what we talk about when we talk about high school

8/11/2019 What We Talk About When We Talk About High School

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MEMORY IS A N OTORIOUSLY MALLEABLE MEDI UM,

a shifting terrain viewed in hindsight from an ever-transforming

present. At a certain point, life begins to seep across the neat nar-

rative lines we draw around our experiences to make sense of

them. The colors, to use a metaphor from the world of laundry,

begin to run, and the things we thought wed never forget begin

to slip unceremoniously into the technicolor mush. So what, inthis unceasing onslaught of experience, are the things that re-

main? What really counts in the long run, and what are the mo-

ments that stay? If you ask someone who went to Prep these

questions about their time at the school, you may start to notice

a pattern about the stories that have stuck. Whether they gradu-

ated in the late nineteen-seventies, the mid nineteen-nineties, or

last year for that matter, there is a good chance that the things

they remember about their teachers, their classmates, and about

themselves were formed on one of the schools many trips, far

away from any classroom or campus.

For me one of those unforgettable moments came on the first

day of my senior year rafting trip down the Green River in south-

ern Utah. I had learned from my friends who had graduated the

year before that our entire class was going to fly in tiny, single

engine airplanes, into the Canyonlands before getting on the river,but it wasnt until I was standing in front of the actual plane on a

dusty airstrip a few minutes before dawn, that the reality finally

set in. My plane got into the air just as the sun broke over the

horizon, and through the windows my classmates and I watched

the warm light spill out across the desert, illuminating the canyons

WHATWE

TALKABOUTWHENWE

TALKABOUT

HIGH SCHOOL

PREPS LONG TRADITION

OF MEMORY MAKING

OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

Alexi L.M.G. Horowitz 08

Stuck in the sand near Mazatln, Mexico,1967. Jane Daum photo.


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and plateaus that splintered and rippled below us in every direc-

tion. Everything held a distorted quality at that middling altitude,

a perspective that turned the world into a series of contiguous

dioramas rendered in immaculate detail. Although the plane was

careening wildly back and forth in the morning breeze, eliciting

responses from my friends ranging from seasickness to real-time

imaginings of our surely imminent funerals, the thing that I re-

member most vividly about the flight was drifting into a state of

calm and contentment, the further into the Canyonlands we flew.

In that moment I realized that no action of mine could any longer

help my chances of survival, that my life was in the hands of forces

much larger than I usually considered. It was a feeling of peace

and perspective that has stayed with me. For me thats what made

the Prep trips such a central part of my experience the feeling

that by stepping onto unfamiliar ground (or air) together, we were

able to discover new ways of seeing that we might never have

otherwise found.

This matches the idea of experiential education as Fred Maas

explained it to me when we sat down recently to talk about hisexperiences from over thirty years of organizing, leading, and chap-

eroning student trips at Santa Fe Prep. Fred sees the challenges

and unexpected situations that inevitably arise during camping and

international trips as essential to the process of learning:Dealing

with these real life situations becomes part of their [the students]

lifes understanding, of stepping from childhood into adulthood.

Fred has dozens of these stories: of campsite floods that awoke

campers in the night, and windstorms that flattened every tent in

the campsite except for his. Speaking both on how he has amassed

and remembered so many stories from his time at Prep, and on

why learning life lessons in the field can be more long-lastingthan those in the classroom, Fred said:Theres nothing like a little

adrenaline to enhance ones memory.

Fred describes himself as one of the earliest and most vocifer-

ous proponents of the move to expand Prep students education

from the classroom to the outside world, and it was in the years

after his arrival in 1969 that camping and international trips began

to play a larger role in the school culture.There was a feeling early

on that outdoors trips werent going to be academic enough,

said Fred, recalling the first faculty conversations about the trips.

There was even an idea floated around at one point to make the

students lug their text books along with them.Whatever the particular deliberations that led to the first Prep

trips in the early 1970s (no textbook lugging was required), by the

middle of the decade the school was taking students on its first

serious trip, the one the teachers who I spoke to say started it all:

the end of the year middle school trip into the Grand Canyon, to

the waterfalls at Havasupai. The Havasupai trips were epic affairs

because of the time required to drive to central Arizona, and

the hot, eight-mile hike down into the canyon, the trip often took

upwards of eight or nine days. At that time, the middle school

student body was small only two dozen or so studentsbut

getting them safely down and back up the exposed, zig-zagging

trail to the falls was a considerable feat in itself, and it required a

good deal of preparation. According to Marie White, who taught

English at Prep from 1970 until 1995,We would take them up

Atalaya mountain before Havasupai, to see if theyre packs were

going to be too heavy, or their boots were going to be too tight.

Mr. Maas described the Atalaya march as a way to simulate the

1,200 foot ascent out of the canyon. Despite the difficulties, the

trip usually went off without much incident, and among both the

teachers and the students who I spoke to about Havasupai, there

is still an overwhelming fondness for the trip, and the place itself.

When we finally got down to the bottom of the canyon the kids

would all throw down their backpacks, and run and jump in the

pools to cool off. said Marie, smiling as she remembered.It was

like a l ittle paradise.

Havasupai was the first major trip to become a yearly Prep

tradition, and for over two decades it served as the unofficial mid-

dle school right of passage, a reward to students for their work

during the year, and a way of interacting in a different way with

their teachers and fellow classmates. As Jesse Roach, class of1990,

put it: Havasu, and all of the trips, on top of bonding us as a class,

were a way for us to get to know our teachers outside of the con-

text of the classroom, away from their roles as authority figuresand disciplinarians. As the school continued to grow, the larger

trips were split up to make them more manageable and soon each

of the classes were taking separate yearly trips to places like

Jacks Creek Campground in the Pecos, Chaco, Bandelier, Diablo

Canyon, and other directions around the Southwest. It was also

in the late 1970s that the senior class began to mark the end of

their final year with a trip to San Francisco. For Prep students from

the late 1970s and early 1980s, the San Francisco trip is legendary,

and conversations with alumni from that time are likely to evoke

stories of disco clubs and Grateful Dead concerts.

Finally there were the international trips, usually held duringthe spring and summer vacations, which developed in the mid-

1970s with the Language department trips led by Steve Machen

and his colleagues. Steve Machen was twenty-seven when he

joined the faculty at SFP and shortly thereafter led a group of

students on Preps first international summer excursion, a six-

week overland journey through Mexico and Guatemala. From the

very beginning Mr. Machen knew that he wanted to make Preps

THERES NOTHING LIKE ALITTLE ADRENALINE TOENHANCE ONES MEMORY.

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IT FORCES PEOPLE TO BE

FLEXIBLE, AND TO ADAPT,

OR AT LEAST TO COME

TO TERMS WITH THAT KIND

OF CHALLENGE. WHEN

YOU COME BACK FROM A

TRIP LIKE THAT, YOU SEE

YOUR WORLD ANEW, AND

YOU ASK QUESTIONS

ABOUT IT THAT YOU NEVER

WOULD HAVE THOUGHT

TO BEFORE.

ELIOT FISHER| 01


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IT WAS A TRIP THAT THEY

WOULD NEVER TAKE WITH

THEIR PARENTS. IT WAS A TRIP

THAT THEY WOULD NEVER

TAKE WITH ANYONE ELSE.

STEPHEN MACHEN


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international language department trips a unique experience:It

was always our feeling that we could do it better than the national

organizations. What we did not want these trips to be was a tour.

We wanted our trips to offer an experience that was absolutely

unique for the students. It was a trip that they would never takewith their parents. It was a trip that they would never take with

anyone else.

And unique and dynamic they were. On his first trip one of his

students had her purse and passport stolen in southern Mexico,

shortly before the group was meant to cross the border into

Guatemala. Mr. Machen had to sneak her through Guatemalan

customs. Later in the trip, another student came down with acute

appendicitis, and had to have it removed in a Guatemalan hospi-

tal.The doctor came out after the operation and showed us the

offending appendix. It looked like a red finger, he said of the

experience. Another time the bus broke down in Mexico, on theirway back toward the states. Mr. Machen, John Bachman, the

Headmaster at the time, and the driver figured out a way to use

a whittled broom handle to plug and fix a punctured brake line,

and, thanks to the bus drivers terrifyingly fast driving he

wanted the new land record, as Mr. Machen put itthe group

still made it to their destination ahead of schedule, despite their

mechanical mishap. Steve went on to lead another thirty trips

after his first, taking Prep Spanish students all around Central

America: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico. Looking

back on his experiences, he says that he had no qualms:That

kind of travel has so many lessons to teach.

What quickly becomes apparent, listening to Fred Maas, Steve

Machen, and Marie White tell stories about their experiences

traveling and exploring with Prep students, is how much enjoy-

ment they have each derived from these experiences, despite the

challenges, and difficult decisions that have had to be made. In

some cases, the impacts of those trips have lasted lifetimes and

drastically altered the life-paths of their participants. Stuart Day, aprofessor of Spanish at Kansas University who graduated from

Prep in 1987, credits Mr. Machens teaching, and the Mexico trip

they went on the summer of his sophomore year: There is no

doubt that by taking us to Mexico Mr. Machen set the course of

my life, said Stuart.Once I had traveled to Mexico I was able to

connect school to the real world, which in turn promoted my first

academic success. It would take me a while to catch up (I was a

mediocre student, at best) but I never forgot the note Mr. Machen

wrote on one of my report cards. It went something like this:

Stuart isnt doing well, but I dont plan to give up on him. I loved

all of my Spanish teachers at Prep, no doubt about it. But those

trips, and the note Mr. Machen wrote on that report card, are two

defining memories that set his influence apart.They are also two

key reminders for all of us that K-12 teachers can and regularly

dowork miracles.

I THINK ONE OF THE MOSTIMPORTANT THINGS WE

CAN DO IN OUR LIVES, ISTO STEP OUTSIDE OF OUR

COMFORT ZONES.

ELIOT FISHER| 01

Above: Cambodia 2012 / Right: Rafting 2012


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Today the raison dtre of Preps international trips has ex-

panded beyond that of language immersionthe last couple of

years have seen trips to China and Cambodia that were designed

and led by history teacher Coco Toderan-Manson, more with

culture and history in mind than language immersion but

the underlying sentiment remains the same. Eliot Fisher 01, an

alumnus who teaches digital media and yearbook at the school,

was a chaperone on the Prep trip to Cambodia last summer, and

sees the role of both the trips he went on as a student and the

ones he leads today, as one and the same.I think one of the mostimportant things we can do in our lives, is to step outside of our

comfort zones, said Eliot. On Preps tradition of experiential

learning, he saidIt forces people to be flexible, and to adapt, or

at least to come to terms with that kind of challenge. When you

come back from a trip like that, you see your world anew, and

you ask questions about it that you never would have thought to

before.Steve Machen is excited about the direction that Prep

trips are going as the school evolves, although he does have an

ongoing desire to see them open to as many students as possible:

The issue for me regarding the trips is an issue of accessibility,

just as it is for the school more generally. I think that being able

to say to any kid, if you work a bit extra, that we can find the

money so that you can do this. I think its really important.

In talking to Prep students and teachers from across the schools

fifty year lifespan, it became clear that these experiences mean

something. They stick.The trips are rites of passage, fundamental

to what makes Prep the unique, vibrant, and cohesive community

that it has become. It means forging common bonds, and con-necting what we learn within the classroom with the world

outside it. For me, flying over the Canyonlands of Utah stoked a

hunger for movement, adventure and alterity. It nurtured in me

the germinal notion that this world, for all of its chaos and com-

plexity, for all of its hardship and strife, was filled with a spirit of

openness and possibil ity, a feeling which empowered me and the

hundreds of others who shared these experiences to delve into

the world more fully and without hesitation.

Havana,Cuba 2003. Stephen Machen photo.

what we talk about when we talk about high school

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