Laurel School
When Laurel School and I met for the first time, I was terrified. I was too shy to speak, too anxious to let go of my parents. I spent the summer before school began feeling worried. My parents, in turn, were worried about me being worried. So, my soon-to-be kindergarten teachers decided to lend a hand.
They invited me to their classroom – which, in a month or so, would be my classroom. It wasn’t ready for students yet. It needed decorating, they said. They wondered if I might want to help. So, I went.
My Mom and I met my teachers, who, in the heat of late July, lovingly hung posters on the walls and filled shelves with books. I tested markers and threw away the ones that had dried up over the summer. The teachers smiled a lot. I liked them and I liked helping.
Then, the long-awaited First Day arrived. I put on my school-uniform jumper, held my parents’ hands and said, as we walked from the car to the front door, “This is the scariest day of my entire life.” In my classroom, as I cried and begged them not to leave, I recognized a box of markers I had vetted.It may seem silly, but that helped.
The “scariest day of my entire life” was made a little less scary because two teachers had been patient, creative, and committed. They had nurtured and challenged me, even before our first day of school together. They had given me a way and a place to grow – even if it was just an inch or two at the time.
Over the thirteen years that followed, Laurel School, whose heavy brown doors I was too scared to walk through in my kindergarten jumper and was too heartbroken to leave in my cap and gown, continued to give me ways and places to grow.
The business of growing is a complicated one. It is tricky and scary and exciting and sometimes there are tears involved. The business of growing girls is even more complicated.
Laurel School For Girls is an expert in this beautiful, messy, important business.
When I was in sixth grade, master girl-grower Ann Klotz made a brave voyage from New York City to Shaker Heights, Ohio so she could run our school. I met her simultaneously as my new classmate Miranda’s mom and as my school’s new Headmistress. Ms. Klotz is a spark who has lit Laurel ablaze with energy and ingenuity. We were “her girls” and she set out to inspire us, to know us deeply, to love us. She taught us we were there to “Dream, Dare, Do.”
She invited us into her office, into her home, into her heart. She made not only our educations but our lives her priority (and showed us that the two are far less separate than we think). She saw not just the people we could be but the ones we already were, and so she asked that we be and do and say our best all the time, everywhere – to each other; about each other; in class; at home; on the internet; after graduation.
At Laurel, with our teachers as our anchors, Ms. Klotz as a leader, and the school’s mission as our springboard, we were asked – no, challenged – to engage with more vigor, to listen with more intent, to leap with more bravery, to speak with more conviction, to fail gloriously.
Our teachers, charged “to inspire each girl to fulfill her promise and better the world,” were entrenched in the business of growing us. They were grower-extraordinaires, with us at each turn, knee-deep in the dirt, not just planting the seeds of our growth but actively cultivating it — questioning, challenging, pushing, demanding, nurturing, encouraging, asking.
When growing was messy, they rolled-up their sleeves and got their hands dirty. They knew that girls need role models, so they rose to the occasion and then some. They were firm but flexible, our fiercest friends and our most honest critics. They asked us not just to learn, but also to teach – to teach each other, to teach ourselves, to teach them.
As they led us with expert oars through the rough waters of The Sound and the Fury, they still left room to hear us — to say “I had never thought of it that way” when we said something new about Benji. They were invested in us as whole people, not just students in their section of Chemistry or workers in their Admissions Office. They knew us deeply.
In third grade, my teacher told me she — like I — was a worrier; that she also used to be afraid of sleeping in her own room; that she would listen if I ever wanted someone to tell my worries to.In eighth grade, when my class went through a rough bout of middle school girl drama, our teachers sat us down in a circle and walked us through understanding the fighting wasn’t worth it. Senior year, when my grandfather died after a long illness, they sent flowers and came to his funeral.
As they helped us navigate East of Eden and the French Revolution and programming robots and composing music, they also helped us navigate grief and loss and fear, excitement and disappointment and joy.
They gave us what we called “assignments” but what they knew were tools. When they asked us to read the International Herald Tribune daily, and to study and see the diagonals in pieces of art, they were using those tasks to arm us with the ability to interpret our world, to question its leaders, and to engage intelligently as global citizens.
When they asked us to investigate gender parity in Paradise Lost with a fine-toothed comb, they were opening our eyes to inequity and misogyny and sexism. They were cultivating feminists who would never settle when they saw injustice, equipping us to demand our safety and our value and our power, and to better the world.
When they drove us crazy by outlawing phrases like “um” and “like” and “you know,” they were forcing us to articulate, to find and claim our voices, readying us to demand to be heard in a world that would try too often to silence us. When they wouldn’t let us preface our work or our opinions in class with explanatory introductions, they were forcing us to own, not apologize for, our intellect.
The Center for Research on Girls at Laurel School, founded in 2007 by Ann Klotz and Laurel’s consulting psychologist, Dr. Lisa Damour, enhanced what, in many ways, had already been happening within Laurel’s walls. Through a combination of original research and synthesis of external studies and best practices, CRG examines and explains how girls learn. We were learning in an environment that was actively engaged in learning how best to teach us – and it shaped our experiences and colored our curriculum.
What CRG learned and discovered, Laurel implemented. A study showed that girls are less likely to “tinker’ than their male counterparts, who see computer parts and bicycle wheels as playthings. CRG and Laurel knew tinkering developed skills like spatial relations and imaginative invention, and so they built Tinkering Stations and placed them throughout our school.
Each Station was updated regularly with challenges and materials. Girls would stop to use blocks and ropes to build a teddy bear a home, use marbles and PVC piping and toothpicks to make Rube Goldberg contraptions. They took pictures of, and pride in, their inventions – many of them (I, for one) for the first time ever.
Before finals and the standard battery of acronym-named Scantron tests (APs, SATs, OGTs, ACTs), Dr. Damour taught us about stereotype threat as it applies to girls and women. We learned that – most prominently, in this case — the belief that girls and women are worse than their male counterparts at math and science – can threaten girls’ performance on tests. We feel we must perform well to bust open and prove wrong every stereotype, that the task of proving women capable lies in our anxious, test-taking hands.
CRG found that exposing girls to “alternate, positive stereotypes effectively offsets the negative effects of stereotype threat.” So, for the SATs, they gave us special green No. 2 pencils with “G.A.T.O.R.S.” written along the side (Laurel’s mascot is the Gator and green is the school color). Those pencils shook stereotype threat from our minds. Each letter stood for something we had going for us – a positive value or attribute we carried with us into our testing place – statistics that remind us of the benefits of our single-sex schooling and the many ways girls succeed (and often outperform boys) in testing and grades.
I graduated from Laurel in June 2011, full of immeasurable gratitude and many tears. I couldn’t fathom leaving the place that had become home, that had been so much more than a “school” for me over the thirteen years I was lucky enough to wear its uniforms. I wanted to carry my 71 beloved, remarkable, outstanding classmates with me as I moved into the freshman dorm. I was at a loss without them.
Our love for Laurel and each other runs deep – it was palpable in the Junior Class rings we wore (and, judging by how many of us still wear them, it still is); in the Song Contest lyrics we sang; in the ways in which we are still each others’ buoys and supports.
In 2012, my freshman year of college, I visited Laurel with some fellow alum-friends during our overlapping Fall Breaks. We made the rounds (a visit the four or five of us, now college seniors, still make together when we’re home, like a ritual pilgrimage).
When we visited Ms. Klotz and sat on her now-familiar couches, taking turns sharing our tales of joys, successes, frustrations, and occasional bouts of homesickness, she gave us each another sticker. This one was Laurel green; with the world “YET” in big white letters. “Growth mindset,” she explained.
CRG had researched, and has introduced to Laurel, the significance of an attitude that says things are not fixed the way they are. That we can and will change, we can and will continue to learn, we can and will continue to improve. Growth mindset rejects “I’m not good at math” in favor of “I haven’t mastered that kind of equation YET.”
I went home and put my “YET” sticker on my laptop, where I knew I’d see it every day and think of Laurel. Laurel had learned how we learned and taught us how we needed to be taught — it fostered community and demanded courage, it gave us traditions and friendships and passions, it forced us to see in a new way, to embrace being confused, to ask and answer hard questions. It was our anchor long after we left its walls, it cultivated women who would ask more of the world around them, who would demand to be heard.
It had given us rings to remind us that we’re connected to generations of once plaid-clad women who have taken on the world. It had given us role models — adults who believed unconditionally, who supported unflappably, who loved wholeheartedly.
And — it seems to me — as all of them had grown us, Laurel had been practicing its own Growth Mindset all along.
