At Saint Ann's, a Father Feared His Daughter Was Too Happy

I understand him completely. I was raised on the principle that if medicine doesn't taste bad, it isn't working, and I apply it to homework, vegetables and dentists.

Then she fell in love with Latin, she said, and he became a total convert.

The same profile toured the then-new lower school building with its longtime head, who had put the library right inside the entrance, she said, to make a statement about values. Opposite it, an undulating wall. "That and the wiggly wall," she said, "because we also value wiggle."

We value wiggle at our house too. We have just never put it in writing, or in drywall.

Saint Ann's still does not give grades, and its current family guide explains how a parent finds out anything. There are checklists twice a year, starting in fourth grade, and narrative reports twice a year, with written feedback beginning in kindergarten. Every report is read by the child's division head or grade adviser before it reaches home. Fuller midyear reports, which describe both the classroom curriculum and the child's learning, arrive by mail about halfway through the year.

The curriculum needs describing, because teachers have real autonomy. The guide's example: one lower school classroom "may be studying the ocean while another is in outer space." One high school U.S. history class may be in Selma while another is in Vietnam. The school deliberately does not require teachers to hand out year-long syllabi to students or parents.

One classroom may be studying the ocean while another is in outer space. I have a lower school at home that does this daily, and nobody calls it a philosophy.

The family guide is candid in other ways. There is no school bus. If your child is late, call the division office, because the school understands "the MTA, traffic, and errant alarms sometimes stymie our best efforts."

So Saint Ann's parents get paragraphs where other parents get letters, and a curriculum that has to be explained because it's different down the hall. I would have hated it for one semester. I would have read every report twice, looking for the grade. Then, like her father, I would have found it in the Latin.