Elizabeth Scheer graduated from the Campus School in 2002.  She is now a PhD student in English literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  She received her BA from Haverford College and her MA from Oxford University, UK.  Below, she recounts her study of the Medieval World in Ms. Cooney’s fifth grade class.

As my parents like to say, I am “a pure product” of the Smith College Campus School.  Having arrived at the infant care center at the tender age of 3 months, I passed through a succession of classrooms, all led by wonderful teachers, until my sixth grade graduation in 2002.  I have so many vivid memories of units and projects from SCCS, and I still keep mementos of work I did at the school.

One of the most memorable of those units was the one on the Medieval World in Ms. Cooney’s fifth grade class.  What I remember most distinctly were the marvelous and varied activities Ms. Cooney assigned.  I remember, for example, copying over (in my own jaunty version of medieval script) a passage of Chaucer onto a piece of pseudo-“parchment,” and then decorating my “illuminated manuscript” with gold gel pens and tying it at the corners with ribbon.  That manuscript still sits on my bookshelf.

Another particularly memorable project from the medieval unit was the construction of our own personal “coat of arms.”  The assignment corresponded to our lessons on heraldic color codes: the ways in which different colors signified different attributes: black means wisdom; green, abundance; purple, justice.  I remember how much I loved learning about these metaphorical correspondences—how each shape and color had a fixed meaning and significance: this color means this.  In retrospect, all that preoccupation with “signs” and “symbols” was probably an indication that I was going to go on to love analyzing literature.

The medieval unit culminated with a special banquet.  All of us dressed up in
medieval costumes and, coats of arms in tow, lined up to be dubbed “knights” by Ms. Cooney.  We dined on “medieval” snacks—figs and cakes, and drank grape juice out of “goblets” that we had decorated in art class.

Looking back, the medieval unit epitomizes everything that I loved about Ms.
Cooney’s class and about the Campus School in general.  At SCCS, the classroom experience was never tedious; it was imaginative and joyful.  I feel so lucky to have gone there.