Ordinary Schools

Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

The end-of-term crunch has begun, with finals just a week away. The students are tired and fall asleep easily. I, like other faculty, am wondering how I will ever get a final exam prepared.

It was in this season, when my daughter was an MIT freshman, that I asked her how things were going. “Ok,” she grunted.

She graduated from Concord Academy, a private high school on the difficult end of the spectrum—so difficult that when she was there, graduated students coming back to visit would always tell the current students not to worry about college. It will be no big deal, they would say, no harder and probably easier than Concord Academy.

So, trying to provoke my daugher into supplying some details about how things were going, I asked her if what those Concord Academy graduates predicted was really true—transitioning to MIT was no big deal. “No, Daddy” she said, “that's only true for ordinary schools—like Harvard and Yale.”

Vive la différence!