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

Such attentiveness is not always easy or natural. “I am very
concerned about the world we live in,” Sidney admits. “We are
bombarded by stimuli and rushing from one appointment to
the next. It is getting harder and harder to slow ourselves down
enough to look, listen, and appreciate. But I try to do that in
my classes.” Most of Sidney’s classes begin with a moment of
silence. Typically he follows that moment by posing a question.
He’ll ask his class something about the story they’ve just read or
about a character, and then he’ll sit back, without rushing in to
goad a response or direct the discussion. By deliberately slowing
down in this way, Sidney hopes to achieve what he views as a
third goal of education, namely to act as a “counteracting force
to the tyranny of the schedule.”
FEATURES – ALUMNI/AE
In a recent Senior Dinner address that Sidney delivered, he
started with the statement: “Anything that brings the world
together is a blessing: Moments of silence, Nature, Music, Art,
Literature, Honesty, Education, Technology (when used sensibly),
Leadership, a humble, well-placed comma, You, the class of
2006.” For him, teaching has been a way to bring the world
together, to share his own enthusiasms and beliefs with his students,
to appreciate theirs, to forge connections, and to encourage
a deliberate attentiveness. One of his greatest rewards has
been the continuity that he now finds all around in moments
like those when Bob Hallett and Tim Golding, the later a teacher
who had failed him for his use of fragments in seventh grade, sat
in on a class and watched him teach syntax, or in sounds like the
familiar creak of an old wood floor welcoming you home.
DIRECTIONS Fall 2006 / Winter 2007 39