Bromley Brook Voice
Summer 2005
Rae Ann Knopf, MSW
Executive Director
Head of School
Over the years I have overheard colleagues, parents and teachers talk about girls with some level of perplexity, not quite understanding how something can start out seemingly small and work into a fairly significant event in the life of a girl. Very often, it seems a bit like the old fashioned game “telephone.” What is said by one person comes out the other side of the group in highly distorted fashion; often with no recognizable path back to the original event.
Understanding the genetic and social programming of girls can bring some clarity to these situations. In general:
- Girls tend to talk more with each other and process things verbally
- Girls tend to handle conflict indirectly
- Girls tend to display more emotion in relationships
- Girls are pre-programmed to care about attachments and relationships
Between girls, very often something that was shared with another is repeated, colored with the emotion of the person repeating it and the perceptions of the individual receiving the information. Before long, what might have been a simple statement or feeling can escalate into something hurtful, scary and confusing. As this spreads and becomes the focus of the community, we pay attention to it in community groups. In so doing, the girls have a forum to speak out, feel heard, and with clarity, move on.
Most girls I have worked with care deeply about how they impact others. They also want to be understood, to love and be loved. Many of our girls have missed steps in social development. They may be highly transitory in their relationships, stuck in the controlling “best-friend” stage, or dependent on the safety of the “clique.” We pay close attention to relationships and purposely help guide them through missing steps in their social development. In a small community girls have the freedom to choose and change their minds. They learn to speak out for their own benefit, knowing they will be supported by faculty and other students.
At Bromley Brook we emphasize defining things in their own terms instead of buzz words that take on a life of their own in a group. Strong, consistent adults teach and model clarity and integrity in communication. Community groups, school committees and constant interaction between students and faculty create opportunities for students to speak out, express their opinion, and share feelings. The openness is like a weight lifted and soon they are walking taller and looking brighter. Next time, they might set the example for others. They might be the one to encourage another girl to come forward or to speak up for herself, in her own words, with confidence, so there is no misunderstanding.
In Community Life we are fully committed to helping develop the Bromley Brook girl in many ways. Most specifically, we help her grow through our positive peer mentor committee. This committee was started to help nurture and welcome new students. More than half of our students have volunteered to be a part of this club, and all of them commit to help every new student, not just her specific mentor.
Another way we help develop our girls is by giving them a voice. We have three committees that meet at lunch every week: Community Service, Dorm life and Recreation, and Diversity Awareness. Based on the feedback from our girls, they feel as if this is the first time their input is truly heard and someone takes action with their ideas! When I asked many of the girls how they feel Bromley Brook has helped them grow, they responded with:
“What helped me grow is how I learned how to love myself even though I am not perfect… And I’m such a perfectionist! This is who I am and that’s how I want people to perceive me. It makes me really proud of myself to go throughout the day without a mask of make-up and my hair done, to be my own person.” - Kristen, age 17
“This school isn’t here to make you happy. It’s here to help you find ways to make yourself happy because the only person who can make you happy is you! No one else can do that. You can have people here that make you happy because you feel cared and loved for, but the person who can make you to the fullest extent happy is YOU! YOURSELF! No one else, but you!” – Livvy, age 15
“The people here have helped me grow. My friends give me advice as well as the therapists. The community coaches listen too!” – Logann, age 16
“The kids have really helped me here. I was really immature and they whipped me into shape.” – Melissa, age 15
“I think BBS has helped me be a lot more confident. I know at home I was a really big pushover and never really firmly stood up for what I believed in. Being in an entirely supportive environment you can learn to rise above occasional negativity. You just learn to do that here because you are surrounded by everyone else’s problems as well as your own.” – Yvonne, age 16
by Lucille Mutty, M.A.
Girls come to Bromley Brook School from a variety of different places and reasons. The one common bond they all share with each other, no matter the issue, is the need for change. For most girls, it involves change in attitude, academics and associates. In other words, their actions and level of managing are no longer suitable to maintain in their current environment. So how does change happen? How long does it take? Glad you asked!
Weekly individual counseling sessions offer and provide structure and support in a safe and secure setting for those who are looking to make change. Group counseling, allows girls to work on themselves as individuals while they are invited to give and receive feedback for each other, again in a safe and secure setting. Groups are modified with a range of topics to help meet the current need of girls at BBS. Many of these topics can be found in the following groups:
- Managing Feelings Through Art
- Relatively Speaking . . . (Family Relations)
- Get Real . . . Body Image Group
- What If?
- The Dating Game!
- Deciding What’s Important
- Powerful Thoughts
Determining the length of time a girl takes to complete her work varies. Here comes the frustrating part. Girls who come to BBS often times start to make immediate progress, which is a good thing. However, it’s this superficial progress that many times is being used as a short term strategy to return home prematurely. Change takes time and most important consistency. It requires time to teach, counsel and practice new and/or rejuvenated healthy methods of coping, particularly when you are an adolescent who has spent a great deal of time doing just the opposite…
by Laura Mack, M.S.
Academic Director
“Bid me lurk where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears,” anything but expect me to do math! 80% of girls feel just like Juliet if one asks them to do anything mathematical, and 20% will say “I love math!” It is always a challenge in girls’ schools to serve both ends of the spectrum of math learning, but we believe we’ve found the answer here at Bromley Brook. Our math curriculum is self-paced and mastery-based. Paring away the jargon, this method really serves both the talented math student and the reluctant learner.
“Anyone can learn anything given enough time,” claims Troy Heaton, our math instructor. If we take away the pressure to perform, helping girls to understand that working slowly, retaking tests, and correcting work will lead to mastery (achievement at 80%), then we have gone a very long way to creating a solid platform for future, stress-free math education. The deft, talented math student can move as swiftly as she is able. We have one student who completed Pre-calculus in less than a year and is now moving forward with Statistics/Economics.
Math journaling helps girls who are challenged by purely mathematical thinking use their verbal strengths to solve problems. Troy puts a series of prompts on the whiteboard, and the girls use them as aids to think through what might have gone awry in the problem solving process.
Math Lab is our after-school, student-run workshop for struggling math students. A girl is assigned to Math Lab, and she reports for extra help after the regular school day. Girls need to feel capable in all areas of their learning and, more importantly, they need to understand that work pays off, hard thinking solves problems, and almost any problem, given time, will offer up a solution. It’s an important life lesson.
