This week I have been on the road—first to a small boarding school in Wisconsin and then on to LA and San Francisco to meet with alumni, parents, and friends of the school. It’s always invigorating to meet with supporters of the school and to hear their stories of how the school—or more usually, a particular faculty member—made a difference in their lives or the lives of their children. And they mention many different teachers—it’s not just one or two—it’s a lot. And that to me underlines the strength of our faculty.
One of the pleasures of traveling is the ability to get caught up on reading. I usually pack a few books, my new iPad loaded with another set of books, and then end up browsing in the bookstores and buying more there. This trip, I brought along
Mark Oppenheimer’s book Wisenheimer, in which he writes about his years on the Loomis Chaffee debate team between 1988 and 1992. The book is often very funny as Mark describes his childhood as an overly smart and verbal boy and how he came into his own at Loomis and most particularly on the debate team under the tutelage of Philosophy and Math faculty member Curt Robison.
The world of high school debate is detailed in all of its intricacy and idiosyncrasy. The book makes clear the many hours that coaches like Curt Robison—who to our good fortune continues to teach at Loomis—put into the development of their students. As Mark himself said in an interview about the book, Curt introduced him to the life of the mind. And Curt’s success as a debate coach continues. This past week,
one of our students took first place at a tournament at Yale, where Mark went as an undergraduate and currently teaches, and she and her partner earned the highest number of speaker points among the 44 teams that competed.
Mark’s is not the only recent book to focus on a Loomis faculty member. If you have not already done so, you should check out
Steve Strogatz’s book The Calculus of Friendship, which details through their correspondence the relationship between Steve, who was a member of the Class of 1976, and his former Loomis teacher Don Joffray over the years. For the past few weeks Steve, who is a mathematics professor at Cornell and Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics, has written a blog for
The New York Times on mathematics. He uses apt analogies and good storytelling to demystify calculus—the mark of a wonderful teacher.
Happy Reading.
