It’s a Tuesday afternoon and the students of Arthur Morgan School are having free time. They are skateboarding on the slab, working in the pottery studio, or playing board games in the meeting room. It’s a very different scene from many other middle schools today because one activity is missing: none of these teenagers are […]
It’s my first day of middle school and I am surrounded by strangers. I recognize an old classmate or two from elementary school, but thanks to the alphabetized seating, they are estranged to distant corners of the classroom. Nervously, I look around for a friendly face. A girl to the left of me notices my […]
It’s a cold, crisp February morning. Frost on the grass is just starting to melt under the sun, but I can still see my breath when I exhale. The middle schooler next to me grunts as she awkwardly lifts the maul a foot above her head. She hold its there for a moment trying to […]
At Arthur Morgan School, we believe heavily in Maria Montessori’s vision for education, we strive to make our classes interdisciplinary. In one math class, we integrated our study of linear relationships with the U.S.’s incarceration rates amongst different races. In another, students studied the planets of our solar system while they learned about scale. Many […]
Middle school sometimes gets a bad rap. Dealing with young adolescents’ unpredictable emotions and behaviors is hard. It makes us forget that middle school is also a lot of fun. Learning evolves into something bigger during this age. Instead of just memorizing multiplication tables or vocabulary terms, middle schoolers also want to ponder larger concepts. […]
Every spring the middle schoolers of Arthur Morgan School embark on 18 day long field trips. The trips are the culmination of a five week academic unit in which the students have learned about a specific topic. Sometimes these topics are science based. Other times they are social studies or art based. This year we are […]
A question I get a lot is what type of student comes to Arthur Morgan School. We get students from all over. A lot of middle schoolers seek us out because they want school to be something more than sitting at a desk. Others choose us because they want a school where they can openly […]
It’s just after dinner and there is a large pile of dishes in the sink. Your teenager beside you is quickly scarfing the last remnants of food from their plate and making sideway glances at their phone. You are exhausted from your day and want nothing more than to relax, but you have a difficult […]
Two years ago while on an 18 days field trip to Florida, a group of our students visited a city council meeting . On the agenda was addressing the disappearing coastline. To some, a city council meeting might seem boring, but our students were fascinated. They watched the adults in the room talk about how […]
Going to boarding school occasionally has its disadvantages. For example, the middle schoolers at Arthur Morgan School almost never have a snow day. Since most of the students live right on campus and can walk from their boarding houses to the academic buildings, there is never a reason to cancel school. Even when 2009’s infamous […]