by Assistant Head of School Rob Phillips
Like many in their early twenties, it took me a while to find a clear sense of direction.
So it was my good fortune to have an opportunity in those years to move to Alaska and live on a remote homestead with my uncle, aunt, and three cousins. I quickly discovered that academic and athletic accomplishments, literary knowledge, and a passionate interest in philosophy and politics were useless in working the business end of a chainsaw, in responding to the daily realities of winds and tides, and in countless other daily chores.
My failures culminated on a wet, cold morning when, after watching me struggle to judge the speed and angle of the boat we were using to pull logs off a beach, my 13-year old cousin pushed me out of the way, took over steering the boat, and abandoned her usual polite manner to ask, “How can somebody know so much stuff, but know so little about stuff that really matters?” She took over running the boat for the rest of the day, and I tried to offer some help as her deckhand; mostly I tried to stay out of her way.
Later that same night, I sat by a fire on the beach trying to make sense of what was becoming more and more apparent: that despite having read thousands of pages written by Alaskan historians and explorers, I was completely unprepared to be a contributing member of a wilderness household. The situation was, I concluded, hopeless, and the only logical response was to return to Seattle.
The next morning, my uncle suggested we take the day off and go fishing. After giving me time and space to reflect, he nosed the boat into a beautiful bay. Pointing up to the waterfalls glistening on sheer granite cliffs, to eagles circling overhead, and to a group of sea lions sleeping on the beach, he said, “This is what you came here to be a part of―everything we’re looking at. And that’s your problem: You haven’t moved past the picture of Alaska that you have in your mind. You’re much better at talking about the wilderness than you are at living in it.”
He paused for a minute, taking in the eagles overhead and the sound of the tide pushing against the rocks, and then continued: “A lot of people come to Alaska with big ideas, and most of them don’t even last a few days up here. So while you haven’t failed by comparison, you haven’t succeeded yet, either. My advice is to take advantage of this opportunity to live in and to begin to really understand the wilderness.”
We stopped talking but kept fishing. It was a beautiful day on the water, and the fishing was good, so it was late in the sunny Alaskan summer evening when we returned home with a full day’s catch. The underlying point my uncle was making was underscored by the need to clean several hundred pounds of salmon―we didn’t have a refrigerator, so the fish needed to be quickly cleaned so that we could smoke or can them.
Surprisingly, I began to enjoy the work. As the hours rolled by, I started to become less awkward with the fillet knife, and the satisfaction of seeing fresh salmon fillets pile up beside me took hold. We labored into the night cleaning the fish and tending the alder-wood fire in the smokehouse. Before I knew it, we had stayed up the entire night working. The last step in the long day’s work was to gather up the salmon scraps and load them in the boat for use in the crab pots.
On our way home from setting the pots, my uncle asked, “Do you want to go back to the house and get some sleep, or keep fishing?”
“Keep fishing,” I replied. And that was all that needed to be said.
Before that moment, I’d loved the idea of Alaska, but understanding the reality took seeing the process through―chasing, catching, cleaning and preparing salmon―to move past the idea to reality, and to begin to understand that powerful ideas are best served when married to concrete action.
I think back often on those pivotal days in Alaska, especially now that I have children of my own. And the topic of struggling with challenges comes up time and again in talking to prospective and current Seattle Academy families. As Joe Puggelli often says, parents’ hopes for their children’s experiences are often based on the possibilities created by an individual’s Basket of Talents: How many Talents Born, Talents Made, and Talents Discovered are in your basket? If there is an implicit premise of the Seattle Academy experience, it is that all three require the marriage of idea and action, a lesson I had learned to appreciate in Alaska.
And while I share with other parents the concern that my children will fail to develop their innate Talents Born and acquire Talents Made, the concern that keeps me up at night is the fear that they’ll miss out on Talents Discovered. It’s tragic that so many students fail to even know about the existence of a potential path or passion because they quite simply never have the opportunity or the encouragement to try something new. That’s one of the reasons we’ve created a program at Seattle Academy that stresses Excellence and Participation, and it’s why there are so many examples of graduates who, over the course of their Seattle Academy experience, found an aptitude or interest that changed the course of their lives.
In the case of 2011 graduate Ben Symons, the door was opened by faculty members who were actively seeking to broaden his perspective.
As Speech and Debate Coach Joel Underwood recounts:
“Early in Ben’s freshman year, history teacher Halsey Bell called me during break one morning and said he wanted to send by one of his advisees who was feeling ‘less than fully challenged.’ While Halsey knew the Speech team starts in the tenth grade, he believed his advisee was uniquely well-suited to what I was doing in the program, and would I be open to at least meeting him and talking about options?
“‘It’s unusual,’ I said, ‘but I suppose so. Tell him to come see me and we’ll talk about it.’ No sooner had I hung up the phone than Ben was at my classroom door: ‘Hello. Halsey said to come meet you.’
“Only in retrospect did I realize that that morning had quietly begun our team’s journey to national prominence: a call, a knock, a conversation.”
Ben went on, during his four years in Speech and Debate, to win six regular season tournament championships, two state championships, qualify for Nationals three times, win a National Forensic League Degree of Special Distinction, and finish third in Storytelling at the National Tournament of Champions. A National Merit finalist and now a first-year at Yale University, Ben had the intellectual and creative horsepower to succeed in any number of areas. But had his advisor not recognized that Ben needed a nudge in a new direction, and had teacher Joel Underwood not been willing and able to recognize, direct, and encourage Ben’s talent, it’s quite likely that Speech and Debate would have been, for Ben Symons, the road not taken.
Rylie DeGarmo graduated from Seattle Academy in the spring of 2011 as a star vocalist in the national award-winning Seattle Academy vocal jazz group, The Onions, and as a soccer player who was one of the school’s all-time leading scorers; but Rylie’s early performances in both soccer and vocal did not reflect her talent and potential. Finally, her soccer coach pulled her aside, and said, “Rylie, you aren’t trusting in your own ability. Keep the ball! You can do great things, but only if you keep the ball, instead of waiting for somebody else to step up to the moment.”
Soon, her vocal director, Mark Hoover, took up the same mantra, encouraging her to unleash her vocal talent for the benefit of the group instead of automatically choosing a background role. And while her ability to “keep the ball” resulted in two soccer state championships (Rylie scored the game-winning goal in one of them) and national awards for The Onions, her greatest performance occurred in the challenging Honors American Studies course.
The culminating project for the class is the Civil Disobedience Project wherein students are given a case study―set in a hypothetical urban high school―that presents them with a Gordian Knot of constitutional issues and moral injustices.
The student groups are required to synthesize constitutional law, the writings of Thoreau and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., propose a plan of negotiation to remove the injustices detailed in the scenario, and, if Plan A fails, to go to Plan B, an act of civil disobedience that stands a reasonable chance of forcing parties back to the negotiation table.
After a forty-five minute presentation, the student group must respond effectively to a rigorous hour of cross examination by a team of teachers, lawyers, and community leaders. Rylie’s work in the project was outstanding: Her responses to the tough questioning were so good that a visiting panelist, who also happened to be a past president of the Washington Bar Association, leaned over to the faculty panelists and said, “That young lady is exceptional. And I don’t mean ‘exceptional’ by high school standards; I mean by professional standards. Please give her my business card; I’d be happy to give her a recommendation, but what I’d really like to give her is a job.”
When asked after the Civil Disobedience Project how she overcame her tendency to slip into the background, Rylie smiled and said, “Every time I was asked a tough question, I just reminded myself to keep the ball.”
When we talk about how the school’s culture helps translate individual and group potential into achievement we refer to “growth from the inside out.” Annapolis graduate and physics teacher Bill Woodman spent years of his life underwater as the commander of a nuclear submarine. Bill often tells his students, “Sometime in your life, a test will come, and you usually won’t see it coming. So take seriously the habits that will serve you well when the test comes.” And, as Bill also points out, “when the test comes, you can’t be certain who else will be there to help you take it, so make sure you develop an internal compass that you can trust and count on.”
We believe that real achievement is the product of students taking control of their lives because they’re engaged in real ways in their education; but look a layer deeper, and there will almost always be a teacher, coach or advisor who is guiding that process along.
Simon Jeynes, a nationally respected consultant and writer from Independent School Management, visited Seattle Academy in January of 2011, and he said it best: “I’ve visited nearly 90 schools on behalf of ISM, and your faculty is in the top 5% of all of the schools I’ve been to. They have résumés that any school would die for, but in addition they have the trust and respect of their students, a trust and respect that can’t be dictated by policies or by résumés. And as a result, your students are achieving remarkable success, and I mean success in the broadest sense. Your faculty is outstanding, and as a result your program is remarkable.”
Simon’s observations were valuable because he confirmed what we think is critical: That while Talents Discovered may be supported by the right program and the right school culture, a student’s step towards discovery requires both the courage to venture along a new path and the resilience to stick to that path, to weather discouragement and frustration, and to continue forward long enough for good responses to become good habits. And it is often the right teacher, coach, or director urging a student forward that is the catalyst for a student’s decision to undertake a journey and for that student’s willingness to complete it.
As we sat in the boat that afternoon in Alaska my uncle put into actions his parenting philosophy: “Sometimes the most important thing is to tell your kids exactly what they need to hear, because otherwise they’ll never face their problems head on. The rest of the time, the most important thing is to not tell your kids exactly what they need to hear, because you’ll rob them of the chance to figure out their problems for themselves.”
He never directly addressed the possibility that I’d give in to doubt, head back to Seattle, and miss an invaluable opportunity to learn from adversity and turn failure into success; that I’d be one step closer to becoming what parents fear as a potential outcome of their children’s education: An adult who fails to respond to adversity, and who lacks the confidence, character, and skills to take control of their own life.
Instead, he helped me to understand the problem and then he helped me in the doing of the things that were the solution.
Which brings us back, again, to relationships: Without the presence of the right mentoring teacher at the right moment, it’s all too likely that students will choose―as I almost did that morning in Alaska―to pack their bags, get on the metaphorical plane home, and be left wondering about the road not taken.
Or, in the words of a recent graduate, when asked to sum up what he valued about his experience at Seattle Academy, “The faculty. They got me to try things I never considered, kept me from quitting when I wanted to bail out on something I’d decided to try, and helped me experience success when all I saw were my own limitations. The fact that you can see doors opening up in front of you doesn’t mean you’ll go through them―sometimes you need somebody there for a push or a pull. So I appreciate the opportunities, but I’m most grateful for the people.”
This article was originally published in the 2011-2012 issue of Best of SAAS, Seattle Academy’s annual magazine.
