A "Q & A" with Corie McDermott, English teacher, varsity girls' squash coach, varsity tennis coach, and head houseparent of St. Mary's.



Where did you grow up? Tell us a little bit about your family.

I grew up in Western Massachusetts in the Berkshires. I have a close-knit extended family: my parents, my brother, my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle. We are the kind of family that goes on vacation and then needs a vacation from it because we do so many athletic events and are exhausted afterwards. I am the odd-woman-out living so far away while everyone else still lives in the Berkshires.

Tell us about your undergraduate experience at Williams and the Bread Loaf program in which you are involved.

I did my undergraduate work at Williams College in Western Massachusetts. It was definitely a dream of mine.  In the sixth grade - I am a musician, too; I play the trumpet - I went and saw the jazz band there.  I had this moment: I need to go to Williams!  In the eighth grade my college counselor said, "You will never get in." I took it personally, as if I needed to prove something to him. I got in - it was my first choice - had a great time, majored in English, did a lot with the arts and music departments.  I played squash for a year and also was a "JA."  In my junior year, rather than going abroad or studying another language, I applied and was accepted to stay on campus with 49 of my peers and basically run a dorm. We were like RAs but without the pay - instead we were getting the "prestige." For the past four summers I have been at the Bread Loaf program through Middlebury, one of the largest masters programs in Literature. The great thing about the program is it allows for you to travel. There are four campuses, and I started in Vermont, and then went to St. John's campus in Santa Fe, and then to UNC Asheville in Asheville, NC.  I was most recently studying at Lincoln College in Oxford.  Middlebury gathers together the professors that are the top in their respective fields. I took a class that looked at romanticism and naturalism between British literature and American literature, and it was taught by one of the premier scholars on that subject. When I took a Faulkner class down south, I took the class from one of the leading scholars.  It is liberating because you get to move and travel and meet a lot of people. I will receive my degree after this coming summer. The program is five summers total and I have one summer left.  I will be finishing in Vermont, where it all started.  Also, my family will be able to come to graduation.  I am excited to finish, too; as fun as it has been, I am ready to be done.

How long have you been at Portsmouth Abbey?

I have been at Portsmouth Abbey for six years now. All of those years have been spent in the St. Mary's dorm, and teaching and coaching the same things: English, squash and tennis.

What first drew you to the Abbey?

Location.  As many people know, when you are looking for a boarding school, there are a lot of schools in the middle of nowhere.  You might get the boarding school experience, but not the awareness of the outside world.  I think we offer a nice balance in that respect.  Secondly, I felt most welcome when I came to this campus.  I had been to other campuses, and had other job offers, but I felt there was always this critical eye.  I did not feel that here. The Abbey felt like the right place to go.

What keeps you here?

The students.  Most certainly, the students. I try to maintain a balanced lifestyle and say "work is work" and "my life is my life," but ultimately they are completely blended, which I think becomes the delight of boarding school in the end.  The fact that I get excited in September, I'm thrilled to teach Old Man and the Sea for the 12^th time, I think, is a positive thing.  The students give me back that energy.  If you put energy in to them, they give it back.  I think that is an important exchange.

Why did you choose the teaching profession and why English?

I chose teaching ... maybe teaching chose me?  I can remember when I was quite young forcing my poor brother to attend "school" in the playroom, which meant me teaching him addition and subtraction, composing sentences, and him dreading it even at five years old.  It has never felt like work to me.  I worked at camps when I was in high school and college, and it always felt like a natural progression.   I can't imagine my life any different. 

Long-suffering little brother?

Very long-suffering little brother! Poor kid.  But now he is an engineer so he can thank me for the math.

What do you like most about teaching?

I think seeing the "aha!" moment on somebody's face.  That can come in a seminar where you press a kid who otherwise curls up into him- or herself when you ask an analytical question, or the moment a kid goes from getting a C on a paper - the dreadful C, it keeps coming back as a C - to breaking through the wall, as I call it, they really feel that sense of accomplishment.  Ultimately, while I guided them, they were the masters of their own destiny. That is an amazing feeling for me; I feel their excitement.

What is your favorite book and why?

That is a hard question; I have to give a couple. My favorite novel is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  Nabokov is a Russian author who found the English language beautiful, and the project in this novel is to write the most beautiful novel about probably one of the most offensive subjects.  The juxtaposition between the two I find just amazing.  The opening chapter, which is only two or three paragraphs long, is something that you can chant, like a mantra, a poem. I also like Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies and The Unaccustomed Earth.  Not only was Lahiri just 30 when she won the Pulitzer Prize, but there is this sort of intimate grace to each one of her short stories that draws you in.  Even though it is about this highly specific world, the Indian population in Boston, around Cambridge, and they are educated, you can still connect with that culture despite the fact that you otherwise don't know anything about them other than what she tells you. I also delight in the humorists novels.  I like Richard Russo's Straight Man.  You are supposed to be able to laugh at books, too. I think that's kind of important. Billy Collins - any of his poetry collections.  I think he is incredible ... and hilarious.

How would you characterize the faculty at Portsmouth Abbey? What have you learned from them since you arrived?

I would characterize the faculty here as ... naturally intellectual.  Which means that they are not posturing about how excited they are about their discipline, they actually are.  They are also aware of community, always trying to contribute to it in a positive way.  I think the important thing for all of the teachers is that we all have the same goal, ultimately.  The faculty here is also vibrant and charismatic.

How would you characterize the students at Portsmouth Abbey? What have you learned from them since you arrived?

The students are diverse, certainly in backgrounds, but more in their curiosities and their demeanors. There are some boarding schools where there is a sort of homogonous "type."  We avoid the stereotype in a really positive way.  I also characterize them as nice, for lack of a better term, and I think nice in a sincere way.  This is especially true in the Third Form dorm when we have new students coming in and they are panicking for the first two weeks of school, convinced they are going to fail.  It is the other students who help them transition through that process, whether it is the prefects or the upperclassmen who offer a helping hand, pointing them to class or whatever it may be.  That is something that the faculty cannot offer. It is a unique aspect that the students bring to the community.

If you could name one thing that you would want the students to take away from their experience with you, what would it be?

Ask why.  Everyone should always ask why.  And whether that is in terms of reading or writing, larger questions or smaller questions, too often we send out an army of passive learners.  There is a really clever bumper sticker: Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History.   I think it is well-behaved children, within the parameters of academia, who rarely make history.  If they learn anything from my classes, which are all seminar based and essentially student-driven, it is to ask the next question.  I both model that and push that. Ask the next question, and then try to answer it.  So what if you are wrong?  Who cares?

What is especially gratifying to you as a teacher?

It is gratifying to learn, too, as a teacher.  One of my greatest fears is to be in a cubicle and never learn anything new again.  I don't mean to say that cubicle life is synonymous with not learning, but I have associated them somehow in my mind.  For as much as I learned in college and even in grad school, I learned so much more as a teacher - especially in my first year teaching, when I would learn a thousand new things every day. It was insane.  And maybe I would make a thousand mistakes.  There is nothing like standing in front of a classroom and, one, having to know the answer or, two, admitting that you might not know the answer and now you have to go and find out what it is.  I find that gratifying.  It is probably a more selfish response, but as a teacher it is my obligation to learn, which is not a bad obligation at all.

How would you characterize the community at Portsmouth Abbey?

The community at Portsmouth Abbey is very welcoming.  When a student is giving a tour or new faculty members are orienting themselves, the offers of help are not empty ones. Our community extends into the world of the parents, too. Sometimes the boarding parents are here every weekend supporting the sports teams or dropping off apples for the dorms because it is fall.  The community reaches well beyond the parameters of the property.  It is a nice feeling.

What are the advantages of living and working with your colleagues?  With your students?

There can be disadvantages, too (laughing)!  The advantage to living and working with your colleagues and students is that you are always immediately available to them.  From a student's perspective, I have to imagine it is probably reassuring (knowing that your teacher is always nearby) considering how much work they have to plow through in any given year.  Also, while it seems like the work day never ends, you also are forced to redefine "the work day":  it is not as strenuous or as taxing or even as awful to "be at work." I really do enjoy it.  Because I am always at work, I also get to share some of my hobbies and the things I like to do.  For example, I love to go hiking, and a couple of students approached me and said, "Let's go hiking." I said, "Sure!" So, we took a bus to Mt. Graylock and hiked the highest peak in Massachusetts. That is something you might not do if you worked in an office or someplace where work and life did not weave together.  There are certain advantages to that.

If you could choose three people from past or present with whom to have lunch, who would they be?

The first person I would have lunch with is a personal one:  my Aunt Peggy, who, I am told, I am very much like.  She passed away on the day I was born.  She needed to make sure my mom had a girl, then as soon as she knew (I was a girl) she was like, "Well, I have done my work here."  Apparently she was very charismatic, pretty sarcastic, and hilarious.  This woman would watch Days of Our Lives and eat an entire stick of pepperoni and then wonder, "Why do I have heartburn?"  I would definitely want to have lunch with her just to get a new perspective on my family, and I think we would laugh for a long time. Another person I would love to have lunch with is Samuel Johnson, who was the lexicographer from the late 1700s.  He basically wrote the dictionary.  It took seven years and combs through all the literature from back then, from Shakespeare to Milton to Dryden to Poe.  Johnson took abstract concepts like "love" and then went through the laborious process of quoting all of those people in terms of his own definitions. He was a sort-of recluse in society who was followed around by a man named Boswell, who wrote a very long biography of Johnson that I have read.  I would ask Johnson about how he codified the language in a time when the definition for a horse was "big dog."  This man gave weight, texture and meaning to words that were otherwise up for interpretation. I would also want to have lunch with someone from the Roaring 20's Jazz Age, any one of those trumpet players.  They were doing something in terms of an American movement in music and giving us a voice that we hadn't otherwise had.  The Roaring '20s and jazz were really an American thing.  Of course jazz was in Paris and Western Europe as well, but it was a really fascinating time.

What are your hobbies? How did they become a part of your life?

Any athletic endeavor is really a hobby for me. My family skis and I have been skiing since I could walk. They were like, "You can walk!" and they put me on skis and pushed me down the hill.  Anything outdoorsy, hiking or camping - any of those things is a hobby.  I play a couple of instruments.  I have studied classically with the trumpet for many years.  I play the drums a little bit.  I have writing hobbies, which are a derivative of my discipline - everyone is a bad poet, and I am one of them.  Nothing that has to do with sewing or coloring; I am terrible at both of those things.  My kindergarten teacher was going to hold me back because I could not cut (paper) without "bunny hops."  I remember my mom went to the parent-teacher conference and said, "But she can read!  And she's 5!" and the teacher said, "But she can't cut!" and my mom said, "But she can read!  And that is what matters!"

Describe your perfect day.

My perfect day would have some sort of truly exhausting physical activity.  Anything where I am outside on a beautiful sunny day; I almost don't care what I am doing, as long as I am really tired at the end, so when you sleep at night, you get that really good, restful sleep.  And I would probably be with my family.

What is #1 on your bucket list?

I checked some things off my bucket list this year by traveling to Europe.  The number-one thing on my bucket list right now is seeing really big glaciers, going really far north.  I really want to go to Glacier National Park. Then again, the bucket list changes.  Sometimes there is a hole in the bucket and something falls out.  But that is what I want right now. Things I have crossed off the list?  Well, I wanted to see Paris.  I wanted to study at Oxford.  I wanted to hike in four or five of the major parks out West, so Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, Archer's National Park, and the Rocky Mountains.  Crossed those things off.  I wanted to go to Bruges in Belgium, crossed that off the list.  I have flown helicopters and small planes, so those things are crossed off the list.  If the opportunity arises, I take it.

What quotation best describes your philosophy of life?

The quotation that describes my philosophy is neither educated nor sophisticated, and it is of my own verbiage.  It is: Do it like you mean it.  When we are in squash practice, I always make the girls "shake hands like you mean it."  And whether it is writing a paper or shaking hands or engaging in a profession or interacting with someone, there is nothing worse than only giving 50%.  That is probably my mantra for anything.

If you weren't a teacher, what would you like to be?

If I wasn't a teacher, I don't know. When I figure that out, I will be that next, I guess!  I really don't know the answer to that question.

What is your favorite time of the school year?

I love the beginning of the school year.  The smell of new pencils and that sense of a fresh start.  Robert Sahms, when he was the academic dean, used to hold up a blank piece of paper and say, "Now you get to write on this blank piece of paper."  That is really important. There is nothing like forging new relationships and getting to know people.  It is a bit like a mystery.  Sometimes, part of the delight of the friendship is actually forging the friendship.  Whether that is students or new colleagues, it is still exciting.

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