School portraits / Alumni recollections
Dalton made room in the schedule. You were the remaining difficulty.
The school cleared a slot in the teacher's schedule and a slot in yours. All you had to bring was a question and some nerve.
You have a question about something that came up in class. Not an urgent question. Nobody needs to be called. You could probably sort it out by Thursday, or you could walk down the hall and ask a teacher who has time set aside for exactly this. The teacher is there. The slot is clear. You are, for some reason, still at your desk.
At Dalton, this time has a name. Lab, part of a plan devised by Helen Parkhurst, keeps slots open in both the teacher's schedule and the student's for one-to-one meetings. A student at Yale, reviewing the school anonymously, described what this added up to over the years. The regular contact had made college office hours feel ordinary. Some classmates found them nerve-racking. The reviewer did not.
A student at Wellesley, also writing anonymously, described the practical side. One-to-one meetings with teachers were easy to arrange, and doing well without hiring an expensive outside tutor was feasible. But the same student noticed a collision. As this student remembered it, Dalton's philosophy promised a personal focus by junior or senior year. What happened instead was an honors-course scramble: college admissions appeared to reward breadth, and the specialization the Dalton Plan describes, the student wrote, "gets lost in a rush to simply be good at everything."
The same student did not write the school off. The arts were among Dalton's best assets. The twelfth floor, where visual arts lived, was a place to leave behind the stress and competition on every floor below.
I like the floor number. You can spend the whole day racing through honors courses, collecting breadth for an application, and still know exactly which button in the elevator takes you somewhere you wanted to be.