School portraits / A 2014 classroom visit and a later student recollection
An Exeter Class Got Stuck on the Letter After C
In a 2014 English class, students recited the alphabet as a group with one rule: never two voices at once. They stalled on purpose, and the reason was a kindness.
In November 2014 a Business Insider reporter, Melia Robinson, spent a day as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. After lunch, Becky Moore, who had taught there for 24 years, started her English class with a game. The students had to recite the alphabet as a group. Nobody could say two letters in a row. If two people spoke at once, they started over.
It went "A, B, C" at random, and then it stopped. Nobody said anything. Finally a girl in glasses said the next letter.
Why the lull? A student explained to the reporter that the girl was the only one who hadn't spoken yet, so the student knew not to talk. Moore said the game prepares students for discussion by reminding them to attend to everybody.
A room full of very bright teenagers, every one of whom knew the next letter, and every one of whom kept quiet. That is not a thing you can see on a transcript.
Exeter's Humanities Institute publishes a tool for watching a class discussion. It is a drawing of the oval table. An observer traces a line from each speaker to the next, the teacher included, with tally marks for comments, a Q for a question and a T for a reference to the text. It does not measure quality or how long anyone talked. It only records who spoke. The notes add that quiet students tend to know they are quiet, while frequent talkers, "even teachers," are often less aware.
I would like this diagram drawn at my office's Monday meeting. I would also not like this, because I have a guess where the ink would be.
In a recent interview series, the school talked to a senior who had arrived shy and hadn't felt she fit in until the spring of her first year, studying outside in red lawn chairs and playing spikeball for hours. She said the table helped. It taught her, she said, that learning is not just showing off what you know, but taking in what others know.
Our family played the alphabet game at dinner. We have never made it past F. The middle one and the youngest speak simultaneously on every letter, by instinct, and start a fight about who spoke first. My wife says nothing until E, which she says every time, alone, with complete calm. The eldest waits. Last night, on our fourth try, she sat there through the whole collapse and said nothing at all.
Afterward I asked her why. She said she was waiting for me to stop talking.
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.
- Melia Robinson: A day at Phillips Exeter Academy, November 2014 businessinsider.com
- Exeter Humanities Institute: The Table observation tool exeter.edu
- Phillips Exeter: Harkness exeter.edu
- School-published interview: Anna ’26 exeter.edu
- Exeter public student reviews niche.com