On October 22, the PHS community received an email from the Board of Education stating that Dr. Carol Kelley would be resigning from her role as PPS Superintendent following a nine-month leave of absence. In a later email to parents and guardians, Kelley offered her own words of explanation.

“This week, after much consideration, I made the difficult decision to resign as Superintendent of Princeton Public Schools. For personal and professional reasons, I must take some time to reset and recenter myself so I can later return to public education and continue to positively impact students,” Kelley wrote in an email.

Following Kelley’s announcement, Rebecca Gold stepped in to serve as Acting Superintendent and Dr. Kathleen Foster was appointed as Interim Superintendent ten days later.

Gold and Foster are both long-time administrators, in Princeton and elsewhere. Gold served for more than 25 years in Lawrence Township, serving in various leadership positions, such as the Director of Personnel. She currently serves as the Interim Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources in PPS. The temporary role of Acting Superintendent added to her current responsibilities.

When asked to describe the role of Gold and the Interim Superintendent, Dafna Kendal, President of the Board of Education, said that it was important to have someone to “sign the checks,” or in other words, act as a formal authority in the district decisions made by the administrative team.

“The board wants someone in charge; even though we have a really strong administrative team, we just want that one person,” Kendal said.

Deeply familiar with Princeton’s educational landscape, Foster most recently served as the Interim Principal for Princeton High School following the dismissal of Frank Chmiel. Prior to that, she held a longstanding administrative position in Robbinsville before joining the PPS district in December 2021 as the Interim Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. On November 13, the board approved her appointment as Interim Superintendent, which is expected to last for the rest of Kelley’s contractual term. 

According to Foster’s contract, the Board wants to “enhance administrative stability, financial security, and continuity within the schools while the Superintendent is on a leave of absence.”

Rashone Johnson, the assistant principal at PHS, believes that PHS is used to these types of changes and can adapt well to them.

“[The] high school administration is still going to do everything in our power to make sure that things still run smoothly for all of our students and staff,” Johnson said.

As PPS changes administrators, students and staff have found ways to continue to achieve the goals of the district, namely quality education. Kendal agreed that students and staff are at the core of the district.

“I think what makes our district great is our teaching staff. And, I know there have been a lot of administrative changes … [but] our teachers just continue doing their jobs and focus on teaching and learning. So while I think it’s important who we have as a leader of the district, I think we’re led by … [what is happening] in our buildings,” Kendal said.

Dr. Kathleen Foster steps in as Interim Superintendent

   On November 16, Princeton Public Schools’ English Language Learner and Title 1 families gathered in Princeton Middle School for the third annual Parent Community Night. The Night included Interactive workshops on family financial planning, technology assistance, and K-12 academic support that hoped to provide a way for attendees to connect and learn about available resources.

   “[Trinidad] Rodriguez and I decided to create this event after noticing many of our ESL families requesting outreach to help understand and know of all the offerings within the school system in the United States,” said Vanessa Bernal, a co-organizer of PPS’s Parent Community Night along with Rodriguez. “Both of us [grew] up with families who immigrated from other countries, [so we] felt this was so important and necessary to do.” 

   At the event, student volunteer translators from PHS were available to assist non-English speaking parents in registering their children for school athletics, the Dual Language Immersion program, and specific school counseling. Several local Princeton organizations — including the Princeton Public Library, Community House, YMCA, the Princeton Health Department, HiTOPS, and Corner House — were also invited to share out-of-school resources with attendees. From providing free academic tutoring for low-income students to helping attendees schedule flu and COVID-19 vaccinations, the variety of community offerings all work towards ensuring that families can have their needs addressed. 

   As an effort to build a sense of community among families, a free shared dinner was hosted at the event with the help of a $1000 Princeton Regional Educational Support Staff Association grant. Following the meal, attendees listened to a keynote speaker, Levi Geurrero, share tips on how to support their childrens’ education, as well as his experience in K-12 and higher education as an immigrant student. 

   “I [want] to be a voice for people that don’t have a voice,” said Guerrero. “I feel like if [people] see someone that looks like them, speaks their language, and comes from the same background, [then] they can relate to them. It’s great to have families engaged in [their] kids’ educational future.”

  Growing up speaking English as a second language in PPS, Guerrero understands the importance of creating a school environment that fosters cultural inclusion and enrichment. As a multicultural school district, PPS’s English Language Learners Program plays an integral role in bridging connections between students who are learning English and their peers. Having at least one ESL teacher in each school, the growing program develops student English proficiency in four fundamental skills: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. 
	
   “[School] districts are required to provide programs taught by ESL certificated teachers if there are ten or more [ESL] students,” said Priscilla Russel, the District Supervisor of World Languages, ESL/Bilingual, and Dual Immersion Programs since 2004. “Our ESL students contribute to the demographic and cultural diversity that characterizes our schools.”

   Individualized classes for ESL students are based on their English screening performances, a language proficiency assessment required for non-native English speakers upon registration in the school district. At PHS, students with limited English proficiency can enroll in Welcome Center I, II, or III, ESL English, History, Science, or Math, where they develop English vocabulary through specialized instruction.

   With the goal of eventually integrating ESL students into mainstream classes, students are taught and expected to complete grade-level history, science, literature, and math assignments in English, allowing them to strengthen their English proficiency while progressing alongside the school curriculum. While classes are primarily taught in English, ESL instructors put emphasis on creating an environment that promotes bilingualism and respects linguistic diversity. 

   “We always emphasize the importance of home languages,” said Ted Holsten, an ESL teacher at Littlebrook Elementary School. “All studies show that students who continue speaking and learning in their home languages have an easier time learning English.”

    At PPS’s elementary schools, ESL lessons combine grade school activities with formal English instruction, with students playing games, singing songs, and writing Halloween stories. 
 
  “I like to let students shape their learning when possible. Some beginners want to start trying to speak right away; some are quieter and are not comfortable trying to speak,” said Holsten. “I try to be sensitive to each student’s personality and interests. I enjoy seeing the way that students are motivated by wanting to communicate with each other and help each other.”

   Opportunities for enrolling in adult ESL classes, or English Conversation Groups, at Princeton Public Library were also offered at the Parent Community Night. 

   “What helps the families the most this evening is just being able to connect, to see themselves in the speaker and the teachers, and to see their children be in the school building and connecting with other students,” said Bernal. “That sense of community is really important.”

Families gather for annual ELL Parent Community Night

   This year, Princeton High School welcomed the first cohort of Princeton Middle School students who took part in the Community Park Elementary School’s Dual Language Immersion program. Having been recognized as a model program for Spanish Dual Language Immersion by the New Jersey Department of Education, CP’s full DLI program engages students in the Spanish culture and language from a young age with half of the core instruction taught in English and the other half taught in Spanish. While this program has gained much praise since its inception in 2015, it has also been met with some criticism, as it provokes the more general issue of overcrowding in the other elementary schools in the school district.
   With over 1,000 new housing units projected to be completed in Princeton by 2026 resulting in consistent growth in enrollment, expansion has always been a discussed topic in the community. In recent years, concerns have been raised by many parents, especially those whose children must be rerouted around the unfilled CP elementary school that is currently exclusively for students in the DLI program. 
   “DLI has become an issue [as] … it's not popular enough to consistently fill a whole school. If you don't want to do DLI, you have to go to another school. So we’re busing kids all over the place. kids that would walk to CP, we're busing them to Johnson Park,” Bouldin said.
   Sharing the same view as Bouldin is District Supervisor of World Languages Priscilla Russell, who explains that while CP is indeed experiencing a lack of students in the DLI program, the district’s other elementary schools are not overcrowded, but full. 
   “We need to be careful — [the other schools] are full, but they're not overcrowded,” said Russell. “[CP] does have some empty classrooms … but our goal had always been to create a dual language immersion school, which we were doing pretty well until the pandemic hit and changed just a whole lot of things.”
   CP Principal Dineen Gruchacz further describes the hindering factors brought by the pandemic, detailing how they have contributed to a lower-than-expected number of students in the DLI program.
   “[During the pandemic], lots of people shied away from anything different than a very basic education program,” said Gruchacz. “The recovery time to build back the numbers in the [classrooms] … is definitely something that needs to be addressed.”
   A DLI program at CP was first proposed in 2013 with the hopes of strengthening bilingual and multicultural learning in the district by taking advantage of Princeton’s extensive diversity. Rather than supplementing English classes with a single world language class, the DLI’s aim was to create a more holistic approach to language and culture, immersing students by teaching half of their subjects in Spanish instead of English. 
   DLI programs have become increasingly popular across the country in recent years due to the cognitive benefits associated with learning more than one language from a younger age and in response to the undervaluation of foreign languages in English-speaking countries. In fact, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the universality of English is one of the main reasons why English is the most commonly taught language worldwide by a factor of 20, a discrepancy that DLI programs hope to address.
   “Princeton is not a huge town, but it's a town [made up] of really diverse community members and perspectives … [and] a large international community,” said Kimberley Tew, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. “We want to make sure that we're honoring that being bilingual and biliterate is a superpower … in an increasingly globalized world. [That] is the goal of the program, not just to develop [linguistic] skills, but to develop cultural competency.”
   Along with welcoming DLI program alums at PHS for the first time, the district has extended the DLI program past the elementary and middle school levels by introducing a new horticulture class tailored to teach basic biology principles in Spanish, taught by science and research teacher Mark Eastburn. Eastburn, who is fluent in both Spanish and English, reflects on the tremendous positive impacts that learning a new language can have on a child’s cognitive abilities and consequently believes that many more people should be signing up for the program.
   “I remember, many years ago, the evidence being overwhelmingly strong that dual language immersion programs are a way of supercharging childrens’ brains,” said Eastburn. “The evidence has only gotten better over time, and why we can’t get more people to sign up in a community which truly cares about education is baffling to me.”
   While the district does offer Spanish classes in the traditional route in all the other elementary schools, many parents believe that language education in the traditional method of language learning is not sufficient for students to gain fluency, leading them to choose DLI. Nicole Pezold, a current CP parent, believes that foreign language education is not prioritized in the traditional curriculum. 
   “I think it’s kind of an American approach to learning foreign languages to just not prioritize them at all. And I think that our schools in Princeton are trying to prioritize it way more than schools elsewhere in the nation, but we still are approaching it from an old perspective of language learning. I think immersion is the future, or one potential road for the future of language learning for people who really think that that's an important part of a rounded education,” Pezold said.
   Some parents who compare the immersive education of their children to their own experiences with the traditional method point out the effectiveness of DLI over the traditional method. Georgette Stern, who currently has three kids enrolled in the DLI program, shares her satisfaction with her kids’ improvement in the language. 
   “My husband and I both took Spanish throughout middle and high school, but you don't get the same level. I often speak to [my kids] in broken Spanish and … it’s great to see the level of comprehension,” said Stern. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to have your kids hear another language for half of their day, and also get core instruction in those languages.”
   In addition to offering enhanced opportunities for students who may not speak a second language at home to become bilingual, the DLI program intends to aid the large Spanish-speaking population in Princeton by helping them strengthen their bilingual skills and learn about their heritage more deeply.
   “One of the original goals of the program was to close the opportunity gap,” said Tew. “A lot of times when students move to the school district or move to America, they lose some of the foundational skills and pieces in their heritage languages … so we [are] targeting our [Spanish speaking] multilingual learners so that they can strengthen their knowledge base in both languages.”
   Olu Ogunyankin, a CP parent and a native of Guatemala, shared that the main reason her family chose to move to Princeton from South Brunswick was for the DLI program.
   “[Before starting at CP], even though we speak Spanish at home, [my son] would reply in English because he was in a Pre-K where they just spoke English. And [although] it’s been two months since the classes started in kindergarten, I see a huge difference in the amount of Spanish that he uses at home. He’s giving me sentences in Spanish, he’s replying in Spanish, and soon he’s gonna write in that language too,” Ogunyankin said.
The program is intended to help both native Spanish speakers and the already multicultural and multilingual families in Princeton who may not speak Spanish but want their children to continue learning in different languages.
   “We're targeting any family or child who believes in multiculturalism, biliteracy, and bilingualism. We have a lot of families who don't speak Spanish at home, but they might already be a trilingual or bilingual family, and they want their child to have that experience in school as well,” Tew said.
   PHS freshmen who took part in the first cohort of the DLI program highly recommend it for incoming elementary students at CP, finding that in addition to learning a new language from a younger age, the cultural immersion provided by the program has given them a different perspective of the world around them.
   “I feel like you're connected to a different culture. You're more immersed [and] you have a better ability to understand things around the world because you get to know people who were specifically part of that culture,” said Charles Baglio ’27, a member of the first DLI cohort. “[CP] did it really well … and it'’ an experience that you’ll take with you for the rest of your life.”
   For the parents who aren’t considering the DLI program, Milania Kapoor ’27, another freshman who participated in the DLI program, recommends that parents try the program for their children before they make a decision, expressing that the program will provide profound benefits.
   “I would say try it because you can always switch out of it … and ask to go to a different school,” said Kapoor. “It was an incredible experience for me. Not only are you learning a language but it's just a different experience … because you learn math in Spanish, you learn science in Spanish, … and you [become] so smart as a young kid.”
   With a growing Spanish-speaking population in the United States and an increasingly globalized world, learning a second language will become an important skill for future generations. How Princeton schools will balance an immersion program and potential overcrowding issues, however, may require compromise. 
   “It's a matter of everyone getting along and understanding each other better, and then building those bridges to actually move everyone forward as a society, which Princeton has the opportunity to do,” said Eastburn. “We really need to hammer that home to the public, because [an immersion program is] such a unique and important thing that we can offer as a district.”

Eight years on, PPS’s DLI program continues to bridge language gaps

First dreaming about becoming a history teacher in the first grade, this fall marks Social Studies Teacher Elizabeth Taylor’s 13th year teaching at PHS. Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, Taylor debated between journalism and teaching history in high school, but the difficulty of attending a journalism college and the lack of a newspaper at her high school compelled her to choose education as a more secure option. 
After receiving her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University, Taylor taught United States and World History at Westford Academy in Massachusetts for nine years before she and her husband moved to South Jersey, where it was closer to family. Budget cuts caused by the 2008 Recession led to fewer available teaching positions, with the only one being PHS at the time. She took the offer to work at PHS knowing the challenge and reputation of the district.

“I chose education over journalism [because] I thought that I had a more secure job as a teacher. I shadowed a reporter at a local newspaper for a day during my senior year and remember them telling me that to get a job as a reporter, … you had to have worked on your high school newspaper. My school didn’t even have a newspaper, so I figured I didn’t really have a chance,” said Taylor. “I liked history; I was good at it, and I had several great history teachers. My mom was also a teacher, as was an aunt and a cousin, so I could easily picture myself as a teacher.”

Taylor strives to create a learning environment that is both intellectually engaging and inspires students to consider different perspectives. In order to keep students engaged, as well as make each year different for herself, Taylor adjusts her curriculum each year to incorporate current events and new resources that fit the needs of the new class. 

“Current events definitely help to make each year unique; this has especially been true over the last several years. Also, getting a new group of students, with their own interests and personalities; realizing that students in one period aren’t as engaged by a topic as students in an earlier period were, and moving on more quickly,” Taylor said.

In addition to social studies, Taylor also teaches Sociology Accelerated at PHS. Because of her limited knowledge on sociology and the time she had to allocate to her baby at home, Taylor was initially reluctant to adopt the new course. However, after five weeks of teaching the subject, Taylor fell in love with the creativity it allowed as well its applicability to students’ lives.

“Professionally, it is the best thing that has happened to me. … I love that it’s a rigorous course without the pressure of an AP exam,” Taylor said.

Having been regarded as a tough but fair teacher by previous and current students, Taylor finds that both of her courses teach students study skills and time management habits, which they can continue to apply in high school and throughout college.

“‘Tough but fair’ sounds about right. I hope to create an environment that is intellectually engaging and where students feel supported as they try new things and perspectives,” Taylor said.

Through her teaching, Taylor hopes to develop students’ desires to keep up with current events and become active members of society. Emma Liu ’26, a student in Taylor’s AP U.S. History class, appreciates her commitment to helping her students.

“She provides a lot of support for her students and really tries to help them succeed whether [that’s] in the classroom or for the AP Exam,” Liu said.

Outside of the classroom, Taylor strives to find a balance between work obligations and spending time with family.

“The demands on teachers are simply too great, and it definitely got much harder once I had kids,” said Taylor. “The best I have done is to ignore anything PHS-related during the summer, and to instead focus on the rest of my life as much as possible, … but during the school year, teaching takes up the majority of my time and attention.”

In her limited free time, Taylor enjoys gardening, dancing, and reading. Having been a dancer her whole life, she finds that her weekly tap dance classes give her the opportunity to unwind from the stresses of teaching.
“I take an adult tap class now that is probably the best hour of the week for me, because I’m just focusing on something that I need and not what my students need, or my kids need, or my husband needs,” Taylor said.
As her two children grow up, Taylor notes how she’s been able to relate much more to her students and their ambitious high school classes and extracurriculars as she learns to deal with her own children’s ambitions.
“I see high school students who are just trying to do it all. … They want to take five AP classes, be president of this club, etc. … and as a teacher, there’s just not enough hours in the day to do all of this, right?” Taylor said. “Now as a parent, I’m struggling to make those same types of decisions because it’s not like we’re pushing them into these things … and it’s really hard as a parent to say no when it’s something that they’re passionate about, because you want to encourage their passions, but you also don’t want them to burn out. … So, I definitely have more sympathy for my students as I watch my children navigate this themselves.”
For incoming and current APUSH students, Taylor hopes that they recognize that the class is much more than just learning history. She stresses how all of the challenges that come with taking APUSH are what makes a student’s journey in her class so special.

“A lot of it is about the journey that they go through over the course of the year. APUSH is a really hard class, but at the end of the year, students overwhelmingly tell me how worth it it was and how they learned so much more than just US history, and even more than just how to be a historian,” said Taylor. “I like seeing the journey from how they first approach the class, and what they think their goals are, what they think they’re going to get out of it, and then seeing at the end of the year, how much that has evolved.”

PHS Profile: Elizabeth Taylor

  In the past, celebrities were shining stars: singers, dancers and politicians only seen by fans on the black screens of television. Now, in the age of unrestrained usage of social media, the distance between celebrities and fans is stripped. From convincing fans to purchase a product they endorse to imposing their views on important world events and issues, celebrities and public figures now hold the power to influence an impressionable audience with the click of a button. 

  After the senseless killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement saw a massive influx of attention on various media. From trending Twitter “blacklivesmatter” hashtags to the 28 million Instagram users who participated in “Blackout Tuesday,” publicly proclaiming support on social media for BLM was deemed the right thing to do, and keeping silent was perceived as immoral and almost racist. Brands and celebrities rode on this social media wave, blacking out their social media profile pictures and professing their support to the movement in posts. While these popular gestures were intended to show solidarity with the movement, it set a larger precedent that activism simply meant announcing one’s alignment with a cause without the intention of further support. 

  Mass distribution of misguided statements is the central cause for the spread of misinformation, an all too common consequence of celebrity “activism.” A study conducted by researchers at Reuters Institution in 2022 found that 20 percent of posts containing misinformation about COVID-19 were created by influencer profiles. Even more damaging, because of their large monopoly on social media, celebrity posts on important issues often overshadow expert opinions and helpful resources posted by lesser known accounts, devaluing the function of professional journalism. The often performative nature of celebrity activism becomes clear upon nuanced situations such as the Israeli-Palestinian war, which saw much less celebrity engagement. Given the extreme nuance of the conflict, there was no longer a clear-cut, “politically-correct” side to side with or to jump on the bandwagon for. Many fans blasted their idols upon observing their “silence,” questioning why they weren’t using their platform to weigh in on the situation. However, celebrities shouldn’t be pressured to “speak up” on political issues that they have no background in when expert opinions hold more importance in informing the public. 

   The influence celebrities have on impressionable fans regarding social issues often unfolds on an emotional level rather than from factual evidence, resulting in unacceptable behaviors by hot-tempered fans that attack individuals who speak out against the misguided ideologies spread by biased public figures. For example, in April 2020, the actor Woody Harrelson shared his claim regarding the 5G network being the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic to his two million followers on Instagram. The time frame of his claims correlated with at least 20 cell tower polls being burned to the ground in the UK. Telecom employees were also harassed on the streets while attempting to set up 5G fiber optic cables. Kanye West, also known for his anti-vaccination stance, told Forbes that he believed COVID-19 vaccinations would “put chips inside of us” during the pandemic. This proven-false conspiracy theory snowballed and soon became a popular statement spread by anti-vaccine groups. Furthermore, the misinformed statements of celebrities are often regurgitated in popular media in order to generate more clicks, consequently exacerbating the spread of their falsified claims.

   As teenagers, the demographic most susceptible to celebrity influence, PHS students should be mindful of avoiding valuing their favorite celebrities' opinions over expert opinions in order to make informed decisions. In a time where rampant false information is spread online, it’s important to realize that the power of reliable research to uncover truths is longstanding and undeniable. 


Stop relying on celebrity activism

   On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the Muslim authority of the Gaza Strip, invaded the state of Israel. In response, the Israeli cabinet vowed “to wipe… Hamas off the face of the Earth.” In the following weeks, the world watched the attack become the bloodiest war in Israel’s history. According to the New York Times, as of November 7, there have been over 1,400 Israeli and 10,000 Palestinian civilian and militant casualties, as well as 422 Israeli hostages and 1.5 million internally displaced Gazans. 

  The war has also come with inflammatory speech and calls for violent protest. The Anti-Defamation League has recorded a 388 percent rise in antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between October 7 and October 25, compared to the same period last year. Similarly, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reports of Islamophobia were up 182 percent in the U.S. between October 7 and October 24, compared to the average 16-day period last year. Educational institutions have been particularly rife with confrontation. For instance, at UMass Amherst, a student was recently arrested for assaulting a fellow Jewish student at a vigil. Stanford has also been investigating possible hate crimes committed against a Muslim student. And at Harvard, a group of pro-Palestinian students received widespread condemnation after “holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all ongoing violence.” 

   Other, less extreme responses have also contributed to the deafening noise. One such reaction is performative activism on social media, and the rush to take sides; this is often caused by the widespread lack of empathy for others and a general lack of understanding of this nuanced situation. You have probably seen it online; a binary stance, or lack thereof, becomes a part of one’s character. This pressures people to hop on social media to share a quick something about the war and get it over with. A global conflict becomes a box they can check off, a guilty feeling they think they can dispose of with a simple click. This leads to a common sentiment — when people lack compassion and time and space for reflection, the results are horrendous. In October 2022, AP News conducted a poll that found that around 75 percent of adults in the U.S. agree that misinformation leads to violent views and behaviors.

   Incorrect, radical, and often conflicting messaging related to the Israel-Hamas war can make it difficult to discern the truth and process our reaction to it. However, instead of trying to easily address the situation with a simplistic perspective or opinion, the most effective solution is to take time to develop a complete understanding and keep empathy at the center of thought.

   While not all responses to the war have been peaceful, we are fortunate that at PHS, we have had thoughtful and constructive opportunities for reflection. On October 17, PHS invited Rabbi Merow from The Jewish Center to help students process their reactions. On October 20, PHS hosted a Gathering for Peace and Hope, in which the Muslim Student Union, the Jewish Club, and the Middle Eastern Students Association came together to recite Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” 

   Rather than making rash and violent decisions or participating in performative acts without a true understanding of the issue at hand, we should continue to encourage each other, and ourselves, to take time in making decisions and keep an open mind. It’s not an easy topic. That’s not to say that one may not have an opinion on the subject; individual opinions are encouraged and valued, but it is essential to maintain an anti-violent and open-minded approach when developing them. This war, and our reactions to it, are anything but a justification for hatred. If we want true unity, true resolution, and true peace, the best reaction is a thoughtful and empathetic one. 

Embracing empathy amidst the conflict in Israel and Palestine

“It almost looks,” wrote Sigmund Freud in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” his dark, sobering final paper, “as if analysis were the third of those impossible professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.” It’s a strange claim for the man credited with founding psychoanalysis — a field which defines what Freud called “neuroses” as results of unchecked unconscious desires — to make: imagine a teacher ending the school year with a lecture about how their class had been predestined to disappoint. And yet the impossibility of fully satisfying the psychoanalytic patient was at the center of Freud’s theories. To understand why — and to understand whether Freud’s ideas, and the discipline that arose from them, matter at PHS — we have to talk about transference.

Don’t let its academic aura fool you: the theory of transference is, quite simply, a theory of love. In his “Observations on a Transference-Love,” Freud proposed that the “layman’s” conceptualization of love as a pure, quasi-spiritual force was shortsighted. This conclusion, characteristically, comes from a deep personal failure: in the early days of his practice, Freud pushed away a string of patients (most notably the pseudonymous Dora) who had become inexplicably attracted to him. His attempt to understand the roots of the pattern, despite being tainted by sexist misconceptions and unscientific assumptions, ended up producing t h e seminally important idea of transference: Freud posited that we bring the emotional expectations and desires of our childhood with us wherever we go — including, of course, to the analyst’s couch.

Today, analysts agree almost unanimously (a rare thing, in the fraught world of psychoanalytic institutes) that doctors can allow nothing to arise from a patient’s love. But this is not because the patient’s love isn’t real — it has the same transferential roots as any other of their romantic attractions. The rule exists simply because an analyst’s office is an inappropriate and manipulative context for genuine romantic intimacy.

Perhaps I’ve failed to explain how lonely and terrifying Freud’s theory is. Janet Malcolm, in “The Impossible Profession,” does it more justice: “even… romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference… destroys faith in personal relations.” Or, more succinctly: “we cannot know each other.” And yet the idea is vital to the psychoanalytic encounter, in which the analyst is often tasked with “knowing” their patient. As it turns out, only by recognizing and “harnessing” countertransference — feelings from the doctor towards the patient which arise from what Malcolm calls “early blueprints” — can an analyst ensure that their patient’s unconscious urges (and the analyst’s own) don’t destroy the possibility for a productive and genuinely helpful process. Some psychoanalysts would object to my language here. Thankfully, I’m not a psychoanalyst, and I have no institutional reputation to uphold. What I am is a high schooler — one who thinks that the classroom, too, should be productive and genuinely helpful, and that student teacher relationships form (of course) an inappropriate context for romance.

Don’t get me wrong: focusing on the erotics of a high school classroom is unhelpful and weird. And Freud — sexist, self-centered, pseudoscientific Freud — hardly seems like a figure you’d want helping teachers at PHS to relate with their students. But a general understanding of transference, as I see it, should help rectify (or at least explain) some of the expectations we form (consciously or otherwise) of the classroom.

As the analyst Leo Stone explained in 1967, rather than casting teachers as lovers, we recognize in them the “caretaking functions of the original parents.” Deadlines at school and curfews at home are subject to the same set of tangled emotional push-backs. But the same time, students crave the teacher’s parental love: we want to be cared for. Of course, openly addressing transference in the classroom would be, as Merve Emre puts it in “Are you my Mother?,” “its own variety of pedagogical failure.” Classes have neither the time nor the moral obligation to become therapy sessions. Still, students would do well to remember that a teacher is not obligated to love them — or even care about them on an individual level — in the same way a parent might. Often, instead of wanting to be taught, we yearn for the teacher to seek out our own knowledge: in a class with 30 other students, though, an educator failing to do so is a practical choice rather than a personal slight.

I’ve also come to believe (with significantly less authority, never having been a teacher myself) that PHS teachers can learn from the way an analyst deals with the urge to reciprocate their patient’s “transference love.” Caring for students is, of course, important, but replacing constructive rigor and challenge with either a doting, carefree environment or one where the teacher feels as though they must make the class wildly, unhelpfully difficult in order to reaffirm their own authority, is harmful for everybody involved. It’s hard, as someone who finds a perhaps embarrassing amount of joy in the classes I take here at PHS, to agree with Freud that education is an impossible profession. But it seems that students who want to please or defy their educators at all costs and teachers who seek to become surrogate parents or all-knowing kings each fall prey to the same misguided assumption: that the high school classroom could ever be truly satisfying.

Teachers and transference: does Freud matter in high schools?

Community service is no foreign concept for many students around the nation. Many school districts, including Princeton High School, require their students to fulfill a certain number of community service hours during their time in high school, ticking off the graduation requirement prior to leaving their senior years. While this requirement can be extremely beneficial and helpful for communities and students alike, it also raises many questions pertaining to the ethical aspect of mandating community service hours: Does requiring community service in schools undermine the intrinsic nature of what community service is? Does it instead build a strong foundation for the students while opening new pathways for students to explore their interests? While there is no definite answer, mandating community service for students infringes upon the intrinsic nature of what community service is supposed to be, despite still posing as a pathway for students to explore their interest and give back to their communities.

Community service at its core has been defined and recognized as an act of voluntary help for one’s community. The essence of community service is based on the foundation of volunteering, rather than a mandated requirement. By setting requirements for students to accomplish for the sole purpose of graduating, schools directly infringe upon the very nature of what volunteer work is, thus damaging and reducing the noble act of giving back to your community from the selflessness of your heart, to yet another “assignment” that needs to completed before the end of high school.

Reduction of such sorts can also prove to be harmful to not only students, but communities alike. By mandating community service, students may start to draw parallels by comparing it to schoolwork for classes, assigned homework, or class credits that need to be fulfilled in order to graduate. Such activities that usually carry negative connotations, due to their mundane and stressful natures, may in turn inflict a similar message upon community service. By requiring community service for graduation, students may start to shy away from taking part in any form of community service after they fulfill their hours or even after high school due to the weak first impressions they experienced as it being a requirement. As such, mandating community service may end up damaging the future of community service, rather than fostering one.

However, despite the concerns raised pertaining to ethics of mandated community service, the system can actually be beneficial for some students. The required hours for community service have created many opportunities, both in the school and within the community. Students are exposed to various forms of community service around their towns, and can pursue different passions or interests that they might have, while at the same time fulfilling their hours for graduation. With more than 20 community service clubs in the school and many more outside in the community, students are given a plethora of options to choose from when deciding how they want to complete their hours, and as part of that process, students may find a passion for a service project. They might continue pursuing that passion for the rest of high school, and maybe even carry that passion beyond, building a strong foundation for students to carry with them into the real world.

While the premise of mandated community service infringes upon the intrinsic nature of what community service is meant to be, its positive impacts can be seen reflected upon the school and community. Students can find boxes of canned goods filled to the brim, elementary children refining their musicality after school, and empowering posters to spread awareness on issues in the PHS hallways. These actions of the student body come as a result of a simple graduation requirement, and while the main intention is to tick that box, the process of reaching that point often leaves a positive mark on our school community, expanding our worldview and making new connections.

College apps or kind hearts: the truth behind community service

The teacher has just asked a question and the answer that was so clear in your mind is now clouded by questions: What if it’s wrong? What if everyone laughs at me? What if I trip up my words and embarrass myself? The hand that you were about to raise goes back to your lap. To a teacher, this lowered hand could automatically lead to a lower grade, an assumption that you didn’t do the assignment, or an overall sour feeling about you. Very quickly those questions about your participation become questions about your grade leading to a new anxious spiral from a want to participate to the fear holding you back. 

Quiet people are often perceived as uninterested, unopinionated, or even disrespectful as they tend not to engage in large groups. Although we have this assumption in schools that quieter students can be coaxed out of their shells, the participation grade incentive that schools use to get students to open up does not work. This incentive leads to greater anxiety as the desire to bring up this grade is overshadowed by the anxiety that comes along with raising it. In general, participation grades are an inaccurate representation of students’ academic performances that ought to be replaced with a more inclusive analysis of students’ understanding of the material.

The desire to remain quiet comes from natural parts of peoples’ personalities such as shyness or introversion. While both traits can coexist, it is critical to make the distinction between the two. Shyness is fear of social judgment. Everyone has shyness to some extent and that is how the initial fear of raising your hand comes out in the first place. Introversion concerns how individuals respond to stimuli. Extroverts typically need more stimuli, while introverts thrive best in low-key environments. Our society tends to idealize extroverts as outspoken people who are often those with the greatest power or influence. PHS is guilty of this idealization as well. This is reflected in our participation grades, who we elect to student government, and even the people that we view as the smartest in our grades. We wouldn’t be placing our more extroverted peers on a pedestal if they didn’t make us believe that they deserved to be there through their outspoken tendencies. However, this idealization of more talkative students completely minimizes the work that quieter students do to maintain their grades, their positions in extracurricular activities, and their efforts to create a social presence at PHS. 

Having established the difference between shyness and introversion, we can dive into why shyness is impacting students’ participation tendencies in the first place. Researchers at Northwestern University theorized that “kids face a social stigma for publicly making an effort to excel”. This stems from a school’s overall academic based culture. We would like to assume that given the pressure to take AP courses, apply to top colleges and fill our plates full of extracurriculars, PHS would fall into the “cool-to-be-smart” category of schools, however this is not the case. It is always incredibly awkward to be the student who breaks the silence in class when it seems that no one knows the answer. In that situation, it is far easier to keep your hand lowered rather than draw attention to yourself for being the know-it-all or the dumb one if you get the answer wrong. Although the chances of that actually happening are incredibly low, human’s inherent shyness creates that narrative within our minds which makes it easier for us to follow the masses. Rather than penalizing people for their inherent shyness, shouldn’t our teachers be understanding of that fear and encourage participation rather than enforce it?

Modern-day teaching needs to embrace all types of learning, listening, and communication styles. In an inclusive learning community like PHS, we should encourage introverts and quiet students to reach their academic potential using a multitude of ways to demonstrate mastery of learning material. A more equitable participation grading technique could help to make it easier for quieter students to demonstrate what they know. The canvas discussion boards can be an effective way for students to interact virtually with a way to edit what they say to feel the most confident about their responses while also maintaining conversations with other students. This would eliminate the overwhelming stimuli of in-class discussions that can be daunting for many students. Regardless of the volume of their voice, every student has one, and it’s time we learn to listen.

November, 2023 Archives