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 […]
Does anyone in the sound of my voice remember The King and I–Rogers and Hammerstein’s Broadway show that hit the boards in 1951 and became one of the Great White Way’s four longest-running shows? If not, perhaps you know the dramatic film remake, Anna and the King, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fat?
Kitchen demolition is slated for next week, and my job is both simple and formidable: empty the hub of the house of everything in it, down to the last pieces of stray dog kibble in the pantry’s far corner. (Some mouse’s stash, no doubt. Bummer when he comes for it.) Knowing how good Rae will […]
“OK, we need some dogs–specifically, ‘a wolfish troop of watchdogs.’” “Me! Me! I’ll be a dog!” “Me, too!” “OK, but the text is clear that you’ll have to fawn on Telemakhos when he arrives at the hut.” “What’s ‘fawn’?” That fawning might be a deal-breaker on my assigning roles for our acting out a scene […]
I just returned from a wonderful trip to Sequoia National Park. It was my first time there and planning an EDT in an unfamiliar location was a little nerve wracking. I wasn’t worried about safety or communication issues, but was more concerned about providing a positive experience for the students. However, as I found out, […]
Fortuitous intersection: I discovered through my English IV Honors students that those of them in AP Psychology were studying Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory just as freshmen in English read the middle chapters of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (In these pages, the young girl must find her way back to emotional and psychological wholeness after a brutal sexual assault.)
I’ve been spending most afternoons this fall with Thacher’s team of Percheron work horses, Pancho and Pedro, who have performed nobly since they moved here from Meredith Bressie’s (CdeP 1994) ranch in Montana six years ago. In the fall and winter terms since then, small groups of Thacher students have learned to harness, hitch, and […]
It was in late August that I first felt the happy dizziness of seasons spinning, doubling back and oddly moving ahead at the same time. There, topping the list of my Sierra campmates, was Nan, senior prefect to the 9th grade girls who’d be trekking together for five days (six, if you throw in the […]
Having just spent five nights and six days with six girls (three seniors, a sophomore, and two freshmen) horse camping in the Sespe, and then coming back to say goodbye to them, put the year “to bed” and then hanging around for the Thacher Reunion (classes ending in “2” or “7”), I have to say […]
It’s nearly 3 p.m. when we lucky seven pull out of the mouth of Horn Canyon and, a few minutes later, into the pack station, our ten horses bone-weary from six days on the trail, covering 65 miles or so of rugged Sespe backcountry. Or maybe that’s just me, projecting. I am bone-weary from my […]