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Here is a horrifying fact: common room television rules actually used to control how much television Deerfield students watched. Today, with nearly every show online, students can watch unlimited television in their own dorm rooms. Many students admitted to watching up to ten hours of T.V. per week, religiously following six or more shows; most T.V. watching occurs online when the common room television is off-limits. While this is an obvious distraction from academics, online television also replaces exercise and outdoor time for some. We are not advocating an end to common room T.V. restrictions or increased control of our internet. However, this presents an opportunity for improvement. If we manage our time responsibly, we can cut back on television, study when our hall residents think we are studying, sleep for a decent number of hours… and still manage to catch the latest episode of Glee. As Mr. Warsaw encourages us to stop multi-tasking, and as Dr. Curtis graces us with a schedule that allows for more sleep, television seems like an enemy to our success. What are our priorities as a community? Gossip Girl or English paper?

Cats gone missing, children stuffed behind chimneys, tavern brawls, a ghost, and a rare mural are all part of the Sexton House history. Located next to Ephraim-Williams, Sexton House has a rather mysterious story. Built in 1760, this salt-box style house had ten different owners during its first hundred years. The house has served as the post office, the home of a tailor and his business, and a publishing place for a weekly anti-Masonic newspaper. Its first owner, David Sexton, used the house as a tavern. “It was the tavern for the patriots of Deerfield during the American Revolution, and across the street was the tavern for the loyalists. There used to be fights between the two parties in the street!” assistant dean of faculty, English teacher, and current resident Karinne Heise noted. In 1924, the house was sold to Deerfield Academy where it was a small dorm until 1958. Since then, multiple faculty families have resided here including English teachers Suzanne Hannay and John Palmer and the Heise family. When asked whether she enjoyed living in a historic house, Ms. Heise replied, “It’s interesting [but] also structurally shaky at points and can be hard to clean.” Ms. Hannay described the Sexton house as a “great old house,” and during their seven year residency, she and her husband, Mr. Palmer, discovered some unusual house traits. The most distinctive feature of the house is its mural, one of only two colonial waterfall murals on the East Coast. “It’s a ‘Cascade Mural,’” Ms. Hannay explained, “meaning that your eye follows the flow of a gigantic woodland waterfall from the top of the house all the way down to the bottom of the stairway.” The Sexton House’s second intriguing aspect is a hideout, used to keep colonial children safe during Indian raids. “The little ones got stuffed into a narrow opening hidden in the molding of the front hall and staircase,” Ms. Hannay shared. “They’d crawl back into a low-ceilinged brick chamber behind the three fireplaces on the first floor. The thinking was that the children might even survive a house fire surrounded by fired earth bricks.” Ms. Hannay discovered the hiding place when one of their cats went missing. Upon moving in, residents are warned about the ghost of a “young man in colonial dress” that has haunted the house for over a century. Ms. Hannay said, “We didn’t pay much attention to this story, though our cats used to stare in a state of high alert at the empty, south-east corner of our bedroom.” She continued, “Very late one night I was awakened by a sensation that someone was sitting on the edge of the bed right beside me. I awoke expecting to see my husband telling me he couldn’t sleep; instead there was nothing but a very cold sensation around me. That was it.” Bedside ghosts, secret chambers, political brawls, rare murals. The Sexton House has it all.

If you walk into the mailroom, past the day-student lounge and the wall of mailboxes, and turn left, sandwiched between the soda and snack machines, you’ll discover a blue bulletin board covered in letters bearing the crests of Harvard, Georgetown, Williams, Colorado College, UC Santa Barbara, Pomona, and Hamilton, all with their sincerest apologies. This is the Wall of Shame, a place for seniors to pin up the contents of those notorious thin envelopes and to commiserate with classmates over rejections. Wall of Shame creator and future University of Texas student KC Morris ’10 applied to no fewer than 18 schools and, so, considered herself a good person to start the Wall of Shame. “Just by the sheer numbers game of it, I knew I’d be rejected from a lot of places,” Morris chuckled. Morris modeled the Wall of Shame after the one at her brother’s school. “When I came here my freshman year and realized that we didn’t have one, I vowed that that would be my contribution to this school as a senior.” Fully committed to her project, Morris posted all her own letters on the Wall of Shame. “I didn’t want to do it half-heartedly, so I put every single rejection letter up there, even the ones that I have to print out,” Morris said. She proposed the idea in her Facebook status to gauge its popularity. “I got three ‘Yes, do it’s, and one ‘No, that would be an awful idea, no one would ever use it, it’s such a private thing,’ and I completely respect that idea but it caught on eventually. My friends laughed at me, but they started putting their own letters up.” Morris wanted her class to feel a sense of togetherness. “Being Deerfield students, people kind of assume that you’ve already done so many great things. Even if I was the only one up there for two months, it was a reminder to let people know that even if they didn’t want to put their letter up, they’re not alone.”

Going to Haiti was a sensory overload. The tent cities, tin slums, rubble, garbage, and sewage form a blurred tableau in my mind, and it’s difficult to discern meaning or importance from any of it specifically. I had come to take recordings of the local music and help my grandparents, who were giving vaccines, and though I essentially accomplished what I came for, what I truly brought back with me were the faces of the people I met, from the smallest schoolchildren at Proje Espwa dressed in their pink and green uniforms, to the old maid who worked in the volunteer compound and chased chickens around with a banana frond broom. There are faces that are more defined than others. The people I got to know personally, whom I talked to, with whom I simply shared a smile stand out in my mind. It was my last afternoon at Proje Espwa, the orphanage where I stayed. As I emerged out of the sticky heat of my makeshift recording studio, I heard guitar and singing drifting from one of the other rooms. I went to investigate and found a guitarist and a singer sitting on some plastic chairs. I knew the guitarist a little bit; his name was Jimi, like the legend himself, and he carried a slightly out of tune acoustic guitar with him at all times. Earlier, Jimi had given me a rendition of Michael Jackson’s “We Are the World” on solo guitar (Jackson is huge in Haiti). The other man, in his late twenties or early thirties, was Prospere. After they finished their song, Prospere and Jimi told me they had something to record. I had already taken down the microphone I had duct taped to a makeshift stand, so I had to sit in between the two of them and hold the microphone in my hands. I had heard the song they played before. Jimi had played it on one of the warm evenings in the quad of the compound. It was called “Prend Ta Guitare” and it was the favorite song of Father Mark, the man who ran the orphanage. We recorded a few takes and though the guitar was a little too flat, and the microphone placement was far from ideal, the song had an endearing quality that I couldn’t quite explain. When we finished recording I played the song back to Prospere and an unforgettable smile came across his face, one of almost childlike glee. It was a smile that seemed to defy everything I’d seen on the trip so far, a smile that communicated a glimmer of hope in a place where I had seen little. The significance of the song itself came to me after I had already flown out. I had asked my francophone grandmother to find out the lyrics to “Prend Ta Guitare” for me and few days after I left Haiti I got the email from my grandmother with the verses. It was then that I knew why the song was Father Marc’s favorite, and why the smile and the song were tied together in my mind. There was a repeating line in French throughout the verses that translated to “We carry the hope for a better tomorrow.” The message of hope in the song could have found no better embodiment than in Prospere’s natural voice and warm smile. They were the sound and vision of the modest hope of the song. People from the outside who come to Haiti are often struck by the resilience of the people there. Even in Port-au-Prince with its infrastructure still in shambles, the Haitian people have sustained themselves. They’ve survived through years of exploitation and invasion by France, Spain, and the United States and they’ve survived through corrupt governments and savage treatment. Maybe it’s that sense of modest hope in “Prend Ta Guitare” that keeps them going, the hope for a better tomorrow, which every once in a while, against all odds, puts a genuine smile on their faces.

I would ask you whether you had ever seen any of Willard Wigan’s art, but chances are, you haven’t and couldn’t. Willard Wigan is a micro sculptor, and his pieces are so small, they can’t be seen with the naked eye. Many of them are only three times the size of a single blood cell. Typically, they sit on the head of a nail, or in the eye of a needle. “I could probably go down to, say, five microns, the tip of a human hair,” Wigan said in a recent interview with CBS. Wigan’s inspiration was born from a childhood of adversity. He had dyslexia as a schoolboy in England, and an abusive schoolteacher once said to him, “You are an exhibition of failure, and all the children in the school need to know about you, because this is what happens if you don’t listen to me, children.” Wigan said, “That made me feel small.” Such belittling had a huge impact on Wigan, and his mother noticed. She told her son, “You are now going to continue to make small things… If you keep making small things, your name will get bigger!” Now Wigan spends his days bent painstakingly over a microscope, crafting his masterpieces. He must make his own tools (e.g. the single hair of a fly as a brush) and use the most precise hand/eye coordination. He must put himself into a meditative state of mind, where he is able to control the most basic of movements. He must be aware of every twitch, every heartbeat, and every breath. He learned the hard way while working on a sculpture of the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland . Wigan reflected, “I’m lifting her [Alice] with the eyelash to put her underneath the table… and as I’m poking her—and I’m doing this microscopically—and at the same time, I’m going [makes deep breathing noise], I lift her out again, and then… And then ugh, gone!” Wigan inhaled her. Alice went down the rabbit hole. Despite its size, Wigan’s work draws a lot of attention. One of his most famous creations is of Charlie Chaplin dancing on the tip of an eyelash. “That one brings a lot of attention, because people see it and they think, ‘An eyelash? Is that really an eyelash? Is that really there?’” Many of Wigan’s pieces are of well-known events or people: the last supper, the Obama family, the Incredible Hulk, Humpty Dumpty, and seven-foot one-inch tall Shaquille O’Neil. “Put a guy like me into a little pin? That’s crazy!” said O’Neil after viewing his sculpture through a microscope. “Took him seven weeks? Probably take me 17 years!” Wigan believes in the sayings “Less is more,” and “The little things mean a lot.” “And my work, it means a hell of a lot to me, and a hell of a lot to everybody that sees it,” declared Wigan. Willard Wigan’s work will be on display at the Flag Art Foundation in New York until May 27th. Sources : http://www.willard-wigan.com/default.aspx http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/21/sunday/main6320206.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260569/William-Wigan-Astonishing-sculpture-church-carved–single-grain-SAND.html

There is nothing but a silent tension that stretches between the six boats lined up at the starting position. Before the start of a crew race, the brawn of the teams sits nervously silent as the official’s countdown begins. The brains of the operation, the coxswains, sit calm and focused as they repeat the race-plan one more time to their teammates. The coxswain’s body is hidden in the bow of the boat with just his head peeping out as he faces the course ahead of him. He grips the steering in his lap as the weeks of training and practice whirl through his head. The official’s speakers blare the word, “ROW,” shattering the river’s silence as six different coxswains’ for power and strength. Coxswains are members of the crew team who, because of their small frames, fit into the front of each boat to steer, direct, and control the course of each rowing event. Despite being the smallest members of the Deerfield crew teams, the coxswains have by far the most difficult and important jobs in racing and practice each day. “You’re an extension of the coach,” said girls’ coxswain Elizabeth Wood ’10. “Since there’s no coach in the boat, it’s up to you out on the water to relay their instructions to the team.” Coxswains’ main goals include keeping the boat on a straight course while racing and keeping their rowers motivated and focused in situations of extreme exhaustion. “I know they’re tired and I can feel their energy slipping, but my job is to push them to go beyond what they think they can accomplish as rowers,” said boys’ coxswain Whitney Nudo ’10. It is also crucial to the outcome of the race that coxswains adhere to the coaches’ race plan. “You need to stick to the plan. but you also need to be able to think on your feet and adapt to the setting of the race. You need to know your rowers well and what it takes for them to win,” girls’ coxswain Liz Earle ’10. affirmed. Technically, the coxswain’s job is to make sure every single stroke pulled in the boat is perfectly synchronized. To accomplish this, coxswains have “calls,” or specific sets of directions that last for the duration of about ten strokes. Boys’ coxswain Thomas Earle ’12 said, “I make calls, or ‘technical tens,’ to keep my rowers focused on specific aspects of rowing, like catching the water together and finishing each stroke at the same time.” To gain the trust and respect needed to control their teammates, the coxswains create a unique bond with each member of their boat. “You need to show them that you are confident in yourself and willing to work as hard as them to gain their respect,” said boys’ coxswain Alfonso Velasco ’11. “You get a possessive feeling over the girls in your boat,” added girls’ coxswain Audrey Cho ’11, “Once things start to click and everyone pulls together, that’s when an automatic connection is made and things really start to happen.”

After a year’s experience with the Deerfield Academy Perspectives Program (DAPP), a student work program formerly known as the Green and White Program, Assistant Dean of Students Amie Creagh said there were no major problems that surfaced during its trial. A few minor issues, however, have emerged this year. In assigning tasks to student workers, Ms. Creagh had a difficulty making sure that each department involved enough workers while trying to accommodate all student’s work requests. Soon after the assignments began, some students questioned the involvement of their peers in the mailroom. It made them uncomfortable that sophomores were distributing their personal mails. As soon as this came to Ms. Creagh’s attention, the task of delivering personal mails, such as graded assignments, immediately returned to staff. It was also difficult to establish rhythm or momentum with the new assignments this term due to spring second visit days. Many supervisors contacted student volunteers to let them know that they wouldn’t start working until a few weeks later. Despite these issues, DAPP is still seen as a valuable program. The survey sent out to participants after the trial term last year returned primarily positive responses. Students enjoyed their experience and thought it should be continued in the future. Laddie Trees ’11 helped out with gardening and trash pickup last spring. “I was not looking forward to giving up a free,” but after the first few times, the task became much more enjoyable. “I found out that a lot more happens than I thought to make our school look as good as it does.” Although students do make small contributions to the community, “the program was something new, which made me feel like I was really contributing to the school’s ability to function,” said Anna Gonzales ’12 about her experience at the ITS. Ms. Creagh is adamant about sticking to the DAPP’s mission: to create and strengthen relationships between students and staff by getting students to help around campus. “Strong human connections are what allow a school to run smoothly,” she said.

Ryan Murphy’s hit musical comedy and drama, Glee , returned to the air April 13 for its second season. It tells the story of earnest Spanish teacher Will Schuester’s attempt to reinvent the school’s once award-winning glee club. The show, which is unlike any other show on television, has won a Golden Globe for best comedy and, after only a season, already has higher ratings than Gossip Girl and So You Think You Can Dance? So why is Glee so popular? Why, when there is a multitude of high school “dramadies” already on air, would so many high school students rather watch this quirky, odd-ball newcomer? The answer, it seems, is incredibly straightforward: Glee has music. “The reason Glee is special is that it has football players bursting into song,” said Rose Pember ’11. Steph Olivas ’10 agreed, adding, “It’s also just funny to watch because the typical high school experience is so over-the-top in the show. It’s very silly and dramatic in a good way.” Another attraction is the good-looking guys, according to Allie Gray ’11, who said “Finn [the teenage male lead] is adorable.” The cast includes Broadway star Matthew Morrison (Will) and comedy veteran Jane Lynch (Sue Sylvester), from The Forty Year Old Virgin and Two and a Half Men , as the school’s caustic cheerleading coach bent on destroying the Glee club.

While I can’t say I know the first thing about fashion, I do see it as a rather curious establishment. Every so often, I find myself in a dentist’s reception room flipping through one of those fashion mags, somewhat involuntarily educating myself on the latest haute couture. What can I possibly compare myself to gazing in bewilderment at the thick, glossy pages – a grandfather watching his twelve year-old granddaughter texting? A three-toed sloth observing the movement of a flying monkey (or any type of movement, really)? Images of creatures from another species meet my eye: some have alien antennae, others long, silky tails, and still others, purple cheeks and Athena-esque armor. I venture to compare this level of fashion, the most haute of haute couture, to curling at the Winter Olympics; it takes some time and patience to understand, but is in fact quite sophisticated. (This is total supposition; I have yet to understand curling, either.) The next fashion level down, however, I begin to follow. There are clear trends, ranging from newly-introduced styles to renewals of vestments from the past. Women walk down the runway wearing monocles, draped in ribbons, or sporting dresses off the set of a Jane Austen remake. Recently, I heard of an upsurge of military-inspired design lines. The latest trends always strike me as impractical or, if not impractical, simply out of place. This idea repeats itself when I see Deerfield students wearing rugged Timberland boots and Barbour jackets around our idyllic preparatory school campus. There is a distinct juxtaposition of the rough and tough quality of the two brands and the pristine, elite setting in which they are worn. John Barbour, a Scottish farmer turned draper turned clothes-maker, began making jackets back in 1894. The majority of his customers were seamen and others involved in the ship industry who bought the coats for their protection against the worst of the elements. Since then, the Barbour company has come a long way, though it has tried to maintain its clothing in the spirit of British country living. Still based in South Shields, England, where John Barbour first set up shop, Barbour distributes worldwide and has expanded from oilskin seafarer-wear and riding coats to more casual clothing, like the quilted and bedale jackets seen on many girls around campus. Still, the physical appearance of these jackets retains the dark, rugged quality of a seaman’s shell, also similar in look to many models belonging to the Carhartt clothing company, which targets its apparel at the active worker— landscapers, builders, carpenters, and the like. Then there’s the Timberland Company, famous for its ecological and humanitarian outlook in addition to its quality footwear. The shoe-maker entered the business as a major player when it introduced a new molding technology that created a completely waterproof boot. Their durable, high-performance shoes constructed from thick, chunky leather are geared towards outdoor activities, such as hiking and boating. Lately, this classic yellow boot has found its way off the trail and onto the street, picked up by many hip hop artists for its rugged, masculine look. It has even made it to the heated brick walkways of prestigious boarding schools like Deerfield. But back to fashion. The curiosity is how it seems to be constructed out of a series of constantly-shifting reversals. Garments representative of lifestyles that were looked down upon or completely foreign to their new wearers are taken up and reversed into something prestigious and high-end. How often over the course of a month, or a year, is a student’s Barbour jacket subjected to the harshness of coastal elements, or Timberlands trudged through the muddy outdoors they were made for? While the gritty, outdoorsy nature of these and certain other items is ironic displayed in such a tame, sheltered, and intellectual lifestyle, there is more to it all than fashion. The fact that their original uses have become in many places, like Deerfield, obsolete, indicates, above all, an irreversible change in lifestyle. Sources : http://www.timberland.com/corp/index.jsp?page=corpTimeline http://www.countryattire.com/barbour-clothing-history.php

At the risk of sounding slightly cliché, the past year and nine editions of the Scroll Volume 84 have flown by. I’d like to first thank all the 2009-2010 editors; your hard work produced high-quality pages and your levity during layout kept me sane. Also, none of this would have been possible without our advisors, Ms. Hannay and Mr. Palmer, who guided us, motivated us, and brought us donuts when we were hungry. Thank you to everyone on and off campus who supported us: readers, Dr. Curtis, and administration. Reflecting on the quality of Volume 84, I like to think that we accomplished many of our goals. We reported with clarity on a number of weighty issues—gender dynamics, over enrollment, the on-campus International Debate, the settlement of the Koch Center lawsuit, our rivalry with Choate, and the fire in the Dining Hall. In addition, we provided a forum for discussion, receiving and publishing many letters from students, teachers, and alumni. We also introduced a couple of exciting initiatives, including Scroll Online. Thanks to Online Editors Camille Villa ’10 and Jake Barnwell ’12 for spearheading the project. The Scroll Online , our website launched in May, has had 16,000 visits and allowed us to begin a video-journalism program and publish a greater volume of and more timely articles. With commenting available online, we’ve received more feedback from a larger audience. Also, we started a regular book review column and blog by Kayla Corcoran ’10, and we feature Amanda Bennett ’10’s almost daily-updated blog about her experience in Spain School Year Abroad. Throughout the year we strove to report on a balance of topics with accuracy and fairness and to accept all constructive criticism with grace. Finally, to end this letter, I’d like to congratulate and wish the best to Elisabeth Strayer ’11, the new editor-in-chief, and her staff. Good night and good luck. – Lucy Cobbs, editor-in-chief

While the rest of the school went on with its regular Sunday schedule, twenty students from English teacher Suzanne Hannay’s senior classes voyaged to New York City and back. The purpose of the trip on January 31, was to see the Broadway play . “The play is about blue collar workers in the Red Hook section of 1950s Brooklyn,” explained Ms. Hannay. Ms. Hannay had already been planning to read the Arthur Miller play in her senior English class when she saw an announcement for it in . “It was really cool to see the play,” attested Grace Burns ’10, a member of Ms. Hannay’s seventh period class. “We had acted the scenes out in class, but it was really exciting to see the play on Broadway.” Fellow classmate Haley Patoski ’10 agreed, “I was a lot more interested in the play after seeing it in New York.” This isn’t the first time Ms. Hannay has taken her class to see a Broadway play. “Last year,” said Ms. Hannay, “we read and saw with John Lithgow and Katie Holmes.” Students also had the privilege of meeting and talking with star John Lithgow. This production brought two more Hollywood stars to the stage. “Liev Shrieber and Scarlett Johansson did an amazing job portraying complicated characters. There was intense emotion between them,” Kevin Smith ’10 said. Ms. Hannay created her English course “Literature of the 1950s” in 2004 after discovering “a huge similarity between the 1950s—with fear of communism, McCarthyism, and atomic bomb— and the 2000s post 9 / 11 with fear of weapons of mass destruction, Islamic terrorists, and any voice that questioned American righteousness,” she described. Ms. Hannay’s interest in the 1950’s spawned the class which has gained the nickname “50/50.” The syllabus includes novels, plays and movies from the fifties and the course explores the defining qualities of the decade and how it compares to present day America. If this visit was so successful, why don’t more classes go on field trips? While Ms. Hannay wishes that more classes at Deerfield went on trips, she explained that “they’re never going to happen unless we start school a week earlier.” Both Burns and Patoski agreed that finding the time for one of these excursions is difficult. “The trip was really fun,” said Burns, “but it was hard to lose my whole Sunday.” It is certainly tempting to stick to the comfortable Sunday schedule. And perhaps New York City is too far to travel on a busy weekend day, but as Ms. Hannay pointed out, “Few of us ever make it into Boston, Stockbridge, or even the Smith or Amherst College Art Galleries. That’s a shame.”

As juniors and seniors looked over this year’s spring electives, many were disappointed to find no science offerings. Where, for instance, have Skywatching and Forensics gone? Aside from these traditional standbys we would like to see courses with more relevance to students. Many have expressed interest in seeing more practical or hands-on courses such as home economics or wood shop. How about a course focused on keeping abreast of current events? Middlesex, for example, offers a course in which students must read the paper daily and write letters to the editor while pursuing a research topic. It seems especially important that seniors on the cusp of, if not already, exercising their voting rights, be well-informed about the issues of the day. In the past, we have complained about students’ ignorance when it comes to current events, why doesn’t the school try a proactive approach as Middlesex does? Offering this to seniors might be a first step towards a class offered towards the entire student body, encouraging overall political awareness.