Talk to Your Teachers!
By TMP 43rd Editorial Board
One of the first things prospective students and families hear about Milton before enrolling is that Milton hosts a top-tier faculty. Indeed, we as high-schoolers have the rare privilege of learning from and alongside leading experts in their field. Calculus students study under Dr. Jiang, a former Tulane economics professor and a published mathematician; biology students conduct lab work with guidance from Ms. Seplaki, who is currently a visiting faculty member in Harvard’s one-of-a-kind Disease Biophysics Group; and English students can choose to dive deep into Melville’s Moby Dick alongside Dr. Holt, who holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and is an expert in comparative literature. Furthermore, many teachers have spent the bulk of their career—decades, in some cases—honing world-class pedagogical skills within Milton’s own walls, rather than achieving extraordinary success elsewhere.
Despite this extraordinary environment, it is easy over the course of a four-year Milton education to get caught up in the stress of homework and college prep, and go through all sorts of wonderful classes with excellent curricula while taking for granted—or missing entirely—much of the most special wisdom teachers on campus can impart.
While The Milton Paper’s 43rd Editorial Board has gained a great deal from Milton’s faculty just from class time with them, we have found that many of our most definitive moments of learning at Milton have come beyond the syllabus, from proactively seeking out faculty insights in their fields of expertise and passion. Developing critical intellectual relationships with faculty beyond class has been an honor and a privilege for our seniors; with a month left of classes, we encourage you to explore them to the fullest.
Examples of our teachers’ going beyond the confines of their official roles to expand our minds span departments and class years. For HT, pestering Dr. Bachelor freshman year with questions about historical materialism and structural violence in lunch lines was the reason our editor-in-chief became interested in the history of politics, a field that has shaped the rest of his time at Milton. For Victoria, their conversations with Ms. Seplaki about the necessity of creative, out-of-the-box thinking within science fields shaped the way they understand scientific exploration—as something intertwined with art and design, rather than parallel with it. For Molly, staying after class with Mr. Lou helped her gain a deeper understanding of the underground perspectives of world history. For Rhys, a list of summer reading suggestions from Dr. Gable introduced him to deconstructions of race, gender, and even intelligence that reframed his relationship with the philosophy of knowledge.
These experiences served as launchpads for us to go from interested in a field to dedicated to meaningfully pursuing them. Staying behind after class to ask questions beyond the curriculum, chatting with your teacher about school policy or their winter break, or going to office hours with general thoughts you want to discuss can seem daunting at first, but it is deeply worth it. We start Milton as young teens just beginning to discover the extent of what we do not know about the world, and our faculty serve as examples of what we could become if we were to pursue a given field. That opportunity inspires us to become interested, then passionate, then dedicated to a cause, or career, or field of study.
Every year the Paper publishes the faculty issue primarily to highlight faculty voices on important issues in the world and at school. We also hope that it gives you a taste of how much our faculty know and how advanced their thinking is, inspiring you to more proactively pursue their expertise. These pages demonstrate their eagerness to share it, so take advantage!