Richard Brady – a teacher of mathematics, a teacher of meditation and mindfulness, a “Quaker-Buddhist-Jew.” Richard on his motorcycle. Richard as a member of the Grateful Dead fan club. Richard sitting at a desk piled with papers – a desk surrounded with cartons of student folders – a desk area decorated with pictures of his Buddhist teacher. Richard always marking papers in green ink. Richard greeting people at the door as the Upper School community hurries into Meeting. Richard on the phone juggling his other out-of-school responsibilities. Richard fighting asthma with acupuncture. Richard posing wonderful questions and laughing at terrible jokes. Richard mentoring principals and headmasters, teaching teachers and thinking about thinking. Richard in his knit cap and his Birkenstocks. Richard with his inhaler and his mouth full of dark chocolate.

These are the Richards we at school have known for 34 years. And there are other Richards we’ve only heard about from time to time: Richard, the husband, father and brother. Richard, the founder of the Washington Mindfulness Community. Richard, the president of a cooperative housing group in Glover Park. Richard, the workshop presenter, and Richard the consultant.

He went to MIT thinking, maybe, about becoming an engineer - or not - maybe, instead, a theoretical physicist. He graduated as a mathematician, went on to the University of Maryland to begin work on a PhD in physics, took a “year” off somewhere in the middle of all the theoretical stuff he was working on to clear his head and to look around, and found himself teaching math at Wilson High School here in the District. He’s never really looked back. Three years later he arrived at Sidwell Friends searching for professional colleagues who were more interested in ideas than in shopping malls (presumably he found them) and he stayed, for 34 years. In that time he’s taught math, (for a year or two he taught Math I in the Middle School) a little physics, and, one semester, a course in conflict resolution. But, most of all, he’s taught his students to open their minds to ideas. Now he’s retiring from the classroom and moving in a direction that, increasingly, his life has been taking him, a focus on mindfulness in education.

If you walk past the math classrooms in the Upper School building, you see small desks clumped together in groups of four. That’s one of the few visible signs of Richard’s influence on the Sidwell Math program. Early on, intrigued by the ideas of Neil Davidson of the University of Maryland Math Education Department about collaborative learning, and energized by his experiences over several summers of teaching problem solving to gifted 7^th and 8^th graders on the Eastern Shore, Richard began experimenting. He presented students with tasks that required and rewarded cooperation. He encouraged them to take responsibility for each other and to thank each other for their help. Sometimes quizzes were group activities, and he devised grading systems that recognized contribution and cooperation as important components of success. The Math Department, being the happily collaborative group that it always has been, found Richard’s enthusiasm for cooperative learning interesting and gradually began incorporating aspects of group work into a broad variety of courses.

Group work also found its way into the inner workings of the Math Department. For years, decisions about who would teach what had been made by the Department chair some time over the summer, and teachers would get back in September to find out what their assignments for the year would be, usually an occasion of mixed pleasure and dismay. Richard suggested that the members of the department should, instead, get together and work it out among themselves. They’ve been doing this now for years. It is always a fascinating process as the needs of the program and the particular interests of each teacher are mixed into the discussion (along with some beer, Perrier, and good food) and a resolution that seems to satisfy everyone just sort of happens.

The genesis of Richard’s journey toward meditation and mindfulness lies in a number of places, one of which is Meeting for Worship where, for the first time, he experienced silence as a conduit to heightened awareness. Through readings, a chance encounter (through a student’s senior project) with Buddhism, a sabbatical year, some of it spent at Pendle Hill (where he met his future wife, Elisabeth Dearborn), and time spent in France with his Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, he was drawn, increasingly, to recognizing the power of contemplative thinking and began to wonder if maybe meditative skills could relieve some of the burdens of noisy business that seemed to make deep thinking a challenge for his students.

With the support of the school administration, he began developing ways to incorporate mindfulness into his teaching. He began to start his classes with readings, from the wisdom of oriental thinkers to the wisdom of Yogi Berra. His students wrote regularly in journals. He devised a grading system that assessed depth of understanding, questioning and growth, and test days that began with silence.

Here is what Richard has written about some of this:

“My students learn new algebraic methods in a day. They learn new topics in a month. Then they move on to learn the math that comes next. All the while there is deeper learning in process that will continue for the rest of their lives. This learning is about things such as perseverance, taking risks, and communicating with others. Ultimately, it is about understanding themselves and the world.”

“However, students do not always see how to put teachings into practice. Last spring I advised an algebra student to slow down and do the math to do the math, not to get it finished and go on to the next thing. Intellectually she understood what I was saying. She wanted to follow my advice, but her habit energy of rushing was very strong. She kept doing her work in the same way.”

“When my students encounter obstacles, their first impulse is usually one of two extremes: they try to overcome them or give up. The approach of welcoming obstacles, sitting with them, and seeing what gifts of understanding they have to offer is foreign to my students. Yet it is one that could serve them well in life. I ask myself how I can do a better job of modeling this way of relating to difficulties in the classroom. I realize I could begin by curbing my impulses to diagnose and suggest remedies for students’ problems and learn how to just be with the students and their problems.”

And here is what some of Richard’s students have had to say:

“Yesterday we were given a pop quiz, but we meditated beforehand. I barely had time to worry because the atmosphere was one of calmness and peace. A little silence went such a long way.”

“It demands a much more focused, active brain to ask questions than it does to passively answer them.”

Richard has led mindfulness workshops under the auspices of the Friends Council on Education and Pendle Hill Quaker Center and at the NAIS and AIMS annual conferences and, increasingly, has found himself in demand from schools around the country to run workshops for their communities, either their faculty or their student bodies. So, as he moves on, his plans include an expansion of activities he has been working on for some time, broader outreach, and time to write about his ideas and experiences in the classroom.

At a recent reunion, a former student reminded Richard of a story he had read to his class many years ago about washing dishes to wash them, not to get the job over with. Richard couldn’t believe that this guy, now a busy lawyer, still remembered the story. “I’d be surprised if any of us didn’t,” he was told. What a splendid legacy!