The Old College Try

I am an enthusiastic lifelong learner with far-flung intellectual interests (just ask my coworkers when they accidentally mention one of them). Though I don’t work in the classroom, I still get to indulge my love of learning each fall, when members of the Admission Office visit classes. 

Every year, we split up to see different subjects so that we can speak authoritatively with prospective families about the important work happening in our school. 

For me, choosing which classes to visit is always difficult. I never know what to pick—even looking at the list can feel like surveying the table at a well-appointed feast. Since joining the school in 2022, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit classes as disparate as AP US Literature, Foundational Pre-Algebra, Physics, Computer Science, African Area Studies, Drawing, AP Statistics, and Studio Art. 

Seeing the “college preparatory” aspects of our curriculum on display is both humbling and invigorating. Often, I find that students are studying the same material I did as a college student. During my visit to African Area Studies, students were discussing how the geographic features of the continent had affected the movement of people and cultures. I’d had the same conversation as a college junior, in an elective course in East African history. That semester, at the second half of my undergraduate career, was the first time in my education that I’d seriously studied any part of the continent of Africa. I had a similar revelation during my visit to AP Statistics. As roughly a dozen students discussed the “68–95–99.7 Rule,” I flashed back to the day that I’d first learned the concept, sitting in a college lecture hall with 200 other students. 

Perhaps even more humbling is seeing students learn things that fall entirely outside my knowledge and ability. In Studio Art, the class created drawings inspired by the work of Alexander Calder: it was a joy watching students relinquish themselves to “the line” and create portraits that, though garbled, managed to retain the essence of their subjects. And all I can say about my visit to Computer Science is that students were learning the Hexadecimal system (the important thing is that the students understood it). 

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think this applies to learning any type of information, really. It’s a rare and beautiful feeling to be truly out of my depth…to know that everything I’ve ever learned was once as indecipherable to me as the Hexidecimal system. And I’m reminded that, even after I think I’ve learned everything there is to know about Dana Hall School, I find a place on campus that can still mystify me.