Inspirational grace

For a variety of reasons, it has taken a few days to post about a loss to our community: a colleague had a recurrence of cancer and decided to stop treatment and enter hospice. A short time later, he died. His last message to everyone read in part: That message resonated with so many of…

Hashtag concerns

A few years ago, in response to global events, we created a display that I promoted on our Instagram.  Later that day a member of the administration asked me to delete the hashtag we'd used because clicking on it could lead to some inappropriate content.  Of course I did. To be honest, I should have…

Better Late Than Never

At Milton we have a "research season" split into three parts, where three different groups come in for a month to work on a project. This past month was the first of those parts and the juniors (and a few seniors) came in. The majority of those students were Milton freshmen in March 2020. They'd…

If I were in charge

Over the years that I've worked with students on research, I've had the opportunity to think about how to do it right. Now, these aren't unique observations or things we wish students could do/teachers wouldn't do, they're just 30+ years of thoughts that if I were in charge would be put in place. Example? The…

Anyone else missing time?

Yesterday I proctored the ACTs and the first person that walked through the door was a student I'd known for seven years. The last time I remember seeing him, he was shorter than I and clearly an awkward boy... and suddenly, he's approaching six feet and very much growing into a much more confident man.…

Language matters

I've been interested in how language changes for years, in part because when I was younger I went from having a mailman to a postal carrier, from stewardesses to flight attendants, and actresses to actors. It was also in part to my uncle being one of the founders of sociolinguistics, specifically language planning. As an…

Modeling good habits

This is one of those times I wish there was a 24-hour surveillance camera on me. Not because what I'm doing is so fantastically interesting, but because I'm trying to do what we tell our students to do when they're working on homework and large projects. What that? First, it's chunking large tasks into smaller…

#SpellcheckFail

At work we occasionally play "Six Degrees of Laura Pearle" because I make weird connections to people. One of those is my cousin, Ralph, who 'invented' spellcheck (fun fact: Ethan once pointed out that the family last name, Gorin, would be changed to, well... you get it, right?). Anyway, it's the end of the year…

Almost there

Thanks to the library building construction project and another surprise project, we're not quite ready for the year to end. But thanks to a massive push last week, we did get our summer reading recommendations out! These recommendations are our suggestions, with little or no input from teachers. There is required reading in many classes…

Please allow me to [virtually] introduce myself

Tonight, the Independent Schools Section of AASL will premiere a new recording of "The 'What If' Scenario", a presentation I first did with Sara Kelly-Mudie and Courtney Lewis in 2018. It's been updated because, let's face it, the worst kinda did happen to our libraries. All our libraries. Next month, my Upper School Librarian, Joanna,…