By the way, I’ve been inconsiderate and short with kids a hundred times a day for four years, and I apologize.

But the worst this year has been a few members of the student body who feel they have to tease others, riding kids who somehow don’t meet their definition of cool. I’ve seen the results of this, and I can’t believe I’m at Darrow. It’s true some victims bring it on themselves in a way; you may know who I’m talking about and they certainly do. That is no excuse at all. Take a second to think about whether you’ve ragged on somebody this year, or if you failed to stand up for someone who was being treated poorly ... It’s your responsibility, and mine, not to let this stuff go by.

This month I expect thousands of speakers like me are mentioning Columbine High School. When it happened Mr Van Meter asked us to think about it in Friday meeting. This was hard for most of us, an event two thousand miles away in a school with two thousand students. And thinking about the even worse violence in Kosovo is even harder. But we could have thought about ourselves. I’m not saying our little episodes are related in scale or even in kind. But I think that little kernel of violence that starts it is the same. And Columbine, at least, resulted from small-time bullying. Again, we need to resist the urge to make ourselves feel better by making others feel worse.

Every school has room for improvement. Since this meeting tonight is for underclassmen, I ask them to think about this over the summer and come back prepared for a better Darrow. The rest of us will work to improve where-ever we are.

Well, that’s my sermon. Easy to ask for and nearly impossible to deliver. How do we do it? Sermon’s over, and I am back in cluelessville, but I do have one concrete suggestion. As I tried to demonstrate earlier, we are ourselves our own very best resource. Think about getting seconds in the Dairy Barn. You know how many times Dan Piner has asked me what I wanted over the past four years? And yet he’s always used full sentences, always addressed me, and he has certainly never been short. Next time you’re tempted to tease someone, or ignore one of these incidents, or order someone to turn off the lights, think about what Dan would do, or how he’d do it. Also, this is school — for all of us — and it’s okay to screw up every once in a while as long as we learn from it and try to do better in the future.

Not to end on a sorry note, I am really proud of having been a member of this community, where the degree of respect, especially among the students, is generally phenomenal. I am extraordinarily grateful to all of you for everything you have taught me. I’m speaking for myself, of course, but I suspect I’m expressing the feelings of almost every one here.

Any questions? So, for Monday, I’d like you to develop three high order polynomial expressions, and graph the third derivative of each.

Thank you very much.