Swimmer Grace Bauer ’08 (right) was honored by the Alumnae Association with this year’s Scholar-Athlete Award. A chemistry major and swim team captain, Bauer was recognized as a superior athlete within the NEWMAC Women’s Swimming Academic All-Conference Team, and set twenty-five swimming records in her fours years at MHC.
Bauer also received the Louisa Stone Stephenson Prize in 2007 for outstanding work in chemistry, as well as an undergraduate award for achievement in organic chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2006.
Said Swim Coach David Allen, “Grace has been a leader within the team as a captain, within the department as a Student-Athletic Advisory Committee representative, and within the chemistry department, serving on faculty-selection committees and as a peer mentor. She is a well-spoken representative for the college and our athletic department, and is deserving of the Scholar-Athlete Award.”
Some students go through college uncertain about their direction and sketchy about what really turns them on, academically or professionally. Not April Empleo Frazier ’08 (above).
Since her first year at MHC, Frazier has worked with low-income youth in nearby Holyoke, and is planning a career in teaching and community development. “I’ve known what I’m passionate about for pretty much the whole time,” says Frazier, who majored in international relations, with a minor in education. “Youth and development found me. I enjoy the honesty the kids present in my life, and I just want to be part of that.”
Thanks to a first-year MHC Community-Based Learning seminar, Frazier allied herself with what is now River Valley Academy in Holyoke, working with students who have behavior problems and learning differences. “I fell in love with it,” she says of that experience, as well as the work she later did with the Holyoke Youth Task Force and the after-school program, Youth Rap.
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Photos of hundreds of MHC students taken from the Facebook Web site were featured in the well-attended Blanchard Gallery art exhibit
The Panopticon: A Facebook Installation. Artist Martha Martinez FP’09 hoped her work would create a critical discourse on how the Internet “tricks users into making compromises with their values,” including privacy in their own life and the lives of others.
Science for All
As the science department chair at a charter school in the South Bronx, I was thrilled to read about the developments in science teaching at MHC in “Ripple Effect: Fresh Teaching Attracts the Next Generation of Scientists” (winter). I graduated from MHC as a chemistry and English double major and went on to teach chemistry for several years. I currently help to lead curriculum initiatives and professionally develop teachers.
I am a huge proponent of the pedagogical work undertaken in the science departments at MHC to promote science literacy for all, to connect relevance and importance, to integrate other disciplines, to stimulate and address interest, and to give students a safe space to demonstrate what they know and don’t know. While viewed as effective teaching techniques, I find them to be motivation essentials, and my colleagues and I strive to incorporate this work into our classrooms every day.
I teach in a community where many students perform below their anticipated grade level due in part to a previous school experience that did not serve them well. Influencing our students to become scientifically literate citizens is a daunting task when school in the past was more debilitating than foundation building. My colleagues and I are working around the clock to fully prepare our students with the knowledge and skills to not only enter college, but to successfully graduate as well.
I am extremely proud to see that MHC is a place where pedagogy is taken into careful consideration and where my students can thrive. With the diversity of students on college campuses today, it is only sound and responsible teaching to offer entry points for all students so that they can, according to Mary Lyon, “go forward, attempt great things, accomplish great things.”
Christine Algozo ’97
Brooklyn, New York
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The faces change every year. The mood remains the same—celebratory. To see many more photos from the two reunion weekends, see our
photo galleries.
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Some of the titles are irresistible, such as “The Milky Way Is a Cow Path: Science in the Poetry of Robert Frost.” Apparently, America’s premiere poet of the bucolic scene considered the principles of thermodynamics as well as the road not taken. Or how about, “No Prior Experience Necessary: Bungee Jumping Into Direct Sales.” Who knew that selling lip butter in other people’s living rooms could be fun and earn you $100,000?
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Reunion I medalists (left to right) W. Rochelle Calhoun ’83, Leslie J. Gianelli ’83, Margaret E. Broadbent ’38, Sandra Klamkin Schocket ’58, Carolyn Bump Marsh ’58
Seven alumnae, including the outgoing executive director of the Alumnae Association, were awarded medals of honor during Reunion. Each alumna was lauded for her ongoing service and commitment to MHC.
Margaret E. Broadbent ’38 has helped maintain the strong bonds among members of her class for seventy years. Her many volunteer roles include class president and vice president, sixtieth-reunion chair, class agent, and reunion gift caller. She also served on the Alumnae Development Committee and the Nominating Committee of the association. She has been an active member of the Cape Cod Club, organizing class reunions and events for more than twenty years.
W. Rochelle Calhoun ’83 began her long career at the college in 1986 as assistant dean of students, and then went on to make her mark as ombudsperson, director of diversity and inclusion, and associate dean of the college/dean of students. Five years ago, she became executive director of the Alumnae Association and has worked to respond to the needs and wants of alumnae with judiciousness and empathy. Always willing to go the extra mile to strengthen and honor the growing membership of the association, Calhoun moves on to Skidmore College as dean of student affairs.
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Achievement Awards were presented to two alumnae at Reunion for “achievement and service to society that exemplifies the values and virtues set forth by the college.”
Faith Wilson LaVelle ’43 (left, in yellow hat), a Phi Beta Kappa member and Mary Lyon Scholar, went on to earn a PhD in biological sciences from Johns Hopkins University and subsequently won the distinguished Mary E. Woolley Fellowship, the Harriet Allyn Fellowship, and the Alumnae Association Medal of Honor.
A frequent speaker for the American Association of University Women and a member of Who’s Who of American Women, her research in the development of the nervous system is highly
regarded. She conducted breakthrough scientific research in the study of mammalian nervous systems and earned numerous significant grants from the U.S. Public Health Service. In addition, she was a professor of anatomy at Loyola University in Chicago.
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“Teaching, Learning, Leading: A Mount Holyoke College Summit on Education” for K–12 and college educators will be held on the MHC campus this fall. Sponsored by the Alumnae Association, the Department of Psychology and Education, and the Harriet and Paul Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, it promises to be an intellectually enriching weekend.
Workshops and panels on current issues in education will include “Curricular Reform: Who Owns the Curriculum,” “Diversity and Equality: Global and Local Communities,” “Networking: Teaching and Learning from Each Other,” and “Critical Self- Reflection: Professional Possibilities and Responsibilities.”
The weekend also will feature distinguished guest speakers; networking opportunities with alumnae, students, and MHC faculty; and a special evening performance.
For additional details and registration information, click here or phone 413-538-2300.
Talk to almost anyone and the first thing mentioned about W. Rochelle Calhoun ’83, who resigned this summer after five years as Alumnae Association executive director, is her brilliant storytelling abilities. Whether you caught her in the hallway, around campus, or in an otherwise dreary meeting, Calhoun could be counted on to interject levity wherever it was justly deserved. Which was pretty much anywhere.
“She uses her theatrical background and her sense of personalities to convey a very vivid picture of the subject matter at hand,” says Alumnae Association President Mary Graham Davis ’65. “At a board meeting we had in New York at my house this year, she had us in stitches, describing different events in her life and her travels. It creates an immediate sense of comradeship and lightens the atmosphere of a meeting. It allows people to have a personal relationship with her, which then you can use to do business.”
For Calhoun, the business at hand from her appointment in 2003 until her departure for Skidmore College in July was inclusivity and member service. “Goal number one was to become a global organization,” says Calhoun, who now serves the Saratoga Springs, New York, college as dean of student affairs. “And really being committed to the old cliché, ‘ask alums what they want and give it to them.’”
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Alumnae "Elf"—Sara Martin ’10 (left) and Tanya Thompson ’10 delight in a goodies bag from Dana Feldshuh Whyte ’60 in a re-creation of an “elfing” scheme designed to bring the two classes together.
Picture this: a couple of older women, large trash bags and flashlights in hand, creeping around a dimly lit MHC dorm in the wee hours of a February night, securing smaller bags to doorknobs. Agatha Christie likely would have followed this escapade with a series of unnerving events. But the only blood in the hallways that night was pooled in the tired eyes of members of the class of 1960 as they “elfed” the sophomore class.
That’s right. The venerable MHC tradition wherein sophomores, their identities a secret, place little gifts at the doors of first-year students over the course of a week in fall, was co-opted by these fun-seeking alums in the spirit of, well, more spirit. And while the entire sophomore class takes a week to accomplish the task, two alumnae and a few students managed to elf nearly all 593 sophomores in just one very long night.
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So that the Alumnae Association may honor deserving alumnae, please share names to be considered for the recognitions listed below. Please include documentation on the strength of your candidate(s), and names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of references. Send nominations to the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA 01075-1486; 413-538-2300; fax 413-538-2254; or alumnaeassociation@mtholyoke.edu. You can also use our online form to submit nominations. (More)
Alumnae can continue to learn from Mount Holyoke professors this fall through several online courses and a lecture series. This Mount Holyoke College Institute Informed Voter Series is cosponsored by MHC and the New York Times.
The courses will be: Documentary Cinema and the Political Process, taught by Robin Blaetz (film studies); Foreign Policy in the 2008 Election, by Vincent Ferraro (politics); The Basics of Stem Cell Biology, by Rachel Fink (biological sciences); and South Asia Challenges to US Policy, by Kavita Khory ’84 (politics). Also, Joseph Ellis (history) will lecture on leadership and the founding of America.
The courses will include discussions between the professors and leading New York Times reporters, critics and editors.
Details, including registration information, are now online. For general information, contact Laurie Boucher (413-538-3517; lboucher@mtholyoke.edu).
F i c t i o n
Despite Gravity
By Marjory Wentworth ’80
(Ninety-Six Press)
South Carolina’s poet laureate presents a collection of her poems that consider topics from college students affected by 9/11 to her son’s diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome. The title poem was written for the dedication of Charleston’s dramatic Cooper River Bridge and in honor of a young Mexican man who died during its construction.
This is the second collection of poems by Marjory Heath Wentworth. She also teaches poetry to cancer patients and writes a poetry column for the Charleston newspaper.
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Announcements
Calling all Alumnae Teachers:
Conference for MHC Alumnae in Education Slated for October 10–12
“Teaching, Learning, Leading: A Mount Holyoke College Summit on Education” for K–12 and college educators will be held on campus this fall. Sponsored by the Alumnae Association, the Department of Psychology and Education, and the Harriet and Paul Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, it promises to be an intellectually enriching weekend.
Workshops and panels on current issues in education will include “Curricular Reform: Who Owns the Curriculum,” “Diversity and Equality: Global and Local Communities,” “Networking: Teaching and Learning from Each Other,” and “Critical Self-Reflection: Professional Possibilities and Responsibilities.”
The weekend also will feature distinguished guest speakers; networking opportunities with alumnae, students, and MHC faculty; and a special evening performance.
Invitations with additional details and registration information were mailed mid-summer and posted on the Alumnae Association Web site. Alumnae will also receive a reminder e-mail, but mark the dates on your calendar now!
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