I am in the Boise airport, waiting to board my flight home to California, after attending high school mock trial nationals with the Phillips Exeter mock trial team, which I coach. I am, I must confess, tired and disappointed.  You are not sure, as the weekend progress, how you have done, but we thought by…

The Phillips Exeter mock trial team has won the New Hampshire state championship; the team will compete at nationals for the fourth time in five years. This year was different, very different, because I live in California not New Hampshire.  So I was not able to work with the Exeter students in person, only by…

Yesterday was graduation day here at the Phillips Exeter Academy.  A wonderful, emotional, difficult day. It was a beautiful, sunny day here, and graduation was held on the lawn in front of the main academy building, where the dog Sunny and I have walked so many times.  My daughter Lydia—intelligent, beautiful, poised, gracious—was among the…

I have just returned from the national high school mock trial championship, held this year in Madison, Wisconsin.  It was an exciting, exhausting, and in the end somewhat disappointing weekend. Most of us traveled Wednesday, arriving in Madison after nine that night.  The next morning, at nine, we had our first scrimmage, against a solid…

Phillips Exeter has once again won the NH state championship; we are once again headed to the national championships.  I cannot claim to be surprised–we were the favorites heading into this weekend’s state competition–but I am so pleased.   In December, we formed three teams for the state championship; an A team composed mainly of…

In September my mock trial team put on a short mock trial for assembly for the whole school.  One of the Exeter students, not on the team, did not much like what he saw, and he posted a long critique on his facebook page. As is the way of these things, other people saw the…

This past weekend I took about twenty Exeter kids to Harvard for a mock trial training weekend.  The weekend has two main components:  lectures by the Harvard students, in which they explain some of the basics of mock trial, and a scrimmage among the various high school students, in which they get a chance to…

It is seven am on what promises to be a beautiful graduation day here at the Phillips Exeter Academy. In one sense I do not have any of my own children graduating; my son graduated from Exeter in 2011 and my daughter (God willing) will graduate one year from now. In another sense though I…