Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/246730
"Here was this lady. Okay let's be truthful, this old, Greek lady who spoke with an accent and barely grazed the 5-foot mark. She was kind and polite and downright shy, everything you'd expect. But she was also strong and brave and downright brilliant, commanding the respect of all around her. "Like most of my friends, I was intimidated. Sitting on those stools at the long, black tables in her lab. Those thick textbooks full of concepts I was never going to be able to grasp. Those fetal pigs looking out from their formaldehyde, waiting for me to be the first one to pass out. What was I doing here? Science wasn't my thing. And as if she could smell the fear, she walked past me, knocked on my book and gave me a wink. 'This? This is easy. Physics is hard.' That was her skill. Convincing you that you could do it. Giving you the confidence to tackle the seemingly impossible." – Thania Papas St. John '80 about science teacher Ellie Lambrakis. Latin science teacher Ellie Lambrakis still going strong in the early '80s. 98 neighborhood school, but what do we mean by our neighborhood? Do we just mean the Gold Coast? It would seem so: 81 percent of our students come from the four zip code areas surrounding the school. "In co-ed day schools such as ours across the country, 12.5 percent of the students enrolled receive financial aid on the average. At Latin, only 10.4 percent receive aid, and if you factor out faculty children from that number, only 7 percent of our students receive aid. How can a school with our resources defend those statistics? And what do L AT I N M AGAZINE we really want for our children? Do we want them to go to a school, which is a cocoon, which insulates them? What kind of a picture of the world do we want them to have, and what kind of adults do we want them to grow up to be? These questions make me uncomfortable, for the answers are implicit in our admissions patterns and our commitment to financial aid. We need not turn Latin into a radical experiment to satisfy our social consciences, but we should ask ourselves the difficult questions of what we owe to all the children of this city, and what kinds of growing experiences we want for our children." In an article in Pro Tem, the community newsletter, a year later, Slater bemoaned "the decline of civility at Latin" not only among students – who, he wrote, were chronically interrupting others and disrespecting school property by leaving their trash in the halls (Even an evaluations team from the Independent Schools Association of the Central States commented on the state of Latin's hallways during a visit in 1987.) – but also among the adults in the community: "Nor are the adults in the school invariably blameless in the way they treat one another and the students. The teacher who repeatedly neglects to respond to a parental inquiry. … Similarly, the parents who insist a teacher be pulled out of class on the spot to come to the telephone and then become rude