This week five years ago, I had a job interview for a position for which I had forgotten I’d applied. It was at the (independent) Greenwich Country Day school, which puzzled me: surely an affluent town like Greenwich would have great public schools, rendering a need for a private one superfluous, no? Whatever: I was in a throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall moment at a school in the grip of an ideological fever that had raged, and would rage, for years.
I soon learned Greenwich public schools are indeed great—but they’re also large in a town of 70,000, ten times larger than my own. There was thus room in the scholastic marketplace for a small all-boys school (Brunswick), a small all-girls school (Greenwich Academy), and a co-ed Country Day. But GCDS only went up to 8th grade until a new high school was launched in 2019. I was interviewing for a post at the newly created upper division. This was amid a flurry of concurrent interviews, but one that emerged as unexpectedly arresting, and even more so when I headed there on a wintry day.
It was a strange time. I few weeks earlier, I had noted to my students that an entire Chinese city had recently gone under quarantine. Only an in authoritarian society, I mused. Can you imagine anything like that happening here? And yet what had once seemed fantastical now seemed inevitable. I seized on the first available date for my campus visit, Monday, March 9, figuring (correctly) that everything would be shut down by week’s end. I had taken the day off from my job for the interview, but had dropped off and picked up my daughter, a student at my current school. When I ducked inside, there was a surreal sense that the world was about to change.
On Wednesday, March 11, I received a job offer. On Thursday, March 12, I negotiated with the head of school on a daybreak call for a contract that would result in a 20 percent pay cut—an indication of how acute my desire to flee had become. (I have just climbed my way back to that benchmark, happy I could afford the luxury.) The next day, under pressure from my principal, who had contacted me twice that week to note I had not signed my contract for the coming year—here’s your hat; what’s your hurry—I made the decision to leave. Ominously, I noted that it was Friday the 13th. That was also the day it was announced the school would be shut down for the rest of the month. Of course that was only the beginning. My departure had an oddly abrupt and yet faded quality because normal routines never resumed before my 19-year tenure expired. I have many esteemed colleagues I have not seen in person since.
I spent the months to come in a state of nervous limbo, afraid that GCDS would say thanks but no thanks: the epidemic had changed things. That didn’t happen. What did happen was my gradual integration into a new school where business could not simply return to usual, because there really hadn’t been any usual to begin with. It took a couple more years before it would be fully populated and staffed, and for routines to emerge with any solidity.
I’m not sure when I can say when normality arrived. But I do know now that five years later, I have bonded to my new home. (I just finished writing a history of the institution, which will be celebrating its centennial in 2026, an experience that allowed me a welcome immersion in the community.) My departure from my last school has gradually faded from a sharp pain to a dull ache, one I know will never leave me. And the precipitous finitude of that experience heightens my awareness that this one will not last for all that long. But such considerations only heighten my gratitude toward the people who hired—rescued—me and the exceptionally fine colleagues I’ve joined who, as a group, punch way above their weight. I miss my old students. But I’m more aware of ever of the privilege of teaching the ones before me.
The fevers of 2020 have broken. Another one in Washington is raging. My doubts about the body politic make the tenuous stability I now enjoy all the more precious.
Your current Head of School ( my successor ) and I are never competitive. However, I wish that I was the visionary leader who offered you a contract to join our community. You are a treasure. Lucky us.