Having watched reflections throughout their time in the upper school and having once given one as a Sixth Former, English teacher Louie Brown ’15 is no stranger to Haverford’s tradition of student and faculty-led talks. Many of Teacher Louie’s core school memories came from experiencing these reflections, and they only grew stronger during time away from the school. Thus, on the first day back from spring break, Teacher Louie looked to participate in this iconic tradition once more, now as a faculty member.
“I wanted to do a reflection again as a faculty member because I felt like it was one of the really special things that Haverford provided me when I was a student,” Teacher Louie said. “Some of my most intense and standout memories are from when other kids and some of my friends or even people I didn’t know did reflections. I really wanted to do [a reflection] to pursue the opportunity and inspire some current students to do it.”
Teacher Louie began simply by doing some mental workshopping. Throughout the planning process, Teacher Louie refined multiple ideas of the Reflection’s primary subject.
“Initially, I wanted to do something much deeper and sort of emotional, and really focus in on the experience I had being a college student and then my dad getting cancer, but it felt a little heavy.”
Teacher Louie ’15
“Initially, I wanted to do something much deeper and sort of emotional, and really focus in on the experience I had being a college student and then my dad getting cancer, but it felt a little heavy,” Teacher Louie said. “Not that I think being heavy is bad—I think being heavy and deep is really good and important, but, just personally, I didn’t want to be spending a lot of time in that headspace with those memories.”
After finalizing the topic and completing the presentation, the reflection was ready to be shared with the community. Ultimately, Teacher Louie hoped to give a personal perspective that focused on one’s connection with one’s body.
“The biggest message that I wanted to send was that there are really fascinating ways we can build our relationships with our bodies,” Teacher Louie said. “A lot of it was informed by my experience being a student-athlete and my experience being in a school full of student-athletes—people who pushed their bodies hard, but only in one specific way.”
In general, most people lack full knowledge of their body’s condition. Teacher Louie believes that the core message of the Reflection—understanding and taking care of the body—is particularly beneficial to Haverford students.
“I think for a lot of Haverford kids, especially kids who are focused on their athletics, there’s a lot you can get out of the experience of being an athlete that we don’t focus on currently,” Teacher Louie said.
These valuable, unseen aspects of being an athlete include understanding the self and knowing how you interact with the surrounding world. Overall, Teacher Louie emphasizes that there is more to athletics than just competing.
“One of the biggest ideas I wanted to get across was: if you’re going to care about being an athlete and you’re going to spend all this time practicing and working out, then you should be thinking about how this work you’re doing for your sport also affects your life outside your sport.”
Unfortunately, rarely are these principles ever taught in high school. As young men, we must recognize necessary information that we haven’t been exposed to yet.
“I think there are big gaps in our education. Not only in our formal school education but also our at-home cultural education that people are missing out on.”
Teacher Louie ’15
“I think there are big gaps in our education. Not only in our formal school education but also our at-home cultural education that people are missing out on. For boys, especially, the overemphasis on strength is fine, but I find it a little harmful,” Teacher Louie said.
In particular, Teacher Louie identifies personal experiences while a part of a college men’s rugby team, in which the men focused too much on “making the big hits” and “lifting as much as possible” without taking proper rest, resulting in physical issues. When compared to the women’s rugby team, a 2x winning national championship team that engaged in after-practice stretching and took care of their bodies holistically, it was clear that resting made a difference.
“I think especially in boys’ environments, where people think that taking time off or focusing on the in-between phases [of sports] is weak or not manly or not masculine, those kinds of ideas circulate, and I want to counter those kinds of ideas,” Teacher Louie said.
In a broader sense, doing things that seem “unmanly” or “feminine,” especially at an all-boys school, often is looked down upon. To counter this, one of the key things Teacher Louie pushed through the reflection was the acceptance of things that broke traditional masculine stereotypes.
“Embracing your ‘femininity’ and doing things that aren’t ‘masculine’ is incredible,” Teacher Louie said. “That is where, for me, I learned how to find the things I cared about. And they can be big things like telling your friends you love them or being willing to hug or cry or show ‘weakness’ in front of people you care about. Or they can be really small things like enjoying cooking, or enjoying cleaning, or enjoying sewing and house work—‘domestic work.’”
“This stuff is important, and Haverford has never, in my experience, taught boys that part of their life should be the work that we systematically have put on women’s shoulders.”
Perhaps most importantly, Teacher Louie argues that we don’t need to subscribe to societal norms of masculinity just because that is what we’re used to.
“What we don’t understand about masculinity is that the things we call masculine, the behaviors, the interests, the way of being and interacting with each other, are all invented.”
Teacher Louie ’15
“What we don’t understand about masculinity is that the things we call masculine, the behaviors, the interests, the way of being and interacting with each other, are all invented,” Teacher Louie said. “They are all created by people, and are all social ideas that have been reinforced over years and years.”
There is work to be done within Haverford, but hearing about these issues is a good first step. In the end, the community was able to grasp the overall message and responded positively to the reflection.
“Seeing the great response from the students and faculty—I’ve had tons of people tell me ‘that was awesome’ or that they’ve ‘been thinking about their movement in a different way—that makes me feel really good, not only about my presence here but also about the work I did,” Teacher Louie said. “I got a lot of affirmation from the school, from my community, which made me feel quite loved.”
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