The Turtle & the Machine: A Century of Technology at GFS

Almost a hundred years ago in the fall of 1930, a group of Lower School students on the second floor of the Main Building shifted excitedly in their seats as blocky machines were brought into their classroom. These contraptions were the focus of great anticipation—even some of the teachers had been whispering to each other about them. It was a set of new, portable Smith-Corona typewriters. 

Despite the deviation from the preceding 85 years of hand-written classroom work at GFS, Lower School Principal Marjorie Hardy felt that in the 20th century, penmanship skills alone weren’t going to cut it. Her students needed to learn to type. 

Luckily, the Smith-Corona company was advertising a free trial-run for their newest line of typewriters. Hardy took the offer and started the “typewriter experiment,” as it would come to be known. 

The experiment that resulted in “rooms full of little typists,” as second grade teacher Margaret Bockius Williams put it, had some unexpected—though not unwelcome—results. In follow-up interviews at the end of the school year, faculty shared that students developed a greater interest in schoolwork if they got to tackle it with their trusty typewriters. They’d also become expert problem-solvers with the sometimes temperamental devices.

Fifth-grade teacher Kathrine E. Dobson observed: "When a hand is raised asking for help with the mechanism of a machine, I can never reach the pupil's side in time to help. At least three or four school mates with the necessary knowledge go instantly and quietly and efficiently to give the needed help." 

There were accessibility benefits, too. Teachers reported that this new way to work aided students who may have been dyslexic, and served as a more comfortable system for left-handed students. 

Ultimately, GFS saw enough potential in the typewriters that they purchased 62 of them from Smith-Corona to include as part of the curriculum. It was this purposeful weighing of a new technology, balanced against the increasing standardization of it in society, that would come to be a remarkably consistent stance for the school in the decades to come. 

This same story has played out over the school’s many eras—the installation of a switchboard on campus, the adoption of calculators and projectors in classrooms, a phone booth by the Main Building arch, and more recently, the spread of computers and digital learning.

Ann Brachwitz Perrone had always been an early adopter of new technology. As a second-grade teacher at GFS in the 1970s, she was a pioneer in computer science education at the school. She introduced computers to her students with help from a little green turtle. 

Via an early computer program called Logo, Perrone taught students to draw shapes by programming an on-screen turtle. Much like the typewriter added a layer of novelty and excitement to students’ learning in the 1930s, so did Logo in math and problem-solving activities. 

Perrone attended workshops and trainings, and even went back to school, to learn how best to teach the newest technologies. During the second half of her career at GFS, she equipped generations of students with the skills needed to keep up with a rapidly changing technological world. And regardless of what the new invention of the day was, her attitude was unchanging: "I wanted them to know that the humans were still in charge." 

By the time Perrone retired in 2019, mobile phones, social media, video games, and other digital technologies were prevalent in the lives of students in a way they hadn’t been even just a decade before. Her curriculum had evolved from the 70s turtle, keyboard, and mouse maneuvers to such contemporary topics as online responsibility and ethics, and the effects of propaganda and misinformation.

Jason Schogel ’91 spent lots of time in the 1980s as a student tinkering with computers in the basement of the Sharpless building. He had grown up on the edge of this new technological era. He remembers the release of exciting new Atari gaming consoles and when computers first entered the classroom.

“It was a new way to express yourself,” said Schogel. 

He dove head-first into programming with faculty member Matt Zipin and a small group of other students; his interest in computers led him to a career in engineering and IT consulting. Schogel went on to work for tech heavy-hitters such as Oracle and NetApp, and co-founded a small video game company, OneNine Studios. He would eventually return to GFS in the new millennium and install the school’s first WiFi system in 2005.

This increasingly digital world was a topic of great discussion at GFS starting in the 1990s. One GFS report from 1998 outlined how the school was planning for a massive technological leap forward to meet what were becoming increasingly baseline and expected technologies in schools. Among these were internet connectivity capabilities across campus, an email server, online library services, computers in classrooms, and dedicated tech labs.

The school did not take this shift lightly. In true Quaker practice, committees were formed and options were carefully considered. The report was exceedingly purposeful in its conclusions. “The future is now,” it read. “We believe that even in a networked world, our school is a far more powerful real community than a virtual one.”

The school never adopted the newest technology out of the institutional equivalent of “peer pressure.” Time after time, it was through careful deliberation on the potential impact on the school community that dictated whether or not a new machine would be brought to campus. This was the measured pace of GFS’ technological evolution—that is, until 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

By the time the White House had declared a national emergency in mid-March, school leaders and faculty had already been in discussion about the possibility of enacting the school's remote learning plan in the event of a prolonged closure. GFS’ beloved community was preparing to become a virtual one. 

Despite the exceptional circumstances, GFS was doing everything in its power—which now depended almost entirely on technology—to support its students. Weeks before the shutdown, administrators had been ensuring that students had laptops with WiFi, cameras, and microphones, and that all classrooms had established digital forums. GFS’ remote learning initiative, Colloquia, was rapidly unfolding. The name, brainstormed by the school’s Classics department, means “conversations” in Latin.

Throughout the spring, the campus sat quiet and idle for weeks on end, for the first time since the influenza pandemic of a hundred years prior. Coursework and final projects were turned in through online portals, platforms, and workspaces. School events and traditions were either canceled or reimagined as virtual versions. The connective tissue of community life, like extracurriculars, championship games, conversations in the hallways, lunches in the cafeteria, games in the Dead Graveyard, and worship in the Meetinghouse, all came to a grinding halt. 

The Class of 2020 marked its commencement with a socially distanced drive-thru style graduation, and prepared to move on to the next stage of their lives. Even as the community mourned the loss of everyday interactions and big milestones alike, there remained a sense of camaraderie in online interactions.

Assistant Head of Upper School for Student Life and Modern Languages teacher Behnaz Varamini—at the time the eleventh-grade dean—noticed how the community kept showing up for each other despite all the challenges.

“It was lovely to have built a relationship with students that whole school year until March,” she remembered. “Trust was there, and we knew we could weather this together.”

She saw it in the way her graduated Upper Schoolers were still popping into Zoom “office hours” over the summer, supporting each other through the uncertainty of the pandemic. It was through technology that the essence of the school community managed to stay connected even in a time of physical isolation.

“I think one of the things that GFS did really successfully during COVID is put our core values and our Community testimony first,” Varamini noted. “We trusted that it would all be okay, we trusted we'd be together again, and we trusted that we were all doing the best we could with what we had, which was often just a computer.”

As in-person classes gingerly returned to campus that fall, Liam Morris-Thompson ’26 recalls one paradoxical, if temporary, effect of the pandemic. Despite having been conditioned to digital learning, students were desperate to connect in person when finally given the opportunity. For a moment, it seemed like perhaps smartphones and social media would fade back into the functional background as “in real life” interactions resumed.

“We were all really addicted to our phones, especially during the pandemic when everything was online,” Morris-Thompson said. “But when we started having in-person classes again, we were really happy to be together face-to-face instead."

However, as society continued its ascent out of the pandemic’s depths, the mountain of new technology adopted out of necessity during COVID-19 did not retire on its own. The fusion of virtual and physical life appeared as if it were here to stay. The data showed that young people were spending more and more time on screens and on social media. And the positive effects of technology in school were no longer as evident as they had been at the height of the pandemic, when synchronous remote learning was a safe option.  

Once full-time in-person learning resumed, GFS began scrutinizing the necessity of existing technologies on campus. Was it really better to have students accomplish tasks on laptops while in the classroom? Was it okay for students to use their phones in school? Based on the leading research, the answer for Carol Rawlings Miller, Director of Academic Program, was a resounding “No.” Technology had overstepped its bounds.

“We realized how overexposure [to screens] impacts students’ learning negatively,” said Rawlings Miller. “If we're using tech, fine. But, is there a purpose? We can’t use it as a default.” 

With technology so integrated into nearly every facet of life, it had become difficult to draw the line. Now, in 2025, GFS is returning to the practice of cautious integration of tech in the classroom. It’s not about a binary of “good” and “bad,” Rawlings Miller clarified, but about a thoughtful, community-centered approach.

“We spend a lot of time working in a very Quakerly way to discern what is actually in the best interest of the students and the institution,” she said.

Five years since the pandemic, examples of this can be seen around campus. In Early Childhood and Lower School classrooms, screens and smart boards are sparingly used. Every morning, Middle School students stow their devices away for the day in locked pouches during homeroom. Faculty and Upper Schoolers are expected to keep their phones tucked in their bags or leave them at home. A recently updated Community Compact outlines the most current stance on technology use at GFS, including clear guidance on social media usage for students in each academic division. 

At the same time, students aren’t sheltered from ideas and conversations around new tech. Cutting-edge classes on machine learning, robotics, 3D printing, and coding are part of the curriculum. One of these classes, taught by Upper School Computer Science teacher Avery Nortonsmith, focuses on AI ethics.

"When I think about AI and especially generative AI, there's one part of me that feels like, This is new, this is scary and I don't want it anywhere near my classroom,” said Nortonsmith. "But then I also think, ‘Okay, what if it was 2005 and my teacher was saying that about the internet?’ I want students to be learning about the technologies that will affect their lives."

New—and sometimes, daunting—technologies are a fact of modern life. Whether they’re clunky typewriters and calculators or sleek phones and AI chatbots, they will continue to exist and impact our society in countless ways. Nonetheless, GFS has been, and always will be, methodical in its review of exactly what new invention attempts to pass through its characteristically open door.

— Fernando Gaxiola

This article was originally published in the Winter 2025 issue of the GFS Bulletin.