School portraits / Spring evenings
Taft has scheduled some not-studying
The softball league includes teachers. The name includes a warning.
At Taft, the softball comes with an unusually honest label: Pre-Study Ball League. You may have fun. You may get quite invested in the outcome. Please note the prefix.
In spring, students and faculty play on teams before study hall. There is a championship. This is not merely an adult standing beside a field suggesting that fresh air might be beneficial. The adults are eligible to win.
Imagine your teacher on the other team. For once, you have a perfectly legitimate interest in their making a mistake. A small mistake. Nothing that would affect your education. Just enough to get you to second base.
Or suppose the teacher is on your side. Now the person whose standards you found excessive at ten this morning is somebody you urgently hope has standards about catching. You would like to withdraw several private observations about their insistence on effort.
Ms. Drakeley knows Taft from both directions: she graduated in 2017 and returned to teach. In her school-site interview, she describes the pleasure of knowing students beyond class, sometimes as their dorm parent or coach. She also mentions dorm dance battles. The adult who understands the homework may therefore have access to other ways of embarrassing you.
A parent reading about this much togetherness might feel reassured. A teenager might want to know whether there is a quiet route back to their room. Being known is lovely; being known everywhere can occasionally feel like a logistical problem.
One parent’s March 2025 public review reports a child who had come to think of Taft as another home. That is one family, not a promise. But it is a useful thing to hear alongside the lists of courses: somebody’s child had begun to belong there.
Home is an ambitious word for a place that still expects you to do the work. It helps if the people making the demands have also been people you can laugh with. Preferably over something that will not appear in a written assessment.
The league’s name does keep its little reservation. Pre-study. Nobody has negotiated an exemption; even the title has left room for the notebooks.
For the moment, though, imagine the ball coming toward your teacher. You could offer constructive feedback afterward. Best to see whether they catch it first.