Each year, a few of our Waterford faculty and staff members are presented with the Educator Prize Award to acknowledge their outstanding teaching and impact on our community. In addition to the honor given for their exemplary service, each award carries a stipend to further the educator’s formal education, research, writing, travel, or scholarly activities. The stipends are awarded by the Head of School based on the written recommendations of faculty peers and colleagues and selected based on their experience at Waterford, passion for learning, and influence on students and colleagues. Congratulations to Sari Rauscher (Director of College Counseling), Matt Robertson (LS Music Teacher), and Erika Munson (MS/US Librarian, English Teacher, and Class XII Dean). 

Below are transcriptions of the remarks made by the 2024 Educator Prize Winners:

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Erika Munson 

MS/US Librarian, English Teacher, and Class XII Dean

I have never been The Cool Teacher. I have no fascinating past from which to pull spellbinding stories. My responsibilities don’t include coaching or Outdoor leadership. I am a stranger in the strange land of Tick-Tock influencers, Youtube channels, gaming, and AI companions.  The classroom as a stage doesn’t really suit me,  I’m an introvert who recharges in solitude. The final blow to any hope of coolness are my roles as dean and librarian.  I lurk in the hallway ready to pounce on an unsuspecting student to talk about “expectations.” I shush you in the library when you are putting off homework and giggling hysterically with your friends. 

Where’s the cool in that?

I comfort myself with knowledge that the cool is in the classroom conversation. Writers speak to readers and readers talk back.

Tuesday morning. Room 716,  Contemporary Poetry.  Although there are a few diehard poetry fans in this class, (the names have been changed to protect our Waterford alumni) most are here because it fits their schedule.  They’ve all encountered  poetry from many eras over their Waterford career, but there’s still skepticism.  Is poetry a mystery that only the elect can interpret?  Random words on a page? Where’s the story in a poem? 

Having just returned from winter break, we are reading “New Year’s Poem” by Margaret Avison. It is a meditation on the memory of a Christmas party and the present New Year’s moment. Avison takes us on a journey—from her home’s interior out to the surrounding landscape, up to the heavens, and inside ourselves. We get to a particularly thorny line: 

I remember   
Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;

A fond memory of a friend (Anne) moves quickly to an invocation of death. I ask the class what they think of that transition—what do we do with “the stiff grave/where cold so little can contain?” Emmy starts, “Well, it’s kind of like, um, it’s hard to explain.” I love it when  students bravely raise their hands before they are sure that they can articulate what they are feeling. You can see the wheels turning. 

Simon, who has a flair for the dark and dramatic, says a stiff grave must be an old grave. Bones, bodies.

Emmy looks into the far distance, still working. I want to give it to her but I resist. The seconds tick by.  Her classmates are quiet—giving her the space she needs. One of my students calls this being “silent together” different from the palpable bafflement, the dead air that every teacher dreads (and we have all experienced): This alternative—this cooperative quiet—can occur in the middle of a  discussion, during a writing exercise (the only sound the scratching of pens on paper)  or during a class walk around the quad where we observe the natural world as a poet would.  

Emmy’s back: “Escape…that’s the word I wanted. It’s about what leaves the grave, what can’t stay in there.”  Yes. I think,  The persistence of memory.  Now my wheels are turning.  That word, “persistence” where did it come from? Oh yes, The Salvador Dali painting! La Persistència de la Memòria. Time becomes fluid. 

The next two lines of the poem give us a more concrete image to hold on to:

I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, 

Milo is a three-season athlete who loves biology and spends lots of time outside. First he helps us establish that the setting of this poem must be urban: sparrows and starlings are city birds (I silently thank Mark Bromley). Then he goes back to that troublesome grave. “It reminds me of the way memories get lost when someone dies. You can’t keep them. Over time they escape, they’re gone.” Now we’ve got a conversation going: poet to student to student. Avison has set the stage for Emmy to conclude that memory is stronger than death, for Milo to contemplate memory’s eventual dissolution,  and for Simon to get creeped out.

There is a genre of Italian renaissance painting referred to as the  Sacra Conversazione. These paintings depict saints and divine figures in conversation. It is a departure from medieval groupings that were stiff and hierarchical. In The Sacred Conversation, figures have a relationship to each other in three dimensional space  They are aware of one another: explicating texts, listening, pointing, even those whose gaze looks out into the middle distance seem to be part of the group.  It’s that “silent together” thing. You see the wheels turning. 

If it’s not too absurd to compare modern day adolescents: skeptical, stressed, and searching, with perfectly composed divine figures of classical beauty, it is that conversation I’m after in English class It is the reason I welcome students to the library.  It’s what I hope they’ll take with them when they graduate. A conversation unbound by time.

I  love the story—probably a myth—that Alexander the Great had his teacher Aristotle’s annotated copy of the Iliad under his pillow every night. It speaks to what was popularized  by Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago as The Great Conversation through the ages. Not only does it reflect a student’s devotion to a wise teacher, but that teacher’s debt to those who went before him: in this case the Homeric bards who had been singing the Iliad from memory for centuries before Aristotle arrived on the scene. Backwards, forwards, and sideways this exchange continues. My goal is to give my students the tools to take their rightful place in this tradition and to enlarge it with new books, new voices: new mirrors, windows and doors. 

It’s spring now, and this term I have four brave seniors taking my seminar with the daunting title “Sacred Texts and Literary Responses.”   It’s a new class for me—inspired by a  summer professional development course and refined with the help of my colleagues in our Critical Friends Group. Our syllabus is a preposterous whirlwind trip through great religious texts. They’ve been eager and curious—even in the context of Senior Spring!

We’ve also read contemporary short stories that are informed in one way or another by these traditions.

The final assignment asks students to write their own creative piece of fiction that wrestles with the ideas we’ve encountered:  What is a moral life? What is eternal? What is our duty? Halley submits a haunting piece about grief and separation. A story within a story, the narrator tells of a grieving mother he loved who conceived of death’s separation as:

… nothing more between us than a thin wall of ice….I might say instead that we’re under the ice. Our loved ones are just waiting for us to break through to them.

Interesting. Hopeful in terms of the proximity of the dead to the living but that image of someone trapped under the ice is unsettling. It will stay with me for a long time. 

Three weeks later we’ve graduated another Waterford class and I’m relishing the pause that late June affords a teacher. I luxuriate in a documentary on Andrew Wyeth, an American artist who among many other things, used landscape to explore the human experience of constancy and change. An art historian is talking about Wyeth’s painting, Thin Ice. A dark pond full of dead leaves is covered in a thin layer of ice. But highlighted in a discreet, diagonal ray of sunshine, is one leaf poking up through the ice. It’s caught there, glistening, half in and half out—bringing the worlds of the dead and the living together.

I am immediately back in Halley’s story. The ice, the hope, what is free and what is trapped.  It’s one of those gifts my students give me. Connection. I can even move back to Milo and Emmy’s competing interpretations of that stiff grave in the New Years’ poem: what is lost and what remains. A conversation that began in English class is now reaching across disciplines, giving me more points of reference, more insight into how I’ll teach it the next time.

My daughter Nicola, Waterford class of 2017, is an assistant teacher at St.Mark’s Episcolpal, a K-6 school in Altadena California. On January 8 the school burned to the ground. No one in the community was injured but many of their families lost everything. Two weeks after the fire, St. Mark’s resumed classes in a local church. Now they’re in modular classrooms for two years while they rebuild. Next year’s enrollment is down by a third, forcing painful staffing decisions. 

What would remain if our beautiful campus, recently taken to new heights, were to disappear overnight? The question moves beyond even man-made climate disasters to the current man-made threats to the liberal arts. Can The Conversation survive difficult times like these? 

Well, remember you’re listening to someone who just compared her students to renaissance saints, who thinks she can teach religious literacy in 11 weeks, who considers it worth her while to challenge political polarization one conversation at a time.

Several years ago I came upon an essay by the Reverend Victoria Safford that has given me comfort amid the chaos.  She talks about the difference between simple optimism and “standing at the gates of hope.”  She characterizes these gates as:

“…the piece of ground from which you see the world  both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.”

All of us who touch the lives of our students every day, do our work at the gates of hope. So no, I’ll never be the Cool Teacher, and my classroom may not be The School of Athens,

Or an Enlightenment Salon,

Or the hub of the Harlem Renaissance,

Or (and maybe this is a good thing) The Algonquin Round Table:

But on any given day I have the opportunity–which is not to say I pull it off every time– but I believe I have the chance to connect these good people:

to those who have gone before. When I’m on my game,  I’m honored to be a guide, a witness, a challenger; welcoming all  into The Conversation, confident that there is always room in this space for the curiosity, connection and courage our spirits and our democracy depend upon.  

Cool, cool, cool.

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Sari Rauscher

Director of College Counseling

Good afternoon. My name is Sari Rauscher and I am the Director of College Counseling. I’m thrilled and honored to be given this award. The Value of Education would be the title of this talk. I wanted to share a couple of anecdotes for a glimpse into parts of Waterford as I see it. I also have a few photos I’ll show which are kind of incidental, but it seems like a tradition at these talks—

I am motivated in my work and life by the idea that education and learning has great value; I see the education at Waterford, and I get to research value in higher education in my daily work. I will examine why I am here and how I see the value in education, sharing a few stories from the past, present, and future.

Before I get into the past, I am at Waterford and on stage today because I have a great college counseling team with Nick and Alicia–our strengths complement each other; we are passionate about helping students find their purpose. We get to assist students through healthy, meaningful college search and application process, through sharing information, talking with students about their essays, and helping them reach their goals. Additionally, the mission, spirit, and ethos of Waterford have kept me here. And working with you, my colleagues, is exciting for me.

The Past: 

I began at Waterford ski coaching with the late, great, Dean Guinn, who started the Waterford ski team; he also started and coached most sports at the new Sandy campus long before I got here —soccer, baseball, basketball, men’s and women’s, and middle school sports included, and he was a German teacher and dean. He was instrumental in bringing school spirit, sports, travel and activities to a strong academic program

After college, I arrived in Utah, having grown up in Maine; I was doing post-baccalaureate pre-med courses at the University of Utah, and working at the U hospital when I started ski race coaching with Dean at Waterford. I would show up to campus at 2:20pm for last period Tuesdays and Thursdays for ski team practice. We would bring students up to Park City to train under the lights on their steep, icy race hill. We’d come back at 8:30 in the evening many nights; weekends we’d take the team racing at Jackson Hole, WY or in Idaho, or somewhere along the Wasatch.

That first year, 1998, Dean had said you need to meet Nancy Heuston —I did, I then found myself teaching term English courses: a writing intensive course with Class X, Senior English electives, as well as ski dryland training, and 6th grade PE. In 2 years, I added a Class VIII Greek and Roman history term long course where I quickly learned that I needed a more robust daily class outline. 30 minutes of “open discussion time” with 8th graders didn’t work as well as it did with 10th graders. At any rate, I decided this was the kind of school and work I wanted, and not four and more years of Medical school.

In my early teaching days at Waterford, I loved the excitement, passion, and freedom to teach how I wanted within a thoughtful curriculum, while supported as much as I needed from experienced colleagues. I see much of the same celebration of learning, of intellectual growth and fire that existed then as now. 

As I was looking in the archives for old ski team photos, I noticed that Waterford hasn’t changed in essence—I saw amazing photos of Waterford students in theater masks, in Shakespeare plays, in ceramics class, deep in class discussion, playing lacrosse, and soccer; Lower School students engaged in reading, in presenting. (Ok, there were some baseball photos also—that has changed!) Also the trees have grown.

I have one ski team story that shows some of the similarities and differences of Waterford past and present: we had Waterford students who were passionate about ski racing and were doing well; we had spent two weeks training at Mt. Hood, OR in June with the ski team, as we did every year; but serious skiers got on snow late fall as well. I had a connection to Breckenridge, CO through my coach and recent years of training there—a ski venue at high altitude—11,000ft.  So Dean and I decided to take about 13 Waterford students out of school for 11 days in early November to travel to Breckenridge, Colorado—why not!?

The students studied on the drive over, read and did homework every night, like they do now on sports trips; we rented a condo, and in addition to coaching all day, Dean and I would go shopping and prepare meals every day for 15 of us! We did this at Mt. Hood camps also. Dean was undaunted by being the parent and adult to 13-20 kids—and some were middle schoolers! Dean was also a great musician—would play his banjo or guitar each night. We taught kids how to chop onions and how to wash dishes, in addition to honing ski technique training next to the best in the world—the student-athletes were ready for a great season. We headed back to school in time for  finals -no problem! I’m sure teachers helped their students upon return catch up and be successful in their exams, as they do now. I’m pretty sure Dean informed the school dean, probably Bob Capener or James Harris at the time, though I’m not sure Nancy Heuston was ever aware of our little trip.

So, Waterford is more professional now, more organized, more planful—and this is a good thing!

Most importantly, I still see this excitement, energy and willingness to try new things, to go outside the box, to be flexible: there are still buses going off campus almost every day—the science teachers on forays up the canyon for birding, geology, botany, or physics at Lagoon—bless your heart, Stuart! [Owens, who led the physics trip last week]! I know Lower School is full of exciting events and trips off campus and on. And the Outdoor Program heads out climbing, skiing, and hiking, many times a week, still around 2:20pm. I thought there would be questions about why we no longer have an alpine ski race team (though we still have ski and ride, and ski touring is a big part of the Outdoor Program).

Dean passed away of a heart attack in 2002, as we finished hosting the Waterford USSA weekend of races in Park City. It was just before the 2002 Winter Olympic games, which he was so excited to see , taking place at the mountains and some of the same slopes where our students competed. We kept the ski team going for a couple of years, but it wasn’t the same, and couldn’t be replicated without Dean; a number of our committed students and families had graduated out, and a couple even went on to compete with the US ski team. 

Waterford Present: 

The value of the Waterford education is very present to me every year, as I work with Class XI and XII and graduates, and see what they are capable of, what they are achieving, and how they are doing it, becoming curious, thoughtful leaders in many different fields. My Waterford present is also connected to the past—through my two daughters who attended from preK 3 until Class XII graduation in 2022 for Neve, and 2024—last year—for Anja; they have just finished their 3rd and 1st years in college. I could list extraordinary learning experiences in every subject and every grade at Waterford, but I will name two that stand out.

In Class V, they both wrote seven-page papers on their famous people; this wasn’t their first extended writing that year, but they worked to research, analyze and synthesize. I was dumbfounded when I saw this paper at the end of the year, with clever graphs and photos perfectly placed to tell their unique take on this person, set into the context of their time in history. This level of writing, teaching, and expectation continued through middle school and high school. 

Another example: Neve danced with Miss Annie from Lower school through graduation; I knew they practiced and danced many hours a week, but to see them on stage in a performance—I was again dumbfounded: how  is it possible you all are doing that —together and in time to the music? When and how did you learn to dance ballet like that? The culmination that year being the clever, perfect, playful Grinch ballet choreography, and seeing the lifts and pas de deux in the Coppelia ballet that I had no idea she was doing until the performances.

Now I see this caring guidance and expectation that has led to their confidence and their ability to thrive in college courses like Biochemistry, Literature of Civil Rights, and in Calculus 3. Students at Waterford get to practice sharing their ideas daily in class, and honing their thinking through writing, presenting and working in teams. What a gift! To learn how to do hard things through daily practice, and to be guided by caring teachers.

Last Thursday I got to Watch Neve present (on livestream) on her term research in the Blue Ridge mountains of NC, on Wilson River flooding and landslides after hurricane Helene. I thought briefly: How did you learn to do that? But by know I know the answer.

For the Future, I’m thinking of the value of education, and of higher education, I’m going to go back to my parents’ educations for a moment.

Also I’m thinking of what Nancy Nebeker called the importance of a trusted adult in young people learning, developing, and discovering themselves. And Finding purpose. Her presence is deeply felt here, and has impacted my approach and my thinking, and I’m so grateful to have worked with her. She talked about kindness and connection, excellence and high expectations;  confidence through doing hard things; this is how adults and teachers can influence young people. And this was true in my parents’ development.

My parents were both first generation to go to college; they came from working class families in post War War II Maine, which was largely rural, with farming, logging, and work in small factories by the many rivers comprising many of the jobs; my father grew up outside of Brunswick, Maine on a fishing peninsula on the coast; his father worked at Bath Iron Works, in the Naval Shipyard; his mother worked raising five children. His high school teachers and neighbors who introduced him to skiing also introduced a larger world of opportunity, and encouraged him to go to college.

His neighbors the Smiths had watched as the neighborhood kids built a ski jump trestle, in the woods near their house, and worked at their ski jumping—a legitimate sport, and a collegiate sport at the time. The Smiths started to bring him to a nearby ski hill where they went on weekend, and helped him buy his first pair of skis—Maine made, all wood, no metal edges. There were many ski clubs in Maine at the time on hills and mountains. His high school math and English teachers started bringing a group up to Sugarloaf, the big mountain, farther away; they opened up a world of recreation for him. My grandfather and father built a camp (Maine-speak for cabin)–a small A-frame on forest service leased land, not far from Sugarloaf ski mountain, and a group of teachers and kids from high school, and later university, would go up regularly. 

His well-funded public high school had excellent teachers. His history, English, and math teachers encouraged him to go to university, and he did. He became a sociology major, track athlete—pole vault —he loved jumping—at the University of Maine, He engaged in scientific studies and research in his sociology major, and subsequent masters work in organizational development. A kid in small town Maine went on to have his world opened up by influential professors of literature, social science, science, and arts. He developed communication and analytical skills to work, and confidence to embark on and develop his own career, living a good life, in different parts of the country, and traveling. He went on to develop consulting expertise in change management, and worked for top companies, from his beloved home in Maine. He still skis and he started a non-profit 2 years ago at age 79 to historically renovate and save the lighthouse, light keeper’s house and barn on the island in the harbor of my hometown. When I talked to him about this talk, he remembered and named four college professors, and the influence they had on him in opening his mind to human history, human behavior, and even art history and world cultures. His was a life changed.

 My mother grew up in a small central Maine town—for those of you who know Maine, much of any wealth is on the coast and in the southern part of the state—but she was lucky to grow up in the countryside outside of Pittsfield, Maine, which was in the feeder region to the private boarding and day school Maine Central Institute—MCI—which contracted with the surrounding towns to provide high school education to the local students. MCI was and is much like Waterford, with aspirational students coming from all over the northeast, with great teachers, and high expectations. 

Her parents ran a gas station on a rural highway. Her father was a New Jersey Irishman who had been stationed in northern Maine during the war; her mother’s —my grandmother’s— parents had immigrated from Lebanon, joining a Lebanese community in northern Maine. She raised six children while helping at the gas station and shop; my mom would get dropped off at MCI with her sister each day, where she had a rich liberal arts education, played field hockey, basketball, did debate and student government. She was primed to be a top student and contributor at the University of Maine, where she majored in English and Classics–Latin and Greek. Fun fact: an English major, she was in classes with Stephen King! She is a retired public school 5th grade teacher —shout out to Michelle, Mike, Samantha, and Paula!

On college breaks, I would come visit her 5th grade classroom for a morning, and be completely exhausted after a half day. She was also a field hockey and lacrosse referee, and softball coach. In her class she would bring in Maine artists to visit–she made sure her students knew some art history, knew a few Maine and national artists and authors, read a lot, and created their own art. 

A good education transforms lives. A liberal education frees you to understand your strengths and how you might contribute to society, to your family, and how you might choose to live. This is what is important for our future, and why I was moved to stand up and to talk about the value of a rich, quality education.

Trusted adults getting involved, great teachers—and a full curriculum—change lives; Nancy Nebeker knew this: be the influence, be involved; be always kind.

I see this in my parents also, the responsibility to take our good education, our good fortune and understanding of the world and make sure it is extended to the next generation; my family and I value America’s free education that aspires to give all students a strong education; we value the pathways that have allowed immigrants’ grandchildren to be a professional teacher with a masters degree;  we value art and culture and freedom of thought.

Thank you for letting me work in this remarkable environment. To those who have taught my children, thank you —It’s probably not possible to convey enough my deep gratitude for what you have taught them and shown them. And thank you to all of you who teach, coach, and guide Waterford students in various roles; I see the effect of your work everyday, working with Upper School students and graduating Seniors and alumni. I hear from them directly about your impact on our students.

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Matt Robertson

LS Music Teacher

This is a huge honor, mostly because I have so much respect for the people who work here. I have loved Waterford these past 6 years and I look forward to many more. For a good part of this year I’ve been struggling with and focused on finding ways to move forward with purpose and optimism and connection in a society that sometimes feels hostile to families like mine; and I keep coming back to something I heard from Stephen Colbert. Speaking of comedians, he said, “I don’t know if you know this about us, but we don’t do this because things have gone so well. We are built for rough roads.”

I have a sister who is fond of saying, “Did you have a happy childhood, or are you funny?” I am not a comedian, but I can confidently say I am the person and the teacher I am in part because of some things that did not go so well. I relate to, and I hang on to the phrase, “We are built for rough roads.” 

I grew up in East Millcreek in the 70s and 80s, in a neighborhood where it felt to me like everyone was the same, but my family felt different. I was the second of five siblings, eventually six. My parents were and are wonderful people, and in so many ways they made space for this kid with big emotions and a big imagination. But looking back I recognize they were deeply, deeply unhappy – individually and together, and this was true before and after their marriage ended. From the outside, my family showed clear signs of struggle, and on the inside there was violence and there was chaos. 

But I was fortunate to also have things that moved me toward stability. And these are also, in part, how I became the person and the teacher I am.

From a very young age I was a quirky kid with a big smile and a big desire to connect with people. 

A neighbor told my mother, “Don’t worry, he’ll grow into that mouth.” I’m still waiting. Here I’m clearly on the path to my eventual sense of style. 

This is about age 3 when I made my musical theater debut as an altar boy in The Sound of Music. I understand they had to re-stage the wedding scene mainly because I refused to follow directions. We were going to slowly process from the back of the theater, through the audience, to the stage; except this one 3 year-old altar boy kept setting his own pace and saying, “It is so much faster to just walk the normal way.” Apparently at one point I told the director, “You may be the boss of this play, but you’re not the boss of the whole world.” 

Here my fashion sense reaches full maturity, and no, this is not a special occasion. The line between dress-up and just wearing an amazing outfit has always been fuzzy for me. 

This is probably my favorite photo of me as a child. You’ll notice carried over from the last photo, the same striped pants and plaid shirt; and of course the goggles. And just to be clear, this was a different day. I’m also holding Oliver, who was my constant companion for several years. 

That kid was primed for an interest in people, partly because I dealt with continuous unpredictability by studying people, trying to suss out what was going to happen and why people did what they did.  

And I credit a television program with providing positive direction and focus to that interest. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m talking about Mister Rogers Neighborhood. It’s a bit “on the nose,” isn’t it? I literally own cardigans; and I am a bit like Fred Rogers if he were super sarcastic and swore a lot (not in front of students of course).  

What mattered to me most about Mister Rogers was simply that he took children seriously. He just saw them as people, like full humans. He talked like their thoughts and feelings and opinions mattered. He talked about hard and sometimes complicated things, but at an appropriate level for how children are able to process information. And he modeled a version of manhood I could buy into. 

Many years later I earned a Bachelors Degree in Human Development, and a Masters in Infant and Toddler development. And all of this to then discover that money exists, and that the field of child development paid even less than my other big interest and area of study, which was Music. 

My family of origin includes generations of professional musicians, and I was raised with the idea that to be a Robertson is to have a special, almost magical level of musical giftedness. 

So I had this sense of “music is for you” and I had some affinity for it; but it was empty and hollow – all potential and no reality – until at age 14 I began serious piano study for the first time when a skilled teacher offered to take me on as a student. Around the same time I began studying double bass with another wonderful teacher. I poured myself into music study. 

And I came to understand three foundational things that still inform my work:

First, Musical excellence is a skill, not a gift. It can be taught and learned. 

Second, There is no magical secret to excellence in music. It’s willing student, skilled teacher, consistent work, time. That’s it. I’m not saying talent doesn’t exist, but I think it’s more complicated than “giftedness,” and I’m more and more convinced that the whole concept of talent keeps more people out of the arts than it brings in.

And that’s tragic, because (Third), music is among the most powerful social connectors – even among people who are different. And experiencing excellence in an environment filled with caring, responsibility, integrity, and curiosity is life-changing; and I think children should have a whole big bunch of that.   

I came to teaching late, and I almost didn’t get here at all. Having basically failed after many years of trying to fit into a corporate world where I did not fit, I returned to grad school in my mid-40s for a Masters in Choral Conducting. 

During these same years that I was finding my feet in a new world, we, in our little family, suddenly awakened to new information about the people in our family. It could have torn us apart because things were suddenly so different than what we had known and expected; but instead, [Family Slide] on a perilously steep learning curve we began to gain some critical skills. I can sum these up as: focusing on curiosity more than control, and finding and focusing on shared values not shared beliefs. In some ways we had to grieve the loss of the family we expected, but this approach continues to result in a profound knowing of one another that is different than we had ever even considered. 

A 17th century British poet, Richard Crenshaw, once wrote of “eternity shut in a span,” and that is how I experience each moment I have with these remarkable people. 

As we have learned to thrive in the midst of difference, I have become passionately devoted to the merits of pluralism and to striving to suspend my very human need for certainty. 

And this leads me to one of the main reasons I choose Waterford. There has never been a world where all people derive their identity and purpose from the same set of beliefs. As I recently heard someone say, “There are no perfect solutions, only different trade-offs.” And this school is an institution, I fear one of a diminishing number (and I would love to be wrong about that), that is taking an actual run at holding space for pluralism through the use of shared values. And liberal arts education is an ideal vehicle for this approach. Pluralism is about a curiosity-filled co-existence, not agreement or disagreement. And here at Waterford we employ values that do not require adherence to specific political or religious beliefs, or to any specific ideology. There is room to build understanding of different perspectives with curiosity as we learn to make peace with the constant tensions and contradictions inherent in a world full of different people. 

We don’t do this perfectly. We don’t always do it well; but damned if we’re not trying. And we’re doing it in the midst of a society caught in the very human tendency to dehumanize others when difference feels threatening. I don’t intend to imply that there are no real threats or that no fear is valid or that anyone needs to be accepting of harm; but today there are entire industries and empires built on – no matter what – keeping us in a state of constantly feeling threatened, outraged, out of curiosity, and out of meaningful connection. And the trade-offs of this kind of approach are just too harmful for all of us.

If we have the potential to help these young students grow into people who can be different from one another and still so proud of who they are, and who can still approach differences with curiosity, then it’s worth keeping at this. There are days when it feels impossibly hard. But we are built for rough roads. Thank you.