Page 7 - St. Albans 2018 Viewbook

COMMUNITY AND CHARACTER
Family-style lunches have become a tradition at St. Albans because of a belief that the best in a boy emerges when he knows he has the support of his peers and teachers.
Every day, teachers and students gather together for a family-style lunch in the refectory, the physical and symbolic heart of the school. St. Albans’ history surrounds the boys as they eat, with the names and pictures of every graduate covering the walls, reminding the boys that they are part of a family that spans more than a century. At each table, boys from different grades come to know and appreciate each other through the informal sharing of their day-to-day experiences. At many tables, boys compete over a trivia question to see who will clear the table. Lunch concludes with announcements, where we celebrate students and faculty, always with the understanding that when one is honored, all are honored.
“At lunch, a student often asks a trivia question to decide who will help clean up the table. When asked: ‘How many species of ants live in an average square meter in the Amazon rain forest?’ I said a few thousand. The answer was fifty. I scraped
the plates that day. Family-style lunches helped me build relationships with teachers and students I might not otherwise have known — and taught me some amazing facts! Now that I have graduated, I fully appreciate the community built by some of
St. Albans’ more unusual traditions.”
JASPER ARNOLD, ALUMNUS