School portraits / School reunions · 2017
GDS Freshmen Apologized to Their Teacher Thirty Years Late
A Georgetown Day School teacher's first year went badly, by her own account. In 2025 she told the graduating class what happened when that first class came back.
Sue Ikenberry came to Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC, forty-two years ago, and about a month in she sat through a faculty meeting debate on whether students should be required to wear shoes. It went on for at least half an hour. The shoes won, she told the class of 2025 in her graduation speech, "but bare feet had plenty of advocates."
It was not her only adjustment. She had come from Capitol Hill, where things were formal, and was hired in late August. Her older students she could handle. The freshmen, she said, were impossible for her. She made every mistake possible and joked that if she could remember every bad lesson, she would put them in a book for new teachers called "Don't do any of this." On Curriculum Night her department head spent the entire allotted time defending her to the parents.
I have been to Curriculum Night eleven times. I have never once seen a department head defend anyone. I have seen one defend the snack table.
It was also a first-names school, as GDS still is. Asked about the custom for the school's 80th anniversary, she remembered making a perfectly reasonable statement in class that first year and having a student respond, "I don't know about that, Sue!"
By the end of the year things were, in her word, bearable. By her third year she had a tenth-grade government course and no more freshmen. Then, in 2017, the class she had taught that first year held its thirtieth reunion, and she went to the evening reception and greeted them by name.
They were surprised. "You speak to us?!" one said. "We were so mean to you!"
Thirty-year-old guilt, delivered at a reunion, received by the one person who did not remember the crime.
She told them she didn't remember them being particularly mean. She had been a totally inexperienced teacher, they had been fourteen, and anything that went wrong was on her. Then they hugged her and took selfies. Students at most schools, she told the graduates, would have remembered the bad teacher and laughed. These ones had worried about it for thirty years.
An early head of the school, Gladys Stern, once explained the first-name policy to a doubtful teacher: a title gives you authority for about twenty-four hours, until the children work out whether you know what you're talking about and whether you love them.
The middle one tried calling me by my first name last week, as an experiment. It lasted about twenty-four hours. Then he needed a ride.
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.
- Georgetown Day School: Sue Ikenberry’s 2025 graduation speech resources.finalsite.net
- GDS: Judith, Nick ’84 & Bina ’88 gds.org
- GDS: What’s in a Name? (or Title) gds.org
- GDS public student and parent reviews niche.com