Re: 50th reunion

[Toby Condliffe]

Mark,

A really thoughtful and stimulating series of thoughts!  Thank you.

Toby

On Thursday, May 31, 2012, marcus acheson wrote:

1) thank you for your and ann's hospitality so graciously extended to us and our class of '62 during our recent reunion. it seems we have been your first 50th class at this school and thus we serve as a marker for you that tells something of what pomfret meant and helped accomplished for us lo those many years ago versus what the school may mean for and to tomorrow's 50 year re-uners.

2) among the many take-aways i have from this experience, i was impressed by the focus pomfret has on skill sets in the current curriculum…so different from the rote recitation of latin reflexive pronouns of the past. 

3) at your table for dinner we discussed outcome measurements for the pomfret graduates of tomorrow. your points, some of which compared you and your brother's parallel tracks through schools, dealt with the current focus on finding the right fits for expected graduates versus simply going to "name schools". my son and i have discussed this tropic off and on for some time.

4) one measure of outcomes--somewhat extreme to be sure-- is the list of secondary schools that produced nobel prize laureates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_laureates_by_secondary_school_affiliation) and another is the list of university/college produced nobel laureates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation). very much along your thought process as i perceived it, malcolm gladwell points out in his book "the outliers" that many very bright people go to many colleges of all sorts and do very well either because of or in spite of them.

but nobel prizes and pulitzers and other such high profile awards are hardly the metrics one can practically build an academic program around. besides, serendipity may play a larger role in this regard than any other single factor.

many successful companies here and abroad look to customer satisfaction surveys for feedback as a measure of their products success. would such an approach if taken up by pomfret's peer group collectively help form a data base that over time might point to areas where successes were accomplished and where improvement might be sought? the idea is that pomfret and peer group school graduates might be canvassed over a period of years during and after college years so as to assess their satisfaction levels with their secondary school experiences. if gathered and measured on consistent bases over time one might imagine a bounty of helpful data which if positive could serve as valuable marketing data as well (each school gets its data and the average/high/low results of the peer group). excellence is a laudable if elusive target but daring to quantify excellence is a challenge perhaps best left to fools and idealists, arguable redundancy notwithstanding.

5) in extremis but not, i suggest, irresponsibly, paul thief (of paypal, (in your) facebook and hedge fund fame) argues that college should be emphasized as something that is not for everyone--even pomfret would be graduates (ala gates and zuckerberg et al)…at least not if their skill sets are such that college may get in their way. as someone described it, his darkly powerful National Review article called "the end of the future" foresees the future of technology developing only along the lines of least resistance namely of those those areas that are least regulated leaving the areas most in need of technology like energy with its over-regulation bereft of meaningful non-solindra-like investment and development. what skill sets would a pomfret grad need to combat or even reverse such a trend?

in reading this article, one wonders what if anything about which he writes is exposed to our secondary students? 

6) moreover, few secondary schools that i know of try to eke out a philosophically differentiated point of view so as to distinguish themselves from their peers. most new england schools like their higher education counterparts are taught by and seek to emulate the liberal northeastern establishment thinking and thus are mostly indistinguishable one from the other. my view from the heartland of america would not see this as an exaggerated statement. seen from out east i suspect a different reaction. nonetheless, i ask, what if pomfret layered in a heavy dose of critical and analytical thinking (back to teaching skill sets) blocks of study and debates dealing with the big issues of the day juxtaposing liberal and conservative arguments on entitlements, debt, the future of the euro-zone and what it portends for the usa? who knows but that it might inspire a pomfret grad to go on and do something about some of these issues!

these then are some of the thoughts and musings i offer in return for the stimulation we received during our class reunion. i hope your future pomfret 50th re-uners take away as much as some of us did. good luck in your coming sophomore year as head of school.

regards, m a r k 

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Toby Condliffe

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[Wally Buschmann]

Mark,

 

Suggest you apply as a visiting, thought provoking guest faculty member for a semester.  You have suggested a very challenging curriculum; one that could set Pomfret apart from its peers.

 

Wally 

 

WALDEMAR G. BUSCHMANN

WEEKS & HUTCHINS, LLC

P. O. Box 417

2 Park Place

Waterville, Maine 04903-0417

w...@lawweeks.com

Tel: 207 872-2783

Fax: 207 872-5749

 

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From: pomf...@googlegroups.com [mailto:pomf...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Toby Condliffe
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 3:57 PM
To: marcus acheson
Cc: tric...@pomfretschool.org; pomf...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: 50th reunion

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