There is a sort of difficulty that accompanies any planning of the future. As second visits start, is easy to remember this time last year when I helped my younger brother choose a high school. It had been a personal dream of mine to spend my last year at Thacher with him, but that was a decision […]
I guess it’s official. The group we referred to last spring as the “rising seniors” are now firmly rooted in their official senior shoes. The prefect meetings are becoming routine, the new classes are starting to feel old hat, and, the icing on the cake… The Senior Exhibition process has begun. We started things off […]
Are those mountain lion prints?
Pre-dawn, and I’m hiking the Forest Cooke solo. My dog won’t go with me anymore, since her best canine buddy dropped out of the picture last June. Karleanne isn’t here today either; she’s packing for a week-long Development/Alumni trip to the East Coast. So all I’ve got for protection on the trail is my “Get Big” consciousness and my Exerstrider poles, which, held up to make the get-big bigger, might (come to think of it) look sort of like antlers to the cougar, which would make me look a little like a deer. Am I thinking too much or too little like a mountain lion? […]
At the start of July, a particularly sporty friend–the kind who believes a vacay-day is squandered if it doesn’t include at least two athletic “adventures”–asked innocently what my goals were for my time here in the Tetons. “Goals? Are you kidding? I come up here to get away from goals!” Guilt–mine–set in before I’d put […]
You never really plan on Plan B. When I told Michael a couple of months ago that my idea of a perfect camping trip would be to backpack with only my own gear and food (OK, I’ll take the med kit, too) and some experienced packhorses schlepping the rest (stoves, tents, tarps, group food, cookware, […]
Starbucks??? Three of my advisees (all senior girls) said hopefully and excitedly after formal dinner the other night. Please???? They’d determined it was too cold for ice cream, so if I was willing to take them somewhere…. And honestly I’ve never been more glad to load my car full of teenage girls and head out […]
“Write what’s in front of you,” Natalie Goldberg advises in Writing Down the Bones, a book I use selected chapters from in my English IV Honors class. And on a day when I’m still trying to imagine the unimaginable–backpack bombs detonating in a crowd gathered to cheer runners and celebrate some April sunshine in Boston–I […]
With our return to campus came the return to the Horse Program for a good many of our students. After riding our horses back from Pasture (an area on the other side of the valley) on Wednesday and getting out to the Gymkhana Field to practice our skills on Thursday and Friday, it was time […]
My favorite class? Math, although at some points challenging I thoroughly enjoy learning about new algebraic concepts and seeing how previous learned concepts come together to help me solve a specific program. I have for some time now enjoyed this subject. It is the easiest for me to follow, I like numbers not words so […]
Before further discussion of Holden Caulfield’s “Sleep tight, ya morons!” goodbye to Pencey Prep, and to get my 9th graders fully into their English minds last period on Tuesday, I rattled them out of their seats and asked them trot around the room on imaginary horses. It was my way of defusing one student’s answer […]