By Aubree Galvin Caunter
News: Freshman orientation offers unique experience
November 12, 2007
There probably aren't too many 14-year-old boys who would include falling out of a tree as a highlight of their freshman year in high school. But Western Reserve Academy student Dillon Giorgis does.
"It was exciting," he says of attempting to scale the tree -- part of a high-ropes course -- while suspended by safety lines 30 feet in the air. "I was trying to balance myself to jump up and get the tire." He missed and plunged nearly to the ground before being safely lowered the remainder of the way by a program in
structor. His fellow students were watching. Yet, no one laughed or jeered, and Giorgis was not embarrassed. "Everyone was just saying 'good job' for almost getting to the top," he says.
It was a good lesson: falling out of a tree didn't mean that Giorgis had failed. It meant that he -- and his sincerely cheering classmates -- succeeded. They'd learned to work together and support one another.
The exercise was part of Western Reserve Academy's freshman orientation program, designed as a bonding experience for the new students and held this past September. The program, in its fifth year, takes the entire incoming freshman class away for three days to the Linsly Outdoor Center in western Pennsylvania, where they participate in individual and group outdoor activities. "It gives students a common vocabulary so we're able to talk to the entire school about the same experience," says Jeff Warner, dean of residential life at Reserve. Because of this shared knowledge, the students are better able to empathize.
"Kids here used to applaud when someone dropped their dishes in the dining hall, but they've learned never to take enjoyment in someone else's failure," says Warner. "Now, they can give each other support when they need it. When a person is struggling here, personally or academically, we support them in the same way we do at Linsly Outdoor Center."
Warner started taking the freshman class to Linsly Outdoor Center when he became dean in 2002. Reserve had been orienting freshman with a variety of more traditional, campus-based programs, like tug-of-war and treasure hunts, and the school had even experimented with taking all new students off campus in very small groups, but Warner was looking to shake things up a bit and do something different.
"I wanted to focus on freshman and give them a common experience," he says. At the same time, he wanted to instill some of Reserve's core values by focusing on activities that foster communication, cooperation and confidence-building.
After some research, he decided on Linsly Outdoor Center, a 7,300-acre facility in Raccoon Creek State Park, about 40 minutes west of Pittsburgh, Penn. It was founded as a non-profit organization in 1987 by the Linsly School and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. The center emphasizes personal confidence development and positive risk-taking.
This year students were broken into two groups of 38 to attend back-to-back trips, September 16 to 18 and September 23 to 25. "We mix the groups so that we balance the day students and boarders and the boys and girls. We split up athletes and this year we even split up female twins," says Warner.
The idea is to encourage intermingling. "What we want to do is get there and have the students talk to someone other than their limited group of new friends," he says. Although orientation is held only a few days after the beginning of school, some students have already bonded through sports or academic programs. "So anything we can do to disrupt the early groups they've created works to our advantage."
Once they arrive by bus, students are broken into smaller teams of 10 or 12. Linsly Outdoor Center instructors guide the teams through the activities: field initiatives like orienteering, a low-ropes course, and a high-ropes course. Throughout their stay, the teams are encouraged to discuss any issues confronting their small groups and relate the activities to real-life situations.
For tree-jumper Giorgis the debriefings gave him insight into his character. "At the beginning, when our group wouldn't be doing well, I always would try to take over and do stuff myself. That was my struggle, but I overcame that," he says. "Then I learned that good leadership is letting everyone give ideas. When I did that later on, it helped out and we succeeded."
Students gain a broadened sense of self and others, making the orientation at Linsly Outdoor Center a perfect complement to Reserve's ideals. "They're teaching the same things that we as faculty teach: listening, respect, and learning from your mistakes," says Warner. "Hopefully, by the end of the program, the students learn that everybody has something to add and that they need to listen to the quiet person."
Prioritizing mutual respect among classmates is especially important for inhibited or quiet students, all the more so if a student happens to be foreign. "When I first came to school, I was nervous and shy," says 14-year-old international student Leah Matalon. "But this trip really opened me up to people. They got to see the real me." The program helped her adjust, not only to life at Reserve, but to life away from her home country of Jamaica.
Micah Collins-Sibley, 14, also felt that the orientation helped the class gel. She is a boarding student from Alliance, Ohio, and her roommate is from Seoul, South Korea. "When you first move here, especially from far away, you have no connections here," she says. "But since that trip we've gotten to know each other as a group."
Alex Spring, a 14-year-old athlete, echoes that sentiment: "In football, we'd done a lot as a team but we were just starting to get to know each other. The trip made us closer." The orientation program ends with the students writing a letter to their future selves. They write about who they are now and who they think they will become. Then, the letters are sealed until graduation. After all the hours spent working on the team-building in the outdoors, the letter-to-self lets the students explore their internal world. "The letter is really the culminating experience," says Warner. "When we give the letters back they can see: Who am I and where have I come from?"
Warner believes the experience -- both writing the letter and tackling the obstacles during the outdoor activities -- gives students a platform on which to build for their entire career at Reserve. He says, "I think it shows kids the power of the collective whole to accomplish things. As individuals, as a class, and even as a school, the students will need to rely on each other if they are to become successful."
