News

Meaning through Service

We send warm wishes to our families who begin celebrating Diwali today. May your hearts and homes be filled with light and laughter.

We will pause BUA classes on Wednesday to mark Veterans Day. To all of you receiving this message who have served our country or who have family members in the armed forces, thank you. I have been inspired by my conversations with BUA graduates who have served our country in this way – several of whom have spoken powerfully at all-school meetings over the years. In those talks, many of them describe the sense of purpose that comes from service. They talk about what we know from decades of research: meaning in our lives comes from our relationships to one another and from contributing to something bigger than ourselves. 

Our mission calls on students “to engage meaningfully in our community and beyond.” That engagement takes many forms, but we have made a focused effort recently to create opportunities for our students to fan out in the local communities around BUA and be of service. We are now in the third year of our afterschool service fellows program, where cohorts of BUA students volunteer as afterschool helpers at local elementary and middle schools. In collaboration with student leaders, we are creating one-day service opportunities for students periodically on weekends with local nonprofit partners. Increasingly, students are organizing grade-wide service efforts, and several extracurricular clubs are considering how they might extend their reach outside of our walls. My hope is that through these programs or in any number of other ways, every student at BUA leaves here having experienced the sense of purpose that comes from service to others and carries that feeling with them – inspiring them to lead lives of meaning and fulfillment. 

What (and Why) I’m Reading

I’m several chapters into a new book by MIT professor Eric So titled The Collision: What AI Does to Us. I picked it up in part to learn more about a phenomenon I am increasingly thinking about: AI-induced cognitive atrophy. There is mounting evidence that offloading cognitive tasks to AI can make us less able to independently perform those tasks; the less we exercise mental muscles, the more likely we are to weaken or lose them. While troubling for adults, this is particularly problematic for young people who are still building their ability to think critically, synthesize information, see connections, develop judgment, write cogently, and even assess the output of an AI system.

I also came across a recent article in The Wall Street Journal provocatively titled “The Brutal Harvard Class that Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take.” It profiles Harvard’s Humanities 10 course – an application-only class taught by a rotating group of professors whose students read one book per week and write intensively. Authors range from Homer and Plato to James Joyce and Toni Morrison. According to the article, the wait list for the course is evidence of students’ desire to engage deeply with challenging, long texts in a technology-free environment – pushing back against the forces pulling in the opposite direction.

I believe that those who say that AI is an inevitable part of our children’s futures are right. In nearly every recent conversation I’ve had with a BUA graduate about their jobs, they tell me about the pressure they feel to use AI tools to increase their productivity and impact. I also believe AI can be a force for good. We have graduates who are harnessing AI to develop new cancer therapies, detect heart disease early, and improve mental health. As a school, we embrace our responsibility to educate students about the technology and consider how AI might enhance what we do in the classroom.

That said, I also believe that the most important thing we can do is make sure that, in these critical developmental years, we live up to our mission’s promise that students at BUA “are challenged to read deeply and think critically.” We rightly insist that students across disciplines do the hard intellectual work themselves and build the capacity to do so, rather than offloading that work to AI. BUA was once lovingly referred to as “a young school that reads old books.” We still proudly ask students to read many of the same texts those Humanities 10 undergraduates are lining up to read. The skills and habits they gain by doing so will be even more critical for our future workforce and citizenry. And I know from my own experience what those students in Humanities 10 are telling us: engaging with great works, complex ideas, and beautiful writing is a source of sustaining joy.

A Special Challenge

I have been visiting classes recently, as I do throughout the year. I typically pop in for 15-minute class visits and then follow up with the teacher for a conversation. Those conversations let me offer kudos, think with the teacher about an area where they would like to grow, and hear more about what they are doing with their students. During one of these meetings, a math teacher told me this story. At the end of a recent class, he offered his students a special challenge: to work up a proof of the concept they had talked through in Calculus that day. He told me with pride that a student came back shortly thereafter with a proof she had done at home. Rather than reviewing it with her one-on-one, he created time during the next class for her to present her proof to her classmates, which she did beautifully. At the close of her presentation, he suggested a tweak that would make her excellent proof more elegant.

I love that this is a place where students embrace a challenge like this, not for a grade or extra credit, but for the love of learning. It is a gift to have teachers who offer students opportunities to stretch and who celebrate them when they do. And it is a sign of respect between teachers and students that, even when a student is going above and beyond, the teacher makes further suggestions for growth. I am deeply grateful to spend my days with such wonderful students and teachers.

Creative Teaching of Foundational Skills

I visited two English classes early this week. The teacher in the ninth-grade class asked students to prepare for and stage a trial of Odysseus to determine whether he should be held responsible for the disaster with the cyclops Polyphemus. During opening statements, rebuttals, and cross examinations, students cited facts and textual evidence (from Book 9 and beyond) to make their cases. The tenth-grade teacher had asked her students to draw one of the pilgrims from the General Prologue to the The Canterbury Tales for homework. Students presented their depictions of their chosen characters and accompanying accessories to their classmates, supporting their choices with references to specific lines in the text.

Both exercises were quite fun; there was good energy and more than a little laughter in the rooms. But they were also lessons – if unconventional ones – in close textual analysis. Students were asked, in the words of our mission, “to read deeply.” Close reading is the foundation of great class discussion, compelling analytical writing, and critical thinking. In an age of infographics, 45-second videos, and even shorter attention spans, I am deeply grateful to work with colleagues who find such creative ways to teach this foundational skill of deep reading. 

Without Being Asked

Thank you to all the families who joined us for Parents Day earlier this week. What joy to have so many parents attending classes with their children and getting an up-close look at life at BUA. I heard from quite a few parents about how taken they were by the care and passion of the teachers and the engagement of the students around the table. I also heard from more than one who said they wished that they could turn back the clock and attend themselves! 

The following morning, I was helping a colleague collect the extra chairs we had distributed to all the classrooms to accommodate our visitors. It was early – around 7:45 before most students had arrived for the day. As we made our way along the first-floor corridor, a new ninth grader who was doing homework at a table outside the athletics office noticed what we were up to. Without a word, she capped her highlighter, got up from her reading, popped into a classroom, and started folding chairs. I didn’t ask; she just saw the need and got to it.

In what has been a strong start to the year, this was one of my favorite moments: a young person helping without being asked. It says a lot about her character and, no doubt, about the way she was raised. It is also the type of small act that builds schoolwide culture. Small acts of kindness are contagious; others notice and are inspired to do the same. Thank you to this student for her example and to all of our students who help without being asked every day. It matters.

Putting Phones in their Place

At our opening meetings in August, BUA’s faculty and staff voted to adopt a smartphone policy designed to support our students and preserve the community we cherish. In broad strokes, 9th and 10th-graders are now asked to deposit smartphones in a cabinet by the front desk when they arrive at school in the morning. 11th and 12th graders are welcome to keep their smartphones with them in the BUA building, but to limit their use to the student common areas and to school-related purposes. 

We have now completed three weeks with the new system. And the impact has been dramatic. Class conversations are spilling into the hallways after the bell, with no text messages or social media posts competing for attention. Lunch tables buzz with conversation. Board games have proliferated in the Student Commons. These early results affirm what I heard from my listening sessions with students before the change: smartphones in the hands of school-aged students – even unusually mature, independent ones – interfere with the kinds of in-person, face-to-face exchanges that lie at the heart of our school. 

The other thing I’ve observed is how readily our students embraced the new system. Even on the first day, 9th and 10th graders streamed through the doors, dropped off their phones, and headed off to class – all without complaint or fanfare. The older students, I believe in part out of respect for the younger students, keep their phones out of sight. To be fair, there is not a line of students outside my office door waiting to thank me and my colleagues for the new rules. But they understand the rationale and are doing their part – and I’m really grateful.

There is certainly more work to do. I’m excited to partner with the faculty and students over the coming months to gather feedback, navigate obstacles, and make common-sense tweaks. But, for now, it’s clear that we are on the right track.