Our third portfolio focused on a particular discourse community that we were either interested in or a member of. The assignment called for us to research and discover first what a discourse community was, and then find a particular one we felt writing about would be enjoyable. In writing it we focused on what were the agreed-upon goals, mission, purpose, language, and lexis of the particular discourse community. We also were required to conduct and include interviews in our papers as well to add significantly more substance to give the audience a better idea of what the community was all about. I chose the discourse community of my high school in Richmond, Virginia because I felt so strongly about that particular community and still serve as a member of the community as well. In addition to focusing on the goals, mission, purpose, and language/lexis I was able to provide a true sense of what being in the community was and still is like for me. In this portfolio I believe I was successfully able to give my audience a perspective that was unique, thoughtful, and very passionate about the school. I focused on the language and lexis that makes our community so special by adding words like “hour”, “breakfast club”, and “rockpile” to the mix. This display of good knowledge and understanding and effectively passing it on to the audience was a success in the essay for me. I also was able to tackle my previous problem of a good conclusion and better paragraph management.

Discourse Community Ethnography

Every morning the day begins at 8 A.M. sharp with a brief, yet in depth message placed before the students to ponder and comprehend. It is with this routine of a chapel service that St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia begins each day. As a graduate of the school, and a native of Richmond as well, there is not another school nearby that begins each day in the same fashion. Beginning the day with chapel is a memory that many alumni—including myself—cherish after they leave. It is this 15-20 minutes at the beginning of each day where all 300 of us reflect on our lives, rejoice our triumphs, and mourn our sorrowful losses, and for this moment each day we are so grateful. Chapel at St. Christopher’s sets apart the community from other, similar ones nearby. It gives us a completely new feel than other discourse communities that are schools—it affords us a different agreed upon goals, extends our communication efforts, and improves the ability to convey the meaning of our school.

After transferring to St. Christopher’s in the tenth grade, I officially became a member of the discourse community. Throughout my time at St. Christopher’s I was able to experience a variety of different perspectives, viewpoints, and feelings from many individuals. I also had the privilege of becoming relatively involved in the school community and invested a fair amount of time into activities—serving on the Student Council, playing two varsity sports, and being a member of various community service clubs are a few examples. Another aspect of my experience is the relationships I built with faculty members during my time at St. Christopher’s. I consider some of the faculty members to be close to father figures in my life and those relationships have allowed me to get an inside look on another important aspect of what makes St. Christopher’s a special Discourse community. All of these experiences during my time at the school have qualified me to analyze and portray the St. Christopher’s Discourse Community to an audience.

Since its birth in 1911, boys from all over Richmond have migrated to St. Christopher’s in hopes of achieving a good education and understanding of the world around them. In addition to educating boys in the academic realm of the curriculum, St. Christopher’s strives to put an emphasis on service to others, and requires a minimum of 50 community service hours in order to be awarded a diploma. Athletics also serve as a major component of the curriculum as well. It is required that boys be involved in an athletic program throughout the entire year. Religion plays a role in the life of St. Christopher’s too with chapel services each morning, mission trips to attend, and other practices of the Christian faith during events of the year such as Christmas and Easter. All of these things bring together the agreed upon values and goals of the school. It is with these—academics, service, athletics, and religion—that bring together the St. Christopher’s curriculum.

Within the St. Christopher’s community there are a number of ways that intercommunication occurs. The most direct form of communication occurs each morning at the conclusion of chapel. At this time, anyone needing to make an announcement, teacher or student, has the chance to do so. Typical announcements generally consist of daily information such as academic meetings, sports practices, and mandatory events. These announcements serve as a liaison across the community—teachers, coaches, and students may share news all in one setting. The Pine Needle, the school newspaper, serves as a way for students to publicly display news and other topics of interest to the entire community. The newspaper has sections dealing with sports, editorials, politics, and many other ways for the students to voice themselves. In addition to serving the school for students, the paper also acts as a liaison between teacher and student because it allows teachers to read what students are interested in and see how they feel about certain events going on in the community. The Pine Needle is a wonderful form of communication resource for St. Christopher’s to have access to. Another reason St. Christopher’s is such a special place is because of its strong, vibrant alumni networking. St. Christopher’s takes advantage of this by encouraging each alumnus to give back to the school that gave so much to them. Even I—a graduate of only 5 months now—receive alumni mailings and e-mails. These notifications provide alumni with updates on improvements to the physical plant, athletic team results and season summaries, and academic successes from students or teachers in their respective disciplines. They also provide updates among alumni such as who was married or gave birth to a child to reinforce the strong alumni bond. The alumni notifications also serve a large role in encouraging alumni to show their financial support to the school. Finally, St. Christopher’s sponsors a mailing that tells the entire community—students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, and friends—about what is happening on campus at the given time. The publication, Moving Boys Forward, has seen a number of different titles with this one being established just last spring. The magazine-like publication gives out news of goings-on at St. Christopher’s in all facets of life—academics, community service, athletics, and extracurricular activities. This serves as a tool so that all members of our community—not just faculty or alumni—can receive information about what is happening at our school.

At St. Christopher’s, just like any school across the nation, a unique language and lexis exists within the community. It is especially true at St. Christopher’s because of the tight-knit community we are very fortunate to have. Because of long-standing tradition of being in business since 1911, obviously many people have attended our school from a variety of different backgrounds. Throughout time the same language has been taught, reinforced, and continues to live on today with the boys. Above all our language is one that declares imperative and strongly emphasizes always being and acting like a gentleman. From day one when our founder and first headmaster, Dr. Churchill Gibson Chamberlayne, said, “We can’t all be scholars, but we can all be gentleman,” this virtue has lived on. It is present in the lives of each and every student because it is something we as a community take truly and purely to our hearts. We pride ourselves as acting as gentleman and this quote is constantly in our minds when it is time to make any decision. Our language also emphasizes Christian values as we are an Episcopal school. Values like choosing the hard right over the easy wrong or numbering our days and applying our hearts to wisdom are said almost every day in chapel and they continue to be reinforced throughout the day by our faculty and staff.

“You have an hour,” says Mr. Tune, the current Upper School Disciplinarian at St. Christopher’s. Just earlier in the day he was assigning breakfast clubs to students who elected to show up late for the third day in a row. These two examples provide an introduction to the unique and wonderful lexis we have at St. Christopher’s. Terms like “hour”, “breakfast club”, and “rockpile” are everyday terms at St. Christopher’s. I shall explain these terms before anyone goes any longer wondering and worrying about the well-being of the school! These three terms are all associated with the healthy punishment for a consequence. An hour constitutes for a student being late twice and on the second time, not serving his first opportunity at the punishment. An hour is exactly what it says, the student must show up an hour before school starts—7 o’clock in the morning—and is confined to a classroom guarded by the long-time hours proctor and teacher of mathematics, Mr. Richard Huedepohl. I have had the pleasure of serving a handful of hours in my time at St. Christopher’s and can assure the outside public it is not fun starting one’s day an hour early and is not worth the extra few minutes of sleep that didn’t get one there on time. Moving on a step up from an hour is the infamous “Breakfast Club”—a wonderful way to put students in their misery by making them do chores for the athletic department beginning promptly at 6:30 A.M. Breakfast Clubs are generally reserved to offenders who are late three times and refuse to serve their hours. Typical breakfast club activities can include folding towels, hanging laundry in athletic lockers, or even setting up proper equipment for sports practices later that day. Finally, we arrive to the arguably the most terribly humbling punishment exercise one could ever receive: the rockpile. A rockpile is proctored by the disciplinarian mentioned earlier, Mr. Tune, and is an exercise that requires a student to carry 50 unassembled cylinder blocks from a location to another location approximately 10-15 yards away and assemble them in whatever fashion that Mr. Tune so desires. This punishment is reserved for the student who chooses the delinquent path at St. Christopher’s and displays frequent behavior of being late, refusing to serve their punishment, or simply showing behavior Mr. Tune and the disciplinary team feels can only be fixed by the rendering of rockpile(s). I have not had the pleasure of taking part in the exercise of a rockpile but have witnessed a few and they do not look fun. In addition to wasting valuable time, it is a strenuous and difficult exercise as well, unlike the other two punishments. It is a punishment that truly serves as a reminder to students that it is always better to do the right thing rather than suffer the consequences.

In order to provide further analysis and merit to this ethnography I decided to interview a former teacher and mentor of mine, Mr. John Burke. Mr. Burke has been teaching at St. Christopher’s since 1987 and in that time has seen the school change and grow on many different occasions. I first asked Mr. Burke about what he thought were the agreed-upon values within the community were. He replied stating that “St. Christopher’s men are to express themselves thoughtfully with clarity and grace,” (Burke) showing that we are committed to producing well-educated, well-mannered, and well-spoken men. Mr. Burke later stated that the school clearly emphasizes “honor and character above all else” (Burke) and that we truly are set apart by our wonderful ability to instill in our students the importance of staying true to those two values at all times. Mr. Burke commented that the St. Christopher’s website has truly become a wonderful tool for the school as it houses almost all of the pertinent information about our community. It also serves a major role as a place for scholarly work (Burke). Finally, I questioned Mr. Burke as to why he has chosen to be a member of this community and he eloquently responded with “I have been a member of this community for twenty-seven years because I believe in the values espoused by the school: honor and character. I feel privileged to work with individuals who share this belief, and who are supportive in emphasizing the importance of a healthy balance of work and play,” (Burke)—a true testament to showing that St. Christopher’s has surrounded its students with a dedicated faculty and staff that love working with our boys and instilling in them values and personal qualities that will benefit them for a lifetime.

For the nearly the entire 20th century St. Christopher’s School has done their best to bring in boys and transform them into men who will go out into the world and make a difference. Our school strives every day for each boy to reach their full potential in life and to realize the values of character, service to others, and being a good citizen. With the faculty we have at St. Christopher’s, they understand and are committed to upholding our traditions and moving forward to continue them into the next generation of students. In 2011, we celebrated 100 years of educating boys in Richmond with the values set forth by Dr. Chamberlayne himself. Though it has been a long time since Dr. Chamberlayne walked the halls of our beloved school, not much has changed and the people have leading the school today continue to focus on the goals and mission he set forth over 100 years ago. As a community, we haven’t changed much and because of that, we have been able to thrive for so long. It is the approach we take to educating boys that makes a difference to the result, and it is a result that is clearly identified among many other peers of the product. It is with this unique product that we will continue to see growth in all different aspects of the school: academic rigor, athletic competitiveness, willingness to serve those in need, and giving back to the community that loved and nurtured each student who walked the halls of St. Christopher’s. These are the reasons that set us apart from other similar communities. The ability to reach through and provide an education that emphasizes all aspects of a healthy lifestyle is something not many other places achieve, and at St. Christopher’s we look to not only provide that but to make our students participate in genuine and caring manner.