News

An Admissions Thank You

We are wrapping our admissions season – and what a season it was. We received more applications than ever in the school’s history. We were more selective than we’ve ever been. We are fully enrolled for the fall. We extended financial aid funding to every student we felt should be here, 再次保持没有经济援助候补名单-这是我们价值观的证明，也是我们社区慈善慷慨的产物. Most importantly, in the fall we will welcome an extraordinarily talented, kind, curious, diverse group of new students. I can’t wait for you to meet them!

I’m writing to thank all of you who played a role in this year’s admission season. It is the work of many hands. Thank you to the dozens of bbin娱乐平台 alumni who conducted admissions interviews and participated in panels. Thank you to our parents who shared their experiences at events, reached out individually to prospective families, and spread the good word about bbin娱乐平台 in their communities. Thank you to our extraordinary student tour guides, panelists, and revisit-day hosts for showing our applicants and their families who we are. Thank you to our faculty and staff for welcoming admitted students into their classrooms, offering master classes online, and following up with applicants with a passion in a particular area. And thanks to the members of our admissions team, whose personal approach, warmth, and professionalism really set us apart. They – and all of you – are a key part of how we perpetuate this culture we are so proud of. Thank you.

Getting Down to Work

Last Sunday, many of our families celebrated Easter, with others set to celebrate in early May according to the Orthodox calendar. I wish you all a happy and blessed Paschal season. I also extend warm wishes to our Muslim families who mark Ramadan this month and Eid next week. Eid Mubarak.

With their teacher away from school attending a national art educator conference, I had the pleasure of covering a first-period painting class this morning. Before class, I sat at the teacher’s desk clicking away at my keyboard, focused too much on clearing my inbox and looking up every few moments to greet students as they settled in. At 8:55, the bell rang to mark the start of class. I closed my laptop screen, stood up, and found ten students seated around the room. They had brushes in hand, paint palettes on trays in front of them, and heads down engrossed in their work – nearly photo realistic oil paintings of fruit. I felt a little bad interrupting them to praise them for their focus and initiative! The experience is not limited to art. 我也遇到过类似的情况，在英语课上，当老师不得不离开时，学生们自己发起讨论，或者数学课上的学生甚至在开始铃声响起之前就在黑板上做题.

What’s different about the kids here? Their motivation is intrinsic. They own their learning. 我知道，当我说与这些年轻人一起工作是多么快乐，我们为我们共同建立的文化感到多么自豪时，我代表了我所有的同事.

The Beauty of Many Hats

What an exciting week here at bbin娱乐平台! Last Friday, the Jazz Band and Swamp Cats entertained students, faculty, staff, parents, and even grandparents for our Valentine’s Cabaret. The dance floor was quite a scene. Yesterday, 在热闹的家乡观众面前，男生和女生的大学篮球队都在势均力敌的比赛中赢得了联赛冠军. In the girls game, senior Anais Kim reached a rare milestone – scoring 1,1000分——考虑到她在短短三年内就做到了这一点，这更令人印象深刻(COVID取消了她的9年级赛季)。. Tonight, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in that same gym. Students from the East Asian Students Association, along with dozens of parents, have organized food, music, and games to share this important cultural moment with the whole bbin娱乐平台 family. All are welcome, and we hope to see many of you there.

I’m struck by how many of our students are engaged across these activities and more. Students who played in the Cabaret last Friday were also playing in the games last night. Some who were on the court last night will be in the gym tonight organizing Lunar New Year. bbin娱乐平台 is a small school. Our vibrancy depends on kids wearing many hats. Rejecting a broader societal push for specialization and balkanization, bbin娱乐平台’s culture rewards trying something new and getting involved. Our community certainly benefits, and I believe our students do too.

Leadership is Learned

On Tuesday, Boston University’s interim President, Ken Freeman, spoke at our all-school meeting. President Freeman has a distinguished history of service to BU, including eight years as the Dean of BU’s Questrom School of Business. That service followed a nearly forty-year career in industry, including senior executive positions at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, and private-equity firm KKR. In 2013, Harvard Business Review named him one of the 100 best performing CEOs in the world. He knows some things about leadership – his topic that morning. He offered a lively overview of what we know about successful leadership, peppering his talk with anecdotes and grounding it in decades of scholarship about what works and what doesn’t. 他邀请学生们思考自己喜欢的领导风格，并要求他们开始发展自己的领导哲学. He touted the centrality of EQ. Most notably, he assured our students that leadership is learned. 

Before introducing President Freeman, I shared a brief story on this last theme. After years of teaching, I was thinking about becoming a head of school but was intimidated by the idea. I thought about my role models – my headmaster when I was a boy, heads of school I had worked for, and many others I had come to know and admire over the years. To my mind, they all “had it.” I assumed that their leadership ability was somehow innate – that they had emerged, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully grown, clad in armor, and ready for battle. Did I have it? What if I didn’t? I mentioned my hesitation to a mentor who very quickly set me straight. He assured me, like President Freeman did for our students, that leaders are grown. He offered me a reading list and a series of coaching conversations with him to process what I was reading. He gave me the confidence to try. 

I heard from dozens of bbin娱乐平台 students about how much they enjoyed President Freeman’s talk. My hope is that, at least for some of them, his words give them the confidence to try too. We will all be better for it.