Somersfield Co-founder Fahy Calls it a Day After a ‘Fabulous 22 Years’
Calling it a day: Somersfield three to six level division head Gwen Fahy is retiring after 22 years with the school. Pictured with her are (behind her) her grandson Aydin Fahy and Samantha Binega-Northcott, and Ale Tatur to her left and Max Wallace to her right. (Photo by David Skinner)
June 25, 2013 — Gwen Fahy, one of the founding teachers of Somersfield Academy, is retiring after more than two decades with the school. The Royal Gazette recently met with Mrs. Fahy to discuss her years with the school. She first started as a teaching assistant when it opened as the Montessori Academy at Tivoli in Warwick in 1991.
At that time, the Montessori teaching method was so new to Bermuda that some people were frightened by it. “We were considered that radical school,” she said. “People were saying, what are they doing up on that hill? There were even articles accusing us of witchcraft and things like that. We had to educate people about the Montessori method.”
Today, the school is Somersfield Academy in Devonshire. It has grown from 75 students during its first year at Tivoli to 475 students from age three to 16 years old (grade ten). It now offers Montessori teaching for students age three to nine years old and then switches to the middle years international baccalaureate programme.
“Mostly it has been a fabulous 22 years,” she said. “The school is amazing. It embraces children who will become lifelong learners. They are Bermuda’s future. They know how to work in teams, solve problems and think creatively and critically; and to learn by doing. Children, we know, learn more effectively when they are engaged in the joyful work of exploring, interpreting and connecting ideas in order to solve problems.”
She came to Bermuda from Canada with her husband, Mike, and their two sons, Stephen and Michael (now Minister of Home Affairs with the One Bermuda Alliance) 34 years ago. She always loved children and started out by working with the Reading Clinic. She saw an advertisement in the newspaper to train in the Montessori method in 1990 and gladly took up the opportunity. Her starting salary as a teaching assistant was around $14,000 a year.
Mrs. Fahy said over the years she has done just about everything at the school from reading intervention to admissions to sweeping the floors when it was necessary. “When you are working with a growing school you wear about 20,000 hats,” she said.
Today, she is the only founding teacher left at Somersfield, although there are other teachers at the school who also taught at Tivoli, such as six to nine year old level division head Victoria Brewer. And she is proud that one of the original Tivoli students, Nadia Kahn, is now a teacher at Somersfield.
“Dr. Maria Montessori, who created the Montessori system more than 100 years ago in Rome, was so ahead of her time it is almost shocking,” said Mrs. Fahy. “She was just a dynamic individual who figured out through her observations how things really worked with children.”
Her grandson, Aydin, is now at the school and about to enter primary two. “I can tell you it is the most thrilling experience to think that I have been here that long to have a grandchild at the school,” she said. “I would be over there at the playground and Aydin would say ‘hi, nana’. So the other children started calling me ‘nana’.
“For Aydin’s first sports day, he and some of his classmates were sitting with their shoes off on the school field. I went over there to tell them to put their shoes on. One of the children said, ‘well, nana, it’s okay because the teacher said we could’. I said, well I’m Mrs. Fahy right now and you need to put your shoes on’. So they all put their shoes on.”
In her retirement, she was also looking forward to spending more time with her four grandchildren and travelling more with her husband. “We have always liked to travel, but it had to be within a certain time frame,” she said. “We have been to Kenya and Tanzania on safari. We went to Peru and Machu Picchu. I always make it a point to visit a school while I am travelling. In Thailand, we found this little Montessori school in a little village.”
In the days leading up to the end of school, there have been many tearful goodbyes from children at the school. There was a special assembly held to mark her retirement. One group of little ones sang ‘We will ... we will ... miss you!’ to the tune of ‘we will rock you’. The building that houses the three to six level (known as The Children’s House) has been named the Gwen Fahy Building in her honour.
Her position is being taken over by teacher Janice Outerbridge.
What is Montessori?
Montessori is an education method devised over 100 years ago by an Italian physician Maria Montessori. She started out looking at the best way to teacher children living in poverty. She found that children learn best by doing and exploring rather than sitting still and being lectured at. She devised a sensorial approach that has a heavy emphasis on classroom materials to teach concepts and skills. There are usually three age levels in a classroom and children learn from each other. Children are encouraged to move about the classroom during the day and are free to choose which materials they will work with, although there is some gentle nudging from teachers if they are neglecting certain materials in favour of others. There are no toys in a Montessori classroom, and they consider what they do “work”. There is a strong emphasis on working together and solving problems peacefully. For example arguing students might be sent to area in classroom designated the peace corner to work out their differences. A 2006 research study by Angeline Lillard of the University of Virginia and Nicole Else-Quest, now at Villanova University found that five year olds in the Montessori system do better academically and socially than their peers in more traditional schools. Twelve year olds did about the same, except in essay writing where they did better. See her book Montessori — the Science Behind the Genius or www.montessori-science.org.