News
Teacher Appreciation
The coming days will be exciting ones for the whole school and include chances to celebrate the Class of 2024: Senior Thesis Symposium, Senior Dinner, Field Day, Senior Week events, Prom, and Commencement a week from Monday. While these goodbyes are bittersweet, we are looking forward to being together. This week, we marked Teacher Appreciation Week. Thank you to the parents who contributed the meals our teachers and staff enjoyed. Thanks to the students who offered their kudos. You might have seen the posts on social media where BUA students shared things they appreciate most in their teachers. Here’s some of what they wrote. “Their passion for learning brings me so much joy.” “They take the time to really listen to you and give you honest and helpful advice.” “They enable me to be excited to ask questions :)” “Their personalities” “Their incredible dedication and commitment to teaching” “They’re all show... More
Our Seniors
As the calendar flips to May, I’m thinking a lot about our seniors and everything they have brought to this community. We started together – they and I – in the height of the pandemic. Smiling behind masks and sitting six feet apart, they forged friendships that will last well beyond their time at BUA. They supported one another through the loss of a beloved teacher whom many of them carry in their hearts. The teams they played on brought trophies and, much more importantly, brought us all together. As seniors, they have made it their mission to deepen that community spirit. Part of their legacy will be a new tradition they, along with younger peers on Student Council, lovingly named the Federal Bureau of Intrepids (FBI) – a yearlong competition involving all students across the four grades; students are assigned to one of eight color teams, which vie for... More
Lobstah Bots Robotics Team Nets Honors at New England District Championships
BUA's robotics team, the Lobstah Bots, participated in the FIRST Robotics New England District Championships in Springfield, MA in early April 2024. Although the team fell short of qualifying for the world championships, it performed at a high level on the field: on the final day of competition, the Lobstah Bots won the FIRST Innovation in Control Award, which is given to a robot with an “innovative and unique” control scheme that is “integrated with the machine, human players, and strategy” in both concept and execution. Its practical and sleek mechanical design, paired with impressive auto-align and LED signaling in software, made the team's robot -- dubbed "The Woodpecker" -- stand out from the crowd. This has been one of the team's most competitive and successful seasons in its history. In February, the Lobstah Bots were invited to present their work and robot at the International Society for Laboratory and Automation... More
An Admissions Thank You
We are wrapping our admissions season – and what a season it was. We received more applications than ever in the school’s history. We were more selective than we’ve ever been. We are fully enrolled for the fall. We extended financial aid funding to every student we felt should be here, again maintaining no financial aid waitlist – a testament to our values and a product of the philanthropic generosity of our community. Most importantly, in the fall we will welcome an extraordinarily talented, kind, curious, diverse group of new students. I can’t wait for you to meet them! I’m writing to thank all of you who played a role in this year’s admission season. It is the work of many hands. Thank you to the dozens of BUA alumni who conducted admissions interviews and participated in panels. Thank you to our parents who shared their experiences at events, reached out... More
Getting Down to Work
Last Sunday, many of our families celebrated Easter, with others set to celebrate in early May according to the Orthodox calendar. I wish you all a happy and blessed Paschal season. I also extend warm wishes to our Muslim families who mark Ramadan this month and Eid next week. Eid Mubarak. With their teacher away from school attending a national art educator conference, I had the pleasure of covering a first-period painting class this morning. Before class, I sat at the teacher’s desk clicking away at my keyboard, focused too much on clearing my inbox and looking up every few moments to greet students as they settled in. At 8:55, the bell rang to mark the start of class. I closed my laptop screen, stood up, and found ten students seated around the room. They had brushes in hand, paint palettes on trays in front of them, and heads down engrossed... More
Purpose through Research and Action that Matter
This week, we heard from two BUA alumni at all-school meetings. Dheekshita Kumar ‘16 spoke about her career as an entrepreneur and the ways her BUA experience set her down that path. She told us about the time when she and her friends published a book of poetry as high schoolers with the support and guidance of their English teacher, who demystified self-publishing. She described the process of envisioning and launching BUA’s middle school model UN tournament (BUAMUN), which has now become an institution. The confidence she gained from her experiences bringing an idea to life at BUA gave her a lifelong I-can-do-that attitude, which has translated into entrepreneurial success at an early age during and after college doing socially meaningful work. We also heard from Jon Freeman ’04, the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Jon is a professor and researcher at Columbia University studying social psychology, combining that... More
Global Trips and the Wall-Less Classroom
In just a few hours, 50 BUA students, guided by trip leaders from the faculty and staff, will be heading off on three place-based intellectual adventures. One group is off to Istanbul, where they will build on their BUA study of classical history, modern politics and culture, and geometry through Ottoman architecture and ornamentation. Another is off to Paris for a hands-on literary experience, visiting the places that so many of the expat writers from their American Literature course frequented and engaging in daily writing assignments while there. The third group heads to New York City for an art-focused whirlwind – jazz clubs, museums, operas, plays, and more – supplementing the work they do every day in the BUA studio, theater, and music room. These are not sightseeing trips. They are a wall-less version of the BUA classroom. I am grateful to all the faculty and staff members who have... More
Asking Good Questions
Yesterday, our 10th graders took part in a lunch talk with Dr. Ingrid Anderson, the Associate Director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. Dr. Anderson, who received her doctorate at BU, took many classes with Elie Wiesel when he was a professor here, worked closely with him, and has done a great deal of research and writing focused on Wiesel and his work. The students are in the midst of a unit in their history course exploring the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. They recently read Elie Wiesel’s Night, the famous memoir of Wiesel’s experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust, and will be reading Wiesel’s Dawn shortly, a fictional work set in the immediate postwar period. Dr. Anderson shared personal stories about what Wiesel was like as a teacher and mentor, explored his views on morality and politics, described the hundreds of... More
The Beauty of Many Hats
What an exciting week here at BUA! Last Friday, the Jazz Band and Swamp Cats entertained students, faculty, staff, parents, and even grandparents for our Valentine’s Cabaret. The dance floor was quite a scene. Yesterday, both the boys and girls varsity basketball teams won their league championships in close games in front of a lively home crowd. In the girls game, senior Anais Kim reached a rare milestone – scoring 1,000 points – which is even more impressive given that she did so in just three years (COVID canceled her 9th-grade season). Tonight, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in that same gym. Students from the East Asian Students Association, along with dozens of parents, have organized food, music, and games to share this important cultural moment with the whole BUA family. All are welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. I’m struck by how many of... More
Leadership is Learned
On Tuesday, Boston University’s interim President, Ken Freeman, spoke at our all-school meeting. President Freeman has a distinguished history of service to BU, including eight years as the Dean of BU’s Questrom School of Business. That service followed a nearly forty-year career in industry, including senior executive positions at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, and private-equity firm KKR. In 2013, Harvard Business Review named him one of the 100 best performing CEOs in the world. He knows some things about leadership – his topic that morning. He offered a lively overview of what we know about successful leadership, peppering his talk with anecdotes and grounding it in decades of scholarship about what works and what doesn’t. He invited students to think about their own preferred leadership styles and challenged them to begin developing their own leadership philosophies. He touted the centrality of EQ. Most notably, he assured our students that leadership is... More