Alumni Profile

 

The Land Use Director and Town Planner of Lenox got her start learning about nature and landscape in Tim Gore’s class at BCD. After graduating from BCD, Gwen attended the Berkshire School, followed by the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Vermont. Gwen joined Americorps VISTA in Syracuse and then obtained a Master’s in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  She then returned to the Berkshires for what she thought would be a brief time, when she began her work for the town of Lenox.

What was your favorite class at BCD and why?
Tim Gore’s science class presented early opportunities to connect with place and learn about how nature and the landscape work. I have vivid memories of dissecting owl pellets and putting the little mouse skeletons back together, the egg drop, catching crayfish in the pond.

Why give back to BCD?
I hope that my modest gifts to the School help make the opportunity of a BCD education accessible to students of all incomes and backgrounds.

What plans do you have for the future?
I hope to continue serving the Berkshires through public service or private practice. I hope to raise my own family here in the Berkshires. Lenox will be updating its 1999 Master Plan, and I’ll be participating in the American Planning Association’s national conference in New Orleans, discussing affordable housing in multi-million dollar markets.

with Winston Boney, Bean Crane, and Liz Butler

I spent 11 years at BCD, which at this point is just over half my lifetime. BCD shaped who I am today in ways that I’m still discovering. It’s difficult, even after 7 years away from the school, to reflect upon those years with any clarity—I still feel too close. One reason for this is that my 3 best friends to this day, Winston Boney, Bean Crane and Liz Butler, are BCD classmates of mine.

Though we shared many years together in BCD classrooms, shared cabins during stays at Mr. Gore’s Camp Najerog, and bus rides to Butternut and Bousquet, our friendship really solidified during our 8th grade year when we all participated in a transformative Jesse Howard theater production called Nerds Eye View. The entire play was based on improvisation and brainstorm sessions with the 11-person ensemble cast of 8th and 9th graders. The final product was a beautifully colorful collage made up of pieces of all of us. The premise, a satirical portrayal of the high school social hierarchy, came out of our collective anxiety about moving on from our safe haven at BCD to the intimidating world of high school. Our self-constructed characters displayed our dreams and insecurities. And, the moral of the story—that being a “nerd” means being self-loving and unabashedly passionate about what you do—helped us all recognize the futility of trying to fit into any prescribed notion of being cool or successful. I think this is a lesson that BCD was quietly instilling in us all along. The incredible people who taught us over the years at BCD—Mr. Fawcett, Mr. Ashworth, Mrs. Meyer, and Mr. Douglas, to name a few—always inspired us to think outside the box. They pushed us to create rather than to reproduce; something I still strive to achieve in my academic life at Kenyon College, where I am now a Junior International Studies major.

After 8th grade, all 4 of us took off in different directions: I went to Groton (a boarding school in Eastern MA), Bean went to Hotchkiss, Winston to Millbrook, and Liz to the Opera school at Walnut Hill and then the Berkshire School. Throughout high school and college we’ve remained close friends: managing to get together during any holiday breaks, meeting up whenever we happen to be in the same region or city (most recently Paris), seeing each other perform in talent shows and play productions at our respective schools, and calling each other whenever we’ve needed words of encouragement or just a good laugh. Our paths have taken us to vastly different and faraway places, but our childhood connection has only brought us closer over time. We’ve all embraced our inner “nerd” and I’m proud to say that because of this, we’ve all grown into passionate, interesting, and unique people:

Winston’s passion for art and service has taken her from the Savannah College of Art and Design, to Ghana where she and Bean worked on behalf of a non-profit to raise money for the construction of a Library and IT center in Kumasi, and finally to UC Boulder where she is a sculpture major.

After their trip to Ghana, Bean sprouted an idea for a non-profit organization called ArtXChange, which is an online platform that connects nonprofits with local artists to auction art, the profits of which benefit both parties. She is now in the 2nd stage of funding for this project, working with a startup incubator called DALI, which stands for Digital Arts Leadership and Innovation lab. This year she won the Stamps Scholar Award for $10,000, which will go towards the website’s launch. Somehow, her entrepreneurship has not gotten in the way of her college career at Dartmouth, where she is active in a variety of clubs and intellectual pursuits. She just returned from a semester abroad in Copenhagen where she studied sustainable city development.

Liz, who was voted “Most Likely to Brighten Your Day” in our 8th grade yearbook, is still brightening people’s lives as an improv and sketch comedy star at Denver University. In January she filmed a comedy sketch with film star Warren Miller and professional skier Chris Anthony. She has also continued to improve French language skills as a French and Theater major at DU, and will be studying abroad in France next semester.

Now, I know this piece was meant to be a profile about me, but these 3 women have been an integral part of my life throughout my time at BCD, and ever since. They have inspired me over the years to follow my inner nerd, create rather than reproduce, and love myself as much as the people around me. My passion for knowledge and people has taken me from Ohio, where I worked as a research assistant for my professor this past summer in the John S. Adams Summer Legal Scholars program, to Morocco, where I spent 3 months studying Arabic and migration and 1 month researching the sustainability of women’s argan oil cooperatives in the southern region of the country.  Upon my return from Morocco, I visited BCD with my college a cappella group, the Kenyon College Chasers, as a part of a weeklong national tour. I’ve been singing with them for the past 3 years and have found with them a sense of community reminiscent of the close-knit BCD community that I loved so much. Seeing the new generation of BCD students, who listened attentively and applauded enthusiastically at our performance, reminded me that BCD truly made me, and my best friends, into the kind of people who find joy in all aspects of life, ask questions that push the boundaries of what is known, and are able to follow the nerd in ourselves and love the nerds who surround us. My wish for all current BCD students is that their passions take them to amazing places and bring them into contact with people as nerdy and amazing as my BCD classmates.

Perhaps my most vivid and abiding memory of BCD is Mme Grad handing back the dictées — if you had any wrong or missing accents, she would slash an accent grave on the back of your hand with her pen and bark “accent!” in her German-accented French. Since no 8th grader is perfect in such matters, handing back the dictées resulted in an assembly-line reprimand as she made her way along the row of desks: Accent! (slash, grimace) Accent! (slash, grimace) Accent! Accent!… She made even the toughest guy in our class cry over the quality of his homework.

This was admittedly very old school — Mme Grad was a Holocaust survivor and was over 70 when we had her as our teacher. I don’t think you could teach that way these days. But it served a purpose — to wit: my boys are enrolled in the Lycée Français de Sofia since maternelle, thus speak with impeccable native accents. They cringe when I attempt to parle in the Québequois twang picked up, I believe, from our 7th-grade French teacher whose name now eludes me. When it comes to reviewing written homework though, I am the unchallenged master of the accents and deem to brook no nonsense, let alone mistakes, from the little twerps* (as Mr. Fawcett might tag them). *Editor’s note: Mr. Fawcett says this word is “questionable.”

No account of BCD days would be complete without a reverential bow to the Fawcetts, Mr. and Mrs. A good part of the reason I’ve stuck it out in the Balkans is down to a love of classics, for which Mrs. Fawcett laid the base. My first impressions of Sofia included the walls of ancient Serdica still visible underneath the central largo, as well as the ruins of the agora in the courtyard of Hotel Balkan. That hooked me. Gibbon wrote that Illyria, more or less Albania and the territories of former Yugoslavia today, was the one province of the Empire that the Romans never really got under full control. Somehow I read that as a challenge, one that continues to keep me hooked, as my work involves integrating some of the same wild territory into the global economy.

That love of the classics has afforded me an appreciation of the region’s languages: I feel right at home with a language such as Bulgarian where sum means “I am.” The verbs go together just like Latin verbs – take a prefix and a root and presto! – you’ve got a new meaning, only the building blocks are Slavic. As I have picked up a smattering of Albanian over the last few years, I’ve understood that the Latin influence is quite strong there, for obvious reasons. Romanian is one of those languages that you can understand intuitively if you’ve had the BCD curriculum of French and Latin plus the basics of a Slavic language. My favorite Romanian word on this point is panificatie – bakery – the bien connu ‘pain’ plus the Slavic ending connoting a production process.

Mr. Fawcett comes in for the books we read with him. First, no traveler is complete without Huck Finn. For my life in a post-communist country in the shadow of resurgent Putinism, Animal Farm and 1984 are hugely relevant. A word to current students: the Snowden leaks and the abuses of power in the name of protecting us from the putative threat of Islamist terrorism show us just how prophetic Orwell was, not just for the East.

Lermontov’s Hero of our Time and Tolstoy’s Cossacks are my lifelines when dinner-party chatter turns to Russian literature. The ethos of Lermontov’s Caucasian Hero translates well in the Albanian-speaking world, where blood feuds still linger on. My wife Galina, who attended the Russian-language Kalinin High School in Sofia, looks down her nose at the gaps in my knowledge of Russian literature and film, but I can always recover a point for having read Solzhenitsyn, whose works were banned when she was in school, while A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch was required reading for Mr. Fawcett.

Mr. Fawcett’s teaching style was rich in anecdotes. One that has stuck with me concerned a British expat in colonial Africa who kept himself from “going native” by donning full dinner dress in the middle of the bush once a week. I muse on that when I cook my Thanksgiving turkey, and when my values and assumptions clash with local mores. Galina finds it infuriating that Mr. Fawcett encouraged us to underline passages in books and make notes in the margins. From her perspective, books are a scarce and precious resource to be treated with utmost reverence. Even dog-earing the pages is a no-no, but I keep doing it. Another Fawcett-esce tic of mine is to remind my boys, ages 5 and 8, to “keep it down to a dull roar” when they wax vociferous.

In such a short piece I necessarily risk offending many beloved and influential teachers and fellow students by omission – the pantheon includes Mr. Buttenheim, Mrs. Capers, Mrs. New, Mr. Douglas (who taught us about Balkanization), Gary Miller, and the list goes on. I have to give short shrift to a time that burgeons with memories. With another 4 or 5 thousand words I might cover the shoe-throwing incident and other mischief, or the trips to Hulbert, Montreal, or Monument Mountain, and still be short on space. Suffice it to say that the heroes of this story and their quest retain enduring relevance for me half a lifetime and half a world away.

Ken Lefkowitz ’84 attended BCD for Grades 7-9, and went on to Hotchkiss and Wesleyan. He moved to Sofia in 1995 to take part in the post-communist transition. He runs a financial advisory boutique, New Europe Corporate Advisory, covering 5 countries in southeast Europe.

I graduated from BCD in 1969. The school had recently added the 9th grade, and I was one of the lucky 1st classes to enjoy an extra year at Brook Farm. I began BCD as a first grader at the old house on Walker Street. I can still picture my classrooms and teachers from those years, especially Mrs. Church whom I had in 2nd grade. She was wise and warm and wonderful but also firm. She sent me to Mr. Oakes, my first and only trip to the principal. She said I was talking too much, and I am sure she was right.

At Brook Farm, I had my first male teacher, Mr. Marks. He would swing us around on the playground and made learning and recess magical. I was challenged in middle school English, reading classics like A Tale of Two Cities, Antigone, and The Crucible. Little did I know that I would teach all of these books later in my own classroom. Mrs. Jones taught us to look backwards and forwards in social studies, and Madame Grad made French a true adventure. I remember reading The Little Prince in French, a book of exquisite beauty, and I remember being riveted by her tales of Europe during World War II. So often I have wished I had written her to tell her how much she inspired me in my own teaching of the Holocaust with my own 8th graders. I remember Mrs. Potter who taught us how to run track and play field hockey. She helped us learn to play fairly and how to win and lose with grace, certainly lifelong lessons.

I went on the St. Margaret’s, a boarding school in Waterbury, CT, where my sister had gone, and graduated from the State University of New York at Albany with a BA in English. I later earned an MEd from Tennessee State University. My husband and I moved to North Palm Beach, Florida, where he had been offered a job teaching history at The Benjamin School. We were up for a tropical adventure, but the real adventure came when I was offered a job teaching 8th and 9th grade English. I had never intended to teach but saw it as a great opportunity. BCD did not so much influence my choices as it did prepare me for anything. It instilled confidence. I remember how I had learned best at BCD and used those memories in my own classroom. It was a tough 1st year, but I knew I had found a job I loved. Books and kids – what a combination!

After 9 years in Florida, we longed for 4 seasons and a place with a greater sense of community for our 2 boys. We found a wonderful new home in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Ensworth School. As my grandparents were both Nashvillians, I even had cousins there, and the hills reminded us of the Berkshires. My husband became the Assistant Head of School, and I taught 7th and 8th grade English. The school gave me the freedom to choose the books I loved and ones I felt could help my kids navigate the tricky years of adolescence. Much like BCD, it offered a warm and supportive environment, and I felt so lucky to spend my days with 13 and 14-year-olds, with all their heart, their humor, their angst, and their open minds.

Ensworth felt strongly about continuing education and sent its teachers all over the world. I was lucky enough to travel to England, Italy, Austria, Poland, and the Czech Republic in connection with my teaching. I was able to take photographs at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Theresienstadt to share with my students and give them a more personal sense of these places as we read Night by Elie Wiesel, Hitler Youth by Susan Bartoletti, and a great young adult novel, Gentlehands by M.E. Kerr. I was also able to visit many art museums which helped me in our term papers done in conjunction with the art department. Each 8th grader chose a painting at the National Gallery and then wrote a biography of the artist and a critique of the painting. When we would visit the National Gallery on our annual DC visit, the students would find their subjects. My fondest memory is the students running up to me, excitedly saying things like, “Mrs. T, I found my painting and it is huge and beautiful!” The art had become theirs, and I loved that.

After 24 years in Nashville, we have come home. We are living in a small town called New London, NH. It is so heavenly being back in New England, and much like I did when I was at BCD, I pray daily for snow. I am about to teach a class with my husband; we will be teaching adults through the local college in town. It is a little scary, but it will be fun to try something new, and BCD really did teach me that learning is discovery.

At BCD, I learned so many lessons. I learned that laughter plays such a crucial role in the classroom and in daily life. I learned that friendships really can last a lifetime, and that a solid academic foundation is a gift forever. To current students, I would say that BCD is an exceptional school. Revel in it! Ask questions because you will never be in an environment more open to them. Savor your days there because they really will fly by. Take a few risks because you’re in a safe and nurturing place. Look around you and appreciate the incredible beauty of your surroundings. Finally, be grateful for what your teachers and parents are offering you. BCD is something special.