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Dr. Courtney Tollison '95 on the Impact of CCES on Her Life and Career Additional
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I appreciate the invitation to speak today, and I thank you for your recognition of CCES as a school and community that values excellence in education and emphasizes the importance of service and character. I am thankful that I was fortunate enough to spend four years among dedicated educators committed to the intellectual and personal development of students. Certainly, my CCES experiences continue to influence my role as an educator. I’ve been asked to speak about these experiences, and how they contributed to my personal and professional development. I matriculated at CCES in the ninth grade. Years later, at some point during my first few years of graduate school, I announced to my father that I felt that the decision I had made at age to 13 to transfer to CCES was the best decision I had made in my young adult life. He strongly concurred. In the fall of my freshman year at CCES, my parents came home from one of the parents programs where they had met with my advisor that year, Rodney Adamee. During the course of their conversation, as it was relayed to me, Mr. Adamee expressed a concern that I was unusually quiet in his Ancient and Medieval History class; that he felt that I knew answers but did not volunteer that information with the class. He found this concerning and inquired into my previous experiences at other schools. Mr. Adamee assured my parents, “Courtney will learn that it is cool to be smart here.”
Among other activities at CCES, I danced on the dance team, I cheered, I performed in Molly Hoffman’s chorus and in the musicals, I engaged in service projects as a member of the Volunteer Club… Between early morning choral rehearsals and late night basketball games, I remember spending so much time on campus that I wished I could just retreat for the evening into a campus dorm. I also learned, especially from Reggie Titmas’s challenging tenth grade biology class, the exhilaration that can come from being engaged in a challenging academic endeavor. That feeling motivated and sustained me throughout college and graduate school. I distinctly remember, however, having first experienced this at CCES. At CCES, I also developed an appreciation for the world and an insatiable curiosity about international cultures and history. CCES does a masterful job of instilling students with confidence in their ability to positively impact society--without fostering a myopic world outlook that can often develop alongside such successes in youth. I have confidence that CCES’ emphasis on international education and the two hallmarks of education, engagement and exposure, will only increase in value and importance. One particular area of this international emphasis continues to be part of my life. When I was in high school in the early and mid-90s, an exchange student program was more commonplace at colleges and universities but somewhat rare in high schools. When I was in the tenth grade, I became good friends with Alissa Quinn ’94, an exchange student from England who spent a year at CCES. This past May, Jenni Allison ’96, Bentley DeGarmo Eskridge ’97, and I traveled to England for Alissa’s wedding. Collectively, we realized, we represented four consecutive years of CCES dance team captains. In late August, I was again in England to visit Alissa and some of her friends that I met at her wedding, and Alissa and I spent a long weekend in Brugges, Belgium. The point of this is that these experiences are not unusual. Dozens of CCES alums have maintained friendships with Alissa and other exchange students, and our lives and experiences overseas have been augmented by those relationships. Student exchange programs benefit not only the exchange students but also the student body of which they become a part; this mutual exchange has the potential to continue long after graduation. During the past several days, while thinking of what to say at this occasion, I was reintroduced to a quote from Aristotle that I found particularly apropos: “We
are what we repeatedly do. CCES cultivates excellence, and her students enter the world infused with this commitment and motivated by the expectations that excellence demands. At CCES, excellence is not defined as success for the sake of success. The essence of excellence at CCES is determined by the positive and productive impact that successes can have on one’s family, church, workplace, and community. CCES also teaches the importance of a spiritual foundation. Success without substance is hollow. Excellence is a lifelong journey, but for those administrators, educators, staff, students, and friends of the CCES community, it is the standard towards which we strive. For me, the establishment of excellence as an expectation is the most long-lasting and unique aspect of the CCES experience. I value the impact of this influence on my life, and when I recently gathered with my classmates at our ten-year high reunion, I realized that I was not alone. Especially now, we are grateful for the guidance we received, the small classes, the personal attention, the senior project, the opportunities to be involved and to lead, and even for weekly chapel. I am so proud of my classmates; they are impressive people engaged in impressive personal and professional endeavors. And
I am so proud to be an alum of this school. Click
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And
I did. I engaged myself wholeheartedly in the CCES community. I
loved my teachers and was impacted by their commitment to teaching
and to students. Because of CCES, I went to college with the expectation
that I would get to know my professors outside the classroom as
well, and in my current role as history professor at Furman University,
I yearn to establish this environment in and out of my own classroom.
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