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This essay appeared in slightly
different form in The Seattle Weekly in March
of 1990:
The Headmaster
Dan Ayrault, the headmaster of Lakeside School
who died suddenly of cardiac arrest on February
24 at the age of fifty-five, was well-known
in the educational community as a person who
stood for certain principles: the liberating
notion of having teachers return papers to
students with comments, but without grades;
the value of giving seniors the privilege
to leave campus during the day or to arrive
just before their first morning classes because,
after all, many would be away from home the
following year and need to learn to use their
abundant free time well; a firm belief that
having fewer rules would make people more
responsive to their simplicity and power.
People at our school even joked about the
evaluations of his administration teachers
were asked to fill out every year or so: "No,
Dan, you can't do a better job of running
the school by turning it over to someone else,
or by becoming invisible, or by going on
permanent leave," we might say.
When I started my first teaching
job at Lakeside in 1975, my only experience
with these matters had been as a student at
a large public high school in Texas where
the administration had tried to enforce twenty-three
regulations which barely fit onto a legal-size
sheet. It did not take long for me, or, I
suspect any of us who were new to Lakeside,
to see the good sense of encouraging students
to do the right thing by giving them three
rules to remember instead of twenty-three.
A recent review article by
Alfred Kazin cited a contemporary student's
astonishment to discover that Abraham Lincoln
wrote his own speeches. Those powerful nineteenth-century
abstractions to be found in Lincoln's addresses,
with their sonorous metaphors ready to take
flight, are not to be found in Dan's writing.
What one does find, I suppose, is an attentiveness
to the power of a well-chosen comparison and
a highly organized yet humanistic sense of
its implications and appropriateness for personal
growth and development. For example, in his
last commencement address, Dan wrote, "Clearly
it is resilience --the resilience, for example,
of a bamboo leaf suddenly bending to shed
an overburden of snow and then springing back
-- that stands out as the kind of strength
which sustains institutions." Later,
he spoke of its more general importance by
saying, "It can be useful, as well as
realistic, to consider life from one perspective
as a continuing series of problems, disappointments,
rejections, or crises ...to move through and
past as healthfully as we can. Assuredly we
are surrounded here today by friends or family
who are now struggling, or who have recently
undergone great loss or pain or illness, or
disappointment, or failure. Surely each of
us has experienced already such aspects of
life to some degree, and even more surely
the quality of our future lives will be signifcantly
affected by, will be substantially a product
of how we adapt -- what sort of resilience
we build into the core of our human spirit.
Interestingly, we often perceive an uncommon
beauty of spirit in people whose resilience
has helped them survive unusually difficult
circumstances, shaping them in the process,
just
as the resilience of an alpine fir, coping
with harsh climate, soil and wind, creates
a special beauty we admire."
For many people who knew Dan,
the distinctiveness of his legacy will be
as much a result of our knowing how he thought
and how he lived as of remembering the things
he accomplished, the changes he effected.
Dan and I did not go fishing more than a couple
of times, but the last morning we did so,
accompanied by his youngest daughter, Megan,
stands out in my mind. It was a lovely, calm
morning on Lake Washington a couple of summers
ago. We had been out well before dawn, and
as the sun came up, Dan commented on the beauty
of a particular pattern of light on a cluster
of clouds, or the dazzling presence of Mount
Rainier as it rose up out of the haze in the
lower air. Time passed, and we had an exciting
moment when Megan caught a sockeye salmon.
Soon it was eight o'clock, then nine; the
fish stopped biting, but still we floated
on. Finally Dan said, "Rob, you know
I really am having a great time, but I do
have one question." He paused. "Is
there any way we can read while we're doing
this?"
Dan's particular way of thinking,
informed as it was by his powerful curiosity
and his belief in self-improvement, was an
inspiration for many who knew him, and was
even occasionally a source of frustration
for those who lacked his patience and faith
in the individual's ability to overcome adversity.
I count myself among those who were frequently
skeptical. A few years ago a coach came into
the faculty lounge and, in exasperation, threw
up his hands. He had just endured a frustrating
series of defeats, and had gone to speak to
the headmaster to try to find some way to
make the situation better next year. After
outlining his plans for getting more of those
precious W's to bolster his dispirited team,
Dan's initial reply had been, "How many
games do we need to win?" In fact, Dan
felt that it was usually better for athletes
to lose more games than they win. When our
school labored over the decision of whether
to dismiss classes for postseason athletic
competition so that everyone could attend,
Dan was quick to point out that a team does
not need the support of people in the stands.
Dan loved winning, and he had two Olympic
gold medals to prove it, but who was better
able to help us keep our perspective on the
value of trying hard yet falling short of
a goal than this man who knew more than most
of us will ever know about winning? A question
Dan asked a number of times about students
who were having difficulty was, "How
do we achieve the maximum increment of
growth?" and this faith in the average
person's ability to do more for him or herself
inspired those around him.
It was no secret that in the
last years of his life, once he had had serious
bouts with tachycardia, taken various state-of-the-art
heart drugs, and worn a pacemaker in his chest,
he became an assiduous student of that most
vital muscle and its various afflictions.
He read journal articles and once remarked
with enthusiasm to a teacher who, knowing
of his interest had xeroxed an article which
described a dozen or so of the latest heart
medications, "I've tried nine of those."
Dan's belief in the disinterested pursuit
of knowledge and the power of resilience was
with him to
the end. It was as though if he had been able
to understand his worst enemy, his weakening
heart, just as he had come to understand so
many other things, then he would be able to
overcome it.
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