Before he arrived at Fenn as a new student, in fifth grade, Colin Cunningham “was different than I am now. I didn’t embrace the culture, didn’t get involved.” But gradually that changed, in large part due to the encouragement of his teacher, Jon Byrd ’76. “He made me feel comfortable and welcome,” Colin said in his Senior Reflection. “And he helped me find my passions.”

His classmate Cal Fries was another “role model,” Colin said. “He was one of my first friends and I watched how he talked to everyone and made friends, and I tried to do the same thing.” Jon and Cal taught Colin that  “I shouldn’t be afraid of new situations and of making new friends.”

In Middle School, Colin bloomed further, becoming actively involved in community service and volunteering with Heading Home moves, at Gaining Ground, and at Open Table Pantry. In Upper School, Colin was participating in more sports, getting to know his classmates better, and working in the Youth in Philanthropy group, where he learned about the importance of giving and where he realized “how grateful I am for what I have.”

Colin asked the community to reflect on “how much different a person you can be leaving Fenn than when you arrived.”

Colin, who is vice president of the School, played football (his favorite sport; he was a running back and a defensive back) and basketball, and is playing varsity baseball this spring. He also plays on the AU Baseball Unlimited Tigers team. He has been a Big Brother to a younger student and a Peer Advocate since seventh grade. The latter experience, he said in an interview following his reflection, has taught him how to approach people who have problems. “When I see someone who is upset, I use what I’ve learned so I can help them and be their friend.”

Being vice president has been another learning experience for Colin, who has found that it is “easier to get small things done than big things” due to all of the logistics and permissions involved. One thing he and President Andrew Metellus still want to do is provide each boy with a new Field Day shirt. Colin has also learned what career politicians experience: "you can’t please everyone," he says. “They might be happy with what we’ve gotten them, like a Panini press, but they always want more,” he said with a sigh.

English is his favorite subject because, he said, he can “relax and be creative.” In his down time a good game of whiffle ball or catch with friends is a favorite activity, and he enjoys playing video games, reading magazines, and keeping up with “all the sports.” Colin will miss the “camaraderie and comfort” he found in his five years at Fenn. One of his best memories is beating Milton Academy in football last year, despite that fact that his team was smaller and “not as strong," he said. "We didn’t expect it,” he declared, “and that was what was so great. We pulled it off with grit and heart.”

“How many of you have older siblings who drive you insane?” ninth grader Dan Pring asked his fellow Fenn students gathered in Ward Hall as he began his Senior Reflection. Many boys, as was predictable, raised their hands or applauded.

Dan has an older brother—by twelve minutes: his identical twin, Sam. Dan and Sam sometimes trick people into believing one is the other; in fact, it was Sam who walked to the front of the hall, identifying himself as Dan and wearing his brother’s jacket. They quickly switched roles, and, to appreciative laughter, Dan proceeded with his reflection.

Having an identical twin is a blessing but sometimes a challenge, Dan said in an interview following his reflection. People sometimes expect the two boys to be equally capable academically or otherwise, he explained, or to have the same personalities and to like the same things. But each boy is his own person. Dan tends to be quiet and reflective, while his brother is gregarious and verbal. “I’m better on paper, when I can think of what I want to say,” said Dan.

During the ninth grade Poetry Slam in March, one of the original poems Dan shared was about being a twin. Musing on people’s assumptions about twins he wrote in part:

They think of how I look
How my face is identical to my brother’s
How our appearance is almost perfectly the same
They see me as a copy of him
A replica that can never be.

As an older brother, Sam can be bossy (“I could go on about this for hours,” Dan joked). But his twin “brings good to my life, too,” he declared. And like typical siblings they argue sometimes, particularly over who should do the chores; the boys are responsible for helping maintain the household, and doing the laundry is their responsibility. They also clean their own dishes after meals. No cooking is involved, however, as Dan’s grandparents, who live with them, “don’t trust me in the kitchen—they’re afraid I’ll burn the house down.”   

The brothers play soccer and basketball together (“But we can get intensely competitive”) and enjoy watching TV shows and playing games. Sometimes Sam and Dan team up to play soccer against the rest of the family, which includes their eight-year-old sister, Alyssa, and they concoct “some crazy tactics” so that they can win.  

At Fenn, Dan plays soccer and basketball and is on the track team. He is a member of the Student Diversity Committee, is a Big Brother to a younger boy—they spend time together in the gym and makerspace or on the turf—and serves as a Peer Advocate. When he graduates in June, Dan will miss the close connections he has had with his Fenn teachers, “which makes my classes more fun.”

Among Dan’s favorite Fenn experiences is his class trip to Camp Caribou last fall, during which four friends—Jake Harvey, Tad Scheibe, Sam Farley, and Andrew Metellus—tried to teach his brother and him to swim. “They were very patient,” Dan said, smiling at the memory.  

The ninth grade class and many eighth graders move on from Fenn in June and spread out in all directions a few months later, attending a variety of secondary schools in the area. For one or two boys, the distance will be much further. Patrick Romeri is heading to Bradenton, Florida, to pursue his passion for baseball while attending IMG Academy, where there are more than twenty sports fields and a 5000-seat state-of-the-art stadium.

But along with the anticipation of an exciting move is the fear of having to make new friends and get used to new surroundings, a new school, and a very different part of the United States, where what we consider spring and summer weather dominates most of the year. “I’ll miss where I grew up,” Patrick said in his Senior Reflection, “and I’ll miss Fenn, which has been a good influence on me.” However, “we all have to accept change in our lives,” he added.

Though Patrick played football and basketball during his six years at Fenn, baseball has always been his favorite sport. A third baseman, Patrick eats, sleeps, and breathes baseball. His room is decorated with “tons of sports memorabilia,” he said in an interview after his reflection, including autographed photos of famous players and his baseball card collection.

When he’s not in a Fenn uniform, he is playing for the Southern California National Tournament Team, SoCalNTT. He was selected for the team to play in four tournaments this summer and will play in the USA Baseball National Championship in Jupiter, FL, followed by three tournaments in Georgia in July. When he is able, Patrick also plays for the Triple Crown Kings of the New England Elite Baseball League. 

Patrick, who believes baseball is “more a mental than a physical game,” follows particular players more than the teams for which they play. Giancarlo Cruz Michael Stanton, a right fielder for the Miami Marlins, is one of his favorites.

At Fenn, Patrick, whose younger brother, Niti, is a Fenn sixth grader, was a member of the Youth in Philanthropy group and is a Big Brother to a Lower School boy who likes to play football with Patrick on the turf. Patrick’s favorite class is Latin, in part because “We have such a good time,” he said with a smile. Patrick has four older sisters and one older brother, and the family has two Cocker spaniels, Hollis and Harvey.

Patrick says he will miss his Fenn friends, some of whom he has had for six years. One of his favorite Fenn memories is the “mud football game”—it had rained earlier—that took place when he was in Ben Smith’s fourth grade class. “Everyone was dirty,” he recalled. “It was so much fun.” 

If School President Andrew Metellus could leave a legacy to Fenn, it would be, he said, “that I was nice to everyone.” For his Senior Reflection Andrew chose to speak about friendship, and his actions were just as loud as his words. He called up every one of his ninth grade classmates and performed an elaborate handshake that the two had rehearsed, and then had all of them sit on the edge of the stage while he spoke.

“I wanted to show the kind of chemistry we have,” said Andrew of his twenty-four “brothers.” He asked the crowd in the hall to reflect on the importance of having, and being, a friend.

In an interview after his reflection, Andrew said that over his six years at Fenn he wasn’t always outgoing. When he arrived, having come from a school in Waltham, he “knew no one” and had to make friends. As time passed, he realized that he had much in common with many boys, including favorite games and TV shows. Andrew became a Peer Advocate in fifth grade and joined the Diversity Committee in sixth, and he values both experiences for helping to build his confidence and providing him with opportunities for sharing his opinions and helping others.

“I’m grateful to know I have a voice and that I can represent the voices of other people,” Andrew said. He confided that it is a heady experience to “see the faces of fourth graders looking up at me each Friday when I run All School Meeting, as if I am an authority figure. It is crazy!” Andrew likes the idea of being “a bridge” between students and administration, though he quickly learned what all leaders do, he said—that representing a constituency can be challenging.

When he and his vice president, Colin Cunningham, “had a good idea and couldn’t make it happen because there wasn’t enough time or money to do it, or we couldn’t get approval, we’d have to listen to cries of ‘You promised!’ from students,” he said.  But he is proud of what they did accomplish, including providing the Panini maker for which older students had clamored, and more important, for the tone they set—one of good humor and comraderie. Andrew said his Fenn experience might lead to other leadership possibilities as he moves on to high school at Arlington Catholic.

“Helping other people is the priority in my life,” Andrew declared. “Everyone has a choice: to be unsupportive of others or to be nice. I go down the path of niceness.” He is known for the way he supports his fellow ninth graders when they offer their Senior Reflections—he even stayed nearby, sitting on the stage behind a particularly nervous classmate.

“It’s funny to think of myself back when I arrived at Fenn,” Andrew said. “How awkward I was at first. I was so quiet; I barely talked. Every Friday when I get up and stand in front of the hall, I think, ‘Here I am—a guy you would never expect to be doing this.’ It’s a good feeling.” Speaking in front of a crowd has gotten easier, he said, in part because he always tells himself, “What’s the worst that can happen?” And when “the worst” does, such as when he occasionally forgets the closing reflection he had planned, he laughs, ever good-natured, as he searches mentally for the answer.    

Andrew played football, basketball, and baseball at Fenn, and served as a Big Brother to a Lower School boy; they enjoyed playing basketball, gym soccer, or board games. Science is one of Andrew’s favorite subjects as he feels that it will help him the most as he continues his education. In his free time he likes to relax with his family, which includes his younger brother, McCliff, who is a Fenn sixth grader, and his older sister, Jenny. They watch TV (he’s keen on animated shows) and enjoy going to the beach in the summer.

Andrew can hardly believe his last of six years at school is coming to a close. What will he miss most about being a Fenn boy? “I’ll miss the people who brought me to where I am today,” he declared.

During the 2013-14 school year, in the Headmaster’s garage, on alternate Tuesday afternoons after sports and on an occasional Saturday morning, a technological transformation began taking place. As part of the School’s sustainability efforts, a group of ninth graders converted a 2001 Jetta diesel-field sedan into a “grease car” that burns used vegetable oil.

Enabled in part by a 2011 summer curriculum grant, math teacher Sean Path did a year and a half of research on the project viability. He talked to other schools that had done similar conversions and addressed safety issues such as the need to acquire parent permission. A car was found on Craig’s list and a western Massachusetts distributor supplied the conversion kit.

Sean saw the project as “awesome and hands-on” and said at the time, “it allows kids to manipulate things physically.” More important, he wanted the boys to feel “a sense of responsibility and pride in their work.” To that end, he vowed to be more facilitator than teacher. “I have to be comfortable with a certain level of chaos and uncertainty and to resist the urge to prevent a struggle or solve a problem,” he said. 

The project is an ideal one for students, Sean pointed out, as “it’s not like a math word problem. It’s difficult in a real way, not abstract one that isn’t relevant. I couldn’t in a classroom come up with a better problem that is more authentic.”

The grease car crew, fifteen boys whom Sean first asked to write an essay about the challenges they would have to overcome, had different responsibilities: some were working on the car or it filtration unit, some were filming the project, and some were handling marketing and solicitation. The team needed a source for used vegetable oil and therefore developed a well-articulated sales pitch to local businesses.

In order “to validate the fact that kids are putting in time” beyond their regular Fenn obligations, the car was driven when the conversion was completed—Sean used the Jetta to commute to campus. At the time he said, “we’re all learning, and we’re going to make mistakes, ask questions, do research, and get dirty, but if we can persevere, we can do this.” And they did in fact do it.

Ninth Graders Build Replica of Thoreau’s Cabin

From a site on the hill above the soccer field came the sounds of hammering and sawing this spring. Rising from the ground was a small building that replicates the tiny home “where I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond.”

The words are Henry David Thoreau’s. He lived in that 10 x 15-foot cabin on Walden Pond in Concord for two years in the mid-1840s. Some call the cabin a “wooden inkwell,” for from it flowed the words that filled Thoreau’s journals and became the American literary classic, Walden.

Constructing a slightly smaller replica of the cabin was this year’s Senior Project, overseen by John Fitzsimmons. Ninth graders had explored Thoreau’s writing and philosophy last fall in their English classes. This led to a study of the “tiny house movement,” during which the boys were asked to ponder what it was to live “simply and deliberately,” which Thoreau exhorted his readers to do.

Most of the building, in which the majority of ninth graders participated, was done in the Fenn woodshop, in sections. Once the house was assembled outside, the group shingled the roof and walls, cut the rafters, and finished the interior, sometimes using early tools. John called the project “an epic odyssey of creation and community.” Ninth grader Tad said it was one of his most memorable experiences as a student here. “Working on the roof shingles was the best part. Perched up there I could see the whole school and think about what an incredible experience my years at Fenn have been!”

During the 2013-14 school year, in the Headmaster’s garage, on alternate Tuesday afternoons after sports and on an occasional Saturday morning, a technological transformation began taking place. As part of the School’s sustainability efforts, a group of ninth graders converted a 2001 Jetta diesel-field sedan into a “grease car” that burns used vegetable oil.

Enabled in part by a 2011 summer curriculum grant, math teacher Sean Path did a year and a half of research on the project viability. He talked to other schools that had done similar conversions and addressed safety issues such as the need to acquire parent permission. A car was found on Craig’s list and a western Massachusetts distributor supplied the conversion kit.

Sean saw the project as “awesome and hands-on” and said at the time, “it allows kids to manipulate things physically.” More important, he wanted the boys to feel “a sense of responsibility and pride in their work.” To that end, he vowed to be more facilitator than teacher. “I have to be comfortable with a certain level of chaos and uncertainty and to resist the urge to prevent a struggle or solve a problem,” he said. 

The project is an ideal one for students, Sean pointed out, as “it’s not like a math word problem. It’s difficult in a real way, not abstract one that isn’t relevant. I couldn’t in a classroom come up with a better problem that is more authentic.”

The grease car crew, fifteen boys whom Sean first asked to write an essay about the challenges they would have to overcome, had different responsibilities: some were working on the car or it filtration unit, some were filming the project, and some were handling marketing and solicitation. The team needed a source for used vegetable oil and therefore developed a well-articulated sales pitch to local businesses.

In order “to validate the fact that kids are putting in time” beyond their regular Fenn obligations, the car was driven when the conversion was completed—Sean used the Jetta to commute to campus. At the time he said, “we’re all learning, and we’re going to make mistakes, ask questions, do research, and get dirty, but if we can persevere, we can do this.” And they did in fact do it.

Ninth Graders Build Replica of Thoreau’s Cabin

From a site on the hill above the soccer field came the sounds of hammering and sawing this spring. Rising from the ground was a small building that replicates the tiny home “where I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond.”

The words are Henry David Thoreau’s. He lived in that 10 x 15-foot cabin on Walden Pond in Concord for two years in the mid-1840s. Some call the cabin a “wooden inkwell,” for from it flowed the words that filled Thoreau’s journals and became the American literary classic, Walden.

Constructing a slightly smaller replica of the cabin was this year’s Senior Project, overseen by John Fitzsimmons. Ninth graders had explored Thoreau’s writing and philosophy last fall in their English classes. This led to a study of the “tiny house movement,” during which the boys were asked to ponder what it was to live “simply and deliberately,” which Thoreau exhorted his readers to do.

Most of the building, in which the majority of ninth graders participated, was done in the Fenn woodshop, in sections. Once the house was assembled outside, the group shingled the roof and walls, cut the rafters, and finished the interior, sometimes using early tools. John called the project “an epic odyssey of creation and community.” Ninth grader Tad said it was one of his most memorable experiences as a student here. “Working on the roof shingles was the best part. Perched up there I could see the whole school and think about what an incredible experience my years at Fenn have been!”