Transcription of Matthew Ruby for the show Bethel #176
Dr. Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio. Show #176, Bethel, airing for the first time on Sunday, January 25th, 2015.
Bethel is known for being home to one of Maine’s largest ski resorts, Sunday River. It is also a place of great natural beauty every season of the year. This informs the creative spirit, which can be found in places like Gould Academy and the Mill Hill Inn. Today we speak with Matt Ruby, Gould Academy Head of School, and Woody Hughes, nationally renowed potter and owner of the Mill Hill Inn in Bethel. Thank you for joining us.
Having spent many a lovely winter weekend and winter evening actually as well up in Bethel, it’s a great pleasure to speak with an individual today who is doing the same, and in fact is there full time. This is Matt Ruby, who is Gould Academy’s Head of School. He has been there since 2012. He hails from a similar latitude out in the Minneapolis region. We’re so glad to have you here today.
Matt Ruby: Glad to be here, Lisa. Thank you.
Dr. Belisle: Matt, tell me why it is that you thought it was a good idea to go into education.
Matt Ruby: I didn’t go right into education. I graduated from college. I was in the Navy for 7 years, worked on ships and other things. Then worked in the corporate world for a little while. But there comes a point when you start asking yourself not only is this interesting work, but is it what I care about. I was lucky enough to have the chance to go back to school and become a teacher, work I love to this day.
Dr. Belisle: It’s a slightly different type of thing that you’re doing as a Head of School, which I’ll have you define for us in a minute, as opposed to being a teacher. Both important jobs, but very different.
Matt Ruby: Right. Well, you know, when I became a teacher I thought I’m putting manag3ement behind me. At that point in my life I’d been a naval officer, and then I was again working in the corporate world. I thought, I’m going to go be a craftsman teacher, but I could not shake the habits of thinking about organizations and how to move them forward. So as much as I love teaching, I had the opportunities to move into administration, and to think about the larger questions of how schools can be great, and great at helping students grow and be prepared for the world. That’s what I’m doing in Bethel now at Gould.
Dr. Belisle: You also served as the head of a history department. Is that your educational love?
Matt Ruby: That is. I suppose if I have a hobby, it’s reading history. When I first was hired to be a history teacher, I couldn’t quite believe I was getting paid to do it. Seeing students learn about themselves through the history of their local area, and then sort of working into larger and larger circles of care and scope was pretty exciting work. for me, that was the kind of thing where I’d go into work each day, and you go into class, and it doesn’t take much for kids to get excited. I went home pretty happy with my work every day.
Dr. Belisle: Going to Gould, you were going to a place that actually has its own very rich sense of history. It was founded in 1836.
Matt Ruby: Correct.
Dr. Belisle: So it’s been around for quite a while, longer than many of the schools in Maine. Tell me about Gould’s history.
Matt Ruby: Gould started, as so many schools did in this region, it was the town school, but people paid a tuition to go there before the public education matured. Ultimately it became a private town academy, and there’s several of those still in the state of Maine, very successful town academies. But in 1968, Gould stopped being a private and public entity, and became a strictly private college prep school. So since ’68 we’ve been a college prep private boarding school. Now we’re at 245 students from 18 states, 17 countries. It’s a very exciting place.
Dr. Belisle: What does it mean to be head of school?
Matt Ruby: Being head of school in a boarding school is a very particular thing. This is a place where we all live together, work together. Honestly, when I first started working at working at boarding schools I thought, “This feels very familiar.” It reminded me of being on a ship when I was in the Navy where there were several hundred adolescents and I was a 22-year-old officer, all trying to get through their day and be productive. Our work is not so different, except in our case we’re creating a community where it’s certainly a voluntary association. People decide to join this community because they see it as a place where they can grow, where they can be challenged, and they’re going to find the sort of relationships that really move them forward in their lives. When I first visited Gould I saw that in so many ways. When my wife Kathy and I first visited, part of the process for becoming head of school was to sit with students. There were 3 times where we sat with students. It was just voluntary. Kids would just come if they wanted to. Packed rooms each time, it was very engaged kids. So 40 to 60 kids in a room looking at you, and you’re sitting there. It’s unscripted. What struck me about the students was they just wanted to know who we were. Did they like us? Did we like them? Would we care about their community and take care of it and them? Was I fun? They asked me what was my favorite Harry Potter character, or who was my favorite Harry Potter character.
Dr. Belisle: And who is it?
Matt Ruby: Oh, Ron Weasley, without a doubt. It was just, you sit with those kids and you go, “These were great.” In becoming a head of school, to go back to your question, you’re really looking for a fit. Is this a place where you come and go, “Yeah, we’re really a match,” because you are a spokesman not only for the intellectual life of the school and the reasons to come for very practical purposes, but also the culture of the school. You’re responsible for the mission and all of its facets. If you don’t feel that at a gut level, the work’s pretty tough.
Dr. Belisle: When I think about Gould Academy, I think about skiing. When I was in high school with the Yarmouth High School ski team, we had our Christmas ski camp at Gould Academy. I remember sleeping on the gym floor. I’m sure it’s still just as lovely as it was when I was there. But I know that, and I know that Gould is very successful and has a strong affiliation with Sunday River. You also have downhill. You have cross country. But Gould is also known for other things.
Matt Ruby: Gould is a flat-out great school. But I will say the partnership with Sunday River was one of the things that interested me about the school, and not because I’m a skiier, because I’d never skied down a mountain before I came to Bethel. This may be the year I move from green to blue. We’ll see. But I was interested in a school that had the creativity and agility to have a partnership with an entity like Sunday River, and successfully blend a top-notch academic program with other great opportunities. The great opportunities at the mountain are so far ranging, from the highly competitive skiing, freestyle skiing, snowboarding that most people know about, to the only ski patrol program where students can earn a jacket. Working with Maine Adaptive, and our students helping people have fun and learn and grow on the snow. Teaching local elementary and middle school students how to ski. Sunday River is a laboratory of learning for us. Then that got me thinking, well, if we can do that with Sunday River, and we’ve got a great academic program, let’s do, with the resources at Gould and the incredible capacity of the faculty, let’s do that throughout the school. Which is really a Maine thing. Mainers are doers. They’re makers. That’s kind of a Yankee, that’s in the Yankee DNA. You can see that there. So now we’re working on programs that really create those opportunities for our students.
Dr. Belisle: From what I understand, Gould has worked very hard to move with the times, that you’ve continued to invest in not only your educators, but also in infrastructure, and you really are seeking to be this world class educational institution. Tell me a little bit about that process.
Matt Ruby: I think we’ll use a word that is overused quite a bit, but it’s being a place that is entrepreneurial. One of the things that’s true in just about any endeavor is, you can never really know if you’re right, but you’ll always know if you’re wrong. We can’t be afraid of that in education. We’ve got a responsibility to model for our students being risk takers, being innovative, and looking at the world, recognizing problems, and taking action in response. That means what we are doing is we are having a conversation across our entire community about what that means. How does that turn into action for our students?
What has happened in the past 2 years, in terms of opportunities for our students, 1) we established a partnership with the Manhattan School of Music. So if you are in Bethel at Gould Academy, you are able to take lessons with the faculty of one of the finest conservatories in the country with a proprietary system developed by the Manhattan School of Music. This is not a second class way to take music lessons. This is how talent connects these days, because it’s efficient. Why travel across the country? Why take time parking and finding your way, when you can connect? It’s multiple microphones, multiple cameras, very intimate. We’re finding great success with that. It just opens up opportunities for students.
A next area of specific investment is the creation of our Idea Center. We have renovated an entire floor of our core academic building to create a facility that really revolves around the idea of design thinking, which is a process coming out of the Stanford Design School, a process that gives students an approach to creativity. It just seemed obvious to us that if there’s a writing process that we teach students, if there’s a scientific method, if the world need creative minds, why aren’t we teaching them a creative method, and why aren’t we creating the opportunities and giving them access to the tools to exercise that creative method. So in the Idea Center, what you would see is an open space, thousands of square feet of community space, sliding white boards for impromptu collaborative work, high tables, lots of other moving pieces. But you’d also see a new woodworking shop, a digital peripheral space with 3D printers, C&C routers, laser cutters, and a video and music production room. We really wanted to provide our students with the geography and the resources to take their ideas and move them forward.
Dr. Belisle: What you’re describing is so interesting to me because having lived up in Bethel for a period of time, what I know about Bethel is that there is so much beauty, and there’s so much quiet, and there’s a sort of a sense that you’re away from the noise of everyday life. You’re describing creativity, and I think that both of those, I think necessarily coexist. You actually need to have both space and also interaction in order to generate ideas.
Matt Ruby: Lisa, you’ve hit on something really important about the assets of the school, which are being where we are in the mountains, the beauty of the place. Our students have the opportunity, and in fact have to unplug, and to go interact in the natural world where you cannot modify the environment, as you can in the digital world. You have to deal with what comes your way and be creative and resilient in the face of those challenges. In our program, for example, in our 4-point program, all of our juniors will go on a 10-day expedition in the Mahoosuc Mountains in March. So this is everyone. These are students who’ve grown up in Shanghai and hardly been off a sidewalk until they came to Gould, and they’re off winter camping, working as teams. It’s an amazing thing to see how people grow. They come back from events like that smiling, and as exhausted as they are, just with that look on their face that says, “I can conquer the world. I can do anything.” That’s really what we want to have happen at Gould. We want students to develop that sort of creative confidence that they can do that and to have the skills to support it. But in our community, where they’re working with great adults, great students, they start to develop their moral imagination, too, so they can discern what’s worth doing. It’s not just about being able to do something slick with a 3D printer. It’s about doing something that’s meaningful. That’s one of the reasons we really like the design thinking process, because it starts with empathy. It starts with thinking outside of your head. I think we can all agree, when we’re talking about adolescents, that’s a big move. I think we can all use practice in that.
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Dr. Belisle: Matt, you and your wife Kathy have 2 children who are in their early 20s, and they’ve been around during the time that you have explored the idea of education and creativity and the mind. How has your work as an educator informed your work as a parent, and what would your children say about that?
Matt Ruby: Well, we all know we’re better with other people’s children than our own. I think I’m really lucky that I have an amazing partner in Kathy, my wife, and we have 2 great children. I think they would say that in our house we talk about everything all the time. Even from a young age we were talking about big ideas. My wife said when she first met me and she started getting to know the real me, she was like, “There’s just no thing as small talk in this household, is there?” She’s probably right about that. When I speak with my own children, I see they have a nuance of thinking about the world that I really appreciate, and a willingness to challenge me in my thinking that I appreciate even more. That’s just come from years of conversation. I think it goes back to what is most important in any learning, and certainly at the core of the Gould experience, which is humans learn through relationship. As much as technology has created wonderful opportunities for flexibility in terms of time and space and how we deliver content, still people learn through relationship. That’s how students see their teachers, and that gives them, helps them develop a vision of themselves in the future. You see someone you admire, and you start looking at various people you admire, and think, “Who do I want to be like?” That doesn’t happen in a vacuum. When young people have a rich array of marvelous people around them, that’s inspiring. It let’s them know also that adulthood matters, with them moving towards something of great import. When I talk to our alums and our current students at Gould, that’s really what they talk about in the experience. We have incredibly challenging academics. They’re doing incredibly challenging things in the outdoors, doing things independently, and with faculty. But in the end, it’s that sense of being part of something and working with people that help them see their better selves, that help them challenges themselves. It’s good stuff.
Dr. Belisle: To me, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the worlds that you came from, the Navy, the military, corporate. I’m thinking about the world that I come from, healthcare, and how so much focus has been on metrics. I know in education there’s so much focus on testing and reaching, and benchmarks and things like this. But I do think that the relationship piece will always be fundamental to any of these places. It’s an interesting question as to how to continue to foster excellence, to continue to foster the, to continue to acknowledge the importance of relationships, and also do what needs to be done in order to meet standards.
Matt Ruby: As an independent school, we don’t have to do all of the testing that other schools do, which gives us a great amount of freedom, but also a great responsibility to push the envelope, to see what’s possible. I think that’s the role of independent schools in American education. We get to be the laboratories. There are a lot of ways we look at our outcomes that are … We certainly, we’re held to a very high standard by our families, the college outcomes, success in college. We’re small enough where we get plenty of feedback on that. So we’re highly accountable in that sense. But we also can look at our own productivity in terms of, we can see the quality of relationship because we can see when things aren’t going right, and we can keep track of that. We can, as you think about the Idea Center and what’s going to happen in that space, which I can’t predict entirely, which is part of the excitement. We’ve been having conversations about measuring our creative productivity as a community. Are things really happening? Are things of value coming out? Are our students discerning things worth doing, or are they just doing … Is this trinket making? Which is not our goal, although it may be a step for some students in terms of skill building. Are we teaching them the right competencies, so when they go to take their idea beyond the school, how is their writing? How is their numerical literacy when they need to put together a business plan, whether it’s for a business like opening a restaurant, or social entrepreneurship, or even an artist is really an entrepreneur. Scientists. So we have a lot of feedback on both the competence level, and then our productivity as a creative community.
Dr. Belisle: Matt, after listening to our conversation, I know that people are going to want to learn more about Gould Academy and what your wonderful history has been, as well as what your future looks like and how they could perhaps get involved.
Matt Ruby: You can go to gouldacademy.org if you want to see what’s going on at the school. If you search on Facebook under Gould Academy, you’ll find an array of Gould Academy. We have a large presence on Facebook because there’s just so much going on that we want to get out there. Certainly give me a call and come on down and have a cup of coffee. It’s always great to come to Bethel, and Gould is a fascinating place. This small school has a richness of program and a creativity and agility that that’s what drew me there, and it just continues to fire me up every day. So come on down.
Dr. Belisle: As an individual who’s interested in history, and I think it’s notable that you joined the Navy, which of course has it’s own rich history, as opposed to the Air Force, and I have family members in both arms of the service, what is it that you hope people will look back on your life, on the life of Matt Ruby, and say? What is your historical imprint going to be?
Matt Ruby: I’m not so concerned about Matt Ruby being remembered. Educators are optimists. I think we believe what we’re doing impacts the future. It goes beyond memory. As we help students become their best selves, we’re helping the world become a better place. I think about my work, and I think about what we’re doing at the school. If I’ve ever contributed something that’s worth attaching my name to, that’s great. But I think what’s really important is what’s happening in the lives our of our studies, and that’s what carries forward.
Dr. Belisle: Well, then let’s take Gould Academy as an entity. What do you hope the legacy of Gould Academy will be.
Matt Ruby: Well, I’ll tell you how I hope we’ll be understood. I hope we’ll be understood as that place you have to go if your mind is on fire and you’re interested in being with creative, supportive people, because you’ve got things you want to do, that you’re ready to go beyond tests. You’re ready to make things and do things that stem from your thesis, your argument, how you want to impact the world. Even if you don’t know what that is, you want to be in the place where you’ll figure that out. I think I want us to be that destination, and it’s one of the reasons I went to Gould, because I think it can be, because in many ways it is.
Dr. Belisle: Where are your children now?
Matt Ruby: My daughter is at Ithaca College. She’s in the vocal performance program, hoping to be an opera singer. My son is an ensign in the Coast Guard, stationed in Boston on the Spencer.
Dr. Belisle: Do you think that the choices that you’ve made in your life have in any way influenced their decisions?
Matt Ruby: They tell me so, and they’re very nice kids to tell me that. I was in the Navy. My son went to the Coast Guard Academy and is now on a cutter. He says that hearing about life at sea certainly affected him. Music runs deep in our family. Johanna, my daughter, happens to be in a different league than any of us. So we’re just excited to watch her become and learn.
Dr. Belisle: In a place like Gould, I would think it’s important to have a spouse who is as invested in the work that you’re doing as it is to have you be invested in the work that you’re doing. How have you and Kathy managed to continue this mutual coexistence for all of these years?
Matt Ruby: Well, you fall in love. I’ll start with that. We met in college, and graduated, and something was missing. We got back in touch, and that’s where it started for us. I think that hasn’t changed. But just as important, we’re a really good team. We complement each other well. I think she’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, and certainly there’s no one I rely on more. When you’re in Bethel doing this work, she’s my best friend. Best decision I ever lucked into making.
Dr. Belisle: Do you think this relationship that you have with Kathy, the team member, the best friend, the wife, the mother of your children, do you think that having this relationship is some way a modeling for the students that know the 2 of you?
Matt Ruby: I think boarding schools, certainly you’re very public figures, and I think a healthy marital relationship is important to the community. It would be unsettling if we weren’t a good team. And kids talk about they like to see us happy together. The faculty tell us the same thing. It’s not something we … It’s not an agenda. It’s just who we are. I will tell you, I think any boarding school worth its salt in the hiring process looks at that, because it is such an all-in job. Kathy has a job outside of Gould, but she still contributes a great deal.
Dr. Belisle: I guess the reason I’m asking this is that it seems as though we spend a lot of time educating our children. As I mentioned to you before, I have 3 children of my own. We spend a lot of time educating our children on facts and figures and ideas and creativity and extracurriculars. I’m not sure how much we educate them in the sphere of relationships, beyond modeling them ourselves. I don’t know exactly how one would go about doing that. But I think if you have somebody else’s children, and you have them in Bethel, they’re away from their families. I would think that the teachers and you yourself and Kathy would be important to that process.
Matt Ruby: I think across, in any school, the first rule is to hire happy, healthy, smart people. There is no amount of policy, there is no curriculum, there’s nothing that replaces that. Because every student is fragile. They’re young human beings, and they’re looking for identity. They’re looking for the relationships that will draw them forward. That’s a tremendous responsibility for the adults involved. You can’t fake it with kids. They’re going to know. So when we bring an adult into the community, we think very carefully. What do they bring, and just on their worst day, with their guard down, which we all have, is this still someone we want around our kids at Gould?
Dr. Belisle: Matt, tell us again the website for Gould Academy.
Matt Ruby: Gouldacademy.org.
Dr. Belisle: I appreciate the work that you’re doing with the children who are to school, the young adults who are going to school at Gould Academy. I know that Bethel is a richer place for having had Gould located there for all of these years. We’ve been speaking with Matt Ruby, who is the Head of School at Gould Academy. Thanks so much for being a part of Love Maine Radio.
Matt Ruby: Thank you, Lisa.