"Hey, this is kind of interesting."

Mr. Kevin Quick, a science department faculty member and assistant on our summer Peccary Trip, handed me a fist-sized rock cobble with a piece of fossil bone poking out of the side.

"Where did you find that?!" I exclaimed. Seeing a distinctive dimpled texture on the bone's surface, I was definitely intrigued. Not only was it from a crocodile, it was a piece of crocodile skull! A very rare find, indeed.

This is just one snapshot of a day collecting fossils in southern Utah. Every summer, Alf Museum staff, Webb faculty, students, and volunteers make the trek from Claremont to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. As one of the last, great, unexplored dinosaur deposits in the continental United States, a major find could turn up at any time. In 2004, a museum volunteer found the skull of a new species of dinosaur. In 2005, a Webb student discovered the partial skeleton of a previously unknown tyrannosaur. And just a few weeks ago, this non-descript piece of rock added another important dimension to our knowledge of Earth's past.

Although our primary purpose is scientific, these summer Peccary Trips (named after a peccary, or pig, skull found on an early expedition) also offer important life lessons for our Webb students. We have to hike several miles across some of Utah's most remote and rugged terrain just to get to the edge of the fossil beds. This effort isn't purely physical - it also takes a mental toughness to push through to the end. Even the students who have never camped or hiked in such conditions before quickly rise to the challenge. In the pursuit of discovering fossils, students learn perseverance and the importance of teamwork, and this new crocodile find would prove to be a great challenge.

The cobble of rock had a relatively fresh broken surface, so more bone had to be out there somewhere. One of the most basic rules of fossil collecting is to always follow the bone uphill. In this case, the task was daunting. The original find was found at the bottom of a steep 100-foot high slope covered in brush, loose rock, and mud from a recent rainstorm. The fossil could have come from nearly anywhere!

Recruiting a half-dozen students, Mr. Quick started the arduous task of locating the original bone layer. Literally leaving no stone unturned, they spent nearly two hours on that slope. Searching on the last day of the trip, we didn't have a lot of time, so this could be our only chance to find the rest of the specimen.

Finally, Sam Woodward ’12 found it. A thin lens of sandstone, nearly entirely obscured by loose debris, hosted a big chunk of crocodile skull. Sam and Mr. Quick did a fantastic job of carefully exposing the fossil, using small hand tools and special glues to preserve the delicate bone. I let out a brief exclamation of extreme happiness - this could be a major find!

We only had a few hours left before we had to leave the field, not nearly enough time to properly collect the specimen. Furthermore, I could see that the find was potentially large enough that we would need an excavation permit to continue. Sadly, we will have to endure another long lesson in patience as it won’t be until next year when find out just how much of that crocodile is in the hillside. Somewhat reluctantly, we stabilized the specimen and covered the site for the coming winter.

Mr. Quick, the students, and I are all abuzz about our latest find.  How much of the crocodile skull is there? What kind of crocodile is it? Is it a species new to science? After 75 million years, we'll just have to wait one more year to find out.

Those seven little words have been at the heart of my professional soul searching for most of my teaching career. As a secondary school math teacher, that question has come up with such regularity over the years that it prompts not just conversations in the classroom, but with colleagues and parents. It can be found as the topic of teacher workshops and key note addresses at conferences. So, why is it that we expect our children to learn something as abstract and seemingly irrelevant to the ‘real world’ as algebra?

One of the most common responses we give as teachers is that it’s not about the algebra itself, it’s about learning how to think. Now, take a moment and put that statement into context. You are standing in front of a room full of adolescents who have an entire world of other things on their minds. How do you think that statement goes over? They already know how to think, have been doing it ever since they could remember, and besides, there are fries for lunch! Well, we invariably move on and continue the lesson, and don’t really worry about it until the next time it is asked, which is usually not too far down the road.

In actuality, however, this is a pretty good answer. If we were not capable of thinking abstractly when facing a problem or new idea, how far would we have progressed? The ability to think abstractly is something that depends upon brain development, but at the same time, is something that can be learned and practiced. And since we are working with children who are at a stage in their lives where this ability is beginning to flourish for the first time, it can be a truly exciting endeavor. So why aren’t they excited about algebra? And even geometry, which seems to have countless applications, gets a bad rap in high school. I believe it’s all about framing and context. Open any high school algebra textbook and it becomes immediately obvious. x’s and y’s and countless exercises that are about as exciting as watching grass grow. And hidden away, at the end of each problem section, are a couple of word problems. Problems numbered in the high 20’s or 30’s. The section that students pray we overlook when assigning the night’s homework. “Just let me grind through the practice exercises, which are just like the examples we did in class, and I can go to sleep.” This begs the question, how much abstract thinking does this entail? What happened to the excitement of discovery? What happened to the answer to ‘Why do we have to learn this?’

If our goal is to help our students learn how to think, then those challenging ‘word problems’ need to come first. It is obvious that there is no way we can teach them to solve every problem they will face in life, so teaching them how to think creatively and abstractly when faced with a new problem is the key to their future success. They need to be able to try out different approaches, discover the ones that don’t work, as well as the ones that do. They must learn to recognize when they don’t have the tool they need to solve a problem and thus must find a new one. Learning then has a context, and there is a reason for developing a new skill. This is at the heart of what we often refer to as becoming a life-long learner, then the door is open for them to experience the joy that ultimately comes from learning for learning’s sake. This is what is at the heart of The Webb Schools Mathematics Department’s phased introduction of Problem Based Learning (PBL) in our mathematics classrooms.

We are in the process of transforming the environment in our classrooms into one which is more student-centered, more focused on discovery, and promotes discussion and presentation of each student’s ideas. The content of our math courses is not changing, however, the pedagogy behind delivering that content is. By using very carefully constructed and sequenced problems that allow the students to discover the skills and concepts found in a traditional algebra/geometry curriculum, we give them a context for their learning. At the heart of the process is nurturing their ability to independently solve challenging problems that they may not have been faced with before. We pose written problems that will ultimately require them to apply a skill they have previously developed, or will guide them in the discovery of a new skill. We then ask them to present their ideas to their classmates. They must present an argument they believe leads to a solution, and to justify it. On the other hand, they may have struggled with a particularly challenging problem and not been able to find the solution. In that case, we expect them to explain their difficulty, and see if any of their peers may have an insight that would help them. In this way we are fostering habits of mind that we all use in our day to day lives as adults, while delivering the content that we know they will need for future studies. As they become aware of their own growth as independent learners and problem solvers, the answer to the question “Why are we learning this?” becomes obvious.

As educators, this approach to teaching mathematics puts us in the position of being a mentor and coach. We pose the questions, and then step back and guide rather than direct. We allow the students to take the center stage. It is their voices you will predominantly hear in our classrooms. At the same time, somewhat behind the scenes, we are in a position to nudge the discussion if necessary. We are there to ensure that the content is recognized and that the different strands that flow though our curriculum are pulled together at the appropriate times. It is critical that the teacher recognize when to step in, and when to let the students take the lead. In this way, we encourage an environment where our students are engaged, collaborating, discovering, and developing habits of mind that will foster success, not just across Webb’s curriculum, but throughout their lives.

For over 70 years, students from Webb have been trekking into the Mojave Desert in search of the long-vanished inhabitants of southern California. In the early days, small groups of boys made the trip with Ray Alf. Now, it's an important part of the freshman year experience, for every single Webbie.

The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, a nationally accredited and globally known research institution on the Webb campus, is devoted to education and research. Some students come to Webb knowing that they want to be involved in the museum program. But, many know very little about paleontology or why a high school would have a museum. Weekend field trips (known as peccary trips) are a fantastic way to communicate this - and also a way to give kids a taste of real-life science.

On two weekends every year (one for freshman boys and one for freshman girls), students explore the desert near Barstow, California, under the guidance of Webb faculty and Alf Museum paleontologists. As one of those paleontologists, and as an advisor to freshman boys, I can attest that this experience is rewarding for everyone involved. Many of the students are a little anxious prior to the trip. Will it be hot? Will I find anything? Are there snakes? Some students have never camped out under the stars. Although fossils are the focus of the trip, it's also about stepping outside one's comfort zone and trying something new.

A typical freshman trip involves setting up camp and then hiking for a mile or two out to Webb's traditional fossil collecting localities. The students learn how to distinguish between fossil bone and rock (it gets easier with practice), as well as which specimens are collectible for research purposes and which can be left for the next person to find. The fascinating history of southern California is at center stage. Fifteen million years ago, the Mojave Desert was covered by scrubs and grass, and was the home of diminutive horses, giant camels, elephants, and bear-dogs. Horses are by far the most common finds - a little patience and luck can turn up some excellent specimens. One student recently found a perfectly preserved horse hoof, and another a horse jaw. These fossils, a priceless record of our planet's history, are collected and brought back to the museum for study by Webb students as well as outside researchers.

After a day out in the field, it's time to head back to camp. Some of the students help prepare supper (burgers on the grill), followed by s’mores on the campfire and a short talk about Webb's history of fossil collecting. Steve Sittig, one of Webb's science teachers, often brings out some telescopes. Following hours of looking down at the ground for fossils, it's only appropriate to look up to the heavens. With clear skies and little light pollution, sights like Saturn can be spectacular. We sleep out under the stars, waking early the next morning for breakfast, a few more hours of fossil collecting, and then the drive back to campus.

There is something for every student on this trip. Some confirm their dedication to paleontology and Webb's museum program and go on to immerse themselves in the museum's paleontology, museum studies, and research courses. Others have an enjoyable weekend in the outdoors and return with a few stories to tell their friends. As a paleontologist and teacher, its fun to see a student get "turned on" to science. Many kids never know how much they're going to enjoy the trip, until they give it a try. Maybe it was something about the hikes, or the camaraderie, or a particularly well-preserved fossil. No matter what the cause, these students are hooked, and keep coming back for more. This is what the museum program at Webb is really about - a unique, challenging experience that changes the way our students look at the world.

CNN, NPR, and numerous other news and media sources just ran stories about the incredible difficulty of getting admitted this year into the top Ivy league colleges and places like Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, U of Chicago, Northwestern, and junior Ivy schools like Wesleyan, Haverford, Davidson, Wellesley, Barnard, and The Claremont Colleges (see list below). Most of these super selective colleges will be announcing record low admit rates, some of the Ivy schools and Stanford with admit rates at or below 7%. It will be the most selective year in college admissions for the top tier of colleges and universities in the US!

Despite the incredible odds against most students all over the country and the world, we at The Webb Schools can once again enjoy some of the best acceptances offers in history, especially with the top tier schools mentioned. Few high schools in America will be able to claim one or two acceptances to these colleges among their entire graduating class, yet we are very proud of our seniors and happy to announce that the Class of 2010 has earned a record number of admit offers from almost every major Ivy League College and University along with their peer group of other outstanding schools. Over 80% of the senior class has been admitted to a college classified in the top tier of schools (by U.S. News ratings) and 100% of the class has been admitted to a national ranked four-year selective college or university – most have multiple offers and will have a hard time turning down some of these amazing schools in order to just go to one. A sample of these schools includes:

Many of these places have offered admit letters to more than one Webb/Vivian Webb student. I want to congratulate not only the students for these amazing results, but also the outstanding college guidance team, including our Director of College Guidance Hector Martinez, his assistant Sandy Ostrow, and our faculty writers of Anne Graybeal, Donald Ball, Jess Chaintreuil, and David Fitzgerald.

Click here to read the college admission and matriculation reports from previous years.

When most people think of a paleontology museum, they imagine displays of dinosaur skeletons with some nice, shiny signage. But, where does the information on these signs come from? Quite simply: paleontologists, the scientists who study life of the past.

Judging by portrayals on television, science requires test tubes, lab coats, and multi-million dollar equipment. Not so in paleontology! Some of the most important information comes from just looking at a fossil, taking measurements, and comparing with other specimens. On top of this, it doesn't take long to reach the limits of our knowledge. There is so much we don't know, and every fossil has the potential to add important new information. For this reason, *anyone* - whether a high school student, professional paleontologist, or amateur collector - can make a major intellectual contribution.

As one of two paleontologists at the Alf Museum (the other is Dr. Don Lofgren), it's a real joy to involve Webb students in every phase of research. No other high school on Earth has a working paleontology museum, and it offers some absolutely unique opportunities. Students are there from the moment of discovery, right up until publication. They have helped to describe new species, presented their work at professional conferences, and collaborated with world-renowned paleontologists from other institutions.

As one example, Webb students Kit Clark ’04 and Ben Scherer ’02 helped describe the first discovery in Utah of a small mammal called Stygimys. This work (co-authored with Don Lofgren and paleontologist Barbara Standhardt) was published in Journal of Mammalian Evolution. Inspired in part by this experience, Kit is now finishing up his graduate studies in geology at University of Nebraska.

Another student, Gy-Su Kim '10, worked on identifying small carnivorous dinosaur teeth that she and other Webb students collected on a summer trip to southern Utah. Gy-Su presented the work at a professional conference, and consequently was invited as a co-author on a book chapter (to be published next year, if all goes well). Among her fossil identifications was the first possible bird tooth known from the state of Utah - a very rare find!

Our students are working on a diverse array of topics - from dinosaur eggshell to elephant jaws to possible fossilized owl pellets. Because paleontology is such a small field, some of our students have literally become the world experts on their topic of study! It's a lot of fun to see their faces when they come to this realization… when they understand that the knowledge they've discovered isn't in any textbook. It's not even in the professional journals. They are the first human beings to make that discovery. How cool is that? Anyone can do science!

Language = Mind + Heart

I’m often asked by students and adults about how to best learn a foreign language. Frankly, at the beginning, there are as many ways as there are individuals. One of my favorite sayings in Spanish is “cada persona es un mundo” (each person is their own world).  It’s easy to find plenty of books, computer programs, etc. that tempt us to invest our money in a guaranteed, speedy approach to learning a language. “Chinese in thirty days!” or “How an Iowa farm boy learned Italian to impress an Italian model” were the titles of advertisements I saw in a recent in-flight magazine. Well, alright…but, huh?! I’m sure after thirty days you’ll know more Chinese or Italian than when you started, but what happens next? In fact, most language learning materials are dedicated to helping people just get their feet wet in the language. It’s the idyllic honeymoon period, when the learning curve is steep and you have everyone convinced that you’ll be fluent in no time.

                                                                                                        
Then hits the reality of the intermediate stage, a challenging period that appears to be interminable. Doubt about whether you will ever improve begins to gnaw at you, tempting you to rationalize your incapacity to learn a foreign language.  It’s during this broad, amorphous phase where the path to language learning takes a two-fold approach: the mind and the heart. No longer children, we tend to find explanations for patterns in a language helpful while learning, hence the mind. The mature mind craves a logical recipe, vocabulary lists, word-order rules, making sense of stuff and figuring things out in general. Left-brains thrive on this aspect of language, devouring grammar and verb conjugations at every opportunity. But is this really sufficient to prevent boredom/exhaustion and to sustain language learning over the long haul? And what keeps us from forgetting everything after a few months? Learning a foreign language is a long, winding road, a jigsaw puzzle that takes considerable dedication and effort to assemble before we start making the associations and begin to see the beautiful whole develop.

                                                                                                                                                                      
At this point, you’re probably wondering if my intention is to convince you to give up before starting. Actually, the water that will sustain you during your linguistic trek comes from the heart aspect of language learning. As passionate, carbon-based life forms, we need motivation, inspiration, and joy to maintain such lengthy devotion.  Connections of a right-brained nature to the language will keep you churning along without checking your watch, and you’ll lose yourself in the humanity that birthed the miracle of language in the first place. After all, the reason we go to such trouble sustaining communication is to share and connect with other humans. Therefore, find appealing links with the culture. Seek friendships with people from that culture. Travel to the country and/or live with a family while studying abroad. Try new restaurants, or even better, prepare food from that culture. Surround yourself with the music, watch movies, explore the history, poetry, art, etc.  Without even realizing it, you’re feeding your soul by embracing aspects of a different, unique world-view. Now that both your mind and heart are satisfied, you’re truly ready to embark on an adventure of discovery and wonder. Buena suerte!

As an independent school educator of some thirty-plus years and a director of admission at a number of highly-selective independent schools for twenty-two of those years, I must admit that I am becoming increasing concerned about the overuse of the term “gifted child.” Now, as a disclaimer, I believe profoundly that every child has a gift for something and that those gifts are often overlooked in large or small schools. And no, I am not talking about that hard-working A’s-all-the-time, terrific test taker. We all have them; we all identify them easily; and, of course, we love them as much as we love all our students. But, I am seeing so many applicants whose resumes list Gifted and Talent Education (GATE) programs or participation in the one of the many programs designed for the “high-performing student” that I am beginning to wonder who is not “gifted.” Many of these students are happily spending their summers studying forensics, psychology, writing, economics and I applaud those interests.  It sure has to be better than spending the summer locked in front of the newest version of World of Warcraft. But there are so many of these programs and the vast majority use your typical battery of standardized tests to identify such students; the result of which is that now we have seventh graders taking some version of the SAT and that is implicitly encouraging parents to prepare sixth grade students for the SAT. Oh, to be in the SAT prep business today! And how very sad this is all becoming. Just the other day, I had a young parent ask me if I would accept her child’s SAT results in place of our typical standardized assessment test for admission. “And what grade is she in, may I ask?” “Well, she’s gifted, you know, and she took the SAT in grade 7.” “How do you know she’s ‘gifted’?” “Well, look at her test scores.”

Some years back, I had the privilege of working as the director of admission for a school whose entire focus was the truly exceptional (we call them “highly capable”) learner. I was simply captivated by these remarkable students, for how one captures their attention and imagination goes well beyond what I am seeing in many a school’s classrooms. These are the children that learn in a completely different way from most children. Their minds are working in overdrive and everything seems a world of wonder.  Placed in your standard “I teach you; you learn” environment, they either explicitly rebel or check out. They might see solutions to math problems completely outside the norm. Some have extraordinary individual talents (I am thinking of the boy I took to the National Geographic Geography Bee finals in 2001. He won.); some have extraordinary verbal skills. What they have in common is that they are such uncommon learners and I believe they are among the most misunderstood and poorly served in educational institutions where standardized tests, SAT results, and registration in AP courses are used to determine what many believe defines a “gifted” student.   It is not so.

During my interviews I can pick out the child of which I am writing. I am thinking of a boy - let’s call him Joseph - who sat in my office and could talk about whatever esoteric subject came to mind. During those thirty minutes we explored black holes and the possibility that if the Big Bang means the universe started from nothing, then nothing must be something. We analyzed the meaning of the word “should” and engaged in solving a physics problem of motion. He was a talented animator and designer of computer games but he never played them. His head was full of ideas; his room full of books. On paper?  A “B” student. He didn’t turn in his work as, for many of these children, the homework we demand is pretty much mindless and I would agree. This is not the kind of student who can sit quietly solving the odd-number problems in the back of the algebra text. Most likely, he knows the material without expending much intellectual energy. Answer the questions in the back of chapter four of A Survey of World Literature? I don’t think so. The result? Well, instead of attempting to discern what this student really knows or can demonstrate mastery of, he gets a “C” since 40% of his grade is mindless homework. So, he disappears to the middle of the classroom, unnoticed and certainly forgotten in big schools. He doesn’t bother anyone and is never encouraged except for the rare instance that a special teacher opens her eyes and reaches out. She notes the student who confounds her with his questions that seem to come out of nowhere and whose verbal dexterity can only be matched by his remarkable insights no matter how seemingly inane. I know because I worked with such students like Bert, all of 10 years old, who assisted me on a tour of the school with a father, an engineer. Upon viewing a class where algebraic solutions were scattered across the board (this was fifth grade), the engineer suggested an alternative solution to the problem. “No”, remarked Bert. “That would be wrong. Let me show you why.” He was right. I can still see that father’s eyes. Bert and all his classmates used to call all teachers and administrators by their first name. “Hi, Leo.” It would only work there. I just loved the place because everything was so very different from what I was used to. And we had waiting lists. 

I always worried for these children because after they graduated from grade 8, there really were no schools for them. Yes, of course, there were the schools hyping IB programs or their lists of AP courses and, horror of horrors, universities that purported to “accelerate” these children bypassing any notion that developmentally they were still only fourteen years old. What’s the rush? I wonder. But IB/AP does not necessarily address the needs of the truly exceptional, highly capable learner. There are few schools that are addressing their needs and certainly not in the public sector. The task is left typically to that special teacher of whom I remark; and given the size of their classes and the independence from state mandated standards, I believe many independent schools, particularly boarding schools, are well-suited to address the needs of such students.

Teenagers want to be known, and once known they do remarkable things. Imagine then if that highly capable child who possibly does not understand his talents or gifts – they seem too natural – is identified in a caring community such as we have in boarding schools. The possibilities for that child are enormous. I love seeing these students on my campus and I can tell stories about every one of them. And I can do so because they seem to thrive in the intellectual freedom provided by schools like ours. When you sit around a table with fifteen students and engage in a Socratic dialogue about Robert Frost’s take on the American Dream, or take your students on a field trip to the Utah wilderness to search for a newly identified miniature T. Rex, you open the possibility for such students to reveal themselves.  It is when you let them stretch their minds without the burden of meeting arbitrary rubrics for success that the highly capable child begins to see that the world has meaning for him or her. And when we teachers hear them think, it is something to behold.