Rivalries & rituals / A Switch Day visit, winter 2022
Three Winsor Students Reviewed Belmont Hill. The Cookies Split the Panel.
On Switch Day in 2022, three Winsor newspaper editors shadowed students at the boys' school down the road and wrote it up. Lunch was at 1:40.
In March 2022 the Winsor Banner, the student paper at Boston's Winsor School, published three accounts of Switch Day, when Winsor students spent a day shadowing students at Belmont Hill. The three editors saw the same school, took the same classes, and reached completely different conclusions about the cookies.
Some context. Belmont Hill has a midmorning tradition called Milk and Cookies. A 2017 video by the school's own student paper reported that the dining staff baked 960 cookies a day for it.
Reviewer one found them worth all the hype, the perfect balance of crunchy and sweet, and closed her review like a love letter: "Truly sublime. I wish I ate more. I miss them."
I have never written anything that sincere about a person.
Reviewer two watched a mass of students rush to an outdoor table of cookies and milk and, "due to my strong preference for chewy cookies," did not taste one. She did note, judging by how fast the food disappeared, that the cookies seemed much appreciated. A critic who abstains on principle and reports the crowd's verdict instead. That is the most professional thing in the paper.
Reviewer three had a different problem. She was starving by the afternoon free block, because Belmont Hill students eat lunch at 1:40, almost an hour after Winsor students do. To distract her "hangry" stomach, her host suggested sledding. The campus has a steep, snowy hill and communal sleds. She went down in what she called a "conservative sitting position" and cheered on the boys who went down on snowboards and on their stomachs.
What a hungry visitor needs, in the opinion of a Belmont Hill senior, is a hill. I respect the confidence. When my wife says she's hungry, I suggest the car wash.
At 1:40 she got chicken marsala with linguini, eaten family style with faculty at each table, and pronounced it a success. Reviewer two, at lunch, skipped the chicken and found the spicy tofu at the salad bar "delectable," and was struck by how formal it was, with assigned tables and student waiters.
Final scores, then. Cookies: one sublime, one abstention. Lunch: late, then excellent. Hill: fast. Hosts: generous enough to lend a sled to a stranger with low blood sugar.
I tried Belmont Hill's system at home. I served cookies at 10:30 and lunch at 1:40. The youngest ate eleven cookies and declined lunch. The middle one asked whether we had a hill. We have a driveway. It is not fast. He tried it anyway.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Winsor Banner: Winsor Visits Belmont Hill winsorbanner.org
- Winsor Banner: Winsor Visits Belmont Hill winsorbanner.org
- Belmont Hill Centennial: Traditions centennial.belmonthill.org
- The Panel: Video—Making Milk and Cookies bhpanel.org