2006-2007 Fall/Winter Directions - Friends' Central School

FEATURES – ALUMNI/AE
Sidney Bridges’79
hen Sidney Bridges ’79
returns to Friends’ Central,
the floors of the Wood
building make him smile.
Each creaking step connects him
to the nine years he spent here as a
student, a time in which important
seeds were sown and nurtured,
seeds that still unfold in
unexpected, gratifying ways. As
the head of the English department
at Brooklyn Friends School,
Sidney says he draws regularly on the resources he acquired and
the values he internalized at Friends’ Central. In particular, he
thinks a lot about the legacy created by schools and the teachers
that shape them. “It is impossible to overestimate the power of
real teaching,” Sidney says. “Real teaching extends beyond the
classroom, beyond the texts and tests. Real teaching is a way to
fight for the values of the human heart.”
Sidney is passionate about teaching, and he readily admits
that since he has become a teacher, he can’t remember a time he’s
ever dreaded going into work. Unlike Mary Louise Cole-Wood,
however, he did not go into education by design. After graduating
from Friends’ Central and then Williams College, Sidney
spent several years in the corporate world, first as an underwriter
for Chubb & Son and then as a consultant for The Richardson
Group. But he could feel himself drifting, and he knew that he
wanted more intellectual stimulation. Around the same time, he
had a conversation with former FCS head of school, Tom Wood,
about his restlessness, and Tom asked if Sidney had ever considered
teaching. The idea caught him off-guard. He’d been raised
by an inveterate teacher, enjoyed a few summers as a tennis counselor
at FCS summer camp, and always felt uniquely at home
when he returned to the FCS campus, but he had never thought
of himself as a teacher. Tom encouraged him to explore the possibilities,
and a little while later, a job offer from Friends’ Academy
in Locust Valley, New York seemed especially fortuitous—Sidney
had a good friend in college who’d gone to Friends’ Academy and
Tom Wood had worked there before coming to FCS.
As Sidney describes them, his first moments in front of a
classroom were terrifying, though in retrospect “miraculous.”
Although he had an instinct about how to lead a class, he did not
know all of the things a teacher attends to in one class period.
What he did have were the examples set by his teachers Clayton
Farraday, Paule Pierre-Louise, Chris Dorrance, Jeff Bowker,
38 DIRECTIONS Fall 2006 / Winter 2007
Michi Tashjian, at FCS.
He clearly remembered
the way teachers and
coaches such as Bill
Bower, Ted Yarnell, and
Juan Jewell had managed
to be caring, non-judgmental,
and demanding
all at the same time, and
how with their encouragement
and understanding,
he had learned to be
himself—no small feat for
a teenage boy. So Sidney
set himself a similar challenge:
when he stood
before a class, he would
remember who he was at
age 14, 15, or 16 even as
Sidney Bridges ’79
he thought about the text
at hand and the lessons
planned. To this day, Sidney tries to stay connected to his students
and to best understand the connection his students form
with the literature he shares by keeping himself in these two
places at once. “We are all students; I am a student, too,” he says.
In a curious way, what Sidney teaches mirrors how he teaches.
“Literature,” Sidney explains, “is about problems of the human
heart. In literature, we confront life’s ambiguities, all the contradictions
and conflicts people encounter. We admire or pity characters,
for instance, based on decisions they make. As a result,
when we react to a story, or when we ourselves write, we discover
what we think and believe.” But our reactions are based on our
own experiences, hopes, and world view. And so Sidney often
asks his students to consider other perspectives, whether of a
character, or a writer from an earlier time period, or even of the
classmate sitting right next to them.
“One of my goals as a teacher is to get my
students into the habit of looking for their own
connection to a text, which is to say their connection
to the world.” He likes the fact that writers are people
who are very attentive to life and its details, and he tries to model
that attentiveness and encourage it in his students. He’ll ask
them to “Find a line, any line that you connect to, and tell me
why it speaks to you.” But the next step is to listen just as closely
to what someone else has to say.