News

Bringing Your Full Self to School

To all of our families celebrating the Lunar New Year, we wish you health and happiness. It was lovely to celebrate with so many of you on Thursday at the event organized by the students in the East Asian Student Association (EASA) and their families. I extend warm wishes to our Muslim families who mark the start of Ramadan this week and am grateful to the students in our Middle Eastern and North African Student Association (MENASA) for decorating the lobby and greeting their classmates there this morning with dates and other sweet treats. For some of our families, this time marks the start of the Lent, with Ash Wednesday falling just a few days ago. I was glad to see students in the halls having received ashes on their foreheads earlier in the day.

The way our students marked this confluence of cultural and religious moments – and many others throughout the year – says a lot about the community. I’m so grateful to be at a school where students are not only comfortable bringing their full selves but also proud to share their identities with their friends. Part of the reason for that is the way those friends respond. They show up for each other, as evidenced by the throng of students who packed the Black Box Theater yesterday for the Lunar New Year celebration or the Tu Bishvat seder earlier in the month. They are curious – like the students who lingered to talk with their peers from MENASA or others who paused at the video screen in the lobby offering information about Ramadan. Those habits create an environment where folks want to share and feel like they belong. And we are a better school as a result.

Courtside Pride

We had an exciting afternoon yesterday. The boys and girls basketball teams both won their championship games, which we hosted in our gym. They were tight games against great opponents. The kids on the court battled hard, and both BUA teams came back from deficits to win. The sidelines were packed with students, faculty staff, and parents – all cheering up a storm. My voice is still a little hoarse! Some students were even nice enough to teach me a new cheer along the way: “Our team is red hot . . . .”

The experience on the sidelines made me so grateful to be at BUA and captured some of the things that make this place special. Students turned out to support their friends, perhaps partially motivated by the Raising Cane’s chicken fingers and fries, but also clearly there out of love for their friends in the game. The cheering was positive – with none of the jeering, taunting, and disrespectful behavior that has unfortunately become the norm in other places. There was a real sense of joy and community – an understanding that we were all part of something. I am proud of our kids, both on and off the court, for representing this school so well.

View more from the championship games here.

Mentors

I’m writing from a conference of heads of school from leading independent schools around the country. Among the roughly 100 attendees are a half-dozen heads – some active, some retired – whom I am lucky to call mentors. Two are former supervisors, and the rest are people I’ve met along the way. They all, at some point, took an interest in my growth and are now always a phone call away when I need advice – and am smart enough to reach out. I feel enormously lucky to have them in my corner. Last week, I had a call with a former student I taught years ago. She graduated from college recently, is in her second year in a new job in New York City, and wanted to talk about what’s next for her education and career. I hope that I was helpful in some small way. And I was glad that she sees me as somebody she can lean on.

Mentorship is powerful. Beyond providing support and advice, mentors can open doors and, like in my case, shape careers. I know from talking with our alums that students at BUA pick up mentors during their years with us – folks they stay in touch with well beyond commencement. Most are BUA teachers and staff members. Some are BU professors who worked with our students in classes, in labs, or through senior thesis. Increasingly, our students are finding mentors among our parent and alumni community through our career mentoring program. Our hope is that a four-year experience opens the door to a lifetime of mentoring.

Connecting Disciplines

I visited several classes this week. Even on these cold, gray January days in the aftermath of a snowstorm, the energy and engagement were high. One special moment stood out. A geometry teacher asked a group of his students who happened to be taking ancient Greek to work through and present on Euclid’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem – handing them an English translation alongside the original text. The “Greeklings” lit up – excited to find Greek words they recognized and piece things together. I later talked to a U.S. history teacher, who told me that her class had analyzed Walt Whitman’s poem Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night during their study of the Civil War. She recounted how her students made immediate connections to other Whitman poems from Leaves of Grass they had read in English and were excited to talk about what they had learned. Foundations in disciplines are critical, and there are good reasons why we teach in the buckets that we do. It is, though, really rewarding when students see that boundaries between disciplines are porous and that the deepest insights often come from a combination of disciplinary approaches. Our curriculum is intentionally designed by this talented faculty to invite students to discover the types of connections they made this week. I’m grateful to our teachers and so happy to be at a school where those connections make kids light up.

The Arts in Bloom

In the depth of winter, we are experiencing a blossoming of the arts. The hallway walls are a riot of color – filled with student drawings, paintings, photographs, and digital graphic design work from the first semester. The technical excellence of the pieces is as impressive as the broad range of styles and perspectives, and I love that the building serves as a rotating gallery. We hope that many of you will join us at the visual art show and reception next Friday afternoon. Today is also opening night of the fall play, Radium Girls – a poignant historical piece about female watch-dial painters poisoned by radium-based paints in the 1920s. I’ve always admired our actors’ willingness and desire to take on thematically important scripts and look forward to seeing them on stage this weekend. Next Friday is our Winter Concert in BU’s beautiful Tsai Performance Center. It is a fitting backdrop for the students in our orchestra and chorus, along with a few intrepid faculty members, who will showcase a semester’s work on a number of challenging pieces. It is also a wonderful occasion for the broader BUA community to support the arts and enjoy an evening together. Great thanks to our world-class arts faculty for their mentorship and love of these exceptional young artists. See you in the audience!