Some of Milton’s best student writers and artists gathered virtually on Monday evening for the Laurence S. Persky Memorial Awards. The annual awards are given for the best work appearing in Milton Academy student publications and honor excellence in creative writing, journalism, art, photography, and production.

Guest speaker and alumna Tina Nguyen ’07 spoke to students about writing and told stories about her “weird career path.” She is a national reporter for POLITICO, covering the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, disinformation, and internet culture. Prior to that, she was a staff reporter for Vanity Fair Hive for more than four years, covering American politics and the rise of Donald Trump.

Nugyen said she tries to make her “writing as compelling as possible.” 

“Writing is the foundation—it’s an art but it’s also a discipline,” she said. “The goal is to make sure your audience gets what you are saying. They may not like what you have to say, but at least they understand it.”

From determining the presence of genetically modified organisms in snack foods to a field study on coastal processes in Jacksonville, Florida, this year’s advanced science final projects explored a wide range of research topics and experiments.

Students in advanced biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental sciences courses displayed their work on a new website, which includes videos, images, lab reports, and graphics. The website was in lieu of an in-person Science Symposium, the traditional event where advanced science students present their final projects.

“The symposium couldn’t happen this year for a number of reasons, so this was our plan B, and it turned out really nicely,” said biology teacher Michael Edgar. Restrictions on indoor gatherings due to COVID-19 and a number of advanced science students learning remotely made an alternate option necessary. Since some students did not have access to labs for the traditional design-your-own (DYO) experiment, teachers opened up a research project option. 

Ten students were selected for a Bisbee Prize by their teachers for outstanding research on their U.S. history papers. For the annual spring tradition, faculty, students, and guests gathered on Zoom to recognize the students’ impressive work on topics ranging from 19th-century Chinese immigrants to communism in Hollywood. The award winners rotated through break-out rooms to discuss their papers and answer questions on their research. 

Matt O’Rourke ’21, who wrote about the prohibition movement, said it was the personal stories, such as how people resisted prohibition and tried to find ways around the laws, that  “made the research really interesting.”

The Bisbee Prize was established to honor Ethan Wyatt Bisbee, a former history faculty member and department chair who retired in 1993 after 40 years of teaching. The Prize was endowed in 2005 through a gift by John Warren, formerly of the history department, and his wife, Laura Warren ’78, former head of Robbins House. Bisbee passed away earlier this year. 

In preparation for the Gospel Choir’s annual spring concert, music director Briana Washington and choir director Lori Dow guided  student musicians through a new exercise: Composition.

Working over Zoom, the student choir developed a song called “The Light,” which delivers an inspirational and urgent message calling for hope in difficult times.

“Since we’re all dealing with this new setting of the pandemic, I thought, let’s do something original, something that shows our character,” said Washington. “Let’s write a song and see where it goes, no pressure. Once we got into the writing process with everyone in the virtual classroom, we thought of the message we wanted to send, which was uplifting and positive in the face of everything going on in the world.”

Lan Hai ‘23 participated in the Conrad Challenge, an international student-driven, project-based science and technology competition to solve problems with a global impact. Hai and two peers from her hometown of Shanghai developed, programmed, and retrofitted a sailboat to pick up plastic garbage while it sails. Their project, called SAIL-E, finished in the World’s Top Six in the Ocean Plastics Category.

Hai said their idea used “end-of-life boats,” which are sailboats that can’t be used by people anymore, but which contain fiberglass that is very costly, polluting, and inefficient to recycle.

“Right now there is no good way to recycle boats,” said Hai, who competes on Milton’s sailing team. “It’s a big problem that’s underrated. So we took an end-of-life boat, an actual sailboat, and modified it to be a garbage collection boat. Our solution is a lot cheaper than current garbage-collecting boats. After the competition’s national rounds, we added a solar panel, so the motors, which run the rudder and nets, run on solar power and there are no emissions.”

Throughout this spring, parts of the Milton Academy campus have transformed into the fictional East High School as performing arts faculty and students filmed scenes for the spring show, High School Musical Jr. 

Opening virtually on Thursday, May 20, the show chronicles the interpersonal comedy and drama behind the scenes of, well, a high school musical. The “junior” show is adapted from the 2006 Disney Channel movie of the same name, which launched the careers of actors Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Tisdale, among others.  

“Shooting this musical like a movie has been such a fun and interesting experience,” said Ingrid Krishnan ’22, who plays Gabriella, a shy transfer student who sparks a connection with star basketball player Troy, played by Ben Simpson ’21. “Before this, I did not have any experience doing film acting, so it has been exciting to work with the cameras.”

The objects, photos, people, and places we choose to hold dear can help us keep memories alive and anchor us in our identities, students in Project Story: Narrative Journalism and Performance demonstrated last week.

Four students, Jack Burton ’22, Tanisha Dunac ’21, Amelia Solomon ’23, and Nate Stewart ’21, narrated the transcriptions of interviews they conducted with peers and adults at Milton. They compiled the narrations into a 30-minute original performance called Keepsakes, which was shared via video. 

Keepsakes are the “things we keep because of the memories they hold within them, because we want to hold onto the parts of other people or times in our lives that we attach to objects,” Solomon said.

Newly elected head monitors Emma Tung ’22 and Jack Burton ’22 took up the mantle as school leaders from outgoing head monitors Eliza Dunn ’21 and Garvin McLaughlin ’21. Every spring, Class II students self-nominate for head monitor. This year, eight candidates participated in a live Zoom Q&A with Upper School students to speak about their goals and ideas for the upcoming school year. Following the Q&A, candidate speeches were released on myMilton for students to view before voting online.

Both Burton and Tung said rebuilding a sense of community on campus is one of their goals. In his speech, Burton said he spoke about “how COVID-19 has been tough for our community, so it’s important for us to come together next year, meet and get to know new people, and bring back the traditions that we love.”

Tung said, “We want to focus on rebuilding our sense of unity as a whole Upper School, and bring back our school spirit because we lost that.”

Tung said another big focus is equity. “Equity in terms of students who want to speak out about unrest in the world,” she said. “Next year, we want to educate our community and make sure students feel comfortable and secure in the environment.”

The difference between a good jazz musician and a great one comes down to one thing, award-winning jazz pianist Aaron Goldberg ’91 told students: “It’s the ability to play and listen at the same time at a really high level.

“It’s an experience you can only have by playing with other people,” he said during a webinar supported by the Melissa Dilworth Gold Visiting Artist fund. “The best jazz musicians can hear everything that’s going on around them and react and interact in the moment. The most important thing you can do to develop that skill is to play with your friends and concentrate more on what they’re doing than what you’re doing.” 

When Heather McGhee ’97 left her dream job to set off on a journey around the country to explore racism and inequality, she was driven by “frustration with nearly 20 years of working to bring more nice things to more people in this country,” she said. “By nice things, I mean universal healthcare; childcare; paid family leave; reliable, modern infrastructure; a real, robust public health system; and well-funded schools in every neighborhood.”

What she discovered was that big needs in society were going unmet and that this “was impacting all of us, not just people of color who are disproportionately among the impoverished and the uninsured, but also white people who are the largest share of the impoverished and uninsured.” But many white people continue to support policies or politics that go against their best interests because of racism and the fear of a rising demographic that is not white, she added.

McGhee discussed her best-selling book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together with alumni, parents, and friends of Milton on a webinar hosted by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations in partnership with the Los Angeles Regional Chapter. Lee Pelton P’17, Emerson College President, served as moderator.

The Nesto Gallery is exhibiting work by alumnus Mikel Glass '81. The show includes several life-size full-length portraits and is titled Parity. It's “a show of contrasts within traditional portraiture–once an honor primarily bestowed upon those of power and...

Before his first meet as an NCAA athlete in 2015, Schuyler Bailar led the Harvard men’s swim team into the natatorium. He was nervous for a number of reasons, he told the Milton community Wednesday.

Bailar was about to be the first openly transgender athlete to compete on a men’s NCAA Division I team—his family and friends were in the stands along with members of the press; the lifelong champion swimmer had never competed as a man before, and he was coming off a nearly two-year break.

“They introduce you in alphabetical order, and my last name beginning with ‘B’ meant that I was first, which also meant that I was all alone out there,” he said. “Everybody had said I couldn’t do it—there was no way a trans guy like me could keep up with, much less beat, other men—so I felt like I had a lot to prove and I was very afraid that I couldn’t prove it. Everything was so new and different”

In a virtual visit coordinated by the Office of Multiculturalism and Community Development, Bailar spoke with students, faculty, staff, and families in the afternoon, followed by breakout Q&A sessions with Milton employees, the Asian Society and the student group GASP (Gender and Sexuality Perspectives), families, and an affinity group for trans and nonbinary students and employees.  

Students Thea Chung ’21 and Oliver Weissleder ’21 recently became published scientists, as their research into how water acidity levels affect organisms’ feeding patterns was featured in the Journal of Emerging Investigators.

Chung and Weissleder completed an experiment as juniors in their Honors Biology class in which they observed the consumption of food by the single-celled protozoans Tetrahymena pyriformis under varied pH levels. The organisms, which live in ponds, lakes, and streams, exist at the bottom of the food chain. 

“The results were really clear. We saw an interesting trend that revealed that the tetrahymena ate less and less as the acidity increased, which is valuable information because this small organism functions as a model in a lot of biological research,” Chung said. “Although it’s so simplistic, it can mimic the biological functions of other, larger organisms.”

Over March break, two student teams participated in the annual RebootHacks competition run by Wayland High School in Massachusetts. The objective of the competition was to design software that aided students with remote learning. Blake Ankner ’23 and Andrew Rodriguez ’23 took home first prize out of more than100 participants. The program they wrote in the programming language Python is called “Summize,” which summarizes transcripts of Zoom meetings to assist students learning asynchronously. 

“The prompt for the whole competition was something along the lines of how we can help with online learning,” says Rodriquez. “Blake and I thought of all the Milton students in different time zones and any students who have to watch long, recorded Zooms. So Summize does a few things. It summarizes the full Zoom class, pulls out key terms, and cuts video clips to match the terms. The teacher can then identify the kids who have to watch the Zoom and they receive an automated email with the summary, terms, and clips.”

Ryan Shue ’23, Sebastian Park ’21, and Aaron Lockhart ’21, made up the other Milton team and they created a web app with a companion Chrome extension called “Focutivity,” which encouraged users to plan out their evenings with daily schedules and kept them from distracting and unrelated websites during those specific time periods. 

Milton faculty gather every year in a Faculty Forum, an opportunity to share ideas and methods with colleagues. This year’s forum, held virtually due to COVID-19, focused on culturally responsive teaching, designing anti-racist curriculum, student agency, flexibility, and equity. 

The overall theme of this year’s forum was the range of teaching experiences during the 2020–2021 school year, said Indu Singh, the Upper School dean of teaching and learning. 

“That could be anything from hybrid teaching to responding to the insurrection on January 6, to having conversations across difference, to technology,” Singh said. “There were a lot of options, and everything was related to what it’s like teaching in this academic year.”

Students gathered virtually on Wednesday for Community Day, during which they attended sessions focused on equity, justice, and anti-racism.

Coordinated by the student-led Self-Governing Association and the Office of Multiculturalism and Community Development, the day offered presentations and discussions on topics including race and politics, gender justice, artists of color, community engagement, environmental racism and justice, deaf culture, activism by athletes, and more. Sessions were led by students and faculty as well as alumni, including Jovonna Jones ’11.

Students on the Community Engagement Board are urging members of the community to take a “polar plunge” in support of athletes with intellectual and physical disabilities between now and spring break, said Andrea Geyling-Moore, director of Community Engagement Programs and Partnerships (CEPP).

The Special Olympics Polar Plunge is an opportunity to raise money and awareness for the Special Olympics of Massachusetts by pledging to take a “plunge” if donors commit to giving. Milton’s plunge is open to interpretation, Geyling-Moore said: Between now and spring break, participants can jump into cold water, do an ice bucket-style challenge, or complete another icy stunt as a pledge for fundraising. To learn more, visit Milton Academy’s Polar Plunge fundraising page.

Writing fiction cannot replace activism, but it can shine a light on problems that demand action, author Lauren Groff told students Wednesday. 

Paraphrasing the poet William Carlos Williams, Groff noted that although literature cannot save lives, it is still crucial to humanity: “Poetry has never saved a life, but men die every day for lack of it,” she said. 

“I do believe that fiction can make one slowly turn one’s eyes to the things that matter,” Groff told students during a virtual reading and Q&A. “And it has, since the inception of fiction as an art form. There is a lot of social progress that has happened because fiction writers have written about what’s important.” 

Three students casually singing together their freshman year have turned into an established trio with more than 43,000 subscribers on their YouTube channel. Henry Wilde ’21 and Conner Hartman ’21 became friends in freshman math class and they often discussed their common interest in music. Although Wilde and Hartman did not consider themselves singers, both knew Dash Evett ’21 was one, and the three decided to perform together at that spring’s Beatnik, an open mic event run by students. 

At the beginning, they focused on singing covers. “After our first Beatnik, we basically would meet during all our free periods, singing in a room in Kellner,” said Wilde. “Over time, we developed a style. We would spend about two months arranging a song, improvising on it.” 

When the pandemic forced everyone to quarantine in their homes, the trio decided to start a YouTube channel as a way for friends and family to hear their music. Hartman says when he loaded up the first video, a cover of “The Misty Mountains Cold” from The Hobbit movie, he typed in their group name as misty., all lowercase with a period at the end, and their official name was born. The video was recorded in a tunnel, which amplified their acoustic voices. Viewership took off after that.

Historian Brenna Wynn Greer spoke about “the perils of symbolic Blackness” and how popular Civil Rights history focuses simplistically on the nonviolent version of Martin Luther King, Jr., rather than the complexities of who he was as a person and an activist. Greer, an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, was this year’s MLK Jr. Day speaker.

Greer said the symbolic King is seen as a kind and gentle Black activist and that, “as a nation, we remain heavily invested in this symbolic King. This is a problem because symbolic King encourages simple and sanitized histories of the Black freedom struggle.”

During the few years before he was assassinated, “King’s criticism of capitalism and his opposition to the Vietnam War made him unpopular not only among U.S. officials but also among Civil Rights activists. This King was a troublemaker, so he was sidelined increasingly as an activist and he was pushed into the shadows as a historical figure,” said Greer. 

Our stories connect us and make us unique, students performing Walk Through This World demonstrated this week. Telling the personal stories of Milton community members, the Project Story performers made connections among the School’s students, faculty, and staff.

Storytelling is especially important right now as people remain distant during the COVID-19 pandemic, said English faculty member Hannah Pulit ’07, who with Performing Arts faculty member Peter Parisi teaches the Project Story: Narrative Journalism and Performance course.

“At a time when many of us are feeling isolated and disconnected, we particularly appreciate the affirmation that stories matter, that they remind us of our shared humanity, and that, though we may feel lonely in our struggles, we are never truly alone,” Pulit said to close the performance.

Senior projects are a Milton tradition providing graduating Class I students with an opportunity to take a deep dive into a topic that interests them, whether they’re serving the community, exploring a favorite class subject further, learning a new skill, shadowing a professional, or creating art.

Planning for the project period—the month of May through the first days of June—has encountered some obstacles during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, leading to an expansion of project offerings, said Academic Dean Heather Sugrue. 

“We wanted to provide some more options and build something that would assume our current pandemic restrictions remain in place,” she said. “So that means that we can’t plan for students having internships or working off-campus. We needed to give some more options.”

The new offerings this year include the choice of more than a dozen seminars coordinated by adults in the Milton community. Topics include creative writing, animation, designing educational games, the historical archeology of Milton, justice and law in the movies, geology, cooking, Latin epigraphy, prize fiction of 2020, race and the war on drugs, military history, the future of schools, and more.  

Three Milton students, Jana Amin ’21, Will Bourell ’23, and Elliot Smith ’22, joined 12 of their peers across the country in creating and producing UnTextbooked, a podcast exploring the real effects of history now and in the future.

“We created UnTextbooked to help address the incomplete narrative found in many history textbooks and to find answers to big questions,” Smith said. “Each of the 15 episodes features one teen podcaster, one book, and one famous historian.”

Smith’s episode, “How a Black teenager and his young lawyer changed the criminal justice system,” features an interview with the historian Matthew Van Meter, author of Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South. Van Meter’s book chronicles the wrongful 1966 arrest of Gary Duncan in Plaquemines, Louisiana and the era’s Civil Rights battles; Duncan’s case, argued by attorney Richard Sobol, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that states must honor requests for jury trials by defendants in criminal cases.

From the violent attack on the United States Capitol to this week’s Inauguration Day, historical moments are unfolding in real time, giving history teachers and their students opportunities to examine current events through a historical lens. 

“It’s essential we address January 6th. Our U.S. History classes are a place where one can grapple with the nuance of the Constitution and the ethics of a democracy,” says Matt Blanton, history faculty member. “The challenge is the events unfolding are a moving target—what was previously understood could be different—it requires being nimble. This is a good time to reiterate the best practices of critical thinking.” 

In response to the events at the U.S. Capitol, the student History Club held a virtual panel last Thursday evening. Five teachers answered questions submitted by students and Jonathan Cao ’21 and Alex Wang ’21 moderated. Questions included whether the U.S. has ever been culturally unified and if there ever was a time in history where America was “great.” One student was curious about what connections police institutions have to white nationalist organizations and the origins of those connections. Another student asked whether there are similarities between today’s American society and periods in the past such as pre-WWII Germany. 

New Math Department Chair LeeAnn Brash joined Milton, along with three other new math teachers, just before the start of this school year. Although it’s been an atypical year, she has spent the fall teaching Honors Calculus and Geometry and getting to know students and fellow faculty members.

How have your first few months at Milton been?
Very good. There are a million things happening with the COVID-19 pandemic that normally wouldn’t be part of the picture, but all things considered, it’s been really great. The Math Department has been incredibly welcoming and supportive, and I’ve had really good support so far from the other department chairs that I’ve met. There are four of us new to the department this year (Brash, Akinade Adeboye, Cory Bhowmik, and Hubert Hwang) and we’re all people of color, which is really cool.

Community Engagement Programs and Partnerships (CEPP) focused on projects aimed at helping others, involving students, staff, and faculty. Although in-person service activities aren’t happening right now, CEPP organizers have found ways to make sure the Milton community can give back. During Hunger Awareness Week in November, for example, student CEPP board members hosted an all-school Zoom session to educate students about food insecurity.

This month, CEPP hosted a gift drive to fulfill the wishes of 50 families supported by the Department of Children and Families, as well as area homeless families through Milton’s partners in the Boston Public Schools. Many student advisory groups together purchased gifts for those in need. In addition, CEPP also collected money for food baskets, which will provide a turkey dinner for 30 families.

Milton students in several humanities classes will join those from six other Massachusetts schools in studying climate change and climate justice through the humanities during this year’s Humanities Workshop.

Teachers from the participating schools decided to focus on climate issues because they permeate many different aspects of life, including economic and racial inequality, human migration, and public health. 

“There is a sense that climate change is just a science problem, which of course is not the case—it’s a human problem,” said Milton faculty member Alisa Braithwaite. “If our climate dies, so do we. We wanted to bring the concepts of humanities disciplines together to create a narrative that helps people to see that climate change is an urgent, human problem, one that we should be learning about and fighting for from every corner of our world.”

Award-winning writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe ’94 spoke with students and alumni about his work, particularly his New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. His talk was part of the Milton in the World webinar series.

Radden Keefe said he knew when he was a Milton student that he wanted to be a writer, but it took many years of rejection letters before he began writing professionally. Today, he is a staff writer at The New Yorker, writing long-form pieces that dive deep into a range of subjects, “from the hunt for the drug lord Chapo Guzman to the tragic personal history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop and the role that the Sackler family and their company Purdue Pharma played in sparking the opioid crisis.” 

He said he looks for topics that have a “strong narrative spine. I want it to be a story about people, often people in conflict. It’s through that lens that I approach the bigger issues.”

The Community Engagement Shoparound (sign-up fair) starts today! It runs virtually through Friday via students’ Campus Groups accounts. Student co-heads Christian Westphal ‘21 and Nina Kathiresan ‘21 say interested students can take a look and sign up on the Google form if they would like to make a weekly commitment. “Visits” with the 20+ partners will all be via Zoom. Some volunteer opportunities include:

A virtual Convocation officially kicked off the 2020–2021 school year on Tuesday, with Milton students joining from all over the world to hear School leaders’ vision for the year. 

The event, a longstanding Milton tradition, provided co-head monitors Eliza Dunn ’21 and Garvin McLaughlin ’21 their first opportunity to formally address the Upper School. Students also heard remarks from Head of School Todd Bland, Upper School Principal David Ball, Director of Spirituality and Community Development Suzanne DeBuhr, Dean of Students José Ruiz, and Director of Equity Vanessa Cohen Gibbons, and introductions from new members of the faculty.

Although it was a summer unlike any other, many students found ways to do community and social justice work, both remotely and in person. Four students, all Community Engagement board leaders, participated in a virtual seven-week program run by the National Network of Schools in Partnership. Nina Kathiresan ’21, Kayla Mathieu ’21, Conner Hartman ’21, and Jaden Thompson ’23 worked on issues including homelessness, food insecurity with students from across the U.S, who were grouped into task forces. Hartman and Mathieu worked together on the same subcommittee called Demographics in Education. 

“We produced the Rezoning Project, which aimed to inform, advocate, and share stories regarding the issues surrounding zoning inequality in public education,” said Hartman. “We were struck by the statistic that, on average, nonwhite districts received about $2,200 less per student than districts that were predominantly white, adding up to $23 billion less overall.” 

Hartman said it was “extremely inspiring working with students from all over the country. Unlike Milton, a lot of the schools represented didn’t have community engagement programs. Hearing their experiences of inequality and powerful examples of civic engagement in communities hundreds of miles away from Milton really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what we can do with our program.”

Milton Academy’s most ambitious campaign in School history, Dare: The Campaign for Milton, concluded on June 30. Dare made a commitment to the people of Milton, with student financial aid and faculty recruitment and retention named as top priorities, along with support for the Milton Fund and campus improvements.

“We launched Dare to put Milton on a firm financial foundation,” Head of School Todd Bland said. “When we began the campaign in 2015, our endowment was two to three times smaller than our peer schools. By growing our endowment, we are making a commitment to investing in our students and faculty today and to securing Milton’s future.”

Eighteen teams ranging in size from one to seven students came together via Zoom to participate in MiltonHacks II, an intramural, student-led hackathon. The hackathon took place over 12 hours on May 24, during which students from different schools built projects that were judged by a panel of Milton alumni. Teams competed in six categories: Most Addictive Game, Most Educational, Most Technical, Most Scalable, Best UX/UI, Best Novice Hack, and Best Overall Hack. 

Most Addictive Game went to Dina-Sara Custo ’22, who built a social-distancing simulator game where the player must avoid others to advance. “The more people that see the good message the game is promoting, the better the outcome will be,” said Custo. 

Oliver Eielson ’21 won Best UX/UI for his app, Busy Beach. Eielsom described BusyBeach as an app that “helps people and governments limit contact and overcrowding at beaches and stop the spread of coronavirus.” He also won the Student Vote award, determined by popular vote at the end of the hackathon.

The School community gathered virtually this morning to celebrate seniors at the Prize Assembly. Awards recognized overall student achievement as well as achievement in the performing arts, visual arts, English, science, math, classics, computer science, modern languages, history, public speaking, student publications, and athletics. 

The Head of School Award honors and thanks certain seniors for their demonstrated spirit of self-sacrifice, community concern, leadership, integrity, fairness, kindliness, and respect for others. Eight students were honored (in photo via zoom): Zaki Ellis M’hammedi Alaoui, Yaneris D’Anique Briggs, Jerry Ducasse, William Conners Livingston, Erinma Adaeze Onyewuchi, Allison Nicole Reilly, Jeanna Yuyang Shaw and Iryna Sobchyshyna. 

Congratulations to all of the prize recipients, including a few junior students. Below is a complete list of awards:

The senior project is a long-treasured tradition at Milton—an opportunity for Class I students to spend the month before Graduation focusing on one topic before presenting their work.

This year, the coronavirus pandemic changed many seniors’ plans for projects, but members of the Class of 2020 still found creative ways to use their time, either by pursuing their projects safely, altering their projects, staying in their regular classes, or dedicating their month to serving the Milton community. In lieu of the senior project fair that traditionally caps off the seniors’ May work, projects were compiled on a website. 

Nine students were selected for a Bisbee Prize by their teachers for outstanding research on their U.S. history papers. Although unable to gather in person for the spring tradition, the history department  recognized students’ impressive work on topics ranging from the 1994 baseball strike to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The Bisbee Prize was established to honor Ethan Wyatt Bisbee, a former history faculty member who retired in 1993 after 40 years of teaching. The Prize was endowed in 2005 through a gift by John Warren, formerly of the history department, and his wife, Laura Warren ’78, former head of Robbins House.

Recipients of the 2020 Bisbee Prize are:

The Milton Speech and Debate teams continue to shine in competitions, which are taking place virtually. Over Memorial Day weekend, students participated in the rescheduled Massachusetts Speech and Debate League (MSDL) State Championship Tournament that featured 30 schools and nearly 500 students competing in live, online speech and debate events. Tyler Tjan ’22 was State Champion in Extemporaneous Speaking and Emily Hong ’21 was State Champion in Radio Broadcasting. Miranda Paiz ’21 and Caitlin Waugh ’20 earned second place in Duo Interpretation, Abby Buonato ’22 earned second place in Play Reading, and Nyla Sams ’20 earned third place in Informative Speaking.

Newly elected head monitors Eliza Dunn ’21 and Garvin McLaughlin ’21 took up the mantle as school leaders from outgoing head monitors Olivia Wang ’20 and Beck Kendig ’20. Historically, head monitor elections are held in May with a School-wide Q&A and speeches in the Athletic and Convocation Center from each candidate. Despite the circumstances of students being home due to the pandemic, Wang and Kendig worked hard to replicate the process. They hosted a live Q&A with the 13 self-nominated candidates over Zoom. The session was recorded so students had the option to watch it at a later time. Then candidates submitted recorded speeches and those were posted so students could watch them before voting online.

A few weeks into Milton’s remote-learning program, math teacher Phil Robson started getting headaches—if the additional time on video calls, email, and creating online instruction plans was affecting him, he figured, students may feel the same way.

To offset the added screen time, Robson instituted “no-screen math” in his precalculus and statistics courses. He offers students a game or activity they can complete entirely off-line.

“There are math games and puzzles they can work on with their parents and siblings, or by themselves,” he said. “I give them different options; they’re not all mandatory, they’re fun.”

Some of Milton’s best student writers and artists gathered virtually on Monday evening for the Laurence S. Persky Memorial Awards. The annual awards are given for the best work appearing in Milton Academy student publications and honors excellence in creative writing, journalism, art, photography, and production.

Guest speaker and alumna Neha Wadekar ’07 spoke to students from Nairobi, Kenya (2 a.m. her time), where she is based as a freelance journalist. She spoke about her non-linear career path and how students can follow their passions and take risks, even in these uncertain times.

“Success comes in many different forms,” said Wadekar. “People who are creative, passionate and flexible are the people who can thrive in any environment. For me, writing is an art. It’s a personal form of freedom and self-expression. It’s a privilege.”

Despite the upheaval of the past two months, Katharine Millet ’00 has worked to create some regular touchpoints for her students. She begins each week with video tutorials explaining what the class will cover and shares helpful resources to guide them.

“They’ve come to expect these weekly orientation videos, and I share resources that they can access on their own time,” she said. “The routine has been helpful.”

Millet teaches two Class IV history courses, Ancient Civilizations and Modern World History. As Milton prepared to go into a remote-learning program, Millet and the other History and Social Sciences faculty members who teach the freshmen classes decided to extend the deadlines on students’ research papers when classes resumed after spring break. Their papers were due today.

Three Milton teams competed in a virtual Independent School League hackathon hosted by Middlesex School. Teams had six hours to collaborate and then develop a working prototype focused on the theme of “creating something that will be beneficial to others.” They presented their projects over Zoom. The winning team was Ben Botvinick ’21, Zack Ankner ’20 and Blake Ankner ’23, who built a fully functional website called Hobbyist  https://hobbyist.fun.

“It’s a simple website, where anyone suffering from quarantine boredom can go to find a hobby,” says Botvinick. “Users fill out a quick form about their goals, interests, and inclinations. Then we give them a suggestion for how to spend their time and some video courses to get them started.”

The student Asian Society (AS) turned missed opportunities into philanthropy this spring, donating all the funds they raised for club programming to COVID-19 relief efforts in Boston.

“It feels empowering to have made a tangible difference, and it’s comforting to know that Asians and Asian-Americans in Boston are receiving aid,” said Tony Wang ’20. “We hope Boston’s many communities will support each other in weathering COVID-19 as well as its economic impacts.”

Making meaningful differences is the mission of Milton’s Community Engagement Programs and Partnerships (CEPP). And this important work continues despite the pandemic, as students and their families, faculty, and staff have found ways to help others. CEPP has updated a list of ways to help local and national organizations. Even the simple act of students writing letters to residents in local nursing homes and assisted living facilities has continued community engagement connections.

Victoria Fawcett ’22, Ellie Mraz ’21, and Sofie Mraz ’23, made masks for residents at the Village of Duxbury, a senior living facility in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Fawcett first reached out to see what the residents needed and then used social media to ask for helping hands for their project. They said they received great support and collected enough material to sew over 250 fabric face masks.

The question was a daunting one: Could there be a way to repair a congenital defect in a child’s heart that would grow with the patient without requiring additional invasive surgeries?

To answer it, Dr. Jeff Karp, this year’s science assembly speaker, and his lab team broke down the problem—the repair would have to be flexible and adhesive, to accommodate the movement and growth of a beating heart and to stay put despite the blood flow. So they looked to nature, investigating how other living things have evolved over time to thrive in similar environments.

“Everything natural that exists today is here because it solved seemingly insurmountable problems,” Karp told Milton students in March. Karp is a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and he has more than 100 issued or pending patents.

For students, the few days before and continuing into the March break were unsettled. John Matters ’22, a talented violinist, was supposed to perform with the Wellesley Symphony after winning a spot in a competition last fall. He was also supposed to tour with Milton’s Chamber Orchestra and continue rehearsals with the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. After everything was canceled, Matters looked for another way to connect musically.

“In any big event, music can bring unique power to people, but how could I provide for the community with music?” Matters asked. Then Music Department Chair Adrian Anantawan shared a video of himself playing Bach in a split-screen video and John said he knew what he wanted to do.

“Although members of the Milton community were unable to meet each other in person, we could still stay in contact and play music together in a special way,” he said. “We could let everyone know that although we are separated physically, we can use music to connect together and stay strong.”

Margot Becker’s ’20 weekly crossword puzzle has become a fun and challenging Friday must-do for many students and adults arounds campus. Individuals and teams of students rush to complete the challenging 15×15 published on the inside back page of The Milton Paper. Becker gives out prizes for a variety of categories and e-mails out the names of everyone who completes the puzzle correctly.

“I wanted it to be that if you send it in and it’s right, you get a reward of some kind, regardless of your speed,” said Becker. “Last week, I started a ‘beautiful completion’ prize for the best looking puzzles (see photos). My whole aim is to encourage everyone to do these, have a good time and get something out of it.”

Becker said she began making crosswords last year on her own, first just sketching some and then making 5×5 puzzles, which are called “minis.” Using a software program called Phil, she progressed to the “midi” size and then to the more difficult 15×15 format, which is the size of The New York Times weekday crossword.

Two visiting Sengalese artists spent Monday morning with students who study French for an in-house field trip. Zeinixx, a graffiti artist and poet, and Karismatik Diksa, a hip-hop producer and rapper, are both Global Artists in Residence at Arts For Humanity Voices in Boston. The event was sponsored by Milton’s Francine L. Bustin Memorial Fund.

The morning began with a screening of compilations from the “Democracy In Dakar” documentary, which showed how the vibrant music and art scene in the Sengalese city inspired a youth voting movement. Then Zeinixx and Diska spoke in French about the work they do and answered students’ questions in both French and English.

Emma Bradley ’20 and Kiran Biddinger ’20 wanted to perform a “complicated” lab experiment for the Honors Biology class they took as juniors. One year later, their findings have been published in a scientific journal.

“It was really difficult to figure out what we were going to do,” Bradley said. “We were in the lab all the time, for weeks straight.”

Their report, “Temperatures of 20°C produce increased net primary production in Chlorella sp.” was accepted by the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a monthly publication that features the work of middle school, high school, and college students. The work must be sponsored by a faculty member—the duo’s sponsor was Science Department Chair Julie Seplaki—and undergo an extensive editing process before it can be published.

The robotics team is on a roll this year, with three robots qualifying for the U.S. Open Robotics Championship in Iowa in April. Under the leadership of team captains Diego Domenig ’20, Avery Miller ’20, and Tony Tao ’20, the team participates in VEX Robotics, which challenges students to design and build robots that compete against others in a small arena where the robots complete certain tasks for points.

Freshman Ryan Shue, who drives one of the robots, says, “It’s great to work with people who have the same interests as you. And it’s a fun way to apply that interest in and knowledge of engineering.”