It's a sleety, unpleasant day here in central NH. This is Bonus Weekend--a four-day midwinter break--and seven students are rattling around, bored, until we take them to Boston for the afternoon. Today's pictures are obsolete; they're from Wednesday. Here's the Ski Patrol's top shack at the Blackwater Ski Area:

Speaking of obsolete, consider this: school magazines and annual reports all suffer the same awful challenge. Sharing a common mission, each publication struggles to convince readers "We’re great!" Everyone knows the ultimate message, even before you look at the cover. What you get are two benefits: maximum control of the message (some articulation of "We’re great!") and shelf life. It’s the latter dimension--time--that mandates the exhalted mission of the piece. The fact that the thing is going to sit on your coffee table till next Christmas is the reason the magazine has an article about the alumna saving a village in east Asia, and another about the alumnus who is an ethical CEO. Wow!

By the way, when you get off the T-bar at The Blackwater, this is the view from the top, with the village of Andover--and Proctor--in the background:

Communicating in real time with constituents is an alternative we find appealing and successful. The mission is completely different. Now it is, “We’re here, doing this, right now!” We are trying to communicate the raw experience of life at this school. Constantly changing in response to happenings, real time communication can take the risk of being honest with messages like "Most of us are sick now," or "All the teams lost this afternoon," or "Kids are bored this weekend." Are you with me?

Every Friday at about noon, an e-mail goes out to the 93% of the parent body for whom we have addresses, linking them to a personalized webpage (Dear John and Mary,) with several paragraphs of text and five big, bright photos. If interested in viewing a few, click "Parents" above, and check out some links to recent pages.