The Milton Incubator for Advanced Programmers
It’s Thursday afternoon during exam week, and a computer lab in the Art and Media Center thrums. Milton’s programming students, laptops spread, are tweaking, honing, perfecting independent projects — it’s noisy “independent” work. Students probe and answer each other’s questions, review lines of friends’ code, wildly gesture to punctuate both frustrations and “aha!” moments. Chris Hales (computer programming faculty) roams the classroom — an open session for exam support that looks and feels like a startup hub. When Chris began teaching at Milton in 1999, he led...
Read MoreIan Torney ’82, Painter, Poses Problems
Ian Torney, Class of 1982—accomplished oil painter and arts educator—has returned to Milton’s art classrooms. Next year he will lead the visual arts department as its chair. The department’s approach to working with students has not changed since his time as a student, and Ian quickly names this underlying asset: “I am inheriting a department with a clear point of view,” he says. “Gordon Chase, Bryan Cheney, Anne Neely, Paul Menneg and Maggie Stark, my former teachers, deserve credit for establishing a contemporary way of teaching art here, a method ahead of its time.” The...
Read MoreAnatomy of a 1212 Performance
As the audience filters out of each 1212 performance, the final scene has yet to unfold. Peter Parisi, performing arts department chair and director, gathers the small cast and crew around him. Together, they absorb the evening’s performance before scattering to collect the congratulations. This moment culminates months of work—planning, auditioning, reading, memorizing, staging and rehearsing. The play that Peter and company staged in February 2012 was Love and Intrigue by Friedrich Von Schiller, a German dramatist and major figure in German literature in the late 1700s. Peter came...
Read MoreWhen the rubber meets the road, can I pursue science?
When I first stepped onto the Milton Academy campus in the fall of 2007, I thought I knew exactly the trajectory my high school career would take. And just as I had a vivid picture of where I would sit in Forbes, and what I would wear to my fi rst school dance, I entertained romanticized visions of myself in the science lab. Long white coat and gloves, in case whatever extremely dangerous substance I was studying should stray from the test tube in my steady and capable hands. I thought I knew what it meant to study science, and I knew that was what I wanted to do. Four years later, and almost...
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