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    Archives: Community

    Not finished. 12.5.2017

    December 16, 2017  |  by Joy Sawyer-Mulligan
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    It feels wrong to be trying to shape my thoughts about the Thomas Fire and The Thacher School, the Ojai Valley, the still vulnerable coastal communities, and my little life when the fire continues to rage and rout, advancing mostly …
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    Posted in Community, Life at Thacher | No Comments »

    Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House in Ways I Cannot Always Convey

    November 26, 2017  |  by Joy Sawyer-Mulligan
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    Yesterday morning, twenty-four hours before students and teachers would return from Thanksgiving break, I was cutting across the sunshiny Pergola to fetch from Olympus any mail that might have arrived in the past few days. There, near the toadstool tables …
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    Posted in Community, Life at Thacher | No Comments »

    Colls

    October 30, 2017  |  by Joy Sawyer-Mulligan
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    It often begins well before sunrise, that dark time when I’m tempted to grab my headlamp but, in waning moonlight, end up trusting my feet to know the way to our meeting place: up walkway, over speed bump and curb, …
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    Posted in Community, Fulfillment, Happiness, Life at Thacher | No Comments »

    Kids to Spare

    October 20, 2017  |  by Joy Sawyer-Mulligan
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    I didn’t see it coming, the “F” I got at mid-term in my Toad Blog “class”–the one I designed and am taking as the only student this year. Oh, I’ve failed before, but this was a surprise because I was …
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    Posted in Community, Fulfillment, Happiness, Life at Thacher, Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Affirming Thacher Values in a Time of Political Turmoil

    March 30, 2017  |  by Michael Mulligan
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    The following is a talk recently delivered by Head of School Michael K. Mulligan at one of our regular All-School Assemblies.  Like many others around our nation, I have not been able to watch the national news lately without wincing. …
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    Posted in Community, Life at Thacher | No Comments »

    Tough’s Take On Resilience

    June 2, 2016  |  by Michael Mulligan
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    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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    Posted in Community, Great Teachers, Grit, Research, Resilience, Stress | No Comments »

    Random Encounters of the Best Kind

    April 2, 2015  |  by Joy Sawyer-Mulligan
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    I have never taught Fernando Zamora ’16, nor have I coached or advised him. Yet I had three encounters with him in the space of 24 hours last week that made me consider how much I value random paths-crossings in this boarding …
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    • Recent Posts

      The Long View

      December 11, 2018 By Blossom Beatty Pidduck

      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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      Can I Get a List of Those Books?

      October 23, 2018 By William McMahon

      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

      May 21, 2018 By Joy Sawyer-Mulligan

      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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      In Stark Relief

      December 28, 2017 By Joy Sawyer-Mulligan

      If you think of the land as a palimpsest—a piece of fabric or hide, sturdy pergamena or velum, here wrinkled, here smooth—on which human and natural history is written and rewritten, then what are fires? Are they a kind of malevolent …
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      Time and Looking

      December 22, 2017 By Joy Sawyer-Mulligan

      We’d come indoors, Beto (José Cortez, Thacher Facilities) and I, from picking up the smaller downed limbs in the yard and raking some of the other detritus ripped from trees around the house in the demon-winds of that first night. …
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