A few days ago my 10-year-old daughter confessed to me that she hasn’t been doing very well in her language arts assignments at school. My eyebrows immediately went up (according to my kids this is my instant “tell” of displeasure). …
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Archives: Research
Can I Get a List of Those Books?
One of our number one goals when a family visits Thacher is for them to come away with a very clear understanding of what makes Thacher Thacher. To that end, we have crafted a visit day that includes the usual …
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Happy Campers
Standing in the grocery store line a couple of days before Thanksgiving, four items beyond Express Lane maximum, I tore my gaze away from the magazine racks (recent challenges for Britney, the Queen’s real feelings about Kate, how Jen stays …
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What Makes Thacher Thacher
Including Some Extra-Credit Reading About What Teenagers Need When I came to interview at Thacher over a decade ago it was immediately clear to me that this was a school unlike any that I had encountered. To start with, there was …
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On Teenage Defiance
A recent article in the New York Times offers this catchy headline: Can Teenage Defiance Be Manipulated for Good? The author is accurate in that teens slide quickly to polarization and respond well, therefore, to hero-villain scripts. They …
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Tough’s Take On Resilience
We have heard and read a lot of late about the importance of grit and resilience, but not so much about how exactly to cultivate these valuable attributes in our students. This article by Paul Tough, who has become something …
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