In a year when feelings can be all consuming, the 9th grade curriculum gently and intentionally directs you towards objectivity. In the sciences and arts, we encourage you to practice close, accurate observation and clear recollection in various contexts. This innovative approach addresses the need to reconcile the world’s complexities while making sense of your own feelings.

As a sophomore, you look for your place in the world and ponder how you fit into it. You seek an understanding of process, of how things emerge, grow, and change. 

Our curriculum addresses such processes through the study of subjects such as development of language, inorganic chemistry, embryology, and ancient history, all taught in our innovative three and four week-long intensive block format.  As the year progresses, we encourage you to move beyond black-and-white thinking to more balanced, inclusive thinking. You can see both sides of an argument and develop flexibility of thought and discourse through debate. It is an important sign of intellectual maturity to argue in favor of a proposition one does not actually support.

As a junior, with a growing capacity for self-reflection and self-knowledge, your search for identity continues with a new focus on existential questions.

The theme of the junior year is the quest and the inner journey. Juniors study Shakespeare and the Renaissance. You learn to live with open-ended questions and begin the long path towards answers that may not be what you expect. This is a time of strong idealism.

As a senior, you strive to envision your own emerging place in the world, grappling with questions of identity and purpose. You have a new consciousness of yourself and of others. You connect with world events in a way you could not when you were younger. You imagine yourself as an active participant in the world and think deeply about how this might look.