Quincy Hall Quotes

I was not able to sleep that night. To be honest, I didn’t even try. I stood in front of my living room window, staring out at the bright lights of New York City. I don’t know how long I stood there; in fact, I didn’t see the millions of multicolored lights or the never-ending streams of headlights and taillights on the busy streets below. Instead, I saw, in my mind’s eye, the crowded high school classrooms and halls where my friends and I had shared triumphs and tragedies, where the ghosts of our past still reside. Images flickered in my mind. I saw the faces of teachers and fellow students I hadn’t seen in years. I heard snatches of songs I had rehearsed in third period chorus. I saw the library where I had spent long hours studying after school. Most of all, I saw Marty. Marty as a shy sophomore, auditioning for Mrs. Quincy, the school choir director. Marty singing her first solo at the 1981 Christmas concert. Marty at the 1982 Homecoming Dance, looking radiant after being selected as Junior Princess. Marty sitting alone in the chorus practice room on the last day of our senior year. I stared long and hard at those sepia-colored memories. And as my mind carried me back to the place I had sworn I’d never return to, I remembered.

I want the building to be welcoming, but I don’t want to pretend nothing happened. I want us to move on, but I don’t want us to forget. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to do all that. When I was training to be a principal, the biggest threat we could imagine was an earthquake. They certainly hadn’t started the duck-and-run drills in the L.A. schools for drive-by shootings. Nor had they ever envisioned that schools would become war zones for rival gangs and street disputes. Now we have teachers and students dying in the halls. Small towns, big towns, black, white, upper class, lower class—it doesn’t seem to matter. And the human in me wants to rail against that, wants to live in denial, while the principal in me knows I can’t do that. I have an obligation to my students. If this is the world we live in, then this is the world I must prepare them for. But how do I do that? I’m not sure I’m prepared for this world. I know Miss Avalon wasn’t.

Thinking that a demonstration of the New Psychology’s practical applications might make it less threatening to traditionalists, Hall delivered a series of lectures on education in Boston (arranged by Charles Eliot). The lectures drew on the work of a man named Francis Parker, who had become famous as the superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the founder of a theory of pedagogy known as “the Quincy system.” Parker had served as a colonel in the Union Army (he retained the title ever after); after the war, he had spent several years in Europe, returning with a philosophy of education derived from Kantian and Fichtean ideas of mental growth, and emphasizing the importance of experience in acquiring knowledge. Hall expressed the germ of the theory in recapitulationist language: “The pupil should, and in fact naturally does, repeat the course of the development of the race, and education is simply the expediting and shortening of this course.”24 The lectures, attended mostly by teachers, were hugely successful. Hall still couldn’t get a job. He started to think about going to medical school.

They didn’t, and now the room felt strangely empty without their grandmother rattling in the corners. They had been here before. Averlee couldn’t place it exactly, but the mix of cigarettes and coffee, the rose-scented air freshener was familiar. The cookie jar shaped like a clock on the kitchen counter. She had seen it, tasted lemon wafers from inside it. They had been here before they had enough words to remember it by. And now she’d left them alone. But it wasn’t her grandmother Averlee missed. It was the braided rug in her bedroom at home, smelling like the cherry sucker Quincy broke between her teeth and let fall like slivers of red glass between the seams. Her grandmother’s voice carried down the hall. “Hospital… Snake… These girls.” Averlee liked to flop onto her belly and read on that rug. She

and Mrs. William Hayes Fogg. New gifts from Forbes and others were so numerous by 1912 that plans were made for a new museum adjacent to Harvard Yard on Quincy Street. As director, Forbes conceived of the new Fogg as a laboratory of learning, accommodating galleries, lecture halls, curatorial offices, conservation, and a research library all under the same roof. He closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to-day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then-extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was