Dear Alumni & Friends:

What attracted me to LA 32 years ago was the autonomy that teachers have in the classroom and how we are always questioning how we teach and what we teach. Over the years, I have watched us evolve into a school that puts students at the center of the classroom experience and requires them to do the observing, thinking, discovering, and expressing of their own ideas within each academic discipline.

What has kept me here for all these years is that our evolving pedagogy really does work. Students learn to take responsibility for their own education, are encouraged to follow their passion, and they truly do learn, as the LA mission states, to think for themselves. In a similar way, LA as a whole thinks for itself in engineering its own educational program, and in the coming years the curriculum will continue its evolution, striving to keep each student at the center of the educational experience. This past year in particular, department chairs and teachers have been examining our 4-year curriculum with an eye on how students learn in the 21st century and how we can continue to do our best at fulfilling the LA mission in the new millennium.

Just as the landscape of our curriculum must evolve to meet the demands of a changing world, so too must the landscape of our campus. Murbach Field, overlooking Gibbet Hill and the Groton Country Club, was named after esteemed English teacher Terry Murbach in 1998, after he passed away following a devastating illness. Over the years, the field has been renovated to keep it level and in good playing condition, and its latest improvement will enhance it even more, not only resurfacing the field with turf, but also creating a natural stone seating area built into the hillside to replace the bleachers, with equally elegant landscaping on the hillside at the southern end of the field. With the fundraising complete, the earth-moving has already begun, and the field will be ready for play this fall. Our field hockey and football teams are delighted, and the field will also be used by many other teams in all seasons, especially on the wet and rainy days. Be sure to check out this video tour of the new facilities.

I hope to see you back on the Quad soon,

Robinson Moore
Assistant Head of School

BTW: The Video Conference Center has opened and an update is included in the video above. Also, we had a big week on campus with our celebrations of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, along with our boys’ and girls’ basketball teams playing at the TD Garden that night. Winter midterms close today, and we are all realizing that Winterim is just a little over a month away...