Faculty Advisors
Shepherd Young Strategists

According to Janet Lin ’97, the 28-year-old chief of staff for Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Dan O’Connell, activities outside of class are what help you define who you are; they help you come to an understanding of yourself as a distinct person. At Milton today, announcements and exhortations positioned to catch the passing eye crowd the walls as they always have. Add to that email conferences laden with debate, information, schedules, assignments and deadlines. Opportunities outside of class, say faculty who advise the many organizations and projects, seem to be multiplying.

Sixteen student organizations are devoted to service, national and international political activity, and fund raising—these are apart from groups that focus on culture and identity, journalism, and the arts. Several of the 16 include subgroups that act as clubs on their own. The twenty faculty members who advise those groups met to help describe the public life at Milton today: the students they work with, the goals students set, the challenges they encounter, and what they learn.

Advising high schoolers eager to take on (or change) the world is a specialized craft in itself and no single template works universally. Students are crossing a developmental threshold during these years.

As engaged, idealistic teenagers they encounter everything from bureaucratic red tape, sensitive political turf and lackluster response to outsized success and community exaltation.

Faculty are often amazed at the competence of even the younger students. “Some come,” says Community Service advisor Andrea Geyling, “deeply committed, eager to involve their peers, and gifted at logistics.” Then, of course, others need a lot of “support,” as Andrea gently puts it, to understand the responsibility they take on when they commit to something.

“I’m always surprised by how big and ambitiously they dream, how strategically they think,” says Ann Foster (History Department) who advises Amnesty International. Her chairs this year wanted to heighten the visibility of Amnesty and the awareness of Amnesty’s issues, which the student leaders called “abstract and somewhat distant issues for high school students to really care about.” So, building on JAMNESTY, their hugely successful fund-raising concert of last spring, they proposed and pulled off “Human Rights Week” this fall, with an activity every day, ending with a Friday-night discussion with a Darfur survivor. “I’m happy when they progress from designing and selling tee shirts to holding open meetings on things like the treatment of prisoners,” Ann says, “and they do.”

So much happens through email, the faculty said, with some amazement. Con-necting, explaining, organizing, assigning, marketing, signing up, reporting results—email speeds functions up, and perhaps contributes to students taking on more than they should. It’s more of a tool than a substitution for personal contact. Bell Athayu (Class III), from Thailand, sent this response to a question about the group she started:

Hello Ms. Everett,

I am one of the student leaders of the Free the Children club. We started the group this year as a fund-raising club, hence our main goal this year is to fund raise for improvements in the lives of children around the world. We are officially registered as a high school chapter of Free the Children (for more information on the organization, please visit www.freethechildren.org). Right now, we have about 10–15 committed members who attend our meetings regularly on Fridays.

Our first fund-raising event is coming up this Tuesday. We will hold a sale for people to buy bags of holiday treats for themselves, friends, or teachers. We will then deliver the candy bags to people’s mailboxes the following week. Another upcoming sale that we have scheduled is in January. We will be selling Starbucks’ bottled Frappuccinos during exam week. All of the money we raise will be donated to Free the Children and will be put towards building schools, buying school supplies, and sponsoring clean water and health care for children in Asia and Africa. We are aiming to raise $1,000 from the two fund-raising events.

We also have many fund-raising events planned for the spring, such as a sticker sale and “mini swap-it.”

I hope the information was helpful. If you have any more questions about our club, please feel free to email me.

Thank you,

Bell


Milton’s connection with Boston is another defining feature of extracurricular activities; it changes the character of what students can do to further their interests. The Community Service program connects 200 students in weekly service at 28 sites, including the Milton area and Boston. Every student on the Community Service Board manages the relationships with the adults at one or two sites. That means—with Andrea Geyling’s training—they determine the site’s needs, check in periodically about how the Milton students are doing there, and help evaluate what went well and what might be changed.

Through parents, local graduates and Web sites, students find—among Boston’s riches—the speakers, experts in a field, practitioners or advocates who will come to campus to engage with students at debates, Straus Desserts, club meetings or fundraisers. “They find the speakers, they invite them, they make the arrangements, do the promoting, and then introduce them to the crowd when they come,” says Sally Dey of the History Department, advisor for students on the Public Issues Board who plan Straus Desserts.

Of course, guiding students who like to act as independent agents provides some “teaching moments” for the advisors, as well. The email that wasn’t appropriately crafted, the follow-up that wasn’t definitive, the details that might have been more helpful, the assumptions that were faulty, the conversation that needed more finesse—these are “effective” mistakes: that is, you must own them, they stick in your memory, they change how you do something the next time.

Another area that advisors watch carefully at Milton is students’ intense desire to engage each other and the adults in wrestling with the complex ideas and events of our time. The debates that surge through online conferences, whether they start in the Young Republicans conference or class conference (each Class, IV through I, has its own conference), sometimes erupt into the campus mainstream conversation. Lessons about honest dialogue, respect for others’ points of view, the effects of carelessly written opinions, understanding your role in a community: these are frequently difficult, but if handled well, by skilled teachers, coaches and student leaders, these can turn into life skills that seem rare enough in the adult world. Involved students make gains in political sensitivity and savvy, communication skills, and resilience (learning not to take everything personally).

Students want to talk about things. Common Ground, the group that promotes cross-cultural dialogues and activities, is running the second year of a successful film series. Students pick films that involve issues like class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability and disability, and race—Real Women Have Curves, School Ties and Good Will Hunting. They arrange the couches in Straus to promote comfortable group viewing, thinking and discussing. They market the series, attract the group and then facilitate the conversation. Typically, 50 students participate in these Friday-night events. THIN, the award-winning film of recent visiting artist and photographer Lauren Greenfield, drew a full house.

The groups’ leaders moderate difficult conversations, and students often teach their peers more directly. Under the umbrella of the Public Issues board, a smaller group (80 students) work on the Model UN program. This group participates in three major weekend-long conferences each year. The first is at Harvard, where 2,300 students participate from around the world; the second is the New York National High School Model UN (NHSMUN), held at the UN building, and the third is a May conference in Boston, sponsored by the UN Association of Greater Boston and held at Northeastern University. Students meet nearly weekly to prepare one another for these conferences. They do research and develop position papers, which the board meets to review. Two students, Alicia Driscoll and Olivia Greene, teach the newer students techniques involved in developing excellent position papers for the model UN meetings.

In many ways, these students are like those of earlier generations: energetic, caring, and curious. They are quite different in one significant way, however. They are digital children. Unfazed by what may be unfamiliar, they know exactly how to find and use information. Part of their wiring tells them that whatever they need is within their reach, that there are many ways to think about solving problems, that there are people around the world they can see and “talk to” about anything at all. The Internet is a source of knowledge and power, and they are familiar with using both.

Students may start out ahead of faculty in technological fluency, but they have room to grow in many areas. These activities give students a chance to get their hands dirty (literally, if they’re active in Habitat for Humanity), work side-by-side with other socioeconomic groups, witness the impact of their decisions, and learn how to reflect on what they’ve observed. Other more complex and subtle learning opportunities come their way as well. David Smith (English Department) mentions that the leaders learn to cultivate successors; Heather Flewelling (Director of Student Multicultural Programs) notes that they can learn how to generate buy-in from the rest of the community. Heather has also observed that students learn to listen to other positions, not “solely for the purpose of gaining the counterpoint. They need to understand different perspectives to design a successful strategy.”

Elected leadership has its own learning curve. Students in the Self-Governing Association find that having power is not always easy. Knowing more, being on the inside track, becoming aware of a picture bigger than most students see, has a downside. Students have to absorb flak, for instance, for not delivering on a promise, or for understanding why a promise can’t be fulfilled. They are accountable, as well, for disciplinary decisions, because they sit as equals in a committee evenly divided between faculty and students—an experience they particularly value.

If working with students in these many ways seems very time-consuming, it is. Helping students achieve a balance between what they’d like to do, what they need to do, and what they can do, is often difficult. When students are passionate about their interests, helping them see the need to pull back from something is a tough sell. Faculty need to insist upon accountability, physical presence, and the idea that they’re not in this alone: their friends and the community depend upon them.

The dominant experience, as one faculty member put it, is “amazing relationships between students and adults all over campus.” Undertaking all these projects and programs is consistent with Milton values. “We have a high-powered intellectual community here,” Heather sums up, “and this outside-of-class activity is a normal part of trying on identity—finding out who I am.”

Cathleen Everett

 

Back to Magazine