News

Being of Service

We paused as a community on Tuesday to mark Veterans Day. There are a number of alumni of this school who have devoted their careers to serving our country in branches across the military. Several have returned to BUA over the years to speak to our students and share their journeys. We are grateful for their service and the example they set.

Service takes many forms, but all forms center around a fundamental truth: service to others – our families, friends, community, a stranger, a cause – is where we find purpose in our lives. Decades of psychological research confirms a central thesis of Viktor Frankl’s seminal work, Man’s Search for Meaning, based on his experience as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during WWII: humans yearn for and are motivated by the feeling of contributing to something bigger than ourselves and being of service to others. That sense of purpose can be psychologically sustaining, not only in the horrific setting of Frankl’s work, but in more ordinary times as well.

As a school, we have a duty to give students the chance to experience the feeling of motivation and contentment that comes from being of use to others – that something they do matters and perhaps makes somebody else’s life better. Our mission promises that these young people will be challenged to “engage meaningfully in our community and beyond.” There are longstanding traditions of students volunteering in the school and around the Boston area. In the past two years, we have initiated a service-learning pilot where groups of BUA students travel to local middle and elementary schools to volunteer in their afterschool academic and enrichment programs. The interest among BUA students has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to expand the initiative in the coming years. We expect that it will create lifelong habits.

Through the Eyes of Our Alums

BUA’s Alumni Council met recently. The group is made up of 22 graduates from across the decades of the school’s life who volunteer to help build community among fellow graduates, encourage alumni engagement with the school, and offer advice and perspective on today’s BUA. We are grateful for their leadership.

At one point in the meeting, the conversation turned to the ways the school has evolved over time. Voices around the table appreciated the dramatic expansion in financial accessibility. Due to the extraordinary generosity of our donors, financial aid now extends far beyond tuition to defray the costs of textbooks, laptops, school social events, college applications, and other pieces – all critical to being a full member of the community. Council members noted with gratitude other ways in which the school has become more diverse in addition to socioeconomics; BUA today much more closely resembles the world our students are entering than it did years ago. They applauded the investments the school has made in supporting each young person’s socio-emotional life beyond the classroom – the presence of the school psychologist, learning specialist, director of student support, and other structural supports are all relatively new in the life of the school.

Finally, there was a great deal of pride in the fact that a school that was, just decades ago, an experiment with little name recognition is now emerging as the school of choice for exceptionally kind and curious students in the Boston area. BUA is Boston’s best kept secret no longer, and our alums take a lot of pride in the evolution of the school they helped – and continue to help – build.

Community through Sports

Our soccer and cross country teams are wrapping up strong seasons this week. Congratulations to all of our student athletes and coaches. Special kudos to our boys varsity soccer team for bringing home the league championship in a great game yesterday evening at Nickerson Field. It was, as they say, a dark and stormy night. Goal kicks traveled either 10 or 50 yards depending on the direction of the wind. Routine shots became dangerous for goalkeepers as the ball skidded over the soaked turf. The boys kept their focus and pulled off a great win.

I was struck by the number of fans who showed up in the monsoon. Parents arrived in the stands with umbrellas, long coats, and hot cider. Students came too – finding spaces on the sidelines and under eaves of a nearby building. It was a festive atmosphere, despite the weather. This was just a week after Fall Fest – BUA’s homecoming celebration – where students, teachers, parents, and alums came out in large numbers to cheer on our girls and boys soccer teams under the lights at the stadium. The sidelines were crowded with students holding signs cheering on their classmates. And there was no rain.

Sports do a lot of good things for individuals. They help young people build lifelong habits of physical activity; give students a rare chance to fail and learn from that experience; allow them to feel what it’s like to be on a team and rely on one another; and provide a way to see the impact of steady, diligent work toward a goal. For the community, it does something else. It brings us together. And I’m really grateful for that.

Basketball and fencing seasons are just around the corner. See you on the sidelines!

Number Games

I start every weekday driving my 5-year-old son to school. He loves math, and on the way to kindergarten he’ll often ask if we can play a “number game” – little word problems with some silliness thrown in (if you had seven strawberry-frosted donuts and each of your sisters takes three when you aren’t looking . . . .). He loves it because it’s challenging, because it’s a puzzle, because it’s play, and because it’s something we get to do together. I hope he always feels that way.

I visited a calculus 2 class here at BUA yesterday, and I was so heartened to see the same spark in these kids. I observed this group of about a dozen 10th to 12th graders for twenty minutes, and the whole time they were working on a single problem in small groups. The teacher shared with me that the problem was both conceptually tricky and algebraically diabolical. Kids were huddled together trying to untangle the knots the problem offered. The room was boisterous – comic groans when they hit roadblocks, celebrations when they worked something through. Now and then, a student from one group would get up and walk over to another to compare notes. The teacher was walking around giving pointers – not answers. At one point he said, “I have heard four answers so far, and no two are the same!” The kids laughed and kept at it. I talked to one of those students in the hallway today and asked if they figured it out. She beamed when she told me that they did.

It breaks my heart that as kids get older, so many of them lose that playfulness and joy in math, which is too often replaced by either grudging acceptance or even a fixed-mindset phobia: “I’m just not good at math.” We owe them better. Our teachers work hard to create environments where we can play with math – providing real challenge alongside loving support. I’m so glad this is a place where kids still get to play “number games.”

World-Class Speakers on our Block

At this week’s all-school meeting, our community heard from Dr. Joshua Goodman, a professor at BU’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. Dr. Goodman studies economics and education policy, working with large data sets to analyze education-related questions. He shared his recent research – which you may have read about in the news – on trends in public school enrollment in the aftermath of the pandemic. The talk was fascinating; he walked us all through his data analysis, the conclusions, and the limitations of the study.

My favorite part was the question-and-answer period. For 15 minutes, our students asked sophisticated, thoughtful questions about the findings, bringing to bear both their personal experiences as young people educated during the pandemic and their critical thinking skills. It could have gone on much longer. Over the next several days, I received wonderful feedback about Dr. Goodman’s talk from faculty and students alike. One student shared how nice it was that he pitched it at a college or graduate-school level, not talking down to this crowd. Another described how interesting it was to explore a quantitative analysis of something that feels so relevant and connected to his personal experience. A third felt inspired to explore adjacent topics for her senior thesis. Dr. Goodman will be returning to BUA later this month for an opt-in lunch with students interested in talking more. I imagine there will be a crowd!

The talk, and the community’s reception, reminded me of how fortunate we are to have the special connection to BU. Beyond the hundreds of BU classes our students take each year and the dozens of professors who advise student senior theses, we are able to bring in remarkable speakers like Dr. Goodman; later in the year, we’ll hear from two leading BU professors on applications of AI in their respective fields. Our tenth-grade seminars feature opportunities for students to work with BU’s school of business, maker space, innovation center, and software engineering group. Students seek out opportunities in BU labs, leverage the archives for research, use the fitness and recreation center, and more. I’m glad to be able to open those doors for these kind and curious young people and grateful for the partnership with the University.

A Culture of Civil Discourse

Fostering productive, respectful civil discourse has always been a strength of this school and one of our most sacred obligations. Our mission promises that students will be challenged to “think critically” and “engage meaningfully in our community and beyond.” Schools have to be places where students can learn how to speak up with conviction, disagree with respect, listen with an open heart, and foreground our common humanity. Where else can they? In a polarized, influencer-focused, social-media-dominated age, spaces for that kind of exchange are disappearing, and the social risks of engagement can feel stifling.

Last fall, I opened the term with a talk exploring this idea, recognizing the challenges, and offering some hope that BUA can be an oasis. The tradition here of open, healthy, and informed back-and-forth in our classroom gives me confidence. We also continue to put in place intentional programming to foster productive dialogue in spaces outside the safety of the curriculum. Conversations@BUA, a teacher-curated space for students, faculty, and staff to meet together to discuss controversial topics every several weeks, will begin again next week with a Friday-afternoon discussion about free speech under the cloud of political violence. This year, several students have formed a current events club to provide even more structured opportunities for learning together and pushing one another’s thinking. The faculty and staff are learning too. Several of us did some training with the Close Up Foundation earlier this year, and we have planned a few internal professional development sessions to sharpen our skills around charged conversations in class. BUA is also in the early stages of organizing a civil discourse conference for students and faculty across Boston-area independent schools for later this year.

In the interest of making sure our school’s voice does not chill individual voices in the community, we clarified the school’s position about institutional statements in response to national and world events. The statement speaks for itself and has, so far, served us well.

I welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and disagreement.

Being Yourself in Public Speaking

I teach a public speaking seminar to all of our 9th graders. The classes are relatively small, since we’ve divided up the group into trimester cohorts. It’s a fun way for me to get to know our new students and for them to get some practice with an important set of skills.

But something else is happening too. The first assignment is for each student to prepare and deliver a 3-minute personal narrative – an experience that they learned something from or that helped shape them in some way. Ninth graders in this fall cohort are understandably just getting to know one another, figuring out who their friends are, and finding their place at the school. Given that, it’s been striking that so many of the students have shared stories that are deeply personal and have allowed themselves to be vulnerable: the experience of feeling isolated and invisible; overcoming a long-standing fear; being forgiven for a transgression; dealing with family relocation and separation from friends. I’m proud of these students who shared so openly up at the podium. I’m grateful for the warm and supportive reception from their peers in the audience. And I’m thrilled about what this says about the culture and community these kids are fostering with one another.