What is a virus? How do viruses behave? Why is this one—which has disrupted life on a global scale—so pernicious? How, exactly, is this microscopic, infectious agent causing a pandemic the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in 100 years? And how do we stop it?

On September 10, Roxbury Latin virtually welcomed Dr. Nahid Bhadelia to answer some of these questions, as our first Hall speaker of the year. Dr. Bhadelia is an infectious disease physician; an associate professor at the Institute of Human Security at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; and the director of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston University School of Medicine. She serves on national and interagency groups focused on medical countermeasures—the intersection between public health preparedness, research, and clinical care for emerging pathogens. Her research focuses on identification of safe and effective clinical interventions and infection control measures.

In Hall, Dr. Bhadelia shared with students and faculty the science of COVID-19, and of viruses in general. She broke COVID-19 down to the cellular level, so that all of us could better understand the biological facts and intricacies of our current moment. She spoke about Zoonoses (infections that jump from animals to humans), the SARS family of viruses, and the many reasons that there exists increasing risk of emergence and spread of infectious diseases—climate change, population increase, globalization of trade, and travel. As we are all inundated with COVID news and updates, Thursday’s Hall was a helpful moment for us all to be educated about, or reminded of, the medical reality of this outbreak and the ways in which we can help to control and limit its spread.

During the West African Ebola epidemic, Dr. Bhadelia served as a clinician in several Ebola treatment units, working with the World Health Organization and Partners in Health. She currently serves as the clinical lead for a joint US-Ugandan effort to combat viral hemorrhagic fevers in Uganda at the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. She has served as a subject matter expert to the CDC; the Department of Defense; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and the World Bank. She is a regular medical contributor on MSNBC and was featured this spring on the PBS NOVA program “Decoding COVID-19.”

On September 17 we will welcome Dr. Galit Alter, Professor of Medicine at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, who will continue the conversation about COVID-19 in a Part II Hall, focused on immunology and vaccines.

View the entirety of Dr. Bhadelia’s Hall presentation.

After months of planning and preparing, Roxbury Latin opened the fall term of the school’s 376th school year on Monday, August 31. This year’s opening was not typical: Headmaster Brennan delivered his address to a largely empty Rousmaniere Hall. There was no all-school handshake—only hope for one in the future. No boys infused the hallways and classrooms with an energetic buzz. However, faculty were on campus and in classrooms—dressed in their first-day best—and students attended Hall, classes, and homeroom remotely anticipating their physical return to these spaces. On September 1, boys will return physically to campus as RL commences this school year with a cohort system; the student body, split into Cohort A and Cohort B, will alternate weeks spent on campus and weeks spent learning from home, in order to de-densify campus spaces each day. Boys in Cohort A will descend upon the campus tomorrow, using particular entrances assigned by class and remaining largely with their campus “neighborhoods.”

In Hall, Mr. Brennan welcomed new members of the RL community—students, faculty, and staff—and focused on the meaning of the word community, and on the rights and responsibilities we should all take seriously as being part of one.

“Often people use this term to describe a geographical and political concept—a city, a town, a neighborhood,” Mr. Brennan began. “However… a community is also a group of people who agree to certain concepts of what it means to live, to live well, to live peacefully and productively together. One person has a stake in another person’s life. Because a community often suggests a relatively intimate group of people, they tend to know each other. And even if literally they don’t know each other, they know each other based on presumptions that can be made within the community about a basic standard of values, mutuality, and care.” Sharing personal stories of community in action, and communities moved to action—especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the wake of the killing of George Floyd—Mr. Brennan talked about the ways in which we’re all having to re-imagine how we live in community these days.

“In considering what it takes to be a valuable member of a community, we ought to imagine seizing opportunities for generosity, kindness, or defense of another. In our school, to my mind—if done well—the quintessence of community, we often treat each other as brothers and sisters, as lovable neighbors, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we intentionally are selfish or self-absorbed or vindictive… or we fail to act, fail to intervene when we should.

“In late July, Congressman John Lewis died. He had done amazing things in his life. He was kind, gentle, persevering, and principled. He was someone whom everyone loved and admired. It was not just, however, because he was kind that he was looked up to. It was because he acted. He lived his beliefs… His example begs the question, ‘What will you do?’”

Finally, Mr. Brennan reminded students, faculty, and staff that, as we begin this school year—with new health and safety protocols in place—we are dependent on one another in an even greater way than we were before. He urged everyone watching “to adhere to the guidelines, to focus, to care, to sacrifice, to do something. In your actions and your words, help all of us to create anew a community that is not only brimming with friendship and love, but that acknowledges that what we do and how we do it can indeed be a matter of life and death. Please do your best… When all is said and done, when we look back on this era, when we remember the 375th and 376th years of the school’s storied history, let’s make sure that others will say that because of all of us, because of this glistening community, because of who we are and what we will do that this was one of RL’s finest hours.”

View the entirety of this year’s Opening of Fall Term Hall.

Learn more about Roxbury Latin’s Fall 2020 Reopening Plans.

This May, the National Merit Scholarship Program announced its selection of 2,500 scholarship winners, chosen from a pool of 15,000 talented high school seniors across the country. These members of the Class of 2020 will each receive $2,500 scholarships toward college next year. Among these outstanding students are four Roxbury Latin seniors: Avi Attar, David LaFond, Ian Richardson, and Chris Zhu.

The National Merit Scholarship Program selection process began in October 2018, when more than 1.5 million juniors took the PSAT, or the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT). This initial screen identified 16,000 Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of the nation’s highest scores. Roxbury Latin had seven semifinalists in a class of 52. Eighteen additional RL boys received commendations, meaning their scores placed them in about the top 4% of all test-takers. All seven of RL’s semifinalists moved on to become finalists, of which there were 15,000 nationally. From there, Avi, David, Ian, and Chris were selected from that group after rigorous review of their RL transcripts, standardized test scores, contributions and leadership in school and community activities, essays, and recommendation letters.

It is a great honor to have four National Merit Scholarship winners in one senior class, a result we have not seen in recent memory. Our National Merit Scholarship winners, in fact, comprise almost 8% of our senior class. Congratulations to all 25 boys who received recognition from the National Merit Scholarship Program this year.

Since 2012, the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education has partnered with independent schools throughout the northeast to allow early career teachers to earn a master’s in education while simultaneously gaining classroom experience. In 2017, Roxbury Latin became one of ten schools in the program’s first day school cohort. Since that time, RL has welcomed two new Penn Fellows to the faculty each year. These Fellows spend their two years with our community filling many roles at school; they are gifted generalists, much like our boys. They are primarily graduate students—taking online courses, attending weekly classes led by on-site administrators, and traveling to four weekend or week-long sessions annually at Penn and other partner schools. But because the Penn program is grounded in both theory and practice, fellows are simultaneously coaching, advising, and, most importantly, teaching their own classes at RL.

This month, RL’s two second-year Fellows, Visaury Moreta and Chris Brown, concluded their degree program in a very unusual way. Like the rest of us, Visaury and Chris are finishing the school year virtually, presenting for their Penn program in recorded videos and teaching their RL courses—Spanish 1 and 2 for Visaury, and AP Economics and History 7 for Chris—via Zoom. Chris’s lacrosse season has been canceled, and Visaury’s debaters have missed their final competitions of the year. Despite these challenging circumstances, however, Visaury and Chris were able to complete the Penn program’s culminating experience—the in-depth capstone inquiry project—which they presented to both their Penn cohort and the RL faculty last week. 

Visaury’s inquiry project sought to answer the question: How can I build feedback and assessment practices that support students in understanding Spanish grammar? In her first years as a teacher, Visaury found that her go-to assessment practice—traditional “red marks” on assignments large and small—left students so overwhelmed with feedback that they actually missed her key points. Through observations, journaling, surveys, and compositions, Visaury established a better practice for her students using what education researchers call the “draft-plus” method, or the “Feedback Loop.” Visaury would not grade students on their first draft of work. Instead, she would use the opportunity for feedback and allow students to ask questions about that feedback in class before redoing the assignment. That final assignment received a grade. Visaury’s research saw incredible results, particularly in how her students felt about feedback. At the beginning of the year, the majority of her students associated the word “feedback” with negative emotions like nervousness or anxiety. By the end of the year, their attitudes had completely transformed; most students were using words like hopeful, determined, or relieved to describe how they felt about feedback. (View Visuary’s video presentation.)

In his own inquiry project, Chris explored how humor might be a powerful catalyst for an effective learning environment. In his Class I AP Economics course, Chris built humor into his daily lesson plans and assignments, made an effort to engage in unplanned humor, and deliberately encouraged student humor on a daily basis. Through journaling, focus groups, surveys, and student work, Chris found that humor made many concepts easier for his students to retain, and it relieved stress in a class that students found challenging. He also found that his humor made students feel as though they could relate to Chris on a personal level, allowing him to be more effective in his work with them. Chris concluded that while each class and teacher is different, there is no one in our community that cannot employ humor to help students achieve their goals. (View Chris’s video presentation.)

With their final projects behind them and the RL school year winding down, Visaury and Chris look forward to next year. Visaury is excited to be joining the Spanish faculty at St. Mark’s School in Southborough. At Roxbury Latin we are thrilled that Chris will be staying on with us next year, as AP Economics teacher, coach, and full-time member of the history department.

For several weeks each spring, Class V students convene—led by Mr. Thomsen and Mr. Heaton of the history department, and Headmaster Brennan—for a series of lessons in what it means to be responsible, engaged, informed citizens of the United States. This Civics mini-course, conceived of by Mr. Brennan, has been a hallmark of the Class V program since 2011. It provides students early in their RL tenure with a lesson on the inner workings of the United States government, their own civil rights and responsibilities, and the many forms service to country and commonwealth can take.

Though this spring forced all coursework to be done remotely, the students didn’t miss a beat as they delved into topics such as the American election process, our branches of government, and immigration and naturalization. After introductions into what the course would entail, students had a taste of the experience that individuals seeking United States citizenship face, as they attempted to answer questions posed in the American citizenship test. In the following class meeting, boys heard from three members of the RL community who were born outside of the United States and became U.S. citizens by way of three very different paths. Ousmane Diop, chair of the modern language department, has been a member of the RL faculty since 1994. Born in Senegal, West Africa, Mr. Diop came to the U.S. originally as a student at Phillips Andover. Emose Piou—mother of RL alumni Hansenard ‘14 and Noah ‘16—grew up in Haiti with 12 brothers and sisters, and came to America as a young adult to pursue higher education, enrolling at New York Technical College to study engineering. Finally, José Flores of Class III was born in Guatemala City, where he was adopted at age three by his mother and father, who were born in the U.S. Virgin Islands and in El Salvador, respectively. José gained full U.S. citizenship in 2011 but only received his official documents and citizenship ceremony last year. These three individuals shared not only their personal stories, but also similar challenges, such as overcoming language barriers, facing discrimination, and maintaining their own cultures while also trying to acclimate to America.

During a class on the judicial system, and the critical role of jurors, Mrs. Berg, Mr. Lieb, and Mr. Heaton spoke about their experiences serving as jurors on both civil and criminal trials. In a class session dedicated to military service, Captain Colin Murphy, Class of 2005, spoke to students about his active duty service in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2011 to 2015. Colin gave an overview of the structure of the U.S. Military; the extensive training that is required to join; the reality of active duty; and the many paths that veterans take after service. Finally, since a central element of democracy is being informed, the boys learned about the important role of the media and how they can be discerning news consumers.

It is fitting that the Class V Civics course relies on so many teachers. To rely on the collective efforts of many individuals is in itself a lesson on the American government and civic responsibility.