Dalton Gives Students Time With Teachers. Asking Is Harder.

Lab is time, in the high school, for one-on-one or small-group meetings with teachers. Teachers can require it. More often students choose when to go, and why.

The teacher is free. The slot is open. The only obstacle left is you, still at your desk, deciding the question is too small.

A Dalton graduate at Yale, reviewing the school anonymously on the site Prep Review, said Lab was where it paid off. Labs, the reviewer wrote, built strong rapport with teachers, and because of that, office hours at Yale caused none of the anxiety the reviewer saw in classmates.

Another graduate, at Wellesley, said Lab made it easy to get one-on-one help and do well without a pricey outside tutor. This reviewer also noticed something else. The Dalton philosophy promised a personal focus by junior or senior year. Instead, in this telling, the focus got lost in an honors-course scramble, because colleges seemed to want students who were good at everything.

The same reviewer had a refuge. In the Dalton building, the visual arts department is on the twelfth floor. Going up there, the reviewer wrote, was "a time to leave behind the stress and competition of the academics on all of the floors below me."

Every school should have a twelfth floor, and every student should know which elevator button it is.

Dalton is, by its own account, not easy to leave. For September 2027 the school says it is not opening its usual sixth-grade application, because of unusually high retention and record-low attrition in the lower grades. Nobody is leaving, so nobody can come in.

The eldest has a teacher who holds office hours on Thursdays. For two years, she has had questions and has not gone. This fall she went, with a question she described as "small." She came home and said it took forty minutes and the teacher was delighted and it was not, in fact, small.

She is going back next Thursday. She says she has another small one.