Meet a Knight: Glass Master Mike Fradin

Our ongoing series Meet a Knight features discussions with members of the PCD community about what they do on and off campus. We began the year by having conversations with two new faculty members, and today we present our first chat with a current student, junior Mike Fradin. Mike is well known around campus as a student and an athlete. What most Knights don't know, however, is that Mike has also been creating glass artwork outside of school for years. @PCD caught up with Mike to talk about his art, a sample of which can currently be seen in a display in Lund Hall.

@PCD: I don't know that I've ever met a student who was also a glass blower. Can you tell me how you got into it?

MF: I started around 12 or 13, so I've been doing it now for four or five years. It's a class through RISD - my mom was the one who found the class and asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, "sure!" and I've stuck with it ever since. 

@PCD: Do you still take the class?

Mike Fradin's glass is on display in Lund Hall. 

MF: In the beginning years it was really a class and I got a lot of directions from the guys who run the studio and have been blowing glass for a while. But after a while they lay off the directions and just let you do it. So I do still go to the class, but it's pretty informal. I go in for about three hours one day a week and take turns blowing with whoever else is there.

@PCD: I know almost nothing about blowing glass other than that it looks pretty intimidating. Can you explain the process of going from nothing to having one of your beautiful pieces of glass? I assume there is a lot of fire involved!

Students Learn about the Humanitarian Crisis in Burma

Myra Dahgaypaw addresses an Upper School assembly.

For several years, PCD's student-run Peace Jam club has been supporting the U.S. Campaign for Burma, an organization that provides aid to refugees from the ongoing humanitarian crisis in that country. Part of the club's ongoing effort includes this Friday evening's Burma benefit concert in Corkery Hall. A variety of students and faculty will be performing at the event, which begins at 6 on Friday evening. We will bring you more on the concert next week.

In preparation for the concert, the Peace Jam club brought Myra Dahgaypaw to an Upper School assembly Friday morning to teach students about the Burma crisis. In an engaging lecture, replete with statistics and photos, Ms. Dahgaypaw eloquently demonstrated the extent to which the ethnic minorities in the country have been persecuted for over 50 years.

School Comes Together to Clear a Trail

Ask any alum about what made PCD a great school while he or she was here and you'll get the same answer: the people, the relationships, the community. Ask around the campus today and the answer hasn't changed much. People love the school because they love its people. Take it from us: we here at @PCD speak with a lot of community members and the degree to which they echo the same thoughts about the power of PCD relationships is unusual for a school.

So perhaps it should have come as no surprise that 84 people would turn out for a morning of work along the nature trail behind Lund Hall. It was an event celebrating the power of the school's community to positively shape its physical campus. Those 84 participants wanted to show that they wanted to personally help the school grow. And yet, no one involved in the event really anticipated such a turnout. The event took place on a Saturday morning at 9 AM, an early time indeed for the 41 PCD Middle and Upper Schoolers who showed up on Saturday. The weather was cold and, at the outset, gray. The project was indeed work, involving lifting, removing rocks, raking, and picking up trash. Outside of the promise of coffee and cider donuts, and a couple of community service hours, there was no incentive for any individual to show up.

Click "read more" below to see the rest of the story and a whole lot more photos.

Political Songster Brian Dewan's Visit

Last Friday musician Brian Dewan visited PCD as the first in a series of visiting artists. It was a really great day--Dewan visited Upper and Lower School assemblies as well as six different classes. The PCD website has the story on the visit, which you can read here. We do have some pictures of him from one of the classes that did not make the website story, so we are posting them here. We're also working to track down some video--if we can, we will post it here as well.