From Hilltop to Home

Finally! Spring has arrived in Blairstown! As I read dorm reports from the weekend this morning, the positivity and happiness emanating from them was simply glorious. It seemed most on campus were in good spirits.

The 20th-annual Headmasters’ Societies Games debuted at School Meeting on Monday. Head of School Peter G. Curran officially launched the games before turning the microphone over to Games commissioner, Rod Gerdsen, and co-commissioner, Alex Cullen, as the team banners dramatically descended from the rafters of the Armstrong-Hipkins stage. 

Five hours of singing! Four seniors, three juniors, three sophomores and four freshmen. And five hours of singing! By all of them. This was my experience on the bus ride back from Washington, D.C., where history department chair Jason Beck and I took students as part of our J-term course last week.

As you can imagine, this period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is among the more intense academic periods of the school year. Students are focused on their upcoming signature assessments, their artwork for the annual winter exhibition, the music they need to prepare in short order for Christmas Vespers, and other end-of-semester project work. News is beginning to come from colleges regarding early decision applications, so it is a generally high-stress time for all.

What a weekend that just passed! We enjoyed spectacular fall weather on Saturday afternoon for our game day against the Hun School of Princeton. Each field was filled with student athletes wearing blue and red—the respective team colors—but you couldn’t keep your eyes from being drawn to the orange, yellow, red and green of the fall foliage whenever the competition paused.