News & Weekly Letters

The weeks leading up to the end of the school year are packed with celebrations that we love. Ahead of the graduations, shows, and tonight’s traditional Splash of Summer party, we enjoyed two evenings of After-School recitals this week. Students from 1st to 8th Grade, who take individual music lessons as part of our After-School program, took to the stage to play a piece they had learned and put their heart and soul into.

This week was punctuated by events that were, to say the least, antinomic: our 3rd to 8th graders completed the Terra Nova tests to demonstrate how robust our curriculum is to the authorities, while in Maternelle, Pre-Nursery to Kindergarten celebrated Fun Day—a new tradition inaugurated this time last year (which incidentally finished under glorious sunshine in Madison Square Park); the FDNY completed the first inspection of our new building kickstarting the countdown to moving day for our Elementary and Middle School classes, while our younger students created a new rooftop mural with the artist Antoine Wagner (aka Daphne from Kindergarten’s dad), symbolically reaffirming our love for our Maternelle Building.

For the past few years, we’ve had ringside seats to a power struggle in the world of education between two fields of thought that we can summarize thus: in the red corner, those who think that teaching is an art, and in the blue corner, those who think it is a science. The blue corner has gained considerable influence recently. The lack of theoretical training for teachers in cognitive learning processes is increasingly surprising. How, one wonders, can anyone teach a child anything without a grasp of how the brain receives and processes information? Is it possible to teach without a basic understanding of neuroscience?

In this unique drama festival, you will ‘see’ 13 shows, 13 completely different universes

The École’s first ever Concours d’écriture (Writing Contest) was a great success!