Tag Archives: learning

Message from Coach

by on 08. Feb, 2012 in Faculty, Fred Coleman

After a sound defeat by a gifted Cate team recently, I sent the following message to my boys [the varsity soccer team]:

I want you to know you behaved magnificently yesterday, and I am forever impressed with your mental toughness, spirit, and ability to hang together as a team under challenging circumstances. You never gave in, and that shows the heart of a champion. It is a distinct honor to coach you.

Looking at both games as a whole it strikes me that Cate was about two goals-a-game better and the difference was simply their ability to finish, which leads me to the crystal clear fact that we were able to create excellent chances on goal in the first half from early crosses, but that for reasons not fully understood, we failed to keep them coming after the break, and generated only one good chance on goal in the 2nd half (Willie’s excellent run and shot).

I believe our best chance to beat Cate (and any really accomplished team), should we meet in the post-season tourney, is to keep early crosses coming for the full 80 minutes. As you know, we have players capable of doing this well. So, in every game we play we will emphasize early crosses even more until it is natural to employ them several times each half. To win in the post-season we must be able to score against the excellent teams.

Now we must dedicate ourselves to continuing to play 80 minutes of superb soccer every game, and then see where the chips fall.

In this note we find the dominant characteristic of Thacher soccer teams over the years: a willingness to play with great passion and energy from the very beginning to the bitter end, regardless of the situation. And then there is always looking forward to the next practice with a plan to improve. The final whistle of our final game will mark my last look forward to the next practice, as I will step down after over thirty seasons of coaching our soccer players from 3rd team to varsity, boys and girls. It has been a great run, full of passion and drama, victory and defeat. I could not possibly have asked for more.

 

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Cambridge 12.3.2001

Cambridge Reconnect

by on 19. Dec, 2011 in Joy Sawyer Mulligan

In Boston a couple of weeks back, as a break in the conference action–the annual meeting of The Association of Boarding Schools–Michael and I went cross-town, over the Charles, and down to Bertucci’s on Harvard Square, there to meet a handful of CdeP’s most recent grads. Over pizza and salad, Leeah (Northeastern), Trevor (MIT), Steffi (Harvard), and David (Tufts)–each of whom had been an advisee or English student of either Michael or me–filled us in on their professors and classes, their roommates, potential majors, Thanksgiving just past and holidays on the horizon, and, generally, residential learning life, post-Thach.

“So, what did Thacher teach you well? What did you already know that, maybe, others are still learning?” I asked them.

Here, in their words, the take-aways foremost on their minds.

How to turn off my lights! No one does that the way we did at Thacher.

How to write a good paper.

How to manage my time.

How to have friends of all kinds in the dorm.

How to live with people my age.

How to balance the work and the social.

How to get creative with a salad bar.

 

Let’s hear it for Ojai Mixed Greens!

 

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Happy(er) Trails, hopefully

by on 09. Dec, 2011 in Kara Hooper

Last January, I sat down next to Cam Schryver in the dining hall to talk about the Thacher trails.  We have this amazing, extensive trail network, and as you might imagine, maintaining it is unwieldy–just when one trail is fully cleared, it seems the last one completed needs work again.  The Twin Peaks trail pushed me to action in this case; it was virtually impassable, and it is a beloved trail in our community.  Cam and I began working to rally students to come and help, and from January onward we worked just about every two weeks on Sundays.  By June, we had cleared Twin Peaks almost to the top, and people could certainly hike it.  Beyond the satisfaction of completing something came so many other benefits.  First, the physical satisfaction that comes with hiking, lopping, swinging a machete; the stunning views we took in while sitting on a boulder, eating lunch; the students I came to know that I had never encountered before on our campus.

As this new year has commenced, we are now tackling the Morgan Barnes trail, which serves as the backbone for our trail system on the Eastern side of our campus.  After several communal work days on Sunday, we had climbed the switchbacks at the beginning of the trail.  The winter sports season is now upon us, and for the first time that I can remember, a student has an Independent Project in trail work.  Will Kirkland, who has been a stalwart participant since last January in trail maintenance efforts, is carrying on for the next few months.  I try to get out there with Will at least twice a week.

Last Friday, we had a huge breakthrough with a hedgetrimmer.  After receiving training from Oscar Luna, who works in the Maintenance Department, about how to operate such a machine, Will and I headed out to Morgan Barnes and discovered that we could move twice as fast with with our brushing efforts.  This was thrilling after months of slow, steady progress.  We are working on a section of the trail that hugs the side of a hill and has lots of shale slides to deal with.  So, on Monday, Mike Vaughn, who does a lot of trail work in the Ojai Valley, came out and worked with Will, giving him some strategies to utilize in repairing the actual trail–also known as “tread.”

The collaborative nature of this project inspires me. I am not really the teacher, but a partner in this endeavor with Will, and when I head out there this afternoon, I will be the student, taking my cues on how to improve the tread from him.  And again, there are the intangible payoffs–the view of the sun setting over the Ojai Valley, and the knowledge that we are improving something for the use of many in the Thacher community, hopefully for many years.

 

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FacBlog12NewEdition

New bottle, old wine. Sort of.

by on 29. Nov, 2011 in Joy Sawyer Mulligan

Two years running, I tried a hand in each camp: one edition of The Catcher in The Rye (what we fondly came to call the “Wee Version”–the maroon cover most readers recall) in my right for the students who’d purchased that one, and in my left, the other–larger format, red carousel horse, sunshine yellow title, a reissue with 1950s cover art. Given how much in-the-text work we do, this juggling made me feel even clumsier than I actually am, but mostly it just took too much time to get everyone on the right page, right paragraph, right line. What with all that, plus reading glasses perpetually slipping southward on my nose and having to get to the other side of the room to re-up the heat every once in awhile, it was just too much.

So this year, we English 1 teachers were determined: it would be all for one and one for all, the reissue.  No choice.  And for me, sadly, the one with dramatically less marginalia and far fewer Post-its marking especially critical annotations.

Of course, on the plus side, the print was significantly bigger. And, serendipitously, another benefit: I had company. A student who’d studied the novel last year had, on our first day with Salinger, come smiling through the door with the Wee Version, confident that his thoughtful 8th-grader scribbles and highlighting would give him a leg up on the nightly reading and daily discussions. I tried rallying his better nature with the cry of the Three Musketeers, clapping him on the shoulder for emphasis– we’d be fellow travelers on a sail through the pages of a fresh, unmarked copy of the novel.

“Really? I can’t just use this one again?” He smiled hopefully.

“I know you’re comfortable with it, but no. If I can do it, you can do it. We’ll both wean ourselves off what we thought we thought about Holden. It’ll be fun.”

As the chapters ticked by, we both saw parts of the novel differently or more fully than before. For me, the very words on the page–a different font style and size from what had become so familiar to me over several years–yielded more meaning as I read each night’s assignment. In a sense, the medium was a whole new message–an object lesson in the value of even small changes for opening the mind one or two cranks wider.

 

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Earlier today…

by on 17. Nov, 2011 in Fred Coleman

Earlier today in class, after an introduction and brief discussion of analyzing rational functions, I turned the kids loose to spend the last twenty minutes of the period reviewing for a test tomorrow on material up to, but not including rational functions. As I moved around the room answering questions and helping students, I noticed a girl working on a challenging analysis of a rational function, and remarked, “Auden, that won’t be on the test tomorrow. Why are you working on it now”?

She looked up at me and said: “I just wanted to figure it out”.

Enough said.

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