This week, after a long hiatus induced by multiple comas, I will finally be discussing something that I am quite the expert on. In fact, it is the school that I go to. That’s right, this week’s Joy of Life will be all about the Model Home itself: Parker.

Side note: I don’t even know why I do those intro paragraphs. YOU READ THE TITLE! You know that it is, in fact, this week. So I don’t know why I do it. BACK INTO PARKER!

Founded in 1901, Parker…I’M NOT PLAGIARIZING! Parker is the best school on the planet. Fact. Parker is the best school that HAS EVER BEEN on the planet, and also better than all the schools that will be on Mars. Fact. Most controversial, Parker is objectively better than Latin in every single conceivable way; I will die believing that. Fact. (I added another fact to round out the set).

But where did Parker come from? Who built it? WHY IS IT SO PROGRESSIVE (like Bernie Sanders, or Theodore Roosevelt, or the CIA apparently). The answers are very simple, my friends, if you follow me down the road. The land belonged to Anita McCormick Blaine. She had a big house…otherwise known as a mansion. It was located where the field is now. There are pictures somewhere. Where? The Archives.

The first principal was Flora J. Cooke. She was one of those people who was really awesome and said very good words and also she’s why we call Cookies, Cookies. Because her last name was Cooke. Parker people are notoriously clever. But where would you find these good words? The Archives.

The namesake of the school was for Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, a fighter for the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry on the union side (the ones that were against slavery (YOU KNEW THAT you went to Parker (that might not be true, I don’t mean to offend (I wanted more parentheses so that this looked like one of the calculus problems I had on my AP test (Parker shouldn’t be so anti-AP, they are fun and becoming more in line with the progressive ethos (or at least the calculus one is)))))). Parker developed the Quincy Method, which I will discuss further…HERE!

The Quincy Method is basically that, if you ever want to raise your Quincy, Massachusetts children to not be farmers for eternity, you have to treat them like human beings and not beat their butts everytime they talk out of turn. It is a method of education in which STUDENTS are the center. This was, and still is, very progressive.

You know what else is progressive? The first parents association! And another? The first entirely student-run paper! You know what else?… I don’t know what else. DO YOU KNOW WHY?

Because the aforementioned archives ARE NOT BEING MANNED BY ANYONE! Ok that’s not exactly true; Andy Kaplan has a key and technically the Secretary is in charge of all the Student Government documents in there. I would know because, as Secretary in Sophomore year, I met with Andy Kaplan and got an exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime, behind-the-scenes tour of the archives.

And Parker needs to maintain them. They need to hire a part-time employee to maintain those archives and allow the community to truly connect to the history of the school that they are associated with. As my final send-off, I ask for Parker to uphold the archives, share the history of the school, and focus on its progressive roots as it moves forward into a post-Covid world. Deal?

It has been a true honor writing for the Weekly these past two years. I will miss it greatly. Good-bye, good-bye, good friends good-bye.