Tenzin Thargay, RL Class of 2014, has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program award to South Korea in political science from the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Tenzin will conduct his research at Hanyang University’s Center for Energy Governance and Security as part of a project to examine how political party affiliation influences local attitudes on nuclear energy.

On 11 May, Tenzin will graduate from University of Massachusetts Amherst, completing dual degrees in political science and Chinese language and literature, as a Commonwealth College Honors student. He has earned a certificate in public policy, as well as an International Scholars Program certificate. Tenzin has also been named one of ten recipients of this year’s 21st Century Leader Awards, and he will deliver the student address at the University’s commencement ceremony.

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government, designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program operates in more than 160 countries worldwide.

Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 380,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, professionals, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. Fulbrighters address critical global challenges in all areas while building relationships, knowledge, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 59 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 82 who have received Pulitzer Prizes, and 37 who have served as a head of state or government.

Sam Trabucco ’11 was the focus of the New York Times’ April Wordplay feature, “Who Made My Puzzle.” This millennial has already published ten puzzles in the NYT.

Sam is a protégé of crossword maestro David Quarfoot, who taught for a few key years at Roxbury Latin and in that short time planted a hardy seed for future RL puzzle makers. Sam calls his first puzzle—published in Tripod, RL’s student paper—“terrible…a one-off, fun project I might have forgotten about a few weeks later if not for the auspicious introduction of David Quarfoot to my high school’s math department my senior year.” Mr. Quarfoot encouraged Sam to start writing crosswords seriously, directing him to the best puzzle-making software and quality word lists and offering lots of advice.

Sam, a 2015 MIT graduate with degrees in math and computer science, always enjoyed puzzles as a child, especially Scrabble and word games in general. “Paper puzzling” began in earnest for him after he attended his first MIT Mystery Hunt as a high school junior; after that he started solving crosswords regularly. As for their creation, he finds grid construction “a fun and satisfying problem to solve, and theme development/clever cluing to be nice creative outlets.” He also enjoys sharing his puzzles with friends, watching them solve them, and hearing their feedback.

In addition to Sam, Mr. Quarfoot’s RL disciples include Math Department chair John Lieb and then-student Andrew Kingsley ’12 (now a member of the English faculty), both of whom have since had numerous puzzles published in the NYT. Mr. Lieb first revealed his wordplay avocation in 2012 when he teamed up with Mr. Quarfoot to produce an RL-themed crossword for The Newsletter. He had only been constructing them for two years when his first puzzle appeared in the NYT in 2013.

Most recently, Messrs. Lieb and Kingsley collaborated on a puzzle that appeared on Saturday, 28 April. They enjoy their shared interest. “As a duo, we find we work nicely together,” says Mr. Kingsley, “especially since we can pop into each other’s office during free periods and talk shop.” Last summer, they teamed up to create a crossword tournament—Boswords— at Roxbury Latin. The first-of-its-kind event attracted 149 competitors from all over New England. (Mr. Quarfoot provided a challenging championship puzzle for the top three competitors.)

Who knew back in 1645 that John Eliot’s “little nursery” would also become—370-odd years later—a little incubator of master crossword makers?

What: 40th Annual Roxbury Latin Giant Yard Sale Where: The Roxbury Latin School, 101 St. Theresa Ave., West Roxbury When: Saturday, May 5, 9 a.m.–1 p.m., rain or shine.

Mark your calendars for this fun, long-standing community event. Treasures abound for everyone in the school gymnasium, including games and toys, furniture, jewelry, linens, books, boutique items, home décor/holiday, sporting goods, A/V equipment and computers, appliances, and clothing. And don’t miss the best baked goods table around! 

Doors open at 9 a.m. Students will be available to help you carry your newest treasures to your car.

All are welcome. Be sure to stop in this year!  

Jonathan Edwards has, for nearly five decades, built a musical career of uncompromising integrity, delivering songs of passion, insight, and humor. A cornerstone of America’s folk music tradition, Mr. Edwards has traveled the world—the “barefoot troubadour”—performing for legions of fans. On 19 April, Mr. Edwards performed (with shoes on!) in the Smith Theater, as this year’s Andrew Daland ’46 Memorial Concert.

Mr. Edwards, who began performing music at age eight, built a following by playing on Saturday nights in the lobbies of college dorms throughout New England. He soon found himself opening for national acts, including the Allman Brothers Band and B. B. King. In 1971 he recorded his first—eponymously titled—studio album, for which he earned mainstream attention. His song “Sunshine” made its way to the top five on the national charts, earning him a gold record. He has recorded 18 studio albums to date—many critically acclaimed, and many cultural markers for our time.

Vigilant over the years about maintaining his own work-life balance, he advises young, aspiring performers on balancing personal life and career. In 2001, he hosted Cruising America’s Waterways, a PBS documentary series in which he traveled by boat from the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River to Key West. In 2008, a documentary of Mr. Edwards’ life and career titled That’s What Our Life Is was released.

Mr. Edwards prides himself on “taking good care of an audience.” He delivered for an audience of RL boys, faculty and staff, with lyrics accompanied by guitar, piano and harmonica—songs ranging from his 1971 hits “Sunshine” and “Shanty,” to ballads “Emma” and “Don’t Cry Blue,” to a tune off his album Tomorrow’s Child, titled “Gracie,” inspired by his daughter.

The Andrew Daland ’46 Memorial Concert Fund was established by Andrew’s wife, Pamela Worden, and his family and friends, with the purpose of bringing a musical concert to Roxbury Latin boys each year in Mr. Daland’s memory. Since the Fund’s establishment, the school has been privileged to hear guitarist Jason Vieaux; the a cappella group, Cantus; Elijah Rock; Roxbury Latin’s own, violinist Stefan Jackiw, Class of 2003; and last year, Yale’s Whiffenpoofs. The School is grateful for the generosity that fuels this musical experience each year, and we were honored to have Ms. Worden join us for this year’s Daland Concert performance.

On 17 April, seniors in Erin Dromgoole’s Current Events class led students from Classes VI through I, along with members of the faculty and staff, through an informed and thoughtful discussion on issues of gun violence and gun control in the United States. In the aftermath of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, information on gun violence (particularly related to schools) flooded the news. Yet even major and reputable media outlets, at times, got their facts wrong. The goal of this month’s student-led forum was to share both facts and informed opinions, in order to generate a productive discussion on a timely topic.

Seniors Quinn Ebben and Ben Bryant launched the forum, assigned to present two opposing sides of an argument on gun law reform. Quinn cited statistics highlighting the disproportionate number of mass shootings—school shootings, in particular—that take place in the United States, pointing to a distinctive “gun culture” that sets the United States apart from other developed nations. “Although we make up 5% of the world’s population, 31% of mass shooters worldwide are American,” said Quinn. “Per million people, the U.S. leads advanced countries with 29.7 gun murders; the next highest highest rate of gun murders occur in Switzerland, with 7.7 per million people.”

In Ben’s opening remarks, he began by affirming that “mass shootings of any kind are a problem for which our government must find a solution.” Ben maintained that the Second Amendment is a key tenet of the Constitution, and he acknowledged the many challenges associated with an outright ban of guns in the United States. “Today, there are 300 million guns in circulation in the United States,” he shared. “That’s approximately a gun for every man, woman, and child in the country. Even if legislation is passed with the sole focus on banning assault rifles, there are up to 15 million of them in circulation. Plenty of owners would be unwilling to sell back their weapons to the government, making it essentially impossible to eradicate the public supply of assault rifles. Additionally, assault rifles have an average price of $1,000, so even if a buy-back program was successfully instituted, it would cost the government about $15 billion.”

After Ben and Quinn offered opening remarks, seniors Chris Knight and Austin O’Brien summarized the details of two different school shootings—one being the recent Florida shooting, carried out with a legally obtained AR-15 rifle, and the second being one in Maryland, during which the shooter used a handgun. With those details in mind, the audience broke down into five discussion groups, led by students in the Current Events class.

In preparing for the forum, Ms. Dromgoole had her students research the Second Amendment of the Constitution; gun laws at the federal and state level; the differences between certain types of guns—automatic versus semi automatic; and school shootings in the United States and abroad.

This student-led forum was the third event of this format during the 2017-2018 school year. Headmaster Kerry Brennan has encouraged these types of formalized discussions as a way to extend the classroom and broach important topics relevant in the world today. In September, Mr. Brennan and a panel of seniors led a forum on the removal of historically significant and controversial statues and monuments; in November, RL seniors partnered with their counterparts at The Winsor School for a joint forum on immigration and DACA, at which the keynote speaker was immigration law attorney Rachel Casseus, Winsor Class of 2002.

By virtue of his outstanding performance in the 2018 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), Class I’s Ben LaFond has been selected as one of eight high school students who will represent the United States at this summer’s International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) in Prague.

More than 1,700 students from the U.S. and Canada participate yearly in the NACLO, which offers young people an opportunity to experience natural-language processing through a series of linguistic puzzles designed to teach students about the universal features of and differences between languages and to test logic skills. No prior study of languages or linguistics is required. Puzzles include translation problems, number problems, writing systems, calendar systems, formal problems, phonological problems, and computational problems. Contestants will also find themselves deciphering kinship systems, transcribing spoken dialogue, associating sentences with images, and translating unknown languages from scratch.

After two rounds of testing, the top NACLO scorers are sent to represent North America at the IOL. One of twelve International Science Olympiads for high-school students, IOL advertises itself as “the world’s toughest puzzles in language and linguistics.” After four days of training at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Ben will fly to Prague with the USA Red and USA Blue teams to participate over five days in late July in individual and team-based contests, see sights around the city, and mingle with young linguists from 41 countries around the globe.

On Wednesday, 18 April, Roxbury Latin celebrated in Hall the eleven members of Class I whose efforts and accomplishments earned them membership in the Cum Laude Society. The school was honored to welcome as the Cum Laude speaker Dr. Richard Melvoin, who this June retires after 25 years as head of Belmont Hill School. The all-school ceremony honors the life of the mind—affirming that at the heart of a good school is scholarly engagement. The following seniors were inducted into the Cum Laude Society:

Dr. Melvoin began his address with the words of John Phillips (the name behind two other respectable schools): “Though goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous, and…both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”

“Whether you are a member of Cum Laude or not, every one of you have been given an extraordinary education. The question is, of course, what are you going to do with that? My fervent hope is that you will do something which is indeed useful to mankind, something that will make the world better.”

If figuring out just how to do good in the world is daunting, Dr. Melvoin offered good news: Not only are there an infinite number of ways, but it doesn’t matter what you study in preparation: anything can be used for good. He encouraged the boys not to feel pressured into narrowing their academic focus prematurely. But wedding knowledge with goodness can begin right where we are:

“We can and should at our schools ensure open and civil exchange of ideas; we need to make sure all views can be heard, even as we need to find ways to disagree. Indeed, many of us worry that the people in our society are taking in views only from those with whom they already agree. Part of the challenge for you gentlemen is not only to note the danger of knowledge without goodness but also to ensure that a full range of points of knowledge and a full spectrum of ideas can be heard.”

Dr. Melvoin charged his listeners not only to listen to all points of view, but also, if we are to live lives ‘useful to mankind,’ to “identify pollution of language when it comes, call lies what they are, and stop allowing this devolution of the integrity of what news and facts need to be.”

Dr. Melvoin concluded with the words of American writer Marianne Williamson, who wrote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

Dr. Melvoin grew up in Chicago. He holds degrees from Harvard College and the University of Michigan, where he earned his doctorate in history. His teaching career took him to Deerfield Academy, Harvard/Radcliffe Colleges, Mt. Holyoke College, and the University of Michigan. Prior to his Belmont Hill tenure, he returned to Harvard as Assistant Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, and Lecturer in History and Literature. He served as board president of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition from 2003 to 2006, and he recently served as president of The Headmasters Association. Rick’s wife, Bunny, was a beloved member of the faculty here at Roxbury Latin for 12 years, where she taught English and served as Director of College Counseling.See photos here.

On 6 April, seniors Joe Nero and Andrew Steinberg traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the United States team competing at the 2018 World Individual Debate and Public Speaking Championships (WIDSPC). During the five-day tournament, which includes 130 students from around the word, speakers compete in four events: Impromptu Speaking, Parliamentary Debate, Interpretive Reading, and either Persuasive or After Dinner Speaking. Scores from each category are combined to determine the overall World Champion. Joe reached the finals in After Dinner Speaking, and Andrew was one of four contestants to reach the finals in three events (Persuasive Speaking, Impromptu Speaking, and Interpretive Reading). Andrew advanced to the grand final in Impromptu Speaking and was recognized as the tournament’s second place speaker overall.

The 130 WIDPSC competitors represent some of the top high school debaters and public speakers from 12 countries on five continents. Many had to win in regional or national tournament in their home country to qualify, as Andrew did by winning the top speaker award at the St. Paul’s Cross Examination Debate in November. Others qualified through their performance at an international competition, such as the International Independent Schools Public Speaking Competition (IISPSC), as Joe did in October.

WIDPSC describes its mission as being “aligned with the ideals of excellence, identity, and the art of expression—the ability to communicate and gain recognition and respect for one’s ideas and opinions. It targets tomorrow’s leaders—students in a global market who must learn and collaborate with peers from diverse schools, cultural backgrounds and countries.” 

“Andrew’s second place finish is the highest that an RL student has placed at Worlds in the 20 years that I have been at the school,” notes Mr. Stewart Thomsen, history department chair and the team’s faculty advisor. “Most importantly, though, Joe and Andrew’s success at Worlds is a victory for everyone in the program, past and present. It is a tribute to the hard work of these two boys, but it is also a tribute to the RL Debate boys at all levels who listened to Joe and Andrew’s speeches and offered feedback; to the boys from years past who shared what they learned from their own international debate and public speaking experiences; to the RL Debate coaches who teach, guide, and support our boys each year in the RL Debate and Public Speaking Program—Ms. Dromgoole, Dr. Stevens, Dr. Kokotailo, Mr. Hiatt, Ms. Delaney, Dr. Guerra, and Mr. Heaton; and to the RL parents who support our boys in myriad ways, including Robyn Steinberg who chaperoned Joe and Andrew so that an RL teacher would not miss a week of teaching, coaching, and advising. The boys’ success is a victory for all of us.”

Roxbury Latin hosted its annual A Cappella Fest on Friday, 6 April, at 7:30 pm in the Smith Theater. The biggest show of the year for the Latonics, A Cappella Fest 2018 included guest performances by the Yale SOBs (with Ben Kieff ’16), Wellesley High School’s Inchordination, and Dover-Sherborn’s DS Al Coda. As always, Nate Piper and Rob Opdycke appeared with Mr. Opdycke’s group Similar Jones. See photos here.

Collaboration and originality characterized the performances of eleven student musicians in Hall on 10 April. The Tuesday morning performances began with a cello ensemble—Eric Zaks II, Raphael Deykin II, Justin Shaw VI, Cameron Estrada III. Two piano solos (Chris Zhu III, Beethoven, and Milan Rosen II, Debussy) were followed by a string duo (Alex Yin V, violin; Eric Zaks II, cello) and an original piano composition for four hands by Jonathan Weiss III, performed by Weiss and Dylan Zhou I. Ben Lawlor I sang his own original composition while accompanying himself on the piano. Senior Marc deFontnouvelle wrapped up the recital with a bluegrass song and some master mandolin playing. (See photos here)Music has a way of changing the light on the day, and that morning seemed brighter and warmer as we prepared to begin our various school day tasks. Meanwhile, these eleven students were already well into their day—and at the top of their game.