Skip to main content

Honoring our faculty and staff

Last night we celebrated as an employee community. Each January, we come together as faculty and staff to share a meal with our trustees and honor great teaching and other work at Berwick. We honored ten year and twenty-five year employees and heard from our Teacher of the Year from 2016. Given that this happens to be my tenth year as well, it was a particularly powerful night to reflect upon all that is special about Berwick Academy.

I was struck once again by the exceptional people who make Berwick what it is today. Thirty-seven year maintenance staff member Paul Calo spoke to the pride he takes in making sure jobs are truly “finished” on his watch. While he admitted that not everyone here would know if he offered this level of care, it mattered to him as this was now “his world.” Polly Davie spoke about the key ingredients of fabulous teaching: 1) Loving your subject and 2) Loving children. The simplicity was powerful. Seeing pictures of Berwick Academy twenty and thirty years ago as we followed these careers once again reminded me just how far this place has come.

Marc Small concluded the evening by speaking openly about his teaching journey and his passion for the tenants of Curriculum 2020. Hearing that it was actually the culture and environment of Berwick that finally allowed him to stretch and grow into the teacher he wanted to become once again filled me with great pride about the professional community we have created here. But in every case, these employees mentioned our students as the reason they found meaning in their work. The students kept them young, always said thank you, and forced them to grow. They have been the greatest gift of all.


Berwick Academy is a magical place. It feels like yesterday when I saw this campus for the first time in 2007, but it is a great feeling to now truly know it as home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Piercing the Bubble

This week we were so fortunate to have former NH Senator Kelly Ayotte address grades 7 – 11 in our theater about Civil Discourse in a time of Political Polarization. Senator Ayotte spoke to the need to take the high road in tough conversations and put an incredible primacy on building relationships with people who hold different opinions. She was able to speak to some of her own successes in working across the aisle to develop legislation to address the opioid crisis in New Hampshire as one powerful example of how this can be possible. Additionally, Senator Ayotte offered a strong reminder to our students of the need for more women in positions of leadership within our government, citing that she had only been the 53rd woman to serve in the US senate during her tenure. With a down-to-earth style and but an appropriately impassioned call to action, she challenged our students to become the leaders that they could be. Her call to action and example of service were powerful reminder...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inspiration Commons

All this week, I have been sneaking into the library every six hours or so. With our new Inspiration Commons set to open over the weekend, the final details are being installed and the results are spectacular. For me, it is so rewarding to see how our donor community has rallied behind the notion of an educational experience that will be hands-on and engaging. Just walking through the new fabrication studio, as the new tools were being unpacked, there was an unspoken energy in the room that it was time to build something. The teachers who were being trained on the equipment simply had smiles on their faces. So did I. But standing on the second floor, looking down over the new balcony, one realizes that the Inspiration Commons has very little to do with technology in the end. Surveying new furniture and the new organization of space, I could envision how kids will want to be in this space - together. They will want to have conversations, collaboration, and time to make their ideas ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Arts Underground

One of Berwick’s great strengths is its arts culture, and I have always felt that there is both a public and private face of this culture. The public face includes our amazing concerts, our ambitious productions, and the various art shows we produce throughout the year. The private face tends to include things like private lessons, coffeehouses, assembly performances, murals painted on walls, and unexpected artistic expressions that emerge on campus throughout the year. One of the great traditions I will miss at Berwick will be the annual recital week in April. So many of our students hone their craft on private music lessons throughout the year in the hopes of having a public performance at this time. Simultaneously, we have a week of performances in the theater and in Chip Harding’s coffeehouse lair – the space he likes to refer to as his “smoldering ruins,” referring to the carnage left there after every Middle School electric guitar class. This year, for my second and final time, I...
Post a Comment
Read more