4
Internet 24/7
Sixth Form President Charlie Lee is ac-
customed to waking up early on occasion
to get a jumpstart on an assignment or to
complete the last sources of an electronic
bibliography before heading to Chapel
and classes.
But because of a School policy that
restricted Internet access between the
hours of midnight and 6 a.m., Lee has
often had to wait patiently for the Inter-
net to “turn back on” before completing
his work.
Thanks to a proposal by Lee and his
fellow Student Council officers, that will
no longer be an issue for members of
the Sixth Form. In January, Rector Mike
Hirschfeld ’85 approved a request by the
Form of 2015’s representatives to grant
24-hour Internet access to members of
the Sixth Form.
“I’m excited that I won’t have to plan
nights around which homework to do
first and I won’t be stuck at 1 a.m. doing
homework on my phone,” says Lee.
Hirschfeld credits the SPS Information
Technology staff with helping to resolve
some technical challenges that prevented
the privilege from being granted sooner.
“I have felt for some time that 24-hour
access for Sixth Formers was an appro-
priate privilege for them,” says Hirschfeld,
“particularly as they transition to the next
stage of their lives.”
Similar proposals had been made in the
past, but where previous officers had re-
ACTION
quested the privilege for the entire student
body, Lee and fellow STUDCO officers
Malaika Ogukwe ’15 (vice president), Noah
Ruttenberg ’15 (secretary), and Priscilla
Salovaara ’15 (treasurer) focused their
proposal on Sixth Formers only.
Official access to the School’s network
24 hours a day is merely a formality,
according to the STUDCO officers, who
say that one of their primary arguments
was that many students already had
24-hour access via smart phones and
tablets with 4G capabilities unrelated to
the SPS Internet policy.
“Anybody could get access, but they paid
for it,” says Lee. “It differentiated those
who could pay and those who couldn’t.
This change just levels the field for all
Sixth Formers.”
Alumni Horae
Digital
This fall featured the launch of a new on-
line resource, the
Alumni Horae
Digital
Archive at site.ebrary.com/lib/spsdash/
home.action. This completely updated
website is built using the ebrary DASH
platform, the same web interface used by
students and faculty to access the more
than 100,000 ebooks available through
Ohrstrom Library’s ebrary Academic Edi-
tion ebook collection. The new platform
offers a highly professional and search-
able online interface, making accessible
every published issue of
Alumni Horae
,
from January 1921 to the present, for
reading on computers, laptops, smart
phones, and tablets – either through
browser access or the Bluefire Reader
application. A detailed help guide (avail-
able at sps.libguides.com/ahda) has been
created to introduce new users to the site.
In addition to this update, every pub-
lished issue of
Alumni Horae
has been
made available in full-issue PDF files –
downloadable from the
Alumni Horae
full-issue archive at www.ohrstromblog.
com/spsarchives/alumni-horae-full-
issue-archive. Issue-length PDFs can be
downloaded to your computer or device
and saved to read offline. Happy reading
and researching.
Assessing Assessments
In January, noted educational author and
thinker Jay McTighe worked with the fac-
ulty for a day-long session on assessment.
Mr. McTighe is the author of several books
on the principle of “understanding by de-
sign,” a method of teaching through which
assessments for the end of a unit or term
are created first, followed by curriculum
planning to help students meet those end
goals. By creating a syllabus in this way,
teachers develop more complete and
systematic coverage of the material and
assessments become formative – part of
the educational process – rather than sum-
mative – asking students to recite memor-
ized facts in order to create a grade.
After Mr. McTighe asserted that “. . . the
primary purpose of classroom assess-
ment is to inform teaching and improve
learning, not to sort and select students
or justify a grade,” the faculty spent the
day considering how to implement these
