The Power of Music

An Unexpected Victory

     Music is one of the uniquely human qualities that make us, well, us. Not a single other species has created music, not even our closest primate cousins or prehistoric forebears. It has never made a dog weep, or an elephant dance, or a dolphin whoop in ecstasy. Much of what makes music special is that it connects to me, and billions of others on a visceral, personal level, as if the music is a person standing beside us, whether commiserating with me in my despondency or exulting with me in my joy. 

     In what is probably my most important single interaction with Music — capitalized because it truly felt like a person —, I was congratulated raucously and gloriously on an unexpected victory with a song that epitomizes just that: Van Cliburn’s 1958 performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in Moscow. 

The Power of Respect

Father and Son

By Max Troiano

     Mutual respect is a must-have in any sustainable relationship, and without it the relationship will crumble. I learned this lesson the hard way, through years of tension and conflict with my father. Last spring, we were in our worst place yet. Nearly every interaction ended in conflict, I would try to avoid him after getting home from school, and neither of us even considered the other’s viewpoint. The tension, the anger, the fear, had all come to a breaking point. Something had to give.

The Power of Friendship

1 bus. 6 friends. 11 hours.

“There’s not a word yet for old friends you’ve just met.”

- Jim Henson

     Shared experience is the foundation of friendship. On an eleven-hour bus ride with 40 of my classmates, my friends and I had just that. This March on the 7th grade Washington, DC trip, four or five of my friends and I all sat together, backpacks filled with snacks and Office episodes, ready to sit back and melt the boring hours before we could arrive in the capital. That ended up being emphatically not the case. Fast forward to 6:30 PM in northern Maryland, and we’re stir crazy, filled with sugar, and are... well, 13 year old boys with nothing to do. I don’t remember how it started or many of the specifics, but what I do have are photos and sensory overload. My friends and I would scream into each others’ ears, go on long sugar-fueled rants about everything and everything, and shine phone flashlights at unassuming classmates. Max Merhige had brought a bag of oranges, which he proceeded to hurl at us, Will Simon sang a nonsensical song about who knows what, and Eli made inappropriate jokes. This exultation of immaturity has a much more important message than what you would be forgiven for assuming. Our DC trip, especially the bus ride, truly melded my friends and I together, leaving us closer than ever. Those dumb jokes, those teenage antics, changed us from people we’re friendly with to true, long-lasting, friends.

The Dustbin Magi

By Max Troiano

     The Gift of the Magi is a classic, well-known, and influential story. However, more and more, its religious tint seems out of place. 

     Unlike a surprisingly (perhaps worryingly) recent 1905, when this tale of love and sacrifice was written, the prevailing religion of the West is humanism; whose goal is to maximize human happiness and potential and to minimize human suffering. We should not kill, the humanist says, not because some great and omnipotent being in the sky declared “Thou shalt not kill”, but because murder causes human suffering. 

     This story is first and foremost about love, and sacrificing for those you love. Jim and Della sold their most treasured possessions not because God told them to, but because they wanted to get a Christmas gift for the person they loved most in this world. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful and relatable theme.

     But then, as we leave the poor couple happily in each others’ arms on Christmas Eve, Mr. Henry finishes up with a hastily tacked-on paragraph about the Magi, who in their pious Christian wisdom gave gifts to the newborn Jesus. We should give Christmas gifts because the wise men did, not because it brings joy to us and those around us.

  114 years later, The Gift of the Magi is still an important story. It’s also still a story that deserves recognition as a great work. But if it wants to live on in our increasingly atheist modern world, the awkward final passage should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

The Power of Place

Summer at Camp Takodah

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery. Air, mountains, trees, people. I thought; “This is what it means to be happy.”
~Sylvia Plath

     Summer camp is a formative experience for millions of kids ever year, a place where they can relax, play, and get back in touch with nature. Three years ago, I too for the first time experienced the wonder of summer camp when I came to a century-old camp nestled among the lake-speckled forests of New England. Its name? Takodah, an amalgamation of the founders’ last names. 

The Power of Place

Summer at Camp Takodah

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery. Air, mountains, trees, people. I thought; “This is what it means to be happy.”
~Sylvia Plath

     Summer camp is a formative experience for millions of kids ever year, a place where they can relax, play, and get back in touch with nature. Three years ago, I too for the first time experienced the wonder of summer camp when I came to a century-old camp nestled among the lake-speckled forests of New England. Its name? Takodah, an amalgamation of the founders’ last names. 

The Power of Family

The Melancholy Joy of Coming Home

”Only our immediate family can show us unconditional love.”

~Mr. Fitzsimmons

     No matter how bad a day has been, family will always be there to love you when you get home. And when it feels like everything in my day has gone wrong, family will help me see the silver lining. There was nothing that could have happened, nothing I could have done, that couldn’t have been washed away by the familiar sound of the front door closing and the warm air inside enveloping me. On one of the worst days of 7th grade, with piles of homework ahead of me and at the end of my fuse, it felt like nothing could get me out of my slump. But family was there to help. It was a damp day in late March or early April, when the whole world is drably waiting for spring to truly begin. I’d been up late the night before with a recurring nightmare, had nearly flunked a math test, was berated for my intellect by classmates, and had to spend an hour running in 55° rain while the other sports were allowed to stay inside. I was just done. Fed up with school, fed up with my classmates, fed up with sports, and fed up with the horrible weather. Then I walked in the door, wet, tired, and frazzled. My mom looked up, and without saying a word she just took me into her arms. In that one moment, that one hug, all the things I had been struggling with disappeared. All I cared about was me, and my mom, in a warm inviting house, surrounded by the melancholy joy of finally coming home.

Journal Entry #7

How is school going so far?

      I’ve only spent 11 days at Fenn this year, and things are going quite a lot better than how I first thought. As opposed to last year, I fortunately ended up being proven wrong. Math, instead of the stressful, consuming slog of past years, has ended up being easier than English (no offense) and Windsor Mountain was a critical learning moment instead of a boring chore. 

     The goals I laid out at the start of the year are all well on their way to completion. A group visit to Lincoln-Sudbury is planned for boys interested in going, I’m loving Mr. Romero’s Spanish class and learning more than ever, and I have much less stress in my life than I did last year.

     It’s hard to underestimate the peace, the joy, the sense of freedom, that comes with a lack of stress I haven’t had at school since 5th grade. I go to school in the mornings and can fail at learning banjo while Panha draws instead of frantically completing science homework. When I get home, I can make a cup of tea and leisurely read a book before starting my homework, safe in the knowledge I have the time to do so. My work might be hard or boring, take an hour or five minutes, but I fundamentally understand it. Contrary to what I think many of my classmates believe, good grades haven’t come naturally to me at Fenn. The jury is still out on whether or not that’s due to my own incompetence instead of the actual schoolwork, but whatever the cause, I have better grades in almost all my classes than I did at this point last year, and with less effort. Less stress means less procrastination and more productivity, creating a self-repeating and beneficial cycle.

     My worries about math and my advisory, while founded, have been significantly dispelled; Mr. Barker is much less demanding or exacting than Ms. Youk See or Mr. Sanborn, and I have barely any classes with my fellow Cribb advisory members. Even problems I didn’t foresee at the start of the year, like my pneumonia-cold “one-two punch” preventing me from participating in sports at all until last week and fully until mid-October, have been surprisingly easily solved. But, as Fitz has paraphrased from FDR many times, “a calm sea never a captain makes”. These eleven days, sickness nonwithstanding, have been my calm sea. I may be a sailor, but the real test - the important test - lies in the mist of the future. 

The Year Ahead

What could go wrong?

     My 8th grade year isn’t looking as bad as it did at first glance. However, I’m not exactly what one could call optimistic about it. That might just be my anxiety, though - in 7th grade I had similar feelings and ended up having a great year.

    I’m hoping that many of my long-term goals will be achieved. I’ve always wanted to truly master Spanish, and feel that this year is a very good opportunity to work towards being so. Mr. Romero seems like a really good fit, and frankly, anything would be better than Mrs. Gupta was last year. It was a little bit of a letdown to have her as my teacher - I was primed to learn a lot at the start of last year and wasn’t able to - but at least now I’m well on my way.

     Another goal of mine is connecting with the boys I’ll be going to Lincoln-Sudbury with. I’m friends with some of them, but for the most part I don’t even know who’s going where at the end of this year. I expect that will come in time as eighth grade progresses, though. I’ll just have to wait and see.

     Specifying less concrete goals has always been hard for me. I suppose that I want to be less stressed about school work than I was last year. I really don’t know what being relaxed and happy at school even is, much less how to get there. Apart from the relatively easy to achieve goals that I talked about in the last paragraph, I feel more or less lost. Uncertainty about the future has always been on my mind.

     More so than not, that uncertainty tends to send me into a spiral of self-doubt and anxiety about the future. Starting this year has left me feeling the same. When I learned who my fellow advisees were, I honestly felt shocked and blindsided by the choice. As far as I could tell, they were all friendly while none of them were friendly with me. I had seen most of them in class together, and the only one who I’ve had meaningful contact with was the only person in my advisory last year I didn’t get along with. They’re athletic and have been here since fourth grade; I’m neither.

      Another flashpoint of stress is math. I tend to be at the lower end of the accelerated math spectrum at Fenn, meaning I struggle behind some of my more gifted classmates. I’ve ended up just scraping by with a B minus or C plus, and have been kept going by the inspirational encouragement of my last two advisors and math teachers, Mr. Sanborn and Ms. Youk See. They’ve made a huge difference for me, and the expected lack of support from this year’s teacher, Mr. Barker, worries me.

     In conclusion, I’m not sure how to feel about eighth grade. There are things to be worried about, and things to be excited about. As with everything else in life, I’ll figure it out soon enough.