Alumni of the Laboratory Schools reflect on prominent memories
December 17, 2021
“I think it goes without saying the teachers were incredible. Some of the best teachers that I’ve had in my academic experience were teachers that I had in third, fifth and I mean, high school. Needless to say, it’s actually remarkable because both of my kids go to Lab and there are teachers that are still there.”
— Chase Chavin, ‘97
“I will say what I tell people whenever I’m talking about Lab, and I really think that it’s so important to me, is my Lab classmates and just other Lab alumni from any year are the most interesting people that I know because of their experience at Lab where they were really taught to think critically but creatively at the same time.”
— Sari Weichbrodt, ‘94
“I know you guys remember Secret Garden too. But it looked very different for me before they did all the renovation of Lab School. I do remember myself that it was like a really quiet little hideaway that I think a lot of us in high school, you know, could kind of go and just peacefully be.”
— Lynn Sasamoto, ‘79
“I didn’t like much of the art class, but there was a thing called cartooning. They actually had a unit where I spent a lot of time drawing the presidential candidates at the time, [such as] Harry Truman. He was President running against [Dwight] Eisenhower. And so I learned what the idea of cartooning was.”
— John Davey, ‘55
“We were very politically active. A number of our classmates went to Washington to petition our senators to get out of the war in Vietnam. And, you know, we were doing all sorts of things, and that is actually one of the things that I remember and am active in until this day.”
— Hannah Banks, ‘70
“We talk about learning by doing, and to learn genetics we did an experiment where we crossbred fruit flies, and I remember it was so much fun, a lot of our fruit flies actually escaped, and so the fruit flies were all throughout the classroom, but we learned so much about genetics, and I never forgot that because we ran the experiment the way we did, rather than reading about genetics.”
— Irene Reed, ‘92
“One of the things that I think I appreciated at the high school level, that I particularly appreciated once I got to college and met other kids who’d been at different high schools, was how much freedom and independence Lab high schoolers had.”
— Sarah Abella, ‘93
“We worked out in the field house every day in the winter, on Stagg Field in the spring. Not only was the university track team on the track at the same time, but the University of Chicago Track Club, which is a world famous track club, with Olympic runners on it. I got to share the track with Olympians and with really good college runners.”
— Marty Billingsley, ‘77
