Auspicious Alums:
-Patrick Demsey, former member of the Brewster varsity boys’ ice hockey team, who portrays team captain Mike Eruzione in the new movie Miracle about the 1980 Men’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team
-Nina Assimakopoulos, flutist who has performed at Carnegie Hall and has just released her second CD

Known in some educational consultant circles as “the laptop school,” Brewster Academy does not simply distribute computers, it integrates them into every aspect of the curriculum. Headmaster Dr. Michael Cooper argues that technology aids with learning activities that may sound attractive in theory, but are often hard to implement. One example is collaborative learning, where students jointly tackle projects under the close supervision of a teacher. Special multi-sided group desks, each with high-speed Ethernet connections, allow students to sit and learn together. In most classes, each student studies a portion of an assignment, which he or she must then share with others in the group. Special software enables teachers to create and distribute handouts and other customized teaching materials that incorporate online readings. A handful of teachers work together to supervise groups of about 50 students.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING at Brewster

Jeff Higgs, a senior, says he regularly uses the school’s instant messaging program to get feedback at night from teachers. He also likes the fact that teachers e-mail papers and distribute in-class handouts online. “I’m a pretty unorganized person in terms of binders and stuff and if the teacher gives me a handout a lot of times I’ll lose it,” Higgs says.

Some parents fear that ubiquitous Web access means wasted time and student forays into parts of the Internet better left unvisited, but Brewster deploys a watchful content-filtering program that pulls restricted site lists from multiple sources. It also limits access to the Web to certain parts of the day, preventing, as the school’s Web site puts it, the modern equivalent of “reading a book under the covers with a flashlight.”