School portraits / Ninth grade at Nightingale, one fall morning, as told to me at dinner
Which Dorito Flavor Are You Feeling Today?
A Nightingale assembly asked students to name their feelings by chip. Three years later, a senior told the whole school about the morning she cried in homeroom over a Latin test.
In October 2022, at an Upper School assembly at the Nightingale-Bamford School in Manhattan, Ms. Foster-Hinds put up a collage of Doritos flavors and asked students which one matched how they felt right now. "Everything is emotional," she began. Students shouted out flavors. Then she explained there are lots of ways to name a feeling: emojis, cereals, music genres. Identify it, name it, own it, she said, and at the end of the day let it go. "But in the middle—that's where the magic happens."
I have spent forty-eight years naming my feelings with a single word, and the word was fine. I am now trying chips. Today I am Cool Ranch: calm, and a little artificial.
At Convocation in September 2025, the student council president, a senior, told the school about the moment she felt she belonged. In ninth grade she got a disappointing grade on a Latin test and broke down crying in the middle of homeroom. Not, she said, "a dainty, single-tear kind of crying," but "a full-on, gasping-for-breath ugly cry."
Before she could collect herself privately, she said, she was inside a group hug: people from her Latin class who understood, people who happened to be sitting next to her, and friends who had crossed the crowded room to get to her. That, she told the school, was when she realized she could be vulnerable there.
Every parent of a ninth grader dreads the ugly cry at school. It does not occur to us to hope for the hug.
The same week, Nightingale seniors kept a long tradition: they greeted the new kindergartners at the school's blue doors and walked them upstairs to their classrooms. The school invited senior parents to watch from the lobby, and asked them, kindly, not to stand on 92nd Street, so the kindergartners could have their special, and sometimes overwhelming, morning without too large a crowd.
Seniors carrying the youngest up the stairs, and the parents asked to stay out of the way. That is most of the job.
The eldest had a bad history test last spring. She came home and went straight upstairs. Before I could rehearse a face, the youngest had followed her, then the middle one, then the dog, slowly. When I got there, all four were on her bed. Nobody was talking. The youngest asked me which Dorito I was. I said Nacho Cheese. She said that wasn't a feeling. The eldest laughed for the first time all day.
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.
- Nightingale: Convocation 2025, A Celebration of Community and Belonging nightingale.org
- Nightingale: Upper School Assembly—Dorito Flavors and Council Vision nightingale.org
- Nightingale public student and parent reviews niche.com
- Nightingale: Class XII back-to-school information, 2025 sites.google.com