February 22, 2024

Dear Columbus Academy Families,

Last weekend, the school celebrated David Block’s 50 years of teaching with an art show of former students called Chip Off the OL’ BLOCK (view photos). Although he’d rather chew glass – as my mother would say – than be the center of attention (often a trait of the finest teachers), David was reluctantly bathed in admiration of his teaching and his care for his students and the school. The entire evening was an excellent illustration of what New York Times columnist David Brooks describes as a ritual of a “thick” institution. A place, he says, that leaves its mark on people.

Brooks writes that thick institutions are not ones people use instrumentally – to simply get a diploma or degree – but instead become part of a person’s identity, and when members of these places “meet each other, even decades later, they know they have something important in common.”

Though it’s not entirely unique in the world of independent schools, it is rare to have two teachers who have dedicated their lives to students for 50-plus years (John Exline ’64 is in his 56th year of service to Columbus Academy). At the art show, generations of alumni were present in person or through their works – all in honor of great teaching in a wonderful place – and in honor of the important things they have in common.

It is also rare for a school like ours to be strong enough and stable enough over its entire existence (113 years) to have excellent teachers in every decade who carry forward the best qualities that make us a good school – dedication to students and respect for faculty, above all else.

Over winter break, I was first reminded of Brooks’ article during a late afternoon at school when someone knocked on my office window. Smiling through the chilly wind was a 2016 graduate hoping to get into a few of the buildings (a tough ask at 4:30 p.m. on winter break when even those who work at school leave by 3:00) so that he could show a friend from college what the place that has most shaped his young life looked like.

After helping them unlock some doors and reminiscing about which of his favorite teachers and traditions are still around, I could tell he was trying to get across what the school meant to him – even as the dark and quiet halls struggled to be helpful.

He was describing classes and moments that seemed to illustrate an intimacy he had experienced when he was here. The school was part of him – after years away at college – and his friend's introduction to the campus was supposed to give her greater insight into who he is. The friend offered that her high school wasn’t half as meaningful (though she happened to go to a revered public high school in the suburbs of a major New England city). She meant, I suppose in Brooks’ vernacular, that it was a “thin” place. An institution where people are there for mutual benefit of each other, but a higher purpose, or grander coalescence around aspirational ideas, is thinly veiled or non-existent.

So, in the quiet moments of winter break, I experienced an overlooked and underemphasized, essential quality of what makes Columbus Academy the school that it is. Families often join the school in a transactional way. They hope, rightly so, that the school will help them and their child/ren achieve their hopes and dreams. And then year after year, while a student is with us and while faculty are with us, the goodness of the school begins to materialize as the depth of the experience – and the continuity of a community that asks something of its members – takes hold. Over time, transactional relationships chafe in the heavily relational environment, and we begin to take responsibility for each other’s success in the most important ways. Then, every member of the school is significant to every other person’s belonging.

Welcome to the thickness that is Columbus Academy.

Warmly,

Melissa