“‘It’s always about noticing,’” Natalie Mills ’13 recalls Commonwealth art history teacher Judith Siporin telling her students. “‘What do you notice? What do you see?’”

Natalie fell in love with noticing at a young age, entranced by trips to art museums with her parents. After taking two impactful art history classes at Commonwealth, her passion for the subject and determination to pursue it further solidified. But the journey wasn’t quite how she pictured it...

These days, Joe Reid ’75 begins his mornings practicing Chopin or Mozart, warming up for the day before heading to a gig, helping students perfect their technique, or some of both. But forty years ago, Joe couldn’t imagine his love of music paying the bills.

Commonwealth has always had a reputation for athletics: specifically, that we’re not very good at them. There was something charmingly countercultural about embracing that identity, as many students and alumni/ae have. We’re nerds! We have our Plato and our problem sets. Let the other schools have their sports, and let our (nonexistent) football team remain undefeated. The joke in the 1980s: “Why did the Commonwealth student cross the road? For sports credit!” (Though that’s an unfair characterization; the ’70s and ’80s had solid fencing and squash programs, and a strong dance program under Jackie Curry.)

That reputation has held fast, even though the school has required athletic participation for more than forty years for all the reasons one would expect: camaraderie, leadership opportunities, general health and fitness, etc. Then, in yet another COVID-19 pandemic shift, Commonwealth saw not just an influx in applicants but a hunger amongst students (and families) for connection, including on the courts and fields.

Enter Jackson Elliott ’10, who returned to Commonwealth as our Director of Athletics and Wellness in January of 2022, bringing with him not just passion for sports and a deep familiarity with the school but a commitment to harnessing our recent growth to shape an athletics program that both speaks to student interests and stays true to our ethos. Jackson now coaches students as they face off against the same schools he played as a student athlete, amongst a host of other responsibilities. Keep reading as he and Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 reflect on the evolution of Commonwealth athletics and moving toward their shared goal.

Long-timers at Commonwealth eventually lose track of how many hats they’ve worn. Some of Don Conolly’s: teaching Ancient History, coordinating academic support, serving on the admissions committee, leading trips to Rome and Naples, and teaching electives on philosophy, Greek tragedy, art history, Russian literature, and precolonial Mesoamerican cultures. This fall, he embarked on his second year of teaching English 9 and spearheaded the new “Classics of World Cinema” discussion group, launched with the screening of a short film by the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky at Hancock. The next night, the talent show opened with the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine,” arranged by Don for an enthusiastic faculty band. His fellow long-timers are used to seeing him pivot from loading speakers and keyboards into the equipment van to paraphrasing Tarkovsky’s idea of the purpose of art: “to plough and harrow the soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.