Speech by Jon Miller
August 19, 2014
{As we embark upon the 35th year of classes here at NCSSM, humanities instructor Jon Miller shares with the staff some memories of what it was like at NCSSM that very first year—1980.}
~~~~~~~~~~
He lied to you. I'm not going to say a few words. I'm going to say way too many words.
Those headlines are a bit misleading. ["A Boost for Quality Education in the Triangle". "Science, Math School May Have Major Impact MIT Professor Says."]
Physically this place was a dump!
The buildings for years stood largely abandoned. Duke was sharing the not yet named Bryan facility with our small administrative staff; which in 1979 had begun to move on to its first floor; ...was slowly beginning to encroach onto the second.
Beall, Reynolds, and Watts were off limits; and they should have been! Paint was hanging off their walls in festoons. Water was standing everywhere.
Wyche, now Royall, had been condemned even while the nursing school was still using it. It became a boy's residence hall as we hoped to hasten its demise.
Hill became a girl's residence hall; and its basement housed the History and English faculty; and where the language lab is now, Ross Baker taught biology. Right out of the back door, were the woods that covered the back half of this lot. That was her lab.
The Athletic Facility was an outdoor swimming pool just outside the Hill classrooms; which made teaching in those classrooms, in the fall and in the spring, impossible.
Late that Friday night, before students were to arrive on Sunday, the painters finished their work in the dorms. The faculty, the residential staff, and the administration spent a hot Saturday cleaning up those dorms; putting mattress covers on the mattresses.
Neill Clark, my colleague in English, and I alternating between the swing blades and the mower, cut the grass around the dorms which was a foot and up to a foot and a half tall. John Armitage, who lived in Durham, and was a member of that first class, frantically put screens in the windows of the unairconditioned dorm rooms.
Students arrived on Sunday; every one of them having left a better equipped, finer physical plant than they were moving into.
Nonetheless they stayed, they graduated, they went to college, and they have remained remarkable supporters of their alma mater.
~~~~~~~~~~
The dump began to become pretty snazzy. In the second year, as I was helping Ross move some of the of her equipment to the brand new biology lab in Bryan, I remarked that she must be very pleased and excited; to which she replied, "You can teach a lot of biology in the woods".
It's a notion which reminds us that a grade school is not made up of just stuff. It's the folk, and it's their willingness to take advantage of what they've got.
Given the different definitions between vacation and work, there are still some small pleasures of coming back to school. Returners catch up with old friends. New folk begin to find colleagues who will unravel the mysteries. And there is a certain comfort of settling into the ways experience was made familiar.
But on that first day there were only vaguely familiar faces. There was no one to ask, because no one knew any more than the asker. There were no comfortable syllabi to organize the future. We had not really even been able to prepare during the summer, because we didn't know what to prepare for. There was to be a program; but nobody knew what the program was to be. We had each spent our summers building air castles in the sky.
But we were all sure, even in the midst of our dump, that we had been entrusted with something special. By some incredible fluke we were given charge of this great educational dream.
It had not been everybody's dream. The NCAE was opposed. The lieutenant governor had had to cast the tiebreaking vote in the legislature to establish the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics; and given the school dumbfounding freedom to shape its own program... its own destiny... as well.
Other than the name, the goal of excellence, a budget, and an admissions plan based on congressional districts; those of us who arrived on that first day were free to create the school; the education that we thought best. We were explicitly outside of, and free from, the expectations of the Department of Public Instruction. We had no connection to the University [of North Carolina system]. And everything seemed possible.
When we first gathered... all of us... almost 25 of us... including the faculty, the residential staff, and four administrators, in a conference room, that was just about where Katie Wagstaff's office is now; we were seated around the table, that couldn't quite fit all of us; leaving a few to sit in the corners around the room.
One of the first questions we addressed was how much student time each day would each of us require to provide excellent education in our areas. (When we toted it up... and I've lost my place....) This was it. This was our chance to get exactly what we wanted; what we needed; and what we had dreamed of. But when we toted that dream up we, discovered that we were requiring about a 38 hour working day. [Laughter] Maybe not everything was possible.
Out of necessity we talked on and on... we're still talking aren't we... we talked on and on; slowly realizing that my dream had to be part of your dream; had to become a part of our dream. And by the time the students had arrived, all that serious talk... (and NASA sending a man to the moon had never talked so high mindedly, or so seriously.)... all that talk had created a serious sharply focused academic plan to speed 16 year-olds well on their way to graduate school. It was pretty much to be books and classrooms.
Unfortunately, the students themselves arrived. [Laughter]
Within the first week some of those young people, not party to our serious talk, not aware of our graduate school plan, approached Branson Brown; he of Brown field, out back. He was our athletic coordinator; and they said to him, "Why not a cross country team?" He made a few phone calls; bought a few t-shirts; took them to Joe Liles, the art teacher, who stenciled NCSSM on them; and by the end of the first week, we had the beginnings of a varsity athletic program.
By the end of the year, we also were in the student government business. We were also in the prom business. Addled, and probably misplaced, opposition to cheerleaders lingered for several more years; but inevitability is inevitable, and soon we had the cheerleading squad.
Clearly the "graduate school" was beginning to learn how to coexist with the high school.
~~~~~~~~~~
The experience... these experiences and so many subsequent ones have taught us, and continue to teach us, that our dreams and ideas need to start big; and all the constituencies and all the folk, need to sit at the table believing that all things are possible.
In the process we need to constantly remind ourselves that we are pretty free. We still aren't part of, or subject to, the Department of Public Instruction. While we are now part of the University [of North Carolina system], they really haven't entered our world too forcefully. We were not for years even in the accreditation box, because we thought the process would be too limiting and too shaking of our program. We didn't officially compute grade point averages for two decades; and even without GPAs and accreditations, our students still got into college... good colleges... and won scholarships... big scholarships.
Just as we did then, we need now to remind ourselves that dreams have a lot of room here to grow; and they can grow! We can almost write our own book.
We also have to remind ourselves that choosing a possibility sometimes eliminates other desirable possibilities. Thus we tried then... just as we continue to try... to make boxes large enough and inclusive enough to fit, and to be ready immediately to renovate them, or to begin again. And the lack of a team makes them limiting. Varsity athletics and home sickness also reminded us that it is inevitable and proper for 16 year-olds to remain 16. This of course led to a much larger code of conduct than we had had. [Laughter]
~~~~~~~~~~
Steve Davis, the first chairman of our Mathematics Department, often said that we don't teach subject material, but we teach young people. If we teach them, the subject matter will follow. A very practical application of this of this "people primacy" principle came in his suggestion at our first comment writing session, that we first needed to have something both real and nice to say. Then we needed to define a problem, if there was one, and suggest a solution, if there was one. And then we needed to end with something nice. Twice a year I think of this; and, however difficult, try to follow its prescription. The academic business is the people business; but this teacher sometimes needs to be reminded of it.
My fellow grass cutter, Neill Clark often and memorably reminded us in our early discussions of curriculum, personnel policies, and contracts, of what faculty should be called; of how often tutorial should be held and when; that we needed to be careful of the "grand thing" / "grand name" distinction. We are at our best when we focus on the "grand thing" and forget the "grand name". If we do as the legislature legislated... if we are excellent... the name will come.
And it came early. In the first several years we were everywhere; on the news and in the newspapers. One could hardly walk across campus without bumping into the New York Times reporter; or one from LA... one from Washington... one from Louisville. We were featured on the covers of major news magazines.
Nobel Prize winners were on our board. A grand name idea for a "Laureate Village" out back was floated briefly for a while. This was an idea where Nobel laureates would come. There'd be cottages built out there; and they would pad around the paths in their slippers, and interact with juniors and seniors in high school. It didn't happen. [laughter] We built a baseball field instead. [laughter]
~~~~~~~~~
Representatives from other states came and questioned, and returned home to start schools much like ours; unconsciously very different from ours. I was once asked by a new faculty member if this were some kind of special school. Well, we were then... we are now... a very special school; a model school.
And still they come. Last year, a Virginia delegation, hoping to turn what they had learned here into their own school. The president of the Oklahoma school was here to find new energy; new ways for his school.
So we begin this year again.
Much has changed. We have new stuff... more stuff... better stuff. But the real NCSSM is much as was at its beginning. This room is full of people with dreams and notions of excellence that we need to share.
And by week's end we will have young people; always the same on the first day. Their entering test scores are just about what they always were, when we adjust for recentering of the test. They are bright; ...eager; ...proud; ...terrified. They are ready to learn.
They will be different when they graduate, because they are coming to a school with different boxes, large and small; in a different time. But they will be equally good; and just as proud of their time here as was that first class.
I know that Ginger Wilson, John Williams, and Clinton Gregg, and I are proud of what succeeding generations... of what you have made of this school that we came to long ago.
~~~~~~~~~~
The YouTube Video of this speech can be seen at the following link:
https://youtu.be/P_1pnE2uhm8?si=0AAP1794WO54h2kV
{NCSSM, a publicly funded high school in North Carolina, provides exciting, high-level STEM learning opportunities.
If you appreciate this video, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the NCSSM Foundation. Thank you!
Please attribute this work as being created by the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. This work is licensed under creative commons CC-BY-NC-SA
No comments:
Post a Comment