43 Freshmen Chanted Until Cistercian's Monk Took the Diving Board

Eight years is a long time to be the man who assigns the reading. I have been the man who assigns the chores for sixteen, and my reviews are not improving.

In 2017 the school magazine, Continuum, told the story of how Fr. Joseph Van House, the school's first young monk to shepherd a class as its form master, handled his. By his own account, it had not started well: he hadn't had much good press from the boys in middle school.

Then came freshman year. Since the nineties, Cistercian seniors have thrown incoming freshmen into the pool at the first party of football season, a rite the magazine describes as one of life's timeless lessons: "a big enchilada one day, a bottom-feeder the next." Faculty mostly stay out of it, though one teacher was backed off the diving board by four seniors in 2003, glasses, wallet and all.

In early September 2013, on a warm Friday evening, 43 soaking-wet freshmen bobbed in the pool and turned their attention to their form master, a slim thirty-something monk in his Cistercian habit. They had been asking him for weeks to take the dive. Now, one of them recalled, they were all chanting his name, and the party around the pool joined in. Fr. Joseph stepped up on the diving board.

I have stood at the edge of a pool while children chanted my name. It was the youngest's sixth birthday, and they wanted me to do the cannonball. I said I had a bad knee. I don't have a bad knee. I have a bad dignity.

He jumped. The dive, he said four years later, helped turn the tide. "The idea of Fr. Joseph being cool was pretty foreign to them, but they gave me the opportunity." He also passed on advice from an older monk: start strict and get looser as you go, because being a form master is a marathon.

The magazine's verdict on the class he graduated in 2017, from one of his fellow monks, was that they were astoundingly at peace with him.

The tradition held. In September 2024, the school reported that Fr. Philip, the new freshman form master, was tossed into the pool by his Form V boys.

I have since done the cannonball. The children were not astoundingly at peace with me. They were astoundingly wet, and the youngest said it was "pretty good for a dad," which is the closest I have come to a turned tide.