Waynflete’s Diversity Advisory Group (DAG), a committee of faculty and staff, sponsored the first annual Spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. Award. Students in the Upper and Middle School were invited to submit writings on the importance of continued commitment to racial justice and equality at Waynflete, in our community, and in the world. Members of DAG reviewed submissions. At assembly on Tuesday, Lindsay Kaplan, a member of DAG, announced the Upper School recipients: Karlina Gonzalez ’15, Najma Abdullahi ’18, and Sarah Daoudi ’17. In addition, she named Anna Lee ’16 as first runner up and Luna Soley ’18 as honorable mention.
The award recipients were given A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of MLK, Jr., and they will represent Waynflete, along with faculty and the Middle School recipients, Julia Fiori, Sarah Acheson-Field, and Andrew Johannen, at the annual MLK Breakfast hosted by the Portland chapter of the NAACP. We look forward to hearing more from the participants about that experience.
Next week, the Upper School will hold an assembly celebrating the work of Dr. King and the civil rights movement he led. We will do so by featuring a recent iteration of Dr King’s legacy, the work of RAaW (Racial Awareness at Waynflete). RAaW is a student activity group open to all that holds weekly conversations about race and sponsors events for the Waynflete community intended to raise awareness about racial issues in America. The work of RAaW has been important since its inception in 2008 and seems even more so now than ever. The following week, we will hold RAaW style discussions in a long advising lunch period about where the civil rights movement stands today.
Waynflete in lights at the 2014 National Science Olympiad
On January 24, a team from Waynflete will be heading to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to compete against 64 high schools from the northeast in a Science Olympiad hosted by MIT. Waynflete’s team of 15 has been working hard to prepare for the Olympiad’s 23 events.
According to the the tournament website, “Science Olympiad at MIT is an undergraduate student group founded in fall 2013 by Connor Duffy ’17 and Kenny Friedman ’17 with the mission of improving the Science Olympiad experience of high school students in Massachusetts and the greater northeast region. Throughout the school year, the members of Science Olympiad at MIT volunteered at Science Olympiad tournaments across New England, running events and helping out behind the scenes at the Yale invitational, Merrimack invitational, Massachusetts state tournament, and New Hampshire state tournament. Their ultimate goal, however, has been to host a tournament of their own at MIT — and so they will do, on January 24, 2015.”
According to Waynflete’s Science Chair Wendy Curtis, she and Carol Titterton are “coaching kids in 23 different events, many of which involve building something. Sometimes we’re working with kids who’ve never built anything and are intimidated by the whole process. It’s worth it to see them accomplish something they never thought they could do. To see them go from blank stares to excited trouble shooting – “well, what if I tried….” as we slowly back away and watch the processes – that’s what I love.”
Waynflete will also compete again in the Maine State Science Olympiad. We will send two teams, totaling 30 students. Preparation begins shortly after the trip to Cambridge. We will also send a team of 15 to the middle school tournament. Go Green.
When South Portland Detective. Sgt. Steve Webster wanted to make the public aware of human trafficking, he turned to Waynflete Senior Mike Rodway for help. USNOW staff member Austin Fanburg sat down with Mike to ask about the film Mike made on Webster’s behalf, his time at Waynflete, and his plans for the future.
The film was made in conjunction with Not Here Justice in Action Network, an organization seeking to “put an end to trafficking and offer assistance seeking both justice and restoration to those who have been victimized.” The film and more information about human trafficking can be found on their website. Articles on the film and the problem it documents also appeared in the Forecaster and the Portland Press Herald.
Eight Waynflete students, representing every class in the Upper School, are rigorously preparing to attend the Harvard International Model UN conference to be held in Boston the end of January, our fifth appearance there. Representing the Republic of Georgia in the Economic and Social Council (EcoSoc), students have written position papers on topics as diverse as resettlement of refugees to hydraulic fracking to the historic human rights crisis in the Congo in 2001.
Senior Jonas Maines, the only student to have been to Harvard before, has this to say about the conference: “To be surrounded by thousands of people who share my interests and passions, and to have intelligent, sharp conversations and debates is what keeps pulling me back year after year. “
He and all of his peers were selected based on their excellent (and recognized) participation in Maine’s Model UN Conference in previous years. Freshman Payton Sullivan even won an award last year as a Middle School student! Her take on the experience: “The opportunity to discuss current events and propose solutions to relevant and pressing global issues with students from countless schools is invaluable.” She will be analyzing environmental issues with Gemma Laurence ’15, another Maine Model UN enthusiast: “Model UN was an opportunity to research relevant global issues, and to connect with hundreds of other high schoolers who are devoted to these issues, informed, and often hilarious. I learned how to cooperate and work successfully with people with different opinions than mine, which is valuable skill. Model UN was a chance to step out of my comfort zone, debate, collaborate, and have a lot of fun doing it.”
Kat Thomas, Cooper Bramble, and Michael Michaelson will be representing the Class of 2016, with Isabel Canning on board for the Class of 2017. Her position on the importance of Model UN: “It gave me a motivation and responsibility to be updated and more aware of what’s going on in the world. Model UN can bring out a confident and competitive side that you may not know was there.”
Confident and competitive they are indeed. We are looking forward to the experience!
Riley Mayes has won first place in Waynflete’s Poetry Out Loud Contest. Her moving recitations of “In a London Drawing Room” by George Eliot won Riley top honors in the school-wide competition held during the Upper School assembly on January 8.
As the winner of the school competition, Riley advances to the Regional contest to be held at City Theater in Biddeford on February 11, 2015 where she will compete with students from other southern Maine schools.
Hana Delaney finished in second place and will be the alternate.
Other participants in Thursday’s school-wide competition include: Andrew Clark, Cole Gagnon, Nick Hagler, Dana Hirschhorn, Laura MacLean, Zander Martin, Abdirahman Mohamed, and Leeza Kopaeva. The poems they read are linked here. The judges for the contest were poets Linda Aldrich and Gary Lawless and actor, acting teacher, and theater director Michael Howard. Brief biographies of the judges are linked here.
Each student recited a poem chosen from the Poetry Out Loud website, which provides a compilation of poems from different eras and traditions. Students participating in Thursday’s school-wide contest had advanced from classroom competitions.
The Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Maine’s program is fostered by the Maine Arts Commission.
I read somewhere once that the biggest fear most people have, even eclipsing fear of death, is that of public speaking. There’s something about having to stand up in front of a large group of people and deliver a statement that is understandable, well-written, eloquent, and engaging that is uniquely frightening. That said, if you can keep the nerves down, master the formula for an effective speech, and memorize thoroughly, public speaking can become something of a routine that gets less scary with practice.
Now imagine this: performing that same routine, but having someone repeatedly interrupt you with an argument about how what you’re saying is wrong. Then, on the spot, you have to come up with a strategy to explain why you’re right. And if it’s decided that you are indeed wrong, you have to completely reorganize your thoughts and keep going without appearing at all flustered. That would be a new level of scary.
Amazingly, there are some incredibly twisted people who do this for fun by signing up for mock trial. Before my time at Waynflete began, I didn’t think I would ever be one of those people. Nonetheless, I have just completed my first semester at Brown University, and my fifth semester of competition on the mock trial circuit. What once was unthinkable has become a favorite activity that I couldn’t imagine leaving behind when I graduated.
As I explained before, mock trial is hard. It’s a chemical compound of countless other pursuits – it’s the intellectual exercise of a debate, combined with the dramatic flair of a theater performance, and the competitive intensity of a sporting event. If you take on the role of a witness in the case, you have to be ready to be shredded on cross examination. If you’re an attorney, you better be able to do the shredding. Whatever your role might be, you have to be well-prepared and flexible. Most importantly, you have to be confident. If you believe that you’re unflappable, chances are you will be.
Caught up in an objection battle with a polished senior adversary recently, it occurred to me just how much my day-to-day life in high school contributed to my ability to do this. At Waynflete, as anyone who has ever gone here will tell you, you can’t hide behind others. From a purely numerical standpoint, the classes are small enough that you will inevitably get called on. When you do, you’re expected to have a thought or a question that furthers the conversation. Teachers here want you to be able to think critically and then express those thoughts in a public setting. I didn’t realize how ingrained in my psyche that instinct had become – until it was put to the test in the intimidating arena of collegiate mock trial.
Waynflete Mock Trial Team ’13
I owe a major debt of gratitude to Waynflete’s resident mock trial miracle worker Debba as well as all my other teachers and classmates for encouraging me to embody confidence in mock trial and outside of it. Using the skills that Waynflete helps to develop, it’s easy to be confident. That makes both public speaking and everything else a whole lot less scary, more enriching, and more enjoyable.
Waynflete’s Diversity Advisory Group (DAG), a committee of faculty and staff, is thrilled to announce the first annual Spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. Award. Recipients will be selected based on writings submitted by Upper and Middle School students on the importance of continued commitment to racial justice and equality at Waynflete, in our community, and in the world. Recent events across the country, including those in Missouri and New York, have highlighted the persistence of racial disparity at both the institutional and individual levels. It is the hope of the committee that by inviting students to reflect in this manner we will stimulate earnest conversation about race in our communities.
The award recipients will serve as ambassadors representing Waynflete at an important Maine event honoring Dr. King. Each year, the NAACP hosts a breakfast to honor the message of Dr. King and his dream that America should not judge people based on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. This year, the event will be held on Monday, January 19, 2015. In addition to attending the breakfast, award recipients will receive a book. This year’s selection is A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Recipients will be selected on the basis of an application with a short essay responding to the following prompt:
Martin Luther King Jr.’s message about justice and social equality is as important today as it was when he first delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Though American society has undergone dramatic changes since the Civil Rights era, recent events have shown that we have yet to achieve racial equality in the United States, and that perceptions about a “post-racial” society are erroneous at best, dangerous at worst.
In no more than 250 words, write about your own understanding or experience of racial inequality. Has there ever been a moment in which you realized how much work we have left to do to achieve racial equality? Tell us about it.
A Google Form application has been mailed to all students, and can be accessed by clicking here. Submissions are due by Friday, January 9, at 12:00 noon. Martin Luther King Spirit Award recipients will be announced at assembly on January 13, 2015.
Click here to watch the trailer for Selma, a newly released film about a pivotal event in the Civil Rights struggle. It opens this week in Portland.
If you have ever been a part of a play, then you have probably had Postpartum Show Depression. Maybe you haven’t called it that, but you’ve probably had it. In fact, if you’ve ever devoted yourself to a long-term project, and felt a sense of loss upon its fruition, you’ve probably had Postpartum Show Depression, or, rather, Postpartum Project Depression. When I first heard the term Postpartum Show Depression from my stage manager at the end of my last show, it struck me as not quite accurate. It seemed to me that the term should be simply Post-Show Depression, because what did the closing of our show have to do with the period following childbirth? But the more I thought about that question, the more I realized the answer was, actually, a lot. Now, of course, our show was not an infant, and we would not have the luxury to raise it and nurture it after it had burst forth from our loins. And yet, it had burst forth, hadn’t it?
Before sending us off to go on stage on opening night, my director had given us a pep talk, as any director I’ve ever had has done. He was going for something inspirational, some strong tonic to assuage whatever pre-show jitters we might have. He told us that the ink on the pages of our scripts was blue, and that the blood of our souls was red, and that where the two met, on stage, it was purple, and alive, and pulsing. Now, I didn’t have pre-show jitters that night, but I still liked the sound of his words, even though I had a sneaking suspicion that our cast was not the first to hear them, and would not be the last. It wasn’t till later, when I had time for reflection, that I really got to thinking about through our work and our passion. I guess our show was purple, and alive, and pulsing on that stage, like a newborn babe, and that we, its mothers, had grown it within us, had given it that gift of life.
Three shows came and went, and in the few spare moments I had, I dreaded the end of the process. It came anyway.
The weekend after closing night, I did as little as possible. I cried a fair amount, moped around, neglected school work, and watched TV in the middle of the day. I was struggling to stop living the show, struggling to sever myself from Anne, my character. I kept returning to two ideas, both of them frightening. One was that now, I was a singular being, not a member of a cast anymore. The other was that the show was out of my hands now, the gestation period was over. It had been presented to the world and was no longer contained within me and my cast mates, but somewhere outside of us, elsewhere, perhaps in the minds of those who had seen it. These realizations brought with them a deep sort of emptiness, and it took a week or two to wait that feeling out, and even thereafter it lingered, a wispy ghost of its original intensity but present nonetheless.
Closing night was a month ago now, and the next show, Henry V, is just starting its rehearsal process. For the past couple days, the theater has been alive with the sounds of auditions, and I’ve been watching, and listening, but not contributing. I won’t be acting in Henry V, since I’ll be doing a semester away this spring, and can’t see the process through. Nonetheless, I’ve been going to the auditions, and helping out with anything I can. It helps with the emptiness. And it hurts. The other day, I was watching the guy who’d played my character’s husband in the last show reading a scene in auditions, and, in an instant, felt overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed to see him being Not Will, who’d been his character. It signaled to me another marker in the end of our show… the time when a new one takes its place. And I was jealous of him. I was jealous that he was on that stage, filling the void with something new. I was on the other side of the audition table, as I’d never been before, because it was the closest I could get to being in his place.
Of course, the best treatment for Postpartum Show Depression is to start a new show, which is why, I think, I’ve been trying to be a part of Henry V. I never knew how much I needed to be in a cast, to be in show, to create, because I have always been doing it. I have always had the next thing… the next show, the next sports team, the next mock trial meet, the next group within which I became a “we,” a we that transcended individuality to create some life within a moment. Until now. Because now, I don’t have the next creation brewing within me. I have been denied my palliative treatment for my chronic condition, my drive to create new life from within myself. If I had that, if I were in a new cast, creating a new living being, I wouldn’t be feeling this. I will fill the hole again, though. I know I will be in another cast, even if I never do another show in my life. I will create again, and when my creation has come to fruition, I’ll repeat the process. And maybe, every so often, I’ll pause to let Postpartum Show Depression take its toll, so that I don’t forget that there will always be hole where a new creation needs to be.
I believe in Postpartum Show Depression. I believe that it exists, that it demands to be felt, and that it can be remedied, if not cured, by its cause.
Waynflete’s MEST Up duo of Julianna Harwood ’15 and Stephen Epstein ’15 defeated Kennebunk High School in the MEST Up competition, capturing the tournament crown. In case you missed it, here is a link to the championship match. In addition to bringing the MEST Up trophy back to Waynflete, Julianna and Stephen each won new i-Pads and, according to the show’s host, “eternal glory.”
MEST Up is a television game show that tests high school students in the areas of math, engineering, science, and technology. Schools from around the area send teams of two students to compete head to head in trivia and engineering challenges. Last spring, Waynflete’s team of Ali Ghorashi ’15 and Sophie Benson ’14 won the championship, soundly defeating Cheverus in the final match. Waynflete’s current duo ran through its tournament bracket, defeating Baxter Academy, Westbrook High School, Greely High School, and finally Kennebunk.
Science Chair Wendy Curtis is rightly proud of her charges. “STEM skills are important in so many fields. I love seeing that by senior year, our students can go head to head with kids from other schools and come out on top. Stephen and Julianna did such a great job! I couldn’t be more proud of them!” They impressed their fans in Waynflete households as well. Heather Courtice Hart, mother of three Flyers and now dedicated MEST Up fans, remarked, “It was such a great experience to be able to sit as a family and watch my kids be just as excited about Waynflete winning a math and science competition as they are about Waynflete winning a soccer game. I’m so grateful to have such amazing role models here for my kids, and so happy that they go to school where it’s cool to be smart.”
Click here to read Sophie Benson’s story of how a simple box of munchkins got Sophie and the Waynflete Science department started on the road to eternal glory.
Genevieve Welch and five other Waynflete students, auditioned for, and were accepted to participate in the All-State Music Festival on May 14-16/2015 at the University of Southern Maine.
Helen Gray-Bauer will perform viola in the orchestra
James Bigbee will perform oboe in the concert band
Leah Israel, Sarah Heath, Genevieve Welch, and Willson Moore will perform in the chorus.
Members of the class of 2005 enjoying fine weather on the Presidential traverse as sophomores
According to Ron Hall – former Upper School Director, Development Director, Acting Head of School, and Outdoor Experience pioneer – Outdoor Experience ran for the first time in 1976, which means that in the fall of 2015, Outdoor Experience will run for the 40th time. To commemorate this historic event, we are collecting Outdoor Experience lore from alums, trip leaders, and parents. If you have OE stories and/or pictures to share, please email us at . We look forward to hearing from you.
During the first week of rehearsals for Henry V, we had an amazing “on your feet” first read followed by an intense drumming workshop led by local musician, Marc Chilemmi, who also teaches drum circle for MS PAW. Additionally, we had a stage combat workshop led by Sally Wood, a guest artist form Portland Stage Co. and Bowdoin College Theater Program. The cast and crew worked on slaps, punches, falls, hair pulls, devising battle scenes in small groups and exploring the physical movement created from shooting a long bow. The goal was to create an epic sense of battle with a variety of movement and sound. Here is a link to another rehearsal video featuring our long bow battle lines. Yes, we are off to a boisterous beginning!
The crew is still open so students should be in touch if they would like to join in! Contact or .
