Faculty Blog

The new Jafari Library often has a very lively feel to it bright and early in the day as more than three dozen boys gather there after they are arrive at Fenn and before they report to their advisors. The 7:30-8:20 time slot in the library is a buzz of activity as friends meet friends to hang out, boys are studying alone or in groups, foursomes are playing cards, boys are using computers, and avid readers are choosing new books. It’s a real hub of activity and a center of campus, and to a librarian, it is a thrill to see. On a recent Saturday this same level of activity filled the ……

Nobody ever told me to read The Odyssey—and that was the greatest educational travesty of my life. I first read it after high school while working at Colonial Motors in West Concord. I didn't "get it" any more than the most confused among you, but what I did do is "feel it." I felt its primordial power and emotional bareness; I felt another world, another age, and another human journey come alive inside of me. It made me feel that I was a part of long and unbroken lineage of humanity searching for truth and purpose in a world—especially my world, a world not always blessed with ……

It may be unexpected to reference a blog post titled “Are You Living Your Eulogy or Resume” when beginning a reflection about the opening of a school year, a time when a teacher’s thoughts typically turn to considering possibilities and aspirations for his students. Yet, I would suggest that this is precisely the time of year to think about the mark we are going to make as teachers (and parents) and for us to encourage our students to think about the mark they want to make as individuals, as members of a class and as members of a community like Fenn. It is in these opening ……

This fall, a new school year at Fenn brought...old binders.  Well, perhaps "old" is a misleading descriptor in this case—let's call them "gently used and still in pristine condition" three-ring binders!

Back in June of 2013, Fenn conducted its second annual Green Clean. The goal of this Green Clean was to divert perfectly good school supplies from the waste stream at the end of a school year.  A recycling and reuse station was set up in the Old Gym, and boys dropped off their used paperback books, binders, folders, pencil cases, empty notebooks, and other supplies. Faculty …

September brings us back to the business of school days and their accompanying mix of work and play. Boys are, at once, excited to be back among school buddies even if it does mean learning to manage the dreaded homework load that summer had made a distant memory. Middle school is a joyous time filled with energy and excitement. It is a time for challenge, triumph and even failure. As we head into the year, there are some things that I mentioned at Back to School Night that bear reiterating.

Middle schoolers are continually trying on new things as they undertake the main “job” of …

In April 2012 I travelled to the Allen-Stevenson School in New York City to hear Dr. Adam Cox share the findings of his global research project for the IBSC on how school boys locate significance in their lives. Two years earlier, The Fenn School, the all-boys school in Concord, Massachusetts where I have spent the past eighteen years, was one of the twenty schools worldwide Dr. Cox visited as he conducted the research that would become central to the findings of his study. As a matter of fact, Fenn was the very first school Dr. Cox visited and one of two schools to which he verbally referred …

Standing at the front of Fenn's meeting hall just thirty minutes into the brand-new school year last Friday morning, I looked out at the faces of our 333 Fenn boys gathered with our teachers and staff. It was our first All School Meeting of the year. The time ahead of us as a school community lay before us with such clean promise—like the dew on the Meeting Hall green on that late summer morning beckoning us to the start of an unspoiled day. A buzz of conversation ran throughout the hall, enveloping the fifty new fourth grade boys seated in the front rows, our twenty-six ninth graders in……

Years ago, when I first began teaching at Fenn, I happened across a tremendous resource developed by the International Boys’ School Coalition (IBSC) titled "Teaching Boys: A Global Study of Effective Practices". The authors of the study, Michael Reichert and Richard Hawley, spent years researching the many ways teachers of boys crafted and delivered lessons, and they also spent years interviewing boys about what parts of that teaching resonated with them. Reichert and Hawley then endeavored to identify patterns within the research that would indicate specific skills or methodologies …