Register now for PUTNEY REUNION 2016!
Register and find weekend info: putneyschool.org/reunion
802-387-6273 or [email protected]
Classes of 1946–47, 1956, 1966, 1980–82, 1991–92, 1996–98June 10–12, 2016
<top> LV74 (RED ROOF), BY JANE DICKSON, 2012, OIL ON CANVAS, 48 X 30 INCHES
ON THE COVER: <front> BLUE BRIDGE—GW1, 2007, OIL ON ASTROTURF, 58 X 32 INCHES
<back> PRATER 6, 2010, OIL ON WOOD, 18 X 18 INCHES
2 Message from the Head of School Fostering broad and open minds
4 Cover Artist: Jane Dickson ’70
Taking art to new places via the
anti-craft ethos of the punk rock era
6 News Oxfam Hunger Banquet, blood
drive, student art show, sugaring,
Chard deNiord, new solar array,
winter concert, and more
11 Doing Something Right A recent Putney graduate confirms
that cultural fluency and collaboration
are useful things in real life
13 Graduation Requirements 2.0
Moving from “chair time”
to competency in defining
Putney graduates
23 Alumni News Alumni authors, events,
and more
27 Alumni Notes
48 In Memoriam
Contents
theputneyschool
ThePutneySchoolVT
theputneyschool
The Putney School Network
@putneyschool
2 P U T N E Y P O S T
When Mrs. Hinton founded Putney in 1935, she
was able to staff it partly with Europeans fleeing
the chaos that was overtaking their homelands.
In those first years, the adult population was
considerably more cosmopolitan than was the
student body. In Putney’s middle years, both adults
and students were almost entirely Americans, and
the few foreigners who broke the pattern are well
remembered. Today we are a quite various and
polyglot community, although the diversity of
the faculty and staff lags well behind that of the
students. Students’ homes are in 14 countries, and
they hold passports from 17; these lists often don’t
overlap. Many of our students born and raised in
the U.S. are frequently multi-cultural in one way
or another, born to immigrant parents or two
parents of very different backgrounds. Our adult
community includes only natives of Afghanistan,
China, England, France, Mexico, and the U.S., and
despite our sincere efforts, is much less diverse
than we would wish.
All of this raises inevitable questions about
curriculum. It is hard to identify a “canon”
appropriate to this student body. If it is our
responsibility to be sure that American students
are well-versed in the history of their country,
is it less important for Chinese students to know
their own history? Or is it actually as important
for students to learn each other’s histories? How
can we best teach the habits of mind that will
predispose students to understand other cultures
and to work effectively with different people? We
have terms abroad in China, France, England, and
Mexico, and have recently approved a new one
in Nicaragua. We have written into our new
graduation requirements (see p. 13) that all
students must spend a minimum of one month
living in another culture. This does not mean a
“foreign” country, just somewhere with a culture
that differs significantly from the one they grew
up in. We are gradually finding it easier to persuade
students to spend time away from Putney, and
Emily Jones
Head of School
A Message from the Head of School
EDUCATION IS ABOUT MORE THAN
SEAT TIME. HERE, HENRY ’16, CURRENT
CO-STUDENT HEAD OF SCHOOL AND
CABIN DWELLER, TAKES A BREAK FROM
HIS WORK IN A SCHOOL GREENHOUSE.
Dear Putney alumni, parents, and friends,
Broad-mindedness is related
to tolerance; open-mindedness
is the sibling of peace.
—Salman Rushdie
Sylvie Littledale’s presentation in assembly (see p. 17) provided a
great vision of how opportunities can open up to a prepared mind.
Without an open and at least somewhat educated mind, though,
travelers are just tourists. We hope that with our diverse student
body, our emphasis on inquiry, and our insistence that students
spend time as a “foreigner” in another culture, we will help to
foster genuinely broad and open minds.
—Emily
f o u n d e r :
c a r m e l i t a
h i n t o n
Emily H. Jones, Head of School
2015–2016 TrusteesTonia Wheeler P’99, Chair
Ira T. Wender P’77, ’89, Vice Chair
Randall Smith, Treasurer
Katharina Wolfe, Clerk
Supawat ’16, Student Trustee
Thanh Ha ’17, Student Trustee
Michael Sardinas, Faculty Trustee
Libby Holmes P’15, ’17, Faculty Trustee
Lakshman Achuthan ’84 John Bidwell ’78
Daniel Blood P’15,’18Dinah Buechner-Vischer P’14
Lee Combrinck-Graham ’59 Freddy Friedman P’12
Joshua Rabb Goldberg ’75 Stephen Heyneman ’61
Dana Hokin ’84 Emily H. Jones
Bill Kellett G’02, ’15 Joshua Laughlin ’82
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt ’52 Franz Paasche ’79
Peter Pereira ’52 Robert G. Raynolds ’69
Marni Rosner ’69, P’04, ’07 Iris Wang P’16
Trustees EmeritiBarbara Barnes ’41
Kate Ganz Belin ’62Joan Williams Farr ’49
Sarah Gray Gund ’60Kendall Landis ’42, P’73, ’79
Bici Binger Pettit-Barron ’48, P’77, ’79, G’07
The Putney Post is published twice
yearly for the alumni, parents, and friends
of The Putney School. We welcome your
comments and ideas. Please direct your
correspondence to: The Editor, Putney Post,
Elm Lea Farm, 418 Houghton Brook Road,
Putney, VT 05346; 802-387-6213;
email: [email protected]
Editorial Board: John Barrengos,
Don Cuerdon, Alison Frye, Emily Jones,
Hugh Montgomery
Publisher: Don Cuerdon
Director of Communications
Editor: Alison Frye
Alumni Relations Manager
Alumni Relations Manager: Alison Frye
Photographs: Don Cuerdon,
Anne Helen Petersen,
Jeff Woodward,
The Putney School archives
Design: New Ground Creative
Please send address corrections and
new phone numbers to: Alumni Office,
The Putney School, Elm Lea Farm,
418 Houghton Brook Road,
Putney, VT 05346;
phone: 802-387-6213; fax: 802-387-5931;
email: [email protected]
The Putney School
Elm Lea Farm
418 Houghton Brook Road
Putney, VT 05346
802-387-5566
www.putneyschool.org
“TO WORK NOT FOR MARKS, BADGES, HONORS, BUT TO DISCOVER
TRUTH AND TO GROW IN KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE . . . ”
—CARMELITA HINTON, “FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS,” 1954
Putney Post
PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS MEMBERS EVALUATE AND DISCUSS
THEIR WORK.
WWe caught up with Jane Dickson
’70 by phone in mid-February.
She was in New Orleans starting
an artist’s residency at the Joan
Mitchell Foundation, which
is good news all by itself. She
was also celebrating the sale of
her Fab 5 Freddy (the original
Yo! MTV Raps veejay) portrait
to the Smithsonian’s National
Portrait Gallery, negotiating a
122x20-foot mural in Brook-
lyn for this summer, and had
a show going entitled Pump
Up the Volume, a two-person
exhibition at Sacramento State
featuring other hip-hop artists
Jane had painted “back in the
day.” Jane’s work has been shown
from the Whitney to New York’s
42nd Street MTA station. See
her website for a more complete
list, but plan to be there a while.
Jane’s first medium was paint, but
her work encompasses printing,
drawing, murals, mosaics, public
installations, and more. The
anti-craft ethos of the early New
York City punk-rock era drove
her from the fine art of oil-on-
canvas to seeking ways to expand
the medium. It all started with
a painting of the World Trade
Center on plastic garbage bags,
which she also showed recently.
The meaning in that bit of art
had also expanded, as we all
now know. The following are
Jane’s own words about her
work, her exploration of paint
and texture, and other details
of telling stories visually.
I am a storyteller. I love
weaving stories, hearing stories,
so I guess I am telling stories
by another means.
I so appreciated Bill Hunt.
Doing art at Putney was
really, I think, crucial to my
becoming an artist—just for
the freedom that he gave
us. Afterwards, I first went to
art school for a year. I drew
from a model every morning,
and then I’d go out to lunch
with my friends. Sometimes,
I’d get back to my studio in
the afternoon, sometimes I
wouldn’t, and I thought to
myself, “Oh, I must not be
serious enough to be an artist.
I’m hanging out a lot, I’m
not working all the time.”
So I thought, “I must not
really be an artist. I’d better
go to university.”
I applied to Harvard and
I got in. I told them I was
going to be an anthropologist.
I thought, “I’ll be Margaret
Mead. It will be really fun,
and I’ll be naked on a tropical
island.” I discovered that’s
not exactly what you do
as an anthropologist. You really
spend your life at the library. I
thought, “Ehhh, I don’t want to
spend my life at the library,” so
I ended up being an art major.
After my years at Putney,
I thought, “I want to go to
the city.” I needed to see what
our culture was doing. I felt like
I wanted to get in the middle of
it and respond to it and document
it. I’ve always gone for the urban
dark side. I got a job working
on the first computer billboard—
digital light board—in Times
Square in 1978. I worked or
lived in Times Square, which
really is the belly of the beast,
for 30 years.
My first anthropology
course was at Putney.
The idea in anthropology is
to look for the key issues in
a culture—the key behaviors—
that tell you about the shared
values of the people. That’s
an understanding that I took
into painting.
Jane Dickson ’70janedickson.com | By Don Cuerdon
4 P U T N E Y P O S T
<top> COVER ARTIST JANE DICKSON ’70, BY THE CONEY ISLAND
FERRIS WHEEL THAT INSPIRED SEVERAL OF HER PAINTINGS
<bottom> “REVELERS 52,” 2008, MOSAIC: A SAMPLE OF JANE’S REVELERS
MTA MOSAICS, A 2007 PUBLIC PROJECT IN WHICH OVER 60 MOSAICS
WERE INSTALLED IN NEW YORK CITY’S TIMES SQUARE SUBWAY STATION
P U T N E Y P O S T 5
Whatever I’m struggling
with in my own life, I look
for to paint. For example,
the paintings of Times
Square are all people alone
and waiting—because I was
young and I was alone, and I
was waiting to find out what
my life was going to be, and
who I was going to be with.
Now, I find aging rappers
who still shake it riveting.
When I first came to New
York, I joined with this
fledgling artists’ group called
Collaborative Projects. I got
to be good friends with a lot
of artists who went on to do
amazing things, such as Kiki
Smith, Tom Otterness, and
Jenny Holzer. And I knew Nan
Goldin from Boston. The great
thing for me about Colab was
a lot of the people had gone to
the Whitney program, which is
really a great intro to the serious
art world. So people would
make these shows and say,
maybe, “I’m going to make a
show about doctors and dentists
in my loft.” Anybody could
submit anything they wanted
on that theme, and they were
free-for-alls, so you’d try and
do things that would stand out.
I started by painting on
garbage bags and other
industrial materials in the
’70s. The punk era was anti-
craft. It was “let’s try anything.”
I painted an early piece of
the World Trade Center in
’78 on garbage bags, which
I exhibited again recently.
Of course, it has a totally different
reference now, because it’s
gone. At the time that I did it,
I thought, “Well, this building
is so imposing.” Every time I
looked at it, I felt like throwing
myself on my knees and saying,
“Yes, you are Oz, the Great and
Terrible, and you dwarf me and
make me humble.” The twin
towers were made to domineer
everything, and make you feel
small. I thought, “I’m going to
paint them on garbage bags so
they’ll be trashy.”
In the ’90s, I did all these
New Year’s Eve revelers—
on one level, they’re about
groups of people pushing
each other and pulling
each other, falling on each
other—and they’re really
about relationships. This
was a time when I had little
kids—and I was experiencing
the charge of family and the
pushing and pulling and being
torn apart, and jostling together
and all that.
I went to art school in
Paris for a year after Putney,
and the French were like,
“Quoi, quoi, mademoiselle?
Painting is dead. We did
it. It’s finished.” They were
on to conceptual art. And the
attitude was, “You must be
crazy to think you can pick
up a paintbrush and describe
the world now. We did it. The
story’s over.” I said, “Well, I’m a
painting addict. I can’t stop, and
I want to go home and paint
what’s American.” I thought,
okay, maybe if I do it on garbage
bags, they’ll stop me at the
door and say, “What? You can’t
do that.”
Picasso, and his early
sculptural experiments in
the early 20th century,
started using all kinds of
industrial materials. Sculpture
had moved away from clay and
bronze 100 years earlier. Painting
has been really slow to let go
of its traditional materials. I also
thought, “I really want to shed
some of the historical baggage
of the same materials as Rem-
brandt, asking to be referencing
that tradition and compared to
that.” That’s a heavy burden.
I’m not particularly
interested in the quirky
individual/eccentric. I’m
looking at, “What am I interested
in that says something about
our culture—our time—and
my personal experience?”
Those are almost always things
that I have mixed feelings
about. I know of it. It’s great.
I’m interested in the things
where I set up a scene and you
fill in the blanks—where it’s
not clear.
I do a whole lot of paintings
of highways. The open road—
it’s part of the American Dream.
But usually, really, when you
get in your car, you’re just
stuck in traffic, right? You went
to experience the country,
but the country’s gone by as
a blur. You’re out in the open,
but you’re really just trapped
in your car—yet for a lot of
people, it’s your meditative spot,
especially if you live in a city.
So it’s not all bad. It’s not all
good. It’s complicated.
<above> “FRED, ” 40 X 50 INCHES, ACRYLIC ON VINYL, 1983, WHICH
JANE RECENTLY SOLD TO THE SMITHSONIAN’S NATIONAL
PORTRAIT GALLERY.
<above> “GOD TRUCK,” OIL ON ASTROTURF, 37 X 36 INCHES, IS A GOOD
EXAMPLE OF JANE’S DESIRE TO SHOW US THE OPEN ROAD ON
PUNK-ROCK SURFACES
6 P U T N E Y P O S T
NewsSTUDENTS HOST OXFAM HUNGER BANQUET BENEFIT
At this interactive event, the place
where you sat, and the meal that you
ate, were determined by the luck of the
draw—just as in real life some of us
are born into relative prosperity and
others into poverty. Putney students
and volunteers at the Putney Foodshelf
organized an Oxfam Hunger Banquet
that took place at the Putney Central
School last December. Mary Starkey,
program support coordinator for Oxfam
America in Boston, was the keynote
speaker and master of ceremonies.
The Hunger Banquet can be an
effective way to simulate the imbalanced
distribution of food in our world.
Participants represented various countries
around the globe and received a meal
that corresponds to that country’s economic status. The Hunger Banquet was an opportunity for our
community to actively express solidarity with the poor around the world.
The banquet was a fundraising event for Oxfam America and the Putney Foodshelf. Oxfam is an
international confederation of 17 organizations working in approximately 94 countries worldwide
to find solutions to poverty and injustice. The Putney Foodshelf provides supplemental healthy food
for area people in need.
Miye ’17 and Maeve ’16 coordinated the event with The Putney School’s executive chef, Marty Brennan-Sawyer,
and the Putney Foodshelf ’s Susan Kochinskas as projects stemming from their classes at Putney.
P U T N E Y P O S T 7
Blood DriveThe first-ever* Putney School blood drive took
place in January in Calder Hall thanks to Lili ’16,
community service activity leader Rachel Mason,
and a slew of student and adult volunteers.
Twenty-nine people made it as far as the health
interview stage. Twenty-two were approved to
donate, resulting in 19 units of “whole blood” and
3 units of “double red.” And no one passed out! The
KDU provided recovery food and beverages and
the Red Cross was grateful for our assistance and level
of organization. It says a lot about the validity of
student work and student agency at Putney.
* This is the first blood drive as far as anyone can remember.
If you have knowledge of a previous one hosted at
The Putney School, please let us know!
8 P U T N E Y P O S T
Vermont
Poet Laureate
Visits Putney
Chard deNiord, former Putney School faculty
member, spent time with us recently to tell us about
himself and to read his work aloud for the assembled
school community. Chard taught here from 1989 to
1998 before moving on to Providence College in
Rhode Island. He was installed as Vermont’s eighth
poet laureate last fall and is charged with promoting
and encouraging poetry throughout the state. He was
more than successful in that mission in our presence,
reading from his collected work, then hammering
home the relevance of his art by requesting topics
from the audience including cows, Work Day, and
parenthood. And he left us thirsty for more, which
is the goal.
Farm Manager and History Teacher Pete Stickney reports as of March 22, “We’re done. Short and sweet, over 100 gallons.” It was a strange season with many Vermont maple sugarers collecting sap as early as January. The students pictured stayed on campus for part of March break to help with collection and boiling.
Sugaring Season
So much student art is generated every trimester at
The Putney School that is only makes sense to have
an opening and show in one of the finest gallery
spaces in New England, the Michael S. Currier
Center Gallery. The first was held this year on
November 21. On display was student work from
painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and other
visual art classes and Evening Arts activities. These
are only the pieces that came to fruition for the show
and many were first attempts at a particular medium
by students who may or may not have previously
identified themselves as artists. Creating art is
an important aspect of every adolescent’s brain
development and useful in fostering creativity
across all educational disciplines, which is why
we have always done so much of it at The Putney
School. Search “Student Art Show” on our website
to see images of the art that was on display.
You will be awed.
P U T N E Y P O S T 9
Student Art Show
10 P U T N E Y P O S T
Namasté Solar, an employee-owned cooperative and leading engineering, procurement, and construction
provider of solar electric systems for commercial, non-profit, government, and residential customers throughout
the U.S., and solar power developer The Atmosphere Conservancy (TAC), principals of which include Alex
Blackmer ’75 and Putney board member Bob Raynolds ’69, have partnered with The Putney School to
install a solar array at Lower Farm that will supply about half of the school’s present electricity needs.
“Namasté Solar is proud to be a partner in The Putney School’s efforts to bring clean energy to their
Net-Zero Energy Campus Master Plan,” said Cynthia Christensen, Namasté Solar’s commercial sales
director. TAC is funding and managing the project, while Namasté Solar has been contracted for the
creation of the array. Some of Namasté Solar’s most notable solar projects include the Denver Housing
Authority, New Belgium Brewing Company, the Colorado Convention Center, the Denver Museum of
Nature & Science, Boulder Community Hospital, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory. Putney will pay TAC for the clean energy drawn from the array over the
first six years (the point at which other economic advantages end for TAC), then purchase the array at a
much lower cost than the original construction, at which point the electricity drawn belongs to the school.
In the Net-Zero Energy Campus Master Plan, the array is sufficient to provide all of the school’s electricity
needs not already supplied by solar arrays. All of the required permits have been approved and
construction is slated for this spring.
SOLAR ARRAY
P U T N E Y P O S T 11
Winter Concert 2015The Putney School orchestra and madrigals took the show on the road in December with three performances of Music of the French
Cathedrals with the Bennington County Choral Society, reveling in the rich and diverse choral and orchestral tradition of French Romantic and post-Romantic composers. Music of the
French Cathedrals included “Phèdre Overture” by Jules Massenet, Francis Poulenc’s evocative “Gloria” and Gabriel Fauré’s gorgeous “Requiem.” See images and two videos from the final performance at The Putney School on December 12, 2015 on our website.
CLENNON L. KING ’78 SHOWS CIVIL RIGHTS FILMAs part of our MLK day events in February, we
watched the documentary Passage at St. Augustine
by Clennon L. King ’78. The film focuses on the
turbulent civil rights campaign in the nation’s oldest
city in 1963 and 1964 that was pivotal in the passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A question and answer
session followed the screening. “I’m excited to be
sharing this story with students at my old boarding
school,” said Clennon, a former TV reporter and
anchor and Putney School major gifts officer, now of
Boston. “In the racially-charged atmosphere America
now finds itself in, this film is both timely and relevant—
giving us a chance to mark history, so as not to repeat
it.” Some years ago Clennon shared a rough cut of the
film with us, so it was a double treat to see how the
film had progressed into the powerful piece it is today.
12 P U T N E Y P O S T
FIRST-TIMER WINS
MOUNTAIN BIKE RACE
Senior class members, Ben and Anna (center, with
sap bucket), participated in a mountain bike race
at nearby Vermont Academy last fall with more than
200 racers from around New England. Although
both were taking part in their first races, they both
performed extremely well and Anna won her
division, earning a coveted sap bucket! We don’t
currently have a mountain bike racing team. This
was just an exploratory adventure that manifested
from our mountain biking afternoon activity, which
is among our current recreational sports offerings.
Matt Dall, one of our Center for Teaching and
Learning tutors, is the faculty member who oversees
the mountain biking activity. He has plenty of riding
and racing experience and is prone to inciting
enthusiasm among his students, regardless of the
topic at hand.
Putney Chef Featured on Food Network
JD Mellowship, chef
and assistant manager
of our kitchen, was
on the Food Network
show, Cutthroat Kitchen,
last fall. It’s a crazy
competition among
chefs from all over the
U.S. in which they
have limited time to
gather ingredients and
prepare specific dishes.
There is also an option in which they can use their
potential winnings to buy obstacles to impose on
their fellow competitors. Crazy, yes, but at the core
you really need to know your way around cuisine.
All of our chefs have that, but JD can also talk smack
as he chops, dices, and sautés. If you missed the episode,
you might still be able to find it on the internet. The
show was recorded in January 2015 and part of JD’s
contract required that he not reveal the outcome
before the show aired. It was a tough secret to keep,
as you’ll see. We won’t spoil it for you here, but rest
assured there are more TV show possibilities thanks
to JD’s outgoing personality and positive attitude.
We’ll see if we can get him to wear a Putney School
logo next time!
Nearly five years ago, it came to light that
The Putney School’s graduation requirements
were defined in terms of seat time, but had
much more to do with the acquisition of skills,
or competencies. As a result, some students
were graduating not knowing some of the
things we felt they should know. In hopes
of changing that, the Educational Program
Committee (EPC) began exploring other ways
of looking at our graduation requirements that
had more to do with competencies than credits.
The challenge of creating a new list of require-
ments was soon brought to the full faculty. Half
a decade later, we’ve learned that this is harder
to do than to state. By the time you read this,
we will be implementing the new system, and
the Class of 2017 will be the first to graduate
under this new paradigm.
The idea of considering competencies over
course goals that don’t correlate exactly with
graduation requirements is not a new one in the
education world, but finding a model that has
been successfully implemented is rare. We hope,
as always, to help pave the way for other secondary
schools to reconsider how we decide what it
takes to be a high school graduate in this country.
As always, we don’t know for sure how changing
the graduation requirements will influence student
outcomes, but something needs to change, or
the outcomes will remain as they are. Our best
minds think this is a smart place to start.
Putney Academic Dean Kevin Feal-Staub,
Dean of Faculty Kate Knopp, and science
teacher Glenn Littledale recently sat down to
discuss with us the story arc and details of this
initiative. Kevin and Glenn have been at Putney
long enough to witness the entire process, from
inception to implementation, while Kate has
seen the evolution with fresh eyes as a faculty
member and administrator over the past two
years. No one individual is responsible for any
of the change. They agreed to comment only
as observers and participants in an effort that
the entire faculty has brought to the fore.
THE DOMINANT PARADIGM
Leadership Briefings on Proficiency, a document
from the New England Secondary School
Consortium, says the current paradigm of “seat
time” graduation requirements “. . . dates back
to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when America
was struggling to create a formal public education
system and standardize teaching across the
country.” The current course credit system is
P U T N E Y P O S T 13
LIBBY HOLMES, LEFT,
DIRECTOR OF INTERNA-
TIONAL PROGRAMS, HELPS
SHAPE THE COMMUNITY
THROUGH HER WORK WITH
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS
FROM THEIR APPLICATION
TO GRADUATION DAY. HERE,
SHE WORKS HAPPILY WITH
FRANCIS DU ’15.
GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS 2.0: Moving from “Chair Time” to Competency in Defining Putney Graduates by Don Cuerdon
14 P U T N E Y P O S T
based on the Carnegie Unit, “. . . a time-based
measurement promoted by industrialist Andrew
Carnegie.” One credit equals approximately 120
hours of contact time with a teacher (one hour/
day x five days/week x 24 weeks). In other
words, the creation of the credit system had
very little to do with learning.
The desire to standardize education has not
faded, but it has begun to evolve.
Vermont’s Framework of Standards and Learning
Opportunities, the guideline source for public
schooling in Vermont (which therefore excludes
Putney), in the section titled “Definitions of
Standards and Evidence,” states, “Standards
identify the essential knowledge and skills that
should be taught and learned in school. Essential
knowledge is what students should know. It
includes the most important and enduring ideas,
issues, dilemmas, principles, and concepts from
the disciplines. Essential skills are what students
should be able to do. Skills are ways of thinking,
working, communicating, and investigating.
Standards also identify behaviors and attitudes
related to success in and outside of school.
These include (but are not limited to) providing
evidence to back up assertions and developing
productive, satisfying relationships with others.
Frequently, standards are accompanied by
evidence. The evidence is an indicator by which
it can be determined whether or not the student
has met the standards.”
Though based more on what students have
upon exiting high school, these standards are
hard to define as requirements, and harder still
to assess. Even in places where the theory of
proficiency-based graduation requirements exist,
they look more like the Carnegie Unit with a
new paint job than a remodeling of a century-old
educational program structure. The work is in
designing the requirements in such a way that
they can be assessed and implemented in a world
where that hasn’t happened yet. This work
involves knocking down a few walls and extending
a few rooflines, which is exactly what The Putney
School’s faculty has been doing these past five years.
CREATING THE NEW PARADIGM
Here is what Kate, Kevin, and Glenn told us about
the process of creating a new set of graduation
requirements that have more to do with pro-
ficiency than seat time in a group interview in
late February. You may be surprised at some of
the conclusions made near the end of this long,
thorough, exhaustive, and collaborative exercise.
Putney Post: What led us to all this work
to establish proficiency-based graduation
requirements?
Glenn Littledale: I think the original ideas came
from the notion that, while the current graduation
requirements might be producing the desired result,
a number of kids were highly developed in some
areas, and not so developed in others. And that
their time spent here wasn’t optimized, because
the way our graduation requirements were
written required them to spend X amount
of time in this seat, and Y amount of time in that
seat, and Z amount of time in some other seat.
PP: And how does a school go about changing that?
Kate Knopp: It’s really just having the courage
to describe what learning looks like, and throwing
out a system of grading and measuring education
by the amount of time you spend with a subject.
How to do it? Therein lies the rub.
Kevin Feal-Staub: There’s a set of learning
goals that are standardized, but we’re trying to
un-standardize the way a kid can arrive at the
same learning—or, at least, much of the same
learning. It’s not all the same learning for
every kid. What we had in place before
was a standardized system of how you work
toward an end result, and we’re trying to
un-standardize the system of how you get
to the standard goals.
PP: Who here has been working to rewrite
our graduation requirements?
GRADUATION DAY
CELEBRATES THE
COMMUNITY, THE
COUNTLESS WAYS THE
GRADUATES HAVE SHAPED
PUTNEY, AND THE SCHOOL’S
EXPANSION OF STUDENTS’
KNOWLEDGE, UNDERSTANDING,
AND WORLD VIEW.
KF-S: The entire faculty, spearheaded through
the EPC, and then broken out from there into
working groups at department levels. It started
there in the 2011 time frame. I think we said
something like, “Let’s look at our graduation
requirements. They’re not serving us.” Two
years after that, we had a faculty vote to say,
“Alright. Do we want to change it from
a seat-time, course-based list of requirements
to outcome-based requirements?” We got
full faculty buy-in, via a vote, that we were
all willing to go.
PP: What concerns have arisen in this process?
GL: How do you measure this stuff? The logical
framework is portfolio assessment. So, one of the
things we’ve been looking at is other schools that
are doing portfolio assessment. My big concern
is that portfolio assessment has been closely
correlated with grade promotion—promotion
by grade rather than promotion by portfolio. In
very rare circumstances has the portfolio been
used as the promotion tool. And it’s been really,
really hard for institutions to decouple these
things. When you really do what we’re proposing
in its purest form, you don’t have “classes”
anymore—there’s no freshman, sophomore, etc.
class. The institutions that have maintained their
classes, while maintaining portfolio assessment
structure, find themselves, I think, at an impasse.
PP: And has the goal changed at all since the
inception of this work?
GL: The original vision hasn’t changed enormously.
PP: What has the faculty done to turn that
vision into something tangible that makes
sense: that seriously restructures the secondary
school environment, but doesn’t scare off the
rest of the educational world by being too
radical to assimilate?
KF-S: It started by our saying, “Alright, we
want to change to a system of proficiency-based
requirements rather than seat time-based
requirements.” There was a coalescing moment
when we realized that there were a lot of seat
time-based things that we really valued here,
like working in the barn, participating in the
work program, evening arts, being exposed
to a lot of art—that’s not a proficiency,
that’s a thing that happens to you.
GL: These are the experience-based points.
KF-S: We define it in two sections. There’s the
proficiency section, and the experience section.
PP: Will the rollout of these new graduation
requirements necessitate some new areas of
faculty professional development?
KK: The development is in the art of teaching.
We’re not talking about “Here’s a course, and
how do I differentiate the structure for this
child and for that child?” We’re saying, “Here’s
a Putney education. How are you going to
navigate through? You can take some standard
courses, still, to meet these graduation require-
ments.” We have a lot of quirky kids at The
Putney School who can get really excited and
excel in one direction, but can’t get out of a
cardboard box in another direction. I think that
this is a more accurate way of saying, “That’s
mostly okay with us. Be who you are. Pursue
your intellectual curiosity in a way that makes
sense to your growth.” [See sidebar: The Animal
School: A Fable.]
GL: With the caveat that you’ve got to be very,
very careful about defining what it is that is
non-negotiable in that education. And that’s
what we’re doing.
KF-S: I think having well-articulated,
well-defined learning goals makes everything
easier in terms of being a good teacher. One
of our big goals is to serve a wide range of
students—artsy students, outdoorsy students,
kinesthetic students—all these different types
of students. And if we have well-defined learning
goals, that makes it really easy to provide different
avenues for these different kinds of kids to reach
the same outcome.
PP: When will all of this hard work become
a reality?
KF-S: We hope to have the overall language agreed
upon this spring—April— so we can go to press
for admissions needs in the next admissions cycle,
’16-’17. The incoming ninth-grade class, in the
fall of ’17, will enter with these new graduation
requirements in place.
KK: I imagine the actual execution, the
implementation, the use of them to credit
work, will be a work in progress.
GL: It will have to be done with such a subtle
and practiced eye, and that doesn’t exist yet.
PP: What additional questions have arisen
through this process? What outcomes?
P U T N E Y P O S T 15
16 P U T N E Y P O S T
KF-S: Some open questions are: What’s
a transcript going to look like? How
are we going to present this to colleges?
Once we write our set of graduation
requirements, is it 100% set? Are we
going to look at a kid who’s got 87 out
of 89 graduation requirements and say,
“No, you didn’t meet our requirements?”
GL: That would be an A+! [Whole
room chuckles uncomfortably.]
GL: Historically, the students here have
owned the work program. And, strangely,
they have not owned their academics.
The idea is that this is a move toward
student agency and ownership of the
academics. That’s one of the expected
outcomes.
PP: Is there still a place for letter grades
in this brave new world?
KF-S: At the moment, they are totally
separate discussions. The issuing of grades
is on the table as part of this discussion.
They are going to stay in place for now.
We’re going to have maps, keys, what-
ever you want to call them, that say,
“In English 10, we address this, this,
this, and this graduation requirement.”
Meeting all those graduation require-
ments while you take that class will
not equate with passing the class, and
passing the class will not equate with
meeting all those graduation requirements.
They’re different things altogether.
GL: The logical extension of this is
that passing the class really doesn’t have
meaning. It’s how the student progresses
toward meeting graduation requirements.
When you look at the portfolio assessment
based upon these rubrics, the notion of
the A, B, C, D, or F is irrelevant, and it
becomes an artifact. And yet it may be
an artifact that we’re stuck with for
a little while. I don’t know.
KK: Over time, kids will come to not
paying attention to grades; the need for
grades will dissolve.
GL: One of the things this is going to
do is clarify our assessment, if we’re
paying attention. As that becomes better
and better, the need for grades is going
to evaporate as an in-house story, but
whether or not to dispense with them
altogether—I’m kind of suspecting
we won’t.
PP: We don’t work for badges and
honors here. What would happen if
we actually didn’t give grades?
KK: We’re a school that believes in
experience and failure. We say that in
our publications. If you really believe
that in the classroom, it means you need
to have some colossal failures. And why
would you average the failures in with
the others? It confounds us, but there
are teachers out there who do think
of it that way. They’re thinking about
trying to measure who that kid is over
their five hours every week.
GL: Who cares if that kid can write
a mathematical model for a thing on
October 14 or December 3? What you
care about, when they walk away, is that
they can mathematically model something.
KF-S: We are a progressive school—well,
progressive in terms of education—
and that, I think, means teaching for
citizenship rather than “workership.” It is
also to progress rather than stay stagnant,
and I recognize that there are a lot of
problems that arise from teaching a
Carnegie course-based system rather than
an outcome-based system. The Carnegie
Unit system standardized the time that
kids spent learning, and left what kids
actually learned as the variable. What
we’re trying to do is standardize what
kids learn, and let time be the variable.
GL: With one caveat: a standard for what
kids learn—a minimum standard. We’re
not trying to standardize what they learn.
We’re trying to set a threshold.
Look for an update in the next issue with news
of the exciting first iteration of The Putney
School’s revised graduation requirements.
THE ANIMAL SCHOOL: A Fable
by George Reavis
Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a “new world,” so they orga-nized a school. They had adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming, and flying. To make it easier to
administer the curriculum, all of the animals took all of the subjects.
The duck was excellent in swimming—in fact, better than his instructor—but he made only passing grades in flying, and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn, and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that . . . except the duck.
The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up work in swimming.
The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class, where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He also developed a charley horse from overexertion, and then got a C in climbing and a D in running.
The eagle was a problem child, and was disciplined severely. In climbing class, he beat all of the others to the top of the tree, but insisted upon using his own way to get there.
At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well, and also run, climb, and fly a little, had the highest average and was valedictorian.
The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy, because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to a badger, and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.
Does this fable have a moral?
Note: This story was written when George Reavis was assistant superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools back in the 1940s! This content is in the public domain, and free to copy, duplicate, and distribute. If you would prefer a full-color, illustrated book, one is currently available from Crystal Springs Books at 800-321-0401 or 603-924-9621 (fax 603-924-6688).
P U T N E Y P O S T 17
Dear Putney,
I want to talk to you about something many
of you are already doing. Among you are
students who have left their homes and cultures
to come see what Putney has to offer. They
have integrated themselves into this community,
and have brought bits of their home to mix in.
This is exactly the environment that initially
sparked my interest in language study and cultural
exploration. I grew up about five minutes down
the road from campus, and, as we all know,
Vermont is not known for its diversity.
When I came to Putney as a student, it was
the first international community I had ever
been a part of, and this had a great impact. I
got interested in languages, beginning with my
Spanish classes, and later Chinese. This was
before Putney offered Chinese classes, so I found
a Rosetta Stone language software program for
Mandarin, and worked with that on the side.
During my sophomore year, Putney launched its
first Cuernavaca program. At that time, it was a
ten-day trip over spring break. You can imagine
a girl from rural Vermont touching down in
Mexico City . . . it was very different. That trip
showed me just how difficult it is to take yourself
out of a place where you feel completely
comfortable, and put yourself somewhere where
you are totally disoriented. But it also showed
me how important it is to do just that.
Putney extended the program to a full trimester
my senior year, and I was able to go back. At
the end of that trimester, I noticed a transforma-
tion in my Spanish. I had gone in at an awkward,
cautious, stuttering, classroom level, and came
back with something akin to comfortable,
conversational Spanish.
I went on to college with the idea of looking
for more opportunities to study abroad. During
the spring of my first year, I took a class with
about 160 people. On the first day, the professor
began by giving a little background about
himself. He said that he ran an archaeological
dig in Peru, and that sometimes he took students
down, and then he moved on to other things.
I don’t think I heard a single thing he said after
that, and after class, I elbowed my way through
the group of students waiting to talk to him.
Overly enthusiastically, I introduced myself
and expressed interest in the project.
Doing Something Right
A recent Putney graduate
confirms that cultural fluency
and collaboration are useful
things in real life
Sylvie Littledale ’14 returned to Putney recently to read the following letter to the school at assembly one
January morning. We think it’s full of experiences and observations that, at least anecdotally, support a lot of
what we embrace in our curriculum and academic infrastructure here. And we thought you would like to know
what Sylvie told us.
18 P U T N E Y P O S T
Now, as a freshman at a big university, I
was expecting his response to be something
like, “Okay, take a few more of my
classes, and we’ll see where you are your
senior year. Maybe we can talk about
your coming down then.” Instead, he
said, “Great,” and told me to come to
his office to talk more about it. I showed
up, and he told me that he basically had
two criteria for students who go to work
on the project. One: that they do well
in his class. And two: that they have a
rudimentary level of Spanish, because the
project is entirely in Spanish, and they
would need to keep up. Halfway through
the conversation, he switched, and started
speaking Spanish. Apparently he thought
that I could, in fact, keep up, so after
that, I sold my soul to his class and ended
up on a plane to Peru that summer.
We were working on the northern coast
of Peru, in the middle of the desert.
The team consisted almost entirely of
Peruvian archaeologists, and the boss of
my unit didn’t speak a word of English.
I had no prior experience in archaeol-
ogy, and was at a language disadvantage
because I was working with a bunch of
native speakers. However, the team
discovered some surprising ways in
which I was able to contribute.
We first discovered this when we were
working in a colonial area, where we
were not supposed to find any evidence
that horses had been there; but we were
finding some suspicious manure samples.
We realized that almost everyone on
the team was from the city of Lima, and
that my background growing up in rural
Vermont on a farm, and my time at The
Putney School, gave me this intimate and
unique knowledge of livestock manure.
After that, I became the shit consultant
on the project. Every time someone
found a piece of manure, I would run
over and help them differentiate between
donkey shit and horse shit. Another
situation similar to this occurred when
we were classifying ceramic shards in the
lab. The group I was working with had
extensive knowledge of the time period
we were looking at, but I realized that
none of them had ever actually worked
with clay before. My time in the Putney
ceramics studio gave me a whole differ-
ent angle for looking at the techniques,
different types of clay, glazes, etc., and
allowed me to contribute a unique
perspective to the analysis. Both of
these cases really crystallized the benefits
of bringing a bunch of different
backgrounds together to collaborate.
After three months of working in Peru,
I went back to college. My boss from the
dig, after noting my enthusiasm for horse
shit, invited me to start a separate research
project on the role of horses in colonial
Peru, and he started emailing me resources.
These were Spanish documents from
the 1500s. When I first started looking
at them, I felt overwhelmed, and didn’t
know how it was going to go. But after
about two weeks, I realized that I could
actually read and use the material.
This was the first time that I really saw
just how far my Spanish had come since
ninth grade at Putney in Spanish 1. I
had gone to Mexico and developed a
conversational level of Spanish. This had
allowed me to go to Peru, where I was
able to build on that and develop a more
specialized vocabulary in an academic
and professional setting. These combined
allowed me to engage with this material
that I would never have had access to if I
hadn’t invested the time in this language
or had the opportunities that I did.
Moving forward, it is pretty clear that I
want language study and study abroad
to be the focal point of my education,
so I am heading off again. In a few
days, I am flying out to Spain to study
for the semester. I will be studying in
Argentina in the fall, and will be
finishing off by studying in China the
following spring. As I was designing
this three-semester-abroad curriculum,
it was not particularly conventional
and I had to jump through a few hoops.
After going through the equivalent of
Putney’s EPC committee to get this
approved, I found that system was
actually very flexible, and that it was
possible for me to make this work.
—Sylvie Littledale ’14
“. . . my
background
growing up in
rural Vermont
on a farm, and
my time at The
Putney School,
gave me this
intimate and
unique knowledge
of livestock
manure.”
P U T N E Y P O S T 19
Please let us know when you have (or plan to have) your work published. Please consider donating
a copy to our school library. Contact Alison Frye at 802-387-6273 or [email protected].
We wish these and other present and future alumni authors well in their endeavors.
Alumni News
EPISODES IN
MY LIFE: THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF JAN CAREW
Jan Carew and Joy Gleason Carew ‘65
Peepal Tree Press, 2015
RETURN TO
STREETS OF
ETERNITY
Jan Carew and Joy Gleason Carew ‘65
Smokestack Books, 2015
Joy Gleason Carew ’65 recently
celebrated the release of two
books by her husband, Jan Carew,
which she helped see to fruition
after his death in 2012. Episodes
In My Life: The Autobiography
of Jan Carew, which takes in his
political awakening in colonial
British Guiana, his sojourns in
communist Eastern Europe, his
life as a writer, his return to the
Caribbean in the nationalist 1960s
and his presence as a reporter in
Cuba at the time of the revolution,
his years in Africa and role as an
advisor to Nkrumah in Ghana
and his restless coming to rest in
North American academia and the
struggle for black self-definition.
Sadly, as Carew grew older his
original plans for writing this book
could not be realized without
the assistance of his wife, Joy
Gleason Carew. As well as what
Jan Carew was able to write, the
memoir was constructed from
taped, transcribed material. Where
there are gaps, Joy Gleason Carew
goes back to some of the vivid,
eye-witness journalism Jan Carew
wrote in those heady days of hope
and struggle.
Return to Streets of Eternity brings
together, for the first time, poems
written during a life-time of pas-
sionate engagement in anti-colonial,
civil rights, black power, and
liberation movements, including
many previously unpublished
tributes to nineteenth and
twentieth-century revolutionary
leaders and to writers like Martin
Carter, Dennis Brutus, Agostinho
Neto, Andrew Salkey, Alejo
Carpentier, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
STAIRWAY
TO PARADISE:
GROWING UP
GERSHWIN
Nadia Natali ’63
Rare Bird Books, 2015
Her father invented Kodachrome,
and her mother—who sang and
danced professionally—was the
sister of George and Ira Gershwin.
Growing up in Westport,
Connecticut amidst great privilege
and uncommon fame, Nadia Natali
might have chosen a life of comfort
and celebrity; but from an early age,
she was driven to create one of great
consequence instead, one in which
she could seek her true purpose and
life’s deepest meanings.
When she met photographer Enrico
Natali, the two embarked on a
shared quest: not simply for adven-
ture, but also to discover how their
lives could most profoundly unfold.
Their yearnings for lives fully-lived
took them to a wild and wonderful
piece of property surrounded by
the Los Padres National Forest in
the coastal mountains of Southern
California—a place where they
lived in a teepee, started a family,
and carved out rich satisfaction as
they transformed their beautiful
piece of earth into Blue Heron
Ranch. The 40 years between then
have been filled with unimaginable
adventures, the kind of tragedy
that can utterly destroy the lives
of those who must endure it
and go on, deep introspection
and personal growth, and joy and
gratitude as bounteous as the
natural world surrounding them.
Alumni Books
20 P U T N E Y P O S T
Stairway to Paradise is a memoir of
uncommon honesty and clarity—the
story of one woman’s determina-
tion to make the most of the gifts
her family heritage has offered her,
and to live wisely and honorably
in every way. This is a book to
savor, one that will make you
marvel at how essential it is for
all of us to bring a commitment
to truth and openhearted honesty
to all of our challenges, as well
as our many blessings.
GREENPEACE
CAPTAIN: MY
ADVENTURES IN
PROTECTING THE
FUTURE OF OUR
PLANET
Peter Willcox ’72
Thomas Dunne Books, 2016
Peter Willcox has been a captain
for Greenpeace for over 30 years.
He would never call himself a
hero, but he is recognized on every
ocean and continent for devoting
his entire life to saving the planet.
He has led the most compelling
and dangerous Greenpeace actions
to bring international attention to
the destruction of our environment.
From the globally-televised impris-
onment of his crew, the Arctic
30, by Russian commandos, to
international conspiracies involving
diamond-smuggling, gun-trading,
and al Qaeda, Willcox has braved
the unimaginable and triumphed.
This is his story, which begins
when he was a young man sailing
with Pete Seeger, and continues
right up to his becoming the iconic
environmentalist he is today. His
daring adventures and courageous
determination will inspire readers
everywhere.
ONE MAN AGAINST
THE WORLD: THE
TRAGEDY OF
RICHARD NIXON
Tim Weiner ’73
Henry Holt and Company, 2015
Based largely upon documents
declassified only in the last few
years, One Man Against the World
paints a devastating portrait of a
tortured yet brilliant man who
led the country according to
deep-seated insecurity and
distrust: not only of his cabinet
and Congress, but also of the
American population at large.
In riveting, tick-tock prose,
Weiner illuminates how the
Vietnam War and the Watergate
controversy that brought about
Nixon’s demise were inextricably
linked. From the hail of garbage
and curses that awaited Nixon
upon his arrival at the White
House, when he became the
president of a nation as deeply
divided as it had been since the
end of the Civil War; to the
unprecedented action Nixon took
against American citizens, whom
he considered as traitorous as the
army of North Vietnam; to the
infamous break-in and the tapes
that bear remarkable record of
the most intimate and damning
conversations between the
president and his confidants,
Weiner narrates the history of
Nixon’s anguished presidency
in fascinating and fresh detail.
A crucial new look at the greatest
political suicide in history, One
Man Against the World leaves us
with new insight, not only into
this tumultuous period, but also
into the motivations and demons
of an American president who
saw enemies everywhere; and,
thinking the world was against
him, undermined the foundations
of the country he had hoped
to lead.
ORPHEUS, TURNING
Faith Shearin ’87
Broadkill River Press, 2015
“If Orpheus, Turning doesn’t
make you ache with the love of
poetry, please have your vital
signs checked as soon as possible,”
is how reviewer Grace Cavalieri
describes Faith Shearin’s latest book.
Faith’s other books include The
Owl Question, The Empty House,
Moving the Piano, and Telling the
Bees. She is the recipient of awards
from the Fine Arts Work Center,
the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Barbara Deming
Memorial Fund. Her recent work
appears in Poetry East and Alaska
Quarterly Review. Faith’s poems
can also be found in The Autumn
House Anthology of Contemporary
American Poetry and in Garrison
Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places.
ETHAN MURROW
Ethan Murrow ’93
Hatje Cantz, 2016
A man caught in and behind
wallpaper, a chimpanzee in a
lifeboat, mountain climbers and
hikers in the middle of a polar sea
à la Caspar David Friedrich: Ethan
Murrow plays with the dimensions
with which we are familiar and
tells a scarcely-conceivable story
with each of his pictures. Their
references lie in personal experi-
ences, historical sources, and
the romanticized landscapes
of the Hudson River School,
from which his fantasy springs.
At first glance, one believes one
is looking at edited black-and-white
photographs, until it quickly
becomes apparent that these are
meticulously-prepared pencil
drawings. Murrow examines
the boundary between the artist’s
fiction and depicted reality, and
this volume deals with more than
his pencil drawings: for the first
time, one can also marvel at the
extensive works he magically
conjures on walls with a ballpoint
pen. [Editor’s note: Find online by
searching “Ethan Murrow Artbook.”
You’ll see a different cover image for
this book on the Artbook website.]
Alumni News
P U T N E Y P O S T 21
ALUMNI EVENTSIt’s been a busy winter and spring, with three Putney events happening around the country. Small gatherings
happened in Washington, DC, and San Francisco, and then a roomful of Putney alumni, parents, friends, and
summer program students and faculty gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to sing Putney songs for two
hours on a warm March evening. It’s a joy to see alumni connect with current parents, and the young
connect with the not-so-young. Thank you all for joining us and for staying in touch.
<clockwise> JOHN BERLINGER, SARAH PARROTT BERLINGER ’95,
JESSE KURLANCHEEK ’95, AND EMILY BUCKBEE CAREY ’95 AT THE PUTNEY SING IN CAMBRIDGE
SUNDARA ZIEGLER ’14, MADDY PARRASCH ’14,
AND FLANNERY MCDONNELL ’14 ENJOYING AN
EVENING TOGETHER AT PUTNEY’S CAMBRIDGE SING
JANE GOTTSCHALK ’56 AND CHRISTIE POINDEXTER DENNIS ’49
AT THE PUTNEY SING
22 P U T N E Y P O S T
TYLER RASCH ’06 VISITS CAMPUS WITH KOREAN REALITY TV SHOWDuring his time as a student at the University of Chicago, Tyler Rasch ’06 spent three months studying Korean
in Seoul. He returned in 2011 as a participant in the Korean Government Scholarship Program, and began
a master’s degree in international relations there in 2012. Spurred by an interest in cross-cultural understanding,
he started, with other non-Korean students, a webzine meant to bring Koreans and foreigners together.
Since 2014, Tyler has been a mainstay on Korean television. He participates on the talk/variety show Non-Summit,
which features non-Korean men living in Korea and discusses topics of Korean and other cultures. In the last year,
Tyler has been a regular member of the show Where is my Friend’s Home, in which Non-Summit cast members visit
their home countries and broaden the multicultural aspect of the two programs. In March, Where is my Friend’s
Home filmed on location at The Putney School, with trips to the barn, the KDU, the art buildings, and more.
It was great to welcome Tyler back to campus; we can’t wait to see the episode!
THE WHERE IS MY FRIEND’S HOME CREW
FILMING IN THE KDU
TYLER RASCH ’06, LEFT, SHOWS THE
CREW FROM KOREA AROUND CAMPUS
Alumni News
P U T N E Y P O S T 23
HARVEST FESTIVALWe see alumni with their young children, faces painted and caramel apples in hand. We watch young alumni
return, embrace, play Frisbee, and sing their hearts out. We laugh with the families who dance together. We
wish we had the time to head into the trails with the Red Leaf Ramble 5K. And we thank the many alumni
and friends who make the trip to campus every fall to join us in this special celebration.
Harvest Festival 2016 is Sunday, October 9.
<clockwise> ALUMNI GATHERED FOR THE GROUP PHOTO AT HARVEST
FESTIVAL 2015 (NOT PICTURED: PARENTS WITH YOUNG CHILDREN
WHO REFUSED TO LEAVE THE BOUNCE HOUSES)
KATHERINE LEE ’75 BROWSES THE GOODS AT THE HARVEST FESTIVAL FARM STAND
RUNNERS TAKE OFF AT THE START OF THE HARVEST FESTIVAL RED LEAF RAMBLE 5K
Bob for apples l Swing from trees l Pet the cows
Toss the hay l Linger on the lawn with old friends
Harvest Festival 2016Sunday, October 9
Fun for the whole family!
Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to your son or daughter who no longer maintains a
permanent address at home, please notify the Alumni Office of his or her new mailing address. Thank you.
The Putney School
Elm Lea Farm
418 Houghton Brook Road
Putney, VT 05346-8675
802-387-5566
www.putneyschool.org
Nonprofit Org.
U.S. Postage
PAID
Putney, VT
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