At Hackley, Students Thank the Teacher on Their Way Out

I have taught one lesson in my life, to the middle one, about long division, and when it ended he said, "Can I go?"

It caught King off guard. It had not been, he wrote, a life-altering class. In all his years as a student he could not remember thanking a teacher on the way out. His department chair stopped by to ask how it had gone, and King shared his surprise. The chair said: "Oh yes, that happens here."

Three words of institutional calm. That is how you know a tradition is real: nobody can explain it, and nobody thinks it needs explaining.

Twenty years later, as director of the Upper School, King asked students why they did it. A junior's answer is the one I keep: "Sometimes we don't realize that they have homework as well." A senior added that it wasn't about keeping up appearances.

Sometimes we don't realize that they have homework as well. I have been doing the homework for this family for sixteen years. Nobody has realized.

Hackley has newer traditions too. Since 2012, ninth-grade advisory groups spend one of the first days of school building boats out of cardboard and duct tape and racing them in the pool, where, King wrote in 2024, they probably will not stay afloat very long. One of his advisees, two years later, still laments that their group didn't build a better paddle, which "probably cost us the victory."

Two years. The paddle. I respect a teenager who holds a grudge against cardboard.

I tried the Hackley custom at home. At the end of dinner on Sunday I said, "Thank you," to my wife, for the meal, on my way out of the room. She looked at me for a long time and then asked what I'd broken.