14 PutNey PoSt - The Putney School

14 Putney post

Lee Hirsch ’90 on
the Movie and the
Worldwide Movement
By Don Cuerdon
Lee Hirsch ’90 says,
“I remember going to see
Cry Freedom when I was
at Putney and it forever
changed my life.” Lee was
an ardent anti-apartheid
advocate in those days and
went on to write and direct
the 2002 film Amandla!
A Revolution in Four Part
Harmony, an awardwinning
documentary
that chronicles the struggle
to end apartheid in South
Africa through the vehicle
of the music that inspired
the participants.
Lee is now crossing the
globe on a monthly basis
with his latest cause, a
much more personal film
that he directed and
co-wrote called Bully that,
as with Amandla!, is so
much more than a movie.
We caught up with him by
phone from Salt Lake City
in January for this look into
his work as both filmmaker
and activist.
PP: How many countries have you been to
promoting Bully?
LH: I feel like I’ve been on an airplane for a year,
non-stop. We’ve been to Australia, South Korea,
New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Norway—lots
of places.
PP: Tell us about the Bully movement.
LH: I think it’s a fledgling movement. I think
that what’s happening is a broader change in the
landscape. In other words, I think the movie, in
tandem with a lot of efforts that have been going
on, has contributed to what appears to me as a
tipping point, where more and more people from
various walks of life—and not just in America,
but globally—ranging from very progressive
urban communities to very conservative rural
communities have collectively started to say,
“Enough,” and “We have this one wrong,” and
“We need to shift our thinking around this and
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Communities have collectively started to
say, “Enough,” and “We have this one
wrong, and “We need to shift of thinking
around this and do that in a public way. . . .
do that in a public way, and start to address
not only the symptoms, but the underlying
causes.” That is a piece of what feels like a
movement. Modern-day movements are hard
to understand. The web is much wider. You have
multiple people exercising leadership in various
communities coming up with solutions. That’s
what makes a movement—not Lee Hirsch or
The Bully Project.
PP: So the underlying idea of bullying is fairly
constant in all of these countries and cultures
you’ve visited?
LH: Oddly, the reactions of kids and adults are
so incredibly similar. And the stories they tell of
their own experiences are very similar as well.
PP: Amandla! was a different film from Bully
in that it was about something that had already
come to some sort of conclusion. It wasn’t
exactly your fight.
LH: It was the tail end of my fight—the
swan song to my fight. It was something that
consumed me, particularly during my time at
Putney. For years it had been my fight and that
[Amandla!] was my “roll it all together and this
is what I made of it” kind of film.
PP: It was a tribute in a lot of ways.
LH: Very much so.
PP: But Bully is not.
LH: I’ve tried to, at least with my documentary
work, make films that are, in their own way, about
social change. They look at the same questions:
What are the drivers? What are the things that
move people off the sidelines? If there’s a thread
to my personal work over the years, it’s that. Both
Amandla! and Bully do that, but they do it in
different ways.
Amandla! examined the idea of a collective,
and how singing and creating energy and spirit
brought people into action and into the struggle
against Apartheid, and sustained them there for a
very, very long time. Bully looks at our attempts
to unlock what is it that would get people to
reevaluate their positions—or rethink or step out
of the box that they’re in, and reach out and be
someone who would stand up for somebody. In
those ways, there is a common thread in the work
in that—at least for me—the internal drive was
about understanding how to fire up engagement.
Bully is obviously a very different film, a very
personal film. It’s a film that I’d been looking
at doing for many, many, many years. Someone
recently reminded me that I was talking about
the film six years ago. I didn’t realize that I had
been carrying it in my pocket quite so long.
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It was also a film I was reluctant to make, that
I was scared to make, because of confronting
my own demons and my own past and a lot of
pain that surrounded not just my own narrative,
but all of the people I would come into contact
with, which has been quite intense. A lot of
people reach out and I meet a lot of people in
my travels who are in really hard places. It’s a lot.
But ultimately I think there was a point for me
where it was just time to make that film. That’s
where it was. I felt like the time was right. I had a
producer who wanted to work on it with me and
off we went to the races.
PP: Why is film such a good tool for firing up
that engagement? In the world of Hollywood
entertainment, why would people pay to see
something that’s so much closer to journalism
than escape?
LH: I think good documentaries run the gamut
from personal dramatic stories that unfold very
differently from traditional journalism to more
classic work like that of Ken Burns, for example.
I think Bully is much less a piece of journalism
than it is a very intimate narrative film. When
you’re in Alex’s house with his mom at the
table, that’s as dramatic as any scene in a fiction
film. Amandla! was much more interviews and
construction and archival footage. Some of it
felt like it was unfolding, but it was more of a
journalistic narrative, whereas Bully doesn’t give
you facts or history or underpinnings. There are
no experts in Bully. You’re kind of . . . locked
in a room with these families and these kids
and you’re walking in their shoes. It’s intensely
intimate. Film is an extraordinary medium,
whether you’re creating it for the big screen or
the small screen. This project will have a greater
life, ultimately, on the small screen than it did on
the big screen. Nothing beats the experience of
when we’ve had our screenings for thousands
of kids, for example the 7,000 in Los Angeles.
Nothing beats that experience. So I’m forever
drawn to it because I understand the possibility
of it.
Empty Bowls for Full Stomachs
Empty Bowls is an annual, worldwide event in October that raises hunger
awareness as well as funds to fight hunger. In Brattleboro, the larger town just
south of Putney, Empty Bowls is a fundraising event for the Brattleboro Area
Drop-In Center, which provides food, shelter, and other essential resources
to those in need. Putney Ceramics Teacher Naomi Lindenfeld has been on
the planning board of Empty Bowls since it started in this area nine and a half
years ago. “I always have students and some adults from The Putney School
community make bowls for it,” says Naomi. “I think of it as social justice and
awareness-raising about hunger issues in our community.” For a $25 donation,
guests are served a simple, nutritious meal of soup, bread, cheese, apples,
beverage, and dessert, and enjoy some live music with their meals. Afterwards,
guests are invited to keep the bowls from which they ate as a reminder of the many people who go hungry each day in our
community and beyond. Empty Bowls is made possible by dozens of volunteers ranging from ceramic artists who begin
making bowls early in the summer, to high school students who help serve and clean up on the night of the dinner. Area
businesses and restaurants contribute food, beverages, desserts and supplies, and local professional musicians provide
entertainment. It’s a true community event.
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Walking the Walk: Action on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
For much of the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a day off. Not
so at The Putney School. “We are walking the walk,” says Janine Hamilton
’73, who teaches theater arts, visual arts, and sits on the board of trustees as a
faculty representative. Janine organized a full day of workshops and community
service work for the school community to participate in. This year’s workshops
were entitled Guerrilla Sing, Madrigals, Spoken Word, Weaving for Rwanda,
Printmaking for Rwanda, Exploring the Challenges of Local Hunger, Pink Slip
Bowl Project, Social Justice, Adrian Piper, Video, Contemporary Slavery, Having Difficult Conversations, Alex’s Haley’s
Interview of George Lincoln Rockwell, The World Needs More Love Letters, White Privilege, Gender Alliance, Awkward
Turtle: The Art of Difficult Conversations, and Implicit Racism: What it is to Be Offensive Without Realizing It. In the
afternoon, students and faculty went out into the community to do service projects ranging from preparing Meals on
Wheels to singing in retirement homes.
PP: What else has been born of the movie?
LH: Do you know about the work that we’ve
done with The Bully Project campaign that
I’ve created—that we’ve, with the Million Kids
movement [ed. note: a campaign to have one million
children see the film and do the prescribed course work
with their schools], engaged over a quarter of a
million kids across the country? It’s an amazing
program through which we were able to enroll
many schools from across the board—and these
are all public schools—Salt Lake City, Cleveland,
Cincinnati, San Francisco.
PP: Who is The Bully Project? Is it just you?
LH: The Bully Project is Lee Hirsch, Sarah
Foudy [’90], also from The Putney School, who
is the campaign director and has been working
with us for over a year, and about six other
people. It’s a small, but really effective, grass-roots
team. We have an office in New York City. We’ve
been working on both [promoting the film and
the Million Kids movement], which is really a
huge effort in terms of being able to facilitate
and raise the dollars as well. We’ve raised millions
of dollars for the campaign at this point. All of
it went into creating these opportunities for
communities across the country. I’m really proud
of that. Our next phase is about to launch, which
is the consumer DVD, but also an educator’s box
kit with the film and the tools we built, and the
guides, the webinars, the principals’ pledges, and
the resources we’ve created together with Harvard
on how to create a more caring community in
the school—to increase emotional and social
competency. We’re finding that we’re able to
market these innovative ideas effectively through
the vehicle of the film. That’s a lot of our work.
PP: What kind of a future are you trying to
create with all of this?
LH: It’s interesting to imagine impact. There are
times when you think about this bigger societal
shift that’s happening—genuinely being a part
of that shift and trying to catalyze it. And then
there are times when you focus down on the
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one family you just talked to that had a really
transformative experience, or the group of kids
who have just written you because they’ve
launched a new project about changing school
culture and standing up for other kids, and it’s
innovative, and it’s smart, and they’re on fire with
it. Or it’s as simple as looking at Alex [one of the
children bullied in Bully] and how his life has
been transformed. At different times I think about it
all in different ways. I’m very proud of the impact
that the film has had and will continue to have.
And, hopefully, if we’ve done our jobs right, it’s
not dependent on me. We’ve given resources and
inspiration and guidance to thousands of people
who have launched their own little movements
and led their own initiatives. And that will
hopefully carry on and be the legacy of this film.
And I will move on and make other films that
may or may not be about changing the world
or have social relevancy. I might want to do
a comedy next. I feel like it’s time to make a
career shift.
PP: What does your near future look like?
LH: In the last three days I’ve been in New York,
California, North Carolina, and now Utah. Two
days from now I’ll be in DC, and then New York,
and then Seattle six days from today. It’s a lot
of travel.
PP: What about 500 years hence? What if we
have political leaders who aren’t bullies? Bankers
who aren’t bullies? Teachers who aren’t bullies?
LH: When I talk about the tipping point, I often
reference something like drinking and driving
where, 30 or 40 years ago, it was accepted. It was
an inevitability. And today, by and large, people
don’t do it and they feel really bad if they do.
I think that’s the kind of transformation that
will happen around bullying—that this is the
generation that will step up and say, “We did that
one in. Public opinion shifted so greatly that it
was no longer acceptable. It will no longer give
you the sort of social currency that it used to.
And so, by that nature, its own fire burned out.”
That’s what I hope to shape.
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Putney Sees Bully
Alumni Relations Manager Alison Frye rented
the Bellow Falls Opera House for a showing of
Bully last September, to which we invited several
other local schools, including the Greenwood
School, Vermont Academy, and Kurn Hattin
Homes. Formal conversations around the movie
occurred during dorm meetings that evening,
but much more was discussed in many
conversations since.
As Lee Hirsch ’90 has mentioned, the movie
brings up feelings for people who have been
bullied or witnessed bullying. Cameron, a Putney
School senior, spent her freshman year of high
school in a place that was, as she describes it,
much different from Putney. She witnessed her
brother’s senior year of high school there.
“My brother is 21 now,” says Cameron. “He has
pretty severe learning differences that have caused
him to be bullied his entire life. He’s partially
bi-polar and has permanent frontal lobe damage,
which causes him to sometimes not be able
to control what he says. His tongue is partially
paralyzed so he’s had a speech impediment his
whole life.”
About watching Bully with us for the first time,
Cameron says, “I felt like I could put my brother
in that movie. I could relate to it in every way. I
could easily put myself in all of those situations.
The bus is the hellhole of high school. It’s worse
than the hallways.”
“People would purposely say something to my
brother and he would say something back that
was obviously a little off—his way of thinking
is completely different. And someone would
say, ‘You’re stupid! You’re a retard!’—all of these
words that make me so angry. And the kids would
say, ‘Mr. Chambers! Mr. Chambers! Chris said
blah, blah, blah!’ And then he [her brother, Chris]
wouldn’t be able to ride the bus for a week.”
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“When I look at where I am right now, and
have been for the past three years, I wish my
brother were in my place sometimes. . . . I
find boarding school to be safe—at least
The Putney School.”
It’s no time to sit back our laurels. Existing in
an environment where bullying is unwelcome
will remain a moving target, like racism, sexism,
and many other social ills. As Lee Hirsch
says, “It’s a place that’s hard-sought.” We will
continue seeking it.
Reflections on the
Rise of Concern
About Bullying
Lee Combrinck-Graham ’59, M.D.
Adult, Child, Adolescent,
and Family Psychiatrist
Medical Director, FSW, Inc.,
Bridgeport, CT
Bullying is a topic that has occupied headlines
with increasing frequency in the last 20 years.
Bullying is a behavior described as oppression
(physical or emotional) of the weaker by the
more powerful. It is quintessentially about
status, the bullies attempting to establish and
maintain their sense of status by degrading and
overwhelming the bullied. Understanding more
about how status is achieved and maintained
among children may illuminate the rise of
bullying and offer more effective ways
of maintaining social contexts that do
not foster bullying.
Bullying may begin in a family, when there
is domestic violence, and can become
internalized by the children as a model
for conducting interpersonal relationships.
But bullying behavior usually emerges in
school. The school experience ushers in a
developmental phase that is more focused
on social behavior and peer interaction than
earlier in children’s experiences. Harry Stack
Sullivan, a quirky and influential psychiatrist,
the original interpersonal psychiatrist, once said
that going to school is the first opportunity
that society has to correct the influence of the
family on the growing youngster. Erik Erikson
characterized the fourth stage in his eight stages
of man, the stage of the school-aged child, as
the focus on industry versus inferiority, the
stage at which the child begins to learn the
“industry” of his or her society. Among
the many ways that Jean Piaget characterized
the developments of the Concrete Operational
Stage of logical development, that stage
occurring during the school age period, was
the capacity to take another’s point of view.
Each of these observations about children’s
development when they go to school clearly
highlights the importance of education not
simply to be mastering academics, but as
learning how to be a member of society.
Policies that focus on standardized test
performance and “No Child Left Behind”
painfully assort effective students (from the
performance standpoint) from less successful
students, drawing attention to differences that
become exaggerated, even though they should
be irrelevant to children’s standing in the
society of their peers.
Respect is fundamental to a functioning
society, and the classification of children
according to their performance assigns respect
and, therefore, status, to those who perform
well. Those who perform less well may deal
with their status problem either by suffering
or by using “brute” strength to compensate
for their feelings of inferiority. This seems to
be the basis of bullying. The fact that bullying
occurs in a social context where respect and
self-respect are not adequately identified,
recognized, and valued, is often being missed.
Bullying is about status, fighting for status, and
claiming status by “demoting” others. And sadly,
everyone in the system becomes absorbed in
the threatening or fearful process of bullying.
Bullying is not simply a one-sided oppression
of the weaker. The bullied individuals are
also involved in the bullying cycle, often by
attempting to gain the respect of the bullies,
and often in a way that actually incites more
dramatic bullying behaviors. Children with
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Greg Pierotti of
Tectonic Theater
Project The
Putney School cast of
The Laramie Project
Ten Years Later;
The Putney School cast
of The Laramie Project
various disabilities seem to be more likely to be
bullied. For example, in their efforts to impress the
bullies, youngsters with Asperger’s disorder may
display some part of their knowledge that has the
opposite effect. One youngster responded to his
bullies by quoting Chaucer in Middle English.
Many parents I have seen who believe their children
are being bullied find that the teachers and other
school personnel are unresponsive and unhelpful.
They cannot intervene, they say. They have not
witnessed the actual bullying; they cannot take one
child’s story against another, and so on. It seems
that in some ways school personnel become bullied
by their own limitations to intervene. Parents
become angry. Parents of the bullies become angry
and bullying as they stand by their children. This
moving from one side to another tends to result
in escalation, not just of the bullying but also of
the reaction of the bullied, who may make more
pronounced efforts to get positive attention from
the bullies, or alternatively, to become more pathetic
and weak, usually spurring the bullies to further
bullying. Ironically, almost any response of
the bullied can aggravate bullying, and so the
cycle escalates.
Saying “no” to bullying is similar to saying “no”
to drugs. It begs the question of what we should
be saying “yes” to.
I believe we should be saying “yes” to recognition
and respect of individuals’ responsibility and
participation in their communities. Both bullies
and the bullied need to have their attributes and
gifts recognized and embraced, perhaps beginning
at home, but definitely celebrated in their school
communities. Recognition and respect mean a
culture that acknowledges differences, recognizes
them, and values them. It means a school culture
of collaboration among students as well as among
students and teachers. There are many models that
seem to have worked over time, but these models
have been difficult to employ when the emphasis
on achievement prevails.
Garrison Keillor describes Lake Wobegon, where
“all the children are above average.” When all the
children are above average, then all the children
have the respect of each other and their teachers
and parents in their communities. Bullying has
no place in such a society.
Social Justice
Theater: The
Laramie Project
The fall plays performed at the end of Project
Week last fall were The Laramie Project by Moisés
Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater
Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
by Moisés Kaufman, Leigh Fondakowski, Greg
Pierotti, Andy Paris, and Stephen Belber. Both
are very difficult shows to perform because
each actor plays several characters who change
on stage. The transitions are critical to the story
telling. Our casts were extremely fortunate that
one of our student cast members, Danny ’14,
is a family friend of Greg Pierotti, an author/
character in the plays, and that Greg was willing
to spend the time to help us get it right.
In October of 1998, Greg was the first to
arrive, with Tectonic Theater Project colleague
Leigh Fondakowski, on the scene in Laramie,
Wyoming, just days after Matthew Shepard had
been murdered. Picking up where the sensationdriven
media left off, Greg and the other authors
went searching for the deeper truth of the crime.
Theater has long been a vehicle for examining
social justice and these plays do just that.
Greg visited The Putney School last semester
and worked with both casts on “Moment
Work,” a specialty of Tectonic Theater Project
that is essential to both plays’ transitions. He also
presented to the entire school in assembly on
what it was like to wade into the hotbed
of emotion that was Laramie, Wyoming, in
October 1998, and what it was like to return
and interview the crime’s perpetrators, among
others, ten years later.
Greg was in the audience here at the Jeffrey
Campbell Theater for one of each performance
because The Laramie Project is an ongoing concern
for him and an excellent tool for social justice
education. Learning about what happened never
really ends.
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Social Justice
Modern Dance:
Lynchtown
Nimbus Dance Works, of Jersey City, New
Jersey, took up residency with us last spring as
they tuned up their 2012 season, including a
collaborative modern dance piece called “Memo,”
which featured many members of The Putney
School dance ensemble and extended community.
This year they’re back to work with us on Charles
Weidman’s Lynchtown (1936), which is recognized
as one of the classic works of American modern
dance and a prime example of dance as a medium
for socio-political expression and protest. Known
for its vivid depiction of a crazed mob at the point
of carrying out a lynching, Lynchtown was created
by Weidman in response to witnessing a lynching
in his home community of Lincoln, Nebraska,
as a child at the turn of the century. Nimbus
Dance Works will present a staging of Lynchtown
in partnership with the Charles Weidman Dance
Foundation. Additionally, Samuel Pott (son of Jay
Goodwin Pott ’62) will choreograph a new dance
that examines some of the same thematic material
as Lynchtown from a contemporary perspective. Sam
is also working with Putney School dance teacher,
Jonathan Riseling, to develop a complementary
piece of our own. A version of Putney’s original
piece was presented by our dance ensemble as
a work in progress when Nimbus Dance Works
visited last October. The final work was performed
on February 15 in Calder Hall of the Michael
S. Currier Center. Pictured here are our dancers
working with members of Nimbus Dance
Works last fall.
Social Justice Literature:
Senior Seminar
Senior seminars in English are opportunities to take
advantage of our faculty’s deeper knowledge—
beyond the nuts and bolts of grammar, composition,
and the other tools we learn in the lower grades.
Juan Rodriguez teaches Social Justice Literature
because it’s what he loves. And his students elect
to take the course because Juan loves what he’s
teaching and encourages them to explore the
subject with him. Last fall they read I, Rigoberta
Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, a Nobel
Prize-winner in which Menchú describes the
virtual enslavement of her people, the Quiché
Indians, by the United Fruit Company in the late
1960s and early ’70s, for the purpose of producing
fruit inexpensively to be sold at a great profit
in the United States. The book focuses on how
the Quiché maintained their cultural identity by
intentionally rejecting the culture of their “ladino”
adversaries, and thereby strengthening Quiché
culture. It’s a complicated, beautiful, horrible story of
triumph in adversity—and a lesson worth learning.
The class stands on its own by virtue of the subject
matter and Juan’s expertise. But there’s much more
to the story. Students at The Putney School hail
from 26 states and 14 foreign countries, including
four students in Social Justice Literature born and
raised in China. Imagine an English teacher of
Mexican descent discussing the life and times of
a Quiché Indian woman with students from the
United States and China in a high school classroom
situated on a bucolic hillside in rural Vermont and
you’ll just begin seeing how deep a diverse, yet
finely focused, educational experience can go.
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