Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

11. Classroom Innovations: Learning from Girls

11 Classroom Innovations: Learning from Girls f o r a s l o n g a s a n y o n e c o u l d r e m e m b e r , w e s t o v e r ’s s c i e n c e department in the old Methodist church’s stables had been too small. When physics was first offered in the 1930s, Louise Dillingham had made room for it in the basement of the main building. Three decades later, the biology and chemistry classrooms were still crowded and noisy, and the space for physics was “almost desperately inadequate,” noted the 1968 accreditation committee. Ten years after that, the chemistry lab continued to be so cramped that science teacher Terry Hallaran worried about flammable fumes sparking an explosion. Nonetheless, Terry and his wife, Alice, “cheerfully arrange and rearrange the different classes and inspire students with their own interest and expertise ,” the educators observed, while enthusiastically adding interesting electives and an Advanced Placement class. Meanwhile, the number of students taking science had increased dramatically, making the overcrowding worse than ever. While the school had been struggling to survive, it had been impossible to do much about the situation, let alone match impressive science facilities at former boys’ schools, which were now attracting girls interested in science. Now that the headmaster and the board of trustees were optimistically looking toward the future, they began talking about what to do. Joe Molder pointed out to the board that the school’s excellence was due to its fine faculty, not its facilities. But, he went on, classrooms must be up-to-date if they were going to convince potential pupils and their parents of the advantages of going to a small and pretty school, let alone to Classroom Innovations: Learning from Girls ✦ 197 maintain its accreditation. Westover, which had a fine collection of art history books but relatively few volumes in the sciences, had also outgrown its lovely Mary R. Hillard Memorial Library. Novels were shelved in the Common Room, while reference books were placed here and there. The original school building and its idyllic surroundings are so attractive, Molder told the trustees, that Westover had been able to rest on this strength for too long. At first there was talk among board members about again putting science classrooms and laboratories in the basement of the main building, or in the infirmary, or in Virginia House. Around that time, businessman C. Lawson Reed, Jr., a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, joined the board. (His wife, the former Dorothy Whittaker, was a member of the class of 1941 along with Emily Detwiler Uhl, whose husband was already a trustee; also, the Reed daughters, Janet and Dorothy, had graduated from Westover in 1964 and 1968.) Patricia Acheson, the new board president, soon became an enthusiastic admirer of the new trustee, saying that he had “a mind like a steel trap” as well as intriguing and progressive ideas about education, which were widening everyone’s perspective. The trustees were still searching for “a unique mission” for Westover, something that would call attention to the school. It had been founded early in the century when private boys’ schools excluded girls, in an era when men and women were expected to live very different kinds of lives. Now as gender roles were becoming more alike, there was an urgent need to find a compelling reason for educating girls together. Only a few years earlier, Matina Horner of Harvard had published her research about the “fear of success” among college women, but its implications were not yet widespread. Lawson Reed urged the board to do something bigger and better than what it had in mind: to build an entirely new structure devoted to science, which would also hold all the school’s books. Not only would a state-of-the-art science building be a dramatic break from the past, but it would also show the school’s seriousness about educating girls for the modern world. The decision to go ahead with Science teacher Terry Hallaran. westover school archive. 198 ✦ w e s t o v e r this plan, when Westover was just emerging from near bankruptcy, was “a pretty gutsy move,” admitted trustee Betsy Michel later, but “we never lost our momentum—we couldn’t afford to.” This new building became Mrs. Acheson’s cause. Annual fund...