Upper School

February 3, 2022

from Dr. Bill Hudson, Head of School

As I walked to my post at the front entrance of the school Tuesday morning, the sound of jazz being played on the piano drew me into the band room where I happened upon the zero-hour jazz band class. The exceptional talent of the students and the beauty of the music they were creating together was a moment of pure joy for me as well as a moment of gratitude to work in a school that truly values music education.

Without denigrating the mastery of musical skill and ability, many of the students were unaware of other learning was taking place in the band room. While I am most certainly not a musician, I do know that that the unique interplay of harmony, rhythmic invention, scale, extended chords, and syncopation all speak to the complexity of jazz. In addition to musical ability, jazz also requires and fosters a number of valuable lifelong skills, including creativity, improvisation, collaboration, interdependency, problem-solving, risk-taking, humility, ideation, integrating and synthesizing information quickly, critical thinking, and navigating complexity.

For several years I taught a master’s level class at the University of St. Thomas on the foundations of American education. As a history buff, I loved studying the evolution of education in the United States and the various reforms instituted over the years. Rather than static, the idea of school has always been in a continual state of change. Educational reform has been the norm for education in response to the needs of students and society. However, our current system, created in response to the industrial revolution, is much the same as it was in the early 1900s.

I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the future of education, particularly now as we begin to emerge from the pandemic and begin the shift from the information age to what author Daniel Pink calls the conceptual age. While the industrial age focused on results and the information age focused on data, facts, and technology, the conceptual age will depend on high-touch skills like empathy and high-concept skills such as the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, combining different or unconnected ideas together. With information readily accessible and computers able to analyze it, our future depends on the ability to harness curiosity and creativity to create novel solutions to pressing challenges in our world. As educational reformer John Dewey said, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”

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January 27, 2022

from Dr. Bill Hudson, Head of School

This is the fourth of a four-part series of Head’s Messages that dives deep into MPA’s new strategic plan, 2024ward. Today we will outline this priority: Enhance institutional capacity by continuing to strengthen financial sustainability. The first article may be found here. The second article may be found here. The third article may be found here. An overview of 2024ward may be found here.

Whenever I am back “home” in Lansing, Michigan, I always take time to drive by my childhood home. When we moved in, it was the first house in a new suburb created from what was previously open fields of a dairy farm. I vividly remember planting several saplings with my dad and impatiently asking him when they would grow to become shade trees to protect my bedroom window from the glaring summer sun. Almost 50 years later, I marvel at their size and find joy knowing they provide shade and comfort to the current family that occupies the house.

In much the same way, our founding families made decisions and took certain actions that benefit our students today. The most obvious example is the generosity of donors over the years that have contributed to our endowment, which stands at $7,104,004 million. While relatively modest for a school our size, the draw on the endowment helps to directly fund programs and services for current students. Read More