Communication Office

It’s National Punctuation Day, and this sentence is missing its marks:

I learned heed this warning future employees how bosses who are desperate to fill positions convince staff who have expressed no interest in those positions to do the job anyway

The sentence is part of a past sophomore English test, challenging Milton students to insert the correct symbols that create the appropriate pauses and attribution in a long paragraph, without under- or over-punctuating. It’s deceptively simple, but those with a heavy hand may be surprised to learn that the sentence is missing just one comma and two em dashes: “I learned—heed this warning, future employees—how bosses who are desperate to fill positions convince staff who have expressed no interest in those positions to do the job anyway.”

Five students crowd around a table and take out their journals and origami works-in-progress, some simple and some more elaborate. This is Mathematics and Art, a new half course taught by math faculty member Anne Kaufman.

In this first unit of the semester, Ms. Kaufman is using Dr. Robert Lang’s website and TED talk on math and the magic of origami as a jumping-off point. “Figuring out the folding process allows students to do things they couldn’t imagine doing before. And seeing the bones of shapes has been an interesting exercise,” she says.

Students use Dr. Lang’s TreeMaker software as they progress to more sophisticated shapes. Today, each student chooses an animal from images of “taxidermy origami,” 3D images of animal heads folded out of one piece of paper. First, they must sketch out a stick figure of the base before figuring out the crease patterns.

When Benjamin Botvinick ’21 and Zack Ankner ’20 traveled to Montreal for McGill University’s McHacks hackathon last year, they knew their competition was strong.

“We went in knowing we wanted to come up with something good and be really competitive, but we were going up against students from MIT, Harvard, and these other great universities,” Zack says.

To their surprise, their project SurfChat, a Google extension that allows people to chat with other visitors using the same website in real time, earned them an Amazon award and the boys offers to intern at the commerce giant. They couldn’t accept the offer, though—they’re too young.

At the opening of Convocation, a formal School tradition marking the beginning of each academic year, Head of School Todd Bland welcomed everyone and encouraged students to “listen to your own voice to guide you in learning and in life.”

Messages from Upper School Principal David Ball and Class I co-head monitors, Olivia Wang and Beck Kendig, were other highlights of the ceremony. Mr. Ball spoke about finding moments of joy, humility and generosity in life. He also introduced new faculty members and presented Olivia and Beck with the James S. Willis Jr. Memorial Award.

Both Olivia and Beck offered specific, humorous, and poignant advice to new students as well as returning ones. Olivia referred each class to a summer pop song where the lyrics fit the feel of each year. Beck introduced the year’s theme as a simple encouragement for students to be welcoming to each other and “Just say hi.”