It’s possible that someone within the sound of my virtual voice recalls the kitchen scene in The Big Chill—although as one of my advisees informed me the other night, “My parents were hardly even born when that movie came out!” …
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The Good Goodbye
I know it’s balsam in the Rocky Mountain air we’re hiking through this morning (as a kid, I built forts in stands of pine and fir), but darned if I can figure out if that’s a chipping sparrow or a …
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Parting Words for the Class of 2017
A few months ago we gathered on our Upper Field to celebrate Thacher’s 128th commencement. Others have encouraged me to publish here the parting words I shared then with our seniors and their families. Here they are: We now come …
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Affirming Thacher Values in a Time of Political Turmoil
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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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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Gazing into the Future
Have you read our Deep Dive on Thacher’s Astronomy Program? If you haven’t, you should. It’s a great look at a model for academic work that not only requires students to take chances, make mistakes, and get dirty (see my last …
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Grit vs. Quit
In her forthcoming book, Angela Duckworth, one of our favorite experts on grit, has some interesting advice about quitting. For example, she suggests that high schoolers should be encouraged to stick with a new endeavor for at least a year before …
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Take Chances, Make Mistakes, and Get Messy!
My twin 7 year-olds and I have been watching old episodes of The Magic School Bus on Netflix lately. It’s an animated PBS kids show from the mid-nineties (based on a book series). It follows a class of elementary students …
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