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of the world. Needless to say, I arrived at the School a
very different student than the one who’d applied the
previous fall. Being a teenager, I reacted to monumen-
tal changes at home with a forced apathy that quickly
seeped into all other aspects of my life. My grades
suffered, nowhere worse than in science and math,
academic areas in which I was interested, but which
didn’t come naturally.
After recent months of returning to SPS, researching
SCL, interviewing teachers, and speaking with adminis-
trators, I’m certain that I would have benefitted from
its techniques in those disciplines. That said, I wouldn’t
want to change a thing about my SPS humanities edu-
cation. In fact, I still reference lessons I learned in
courses I took more than a decade ago, including
Barbara Talcott’s Challenges of Unbelief and John
Rocklin’s Fifth Form Humanities. One of the few times
I spoke openly about those life-altering events was
in Mr. Rocklin’s class, where, overconfidently, I volun-
teered to read aloud an essay and was surprised to
find my hands shaking by the time the final sentence
escaped my mouth. Tears weren’t far behind.
Though it’s possible these courses could have made
more of an impact if they’d been taught according to
SCL methodology, it’s difficult to picture how. To me,
math and science appear to be more of an easy fit to
SCL than disciplines like humanities – there’s a definite
correct answer to an algebraic equation, but there are
infinite interpretations of a poem. It’s not that humani-
ties doesn’t jive with SCL’s intention of arming students
with the ability to learn information and think critically.
Rather, the obstacle lies in figuring out how to teach
humanities in that way.
However, when I give Alisa Barnard ’94, SPS dean of
studies, this hypothesis, she doesn’t mince words in her
assessment. “I absolutely disagree,” says Barnard. “I’m
still having specific conversations with my students
about how to craft a paragraph; I’m not going to have
them figure it out on their own.”
Though the way it plays out varies from discipline to
discipline, Barnard insists SCL doesn’t mean abolishing
all instruction. As a humanities teacher, Barnard’s goal
is to identify and build in students the desire to improve
their own skills, not because she told them to, but be-
cause they understand why it’s important.
“In terms of writing instruction, there’s a difference
between diagramming sentences because the assignment
is to complete sentences one through 15 in a given
chapter,” Barnard says, “versus approaching it with a
question: ‘I want my own writing to improve, so how
do I construct an interesting sentence?’”
That is no longer. Instead, Cepiel begins a lab by
challenging students to come up with a question
and figure out how to examine it based on
what they’ve learned, sometimes to the dis-
may of students used to being told exactly
what to do.
“Often they look at me like, ‘Oh dear
God...’” Cepiel laughs. Still, labs can be one
of the clearest showcases for SCL’s success.
Remember that “muddling around” men-
tioned earlier? Prompted for an anecdote of
SCL in action, Cepiel recalls the day a group of
students decided to investigate pH in the context
of a previous lab.
“They were trying to manipulate pH,” she
explains. “We were working with yeast and
they had forgotten all about how organ-
isms buffer to make the pH stay the same.”
Cepiel watched as the group repeat-
edly tried – and failed – to increase and
decrease the yeast’s pH. Finally, exasper-
ated, they approached her: “We’re putting all
this acid and base into the yeast and nothing is
happening!” Cepiel kept quiet and looked at them. Then,
suddenly, they turned to each other and exclaimed, “Oh
my gosh. Yeast is alive! It’s buffering!”
“They made the discovery completely on their own –
I really had nothing to do with it,” Cepiel says. “It was
them coming up with a question, wrestling with the
process, and getting frustrated at it not working that
led to that moment of realization: ‘Oh wait, we already
learned this. Why are we doing this?’ Then, they went
back to the drawing board and refined their experiment.”
It was a significant point for Cepiel: “I thought, in
this moment, it is working,” she says. “They will never
forget that living organisms buffer because of that
moment. It happened.”
SCL DOESN’T MEAN ABOLISH-
ING ALL INSTRUCTION
As a journalist, I rarely insert myself into assignments,
but as an alumna, it’s been hard to resist imagining
what my St. Paul’s experience would have been like if
SCL had been the norm in the early part of this century.
Months before my first day as a new Fourth Former, two
personal life-changing events changed my perception
