August 29, 2019
Walking the Bifurcated Walk: Urban Design for Social Justice
By Kathryn Chao, Hannah Gordon, Clay Thornton, and Michael McElreath This summer, CA’s Center for Community Engagement offered a new intensive experiential course: Urban Design for Social Justice. Designed, organized, and sponsored by CA, the course was a pilot initiative to explore authentic opportunities for CA students to collaborate in impactful ways with their peers […]
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August 22, 2019
Changing how we Change the World
On August 21, Scott Phillips, director of the NC Field Office for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, came to speak to seventh graders to kick off a new interdisciplinary design thinking project: Migration Collaboration. Dr. Phillips gave an overview of who refugees are, the various countries they come from, and the kind of […]
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August 15, 2019
Greetings!
Hello, Cary Academy! Yesterday, we opened school in the same way we have since our founding—with our traditional Handshake Ceremony. What a great way to start the school year, with a face-to-face greeting between every employee and every student in the school. As a Minnesotan, I have to admit that I can get a little […]
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July 30, 2019
Year 4 Update
Below is our annual update on the school’s strategic plan. Earlier in the year, HOS Mike Ehrhardt shared an update with parents on the school’s strategic vision. You can check out that (rather long) video here. Goal 1: Institutional Flexibility Cary Academy will create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences. Continued work […]
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May 30, 2019
Exciting service learning changes are coming to the Upper School
Cary Academy’s mission of being a learning community dedicated to discovery, innovation, and collaboration often drives us to look for ways to improve on our practices. Propelled by both our mission and our strategic plan to make students’ learning more personalized, flexible, and relevant, we are excited to share a new vision and structure for […]
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May 16, 2019
Summer Off or Summer On?
We typically think of teachers as being off during the summer, but several Cary Academy faculty each year choose to devote at least part of their well-deserved summer vacation time to professional growth activities. Cary Academy offers two major summer grant programs for teachers, the Friday Fellowship and the Innovative Curriculum Grant. The Friday Fellowship […]
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May 9, 2019
To our teachers: thank you!
How do you quantify the impact that a teacher makes on the lives of their students, let alone the cumulative effect of an entire community of educators on the larger Cary Academy community? Teaching is exhausting work, even though we too-often pretend it should be effortless.
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May 2, 2019
Community engagement spotlight: Triangle Debate League
Earlier this month, I welled with pride watching confident Southern High School students participate in an articulate, well-argued, impassioned Congressional debate on a bill raising the minimum wage. As their CA peer-mentors cross-examined them, both sides lighting up in delight from the equal intellectual exchange, I was struck by how far we have come and […]
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April 18, 2019
Learning to Make a Difference
Members of the Community Engagement Class tend the community garden at Alliance Medical Ministry in Wake County. How do students at a private school understand and respond to the critical needs in their community? One way a group of us tried to break out of our CA “bubble” was in an innovative class that began […]
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