“No, we’re pretty much done. This is who we are.” A few weeks back in a Grade 12 Health class, we were discussing how personality and character evolve over time, and how the role one plays in relationships likewise changes as you learn more about yourself and how the world around you reacts to your…

“Learning at AAS is a dynamic and engaging process of inquiry, creativity, and critical thinking that prepares students to contribute purposefully to the world around them.”– Anglo-American School of Sofia Definition of Learning created 2024 As many of you already know, AAS is jointly accredited by the Council of International Schools (CIS) and the New…

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life The most interesting people I know Didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t Back in 1997, these lyrics jumped out at me.  Buried in the…

Almost every day as a principal, I find myself having conversations about big and real emotions. Maybe you have also heard statements like these: “I’m worried my friend is mad at me; our friendship is over.” “I’m frustrated I don’t understand this homework; I’ll never get it.” “I’m stressed about this project; I can’t handle…

This week was fun. For our students. For our faculty. For our parents. This week was fun. About a month ago, we came back one weekend and our campus had started changing. The mature, sophisticated, orderly halls started filling with cobwebs and spiders and bats and skeletons and all sorts of blackened decor and spooky…

The internet is a wonderful place for mining quotations. Last week, I came across this pearl of wisdom in a Rand Corporation Publication. “ … research suggests that, compared with teachers, individual and family characteristics may have four to eight times the impact on student achievement…” Mind you, the Rand Corporation is an ultra-conservative American…

I have to admit that when the time comes around for me to submit a blog post, I get a bit anxious. I struggle with trying to find something to write about that I think students, parents, and staff could relate to or even want to read. With the beginning of the new school year…

          Did you have a good year?           Yes or no?           Did you have a good year?           “YES!”           The only honest, accurate answer has to be “Yes.”          …

As educators, we spend significant time talking about how “mindset” is important in education. This has always been en vogue in our field; attitude matters! Growth mindset! Grit! We are taught to not allow students to give up, to become comfortable with failure. Teacher education programs have always reveled in this kind of theory. There…

In my years as a principal working with families in high school, middle school, and elementary school, I have had hundreds of conversations with parents about challenging situations with their children. In my office, parents have talked with me about academic struggles, friend problems, personal habits, technology use, drugs, sex, mental health, future planning, and…

How would you respond to the statement, “Education does not end when you leave the classroom”? This was the prompt for the championship round at a recent CEESA Speech and Debate competition in which an AAS student won first place. Students had to come up with an impromptu speech to share their thoughts on this…

Since late November, ChatGPT has dominated the news headlines. For the uninitiated, Chat GPT is a cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI. It can generate human-like text, allowing it to engage in natural language conversations and perform various language-based tasks like; writing compelling stories or essays, answering complex math problems, and writing basic code. So,…