Blurred Lines

I admit that using the summer's hottest pop song ("Blurred Lines") as my blogspot title is partly a ploy to entice people to read my thoughts, but it also appropriately captures a theme that continuously emerged as I read both articles. 

As BB&N teachers, we need to understand that more and more of our students will enter our classrooms with not one country, culture, religion, or ethnicity of origin, but with identities that draw upon a patchwork of origins.  As I stare at the boxes students must check on the Common Application in order to "identify" themselves to colleges, the idea of understanding and appreciating these blurred lines of identity never rings more true.

As a member of two departments at the Upper School (Science and College Counseling) I have a sense for the challenges and the upsides of working with two distinct groups of people and modes of communication, but again, I think we as a school would benefit from (forgive me) more blurred lines as we make decisions about how to structure our curriculum.  On a grand scale, maybe it means merging some academic departments or abandoning the idea of academic departments altogether. On a smaller scale, maybe it means creating a host of interdisciplinary courses and requiring our students to enroll in at least one in order to graduate.  

In any event, "blurred lines" can stand for ideas far more educational (and less suggestive) than the pop song suggests.

Katie