Every so often a Senior Reflection will appear as a feature story on the website. Senior Reflections are personal stories that ninth graders share with the community during All School Meeting throughout the year. All of the Reflections can be viewed by clicking on www.fenn.org/seniorreflections.
“Imagine you are me,” Tad Sheibe asked his audience during his Senior Reflection on January 8. “You are twenty feet up a tree, looking down through a tangle of branches, and below you is someone who wants what you have in your hand—his dorm keys.”
Tad grew up at Middlesex School, where his father, Dan, was a teacher and administrator, and more recently, at Lawrence Academy, where Dan is in his fourth year as the head of school. As a faculty child, Tad and his siblings, including Peter, a Fenn sixth grader, and Hans, a fourth grader (big sister Lily is at Yale), had a built-in community where they could safely ride their bikes around and around the paths and campus roads, catch frogs, snakes, and fish in the woods and pond, and they would delight in eating in the dining hall with all of the students. But as boarding school faculty kids are wont to do, they not only had students as baby sitters, but they idolized some of the teenagers and gently teased others. One of those was Chase, they boy whose keys Tad held that day, “and we loved to chase Chase,” Tad said with a grin.
Tad had fun growing up on a boarding school campus, “which is a special thing to do,” he said, but he also gleaned life lessons from observing the teenagers who were students there. “I learned how to listen first, and then act,” he explained, or simply “how to observe and be quiet.” Tad said that being an introvert is part of his “multi-layered” personality. “There’s more to most of us than what others might see and judge,” he pointed out, “and for me it’s that I am a quiet person, but I have many interests and like to have fun.” He urged his audience to “think about what is inside you that other people may not see,and take the time to see what isn’t visible in others.”
Tad is an avid reader who counts the Game of Thrones series and Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto as among his favorite books. He is a competitive swimmer who practices four to five times a week. And he is one of Fenn’s all-time great cross country runners who swept across the finish line in first place at Homecoming in September and set a new course record during the season. When he needs to de-stress and “reset,” Tad said, he likes “to do projects.” He might redecorate a room in his house or make a diorama of something that interests him; he hopes to construct one of a “tiny house” next, he said in an interview after his Reflection. A devotee of the Star Wars movies, he has bought figures of its characters online, retooled and painted them, and sold them on eBay.
Besides running with the cross country team at Fenn, Tad, a High Honors student, is on the varsity tennis team. A former Trebles singer, he plays the trumpet and tuba, performing with the Fenn Band, and he has appeared on stage numerous times; he is currently rehearsing for his role in the winter musical, Godspell. Tad is a member of the Youth in Philanthropy class, which made site visits this week to decide which area non-profit organization the group would like to support with funding provided by the Foundation for MetroWest.
When Tad graduates in June, he will most miss being in a community “where I pretty much know everyone and where I have such great relationships with my teachers,” he said. His favorite subjects change “based on what we are studying and who is teaching,” Tad said, but he added that taking a science class with Derek Cribb for two years “got me excited about the subject.” Then again, “I like to go through all the steps to solve a math problem,” and “English and Global Studies are where you can do some free thinking,” he said.
Tad’s favorite Fenn memories include, he said, “sitting with friends at lunch around a wooden table on the dining hall deck and talking about everything,” and more generally, “Just the whole vibe at Fenn, which I love so much.” When asked what he hopes to be remembered for, he thought a moment before saying, “That I was accessible, accepting, and non-judgmental. And fun, too.”