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

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

Behind the scenes

I often like to use the word authenticity when talking about Berwick Academy. I have said that I feel more able to be myself at Berwick than any place I have worked to date; it truly is a gift to feel that way. For parents, we usually focus on the teachers and coaches who make our kids’ lives so dynamic, and we forget the people behind the scenes who make the Berwick experience possible: maintenance, custodial, food, transportation, and support staff, etc. Berwick could not deliver the program it delivers without such high quality yet largely unheralded work. The same could be said of the Head of School. I am quick to point out that being a father is far more humbling than being a Head of School. There is no way on earth that I could have possibly moved this school forward without the unquestioned support of my wife, Amy. I often marvel that, in addition to dealing with a husband who can be tired and grumpy at the end of long days, she somehow has managed to catalyze the amazing...
1 comment
Read more