Appearing on the September poster for the New Lebanon READ poster campaign is Darrow School Head of School Nancy Wolf reading her favorite book, The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer.
Wolf is an active member of the New Lebanon community, serving on the Board of the Lebanon Valley Business Association
and the committee for the New Lebanon Farm Protection Project. Under her leadership, the school is an active part of the community through its Hands-to-Work program, which provides fuel assistance to needy families in the area, Christmas trees and roadside clean up. The music department collaborates on events in local schools and at the annual Christmas tree lighting. To share its special site, the original Mount Lebanon Shaker Village, the school encourages local groups to host meetings there.
In her ninth year as Head of School, Wolf began her independent school career at Darrow as a math teacher in the school’s first year of coeducation (1970). She spent the 30 years between Darrow assignments teaching math and in a variety of independent school administrative roles.
Her choice of The Courage to Teach rests on the book’s message that “community, connectedness and school culture are as integral to education as the content and curriculum in developing lifelong learners. Those are the values on which the Darrow education is founded,” according to Wolf. She also admires the author’s way with words, quoting from the book, “Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.” Wolf said that she often quotes from this book in faculty meetings to remind teachers of the value of their engagement in such a worthy profession.
NL READ, which is inspired by the American Library Association READ program, promotes reading and the use of library services through a poster campaign that features local citizens with their favorite books. The campaign started in June and will continue into May 2010. Jane Feldman, an award winning photojournalist, photographed the subjects for the poster campaign.