September 27, 2026

What Grounds Us? What Draws Us Forward?

WHAT

Trees know something about direction.

I learned recently that plant growth is both gravitropic and phototropic.

Gravitropism is a plant’s growth response to gravity. Roots generally exhibit positive gravitropism: they grow downward, deeper into the soil. Shoots do the opposite. They grow against gravity.

Phototropism is growth in response to light. Stems and leaves orient themselves toward it.

So a tree does not simply grow.

It grows in relationship to forces around it.

Down toward gravity.

Up toward light.

Roots deepen while branches reach.

I love that.

Especially because our theme at Mack this year is Rooted & Rising.

When we chose those words, I mostly understood them metaphorically. Be grounded in what matters. Keep growing toward what might be possible.

But biology makes the metaphor richer.

A tree does not have to choose between being rooted and rising.

Its rootedness makes the rising possible.

And its growth is not random. It is oriented.

SO WHAT

I wonder if that is an increasingly useful way to think about education.

We spend considerable energy trying to prepare children for a future we cannot accurately map.

What careers will exist?

What will artificial intelligence make easier, harder, obsolete, or newly possible?

What will citizenship require?

Which knowledge will remain essential?

What kinds of problems will our children inherit that we have not yet imagined?

There is a temptation, when the future feels uncertain, to become obsessed with prediction.

If we can just anticipate what is coming, perhaps we can prepare children for it.

But trees offer another possibility.

Maybe preparation is not primarily about predicting the landscape.

Maybe it is about orientation.

What are the forces that help a young person know which way to grow?

What provides the gravitational pull beneath them?

A sense of identity.

Belonging.

Values.

Relationships.

Knowing that they are known.

Knowing what they stand for.

Those are roots.

And what is the light they learn to grow toward?

Curiosity.

Purpose.

Possibility.

Beauty.

Questions worth pursuing.

Problems worth solving.

Other people worth understanding.

A world they believe they can help shape.

Those are not destinations. They are directions.

That distinction matters.

Because we cannot possibly give children a turn-by-turn map for the decades ahead.

We can help them develop a sense of true north.

At Mack, our mission has named some of that orientation for years:

Keen Minds.
Compassionate Hearts.
Global Action.

Think deeply.

Care deeply.

Do something with both.

Those feel less like three outcomes to complete and more like three ways of orienting oneself to the world.

NOW WHAT

This raises a question I have been carrying lately:

What should remain gravitational at Mack, and what light are we growing toward?

There are things about this school that should exert a powerful pull.

Children being deeply known.

Gifted and creative learners being understood for who they actually are.

Inquiry.

Relationships.

Belonging.

Compassion.

The courage to see children as possibilities rather than problems to be solved.

Those are roots worth deepening.

And then there is the light.

How might Mack become an even more extraordinary place for the children we serve?

What does learning look like in a world changing this quickly?

How might our campus, program, community, and ambitions increasingly reflect what we know about gifted, twice-exceptional, neurodiverse, and creative learners?

What might Mack contribute not only to the students here today, but to the larger conversation about what school can be?

These are questions we are beginning to explore together. They will surface in different ways this year, including at Mack Forward next week, but they are much bigger than any one evening.

They are questions of orientation.

Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of a school community.

Not to pretend that we know exactly where the trail leads.

But to keep asking:

What grounds us?

What are we growing toward?

And which way is the light?

Rooted & Rising,

Bo

What is The Alpine View?

The Alpine View is a weekly reflection from the Head of School at Mackintosh Academy Boulder. It is a place to pause, notice, wonder, and make meaning together about learning, childhood, community, and the work of becoming. The view may change from week to week, but the hope is the same: to look closely at what matters and to invite conversation about the people we are and the people we are becoming.

The Boulder Bite & The Alpine View Archives

September 13, 2026

The Space Between Us

WHAT

Some of the most important relationships in our lives depend on people seeing the same person from different angles.

A parent knows the child who wakes up worried in the middle of the night.

A teacher knows the child who lights up in discussion but goes quiet during independent work.

A coach knows the child who becomes a leader when the score is close.

A friend knows the version who is funny, daring, loyal, or unsure.

None of these views is complete.

But together, they begin to reveal something fuller.

This is one reason partnership matters so much in education. Not because parents and schools should always agree. Not because one side has the “real” picture and the other is missing it.

Partnership matters because children are too complex to be fully understood from a single vantage point.

SO WHAT

We often use the language of partnership when things are going well.

It is much harder—and much more meaningful—when perspectives differ.

A parent may see exhaustion where a teacher sees avoidance. A teacher may see growing independence where a parent sees a child who still needs more support. One adult may be focused on challenge; another may be focused on confidence. Both may be responding to something real.

The temptation in those moments is to decide who is right.

But perhaps the better question is:

What can each of us see that the other cannot?

That question changes the conversation.

It moves us from defending positions to building understanding.

It asks us to become curious before becoming certain.

And it reminds us that the goal is not for the adults to win an argument. The goal is to know the child more fully.

At Mack Boulder, one of our core beliefs is that gifted and twice-exceptional learners are known deeply. That kind of knowing cannot happen only at school.

Families carry years of history, pattern recognition, intuition, and love. Educators bring professional expertise, classroom context, developmental perspective, and the benefit of seeing children among peers.

The magic is not in choosing one over the other.

It is in the space between them.

NOW WHAT

Real partnership asks something of us.

It asks us to bring what we know without assuming we know everything.

It asks us to name concerns clearly without making them conclusions.

It asks us to listen for the possibility that another person is seeing something we have missed.

And sometimes it asks us to hold two truths at once.

A child can need more challenge and more support.

A child can be thriving in one environment and struggling in another.

A child can be independent and still need help.

A child can be extraordinary and unfinished.

Perhaps this is true far beyond schools.

The strongest communities may not be the ones where everyone sees things the same way.

They may be the ones where people trust one another enough to bring different perspectives into the same room—and remain curious long enough to discover something none of them could see alone.

The view from here:
Partnership is not seeing things the same way. It is believing that the space between our perspectives might help us see more.

The Alpine View

September 6, 2026

Before We Know Ourselves

WHAT

There are people in our lives who seem to see something in us before we can see it ourselves.

A teacher notices the way we think. A coach recognizes leadership we have not yet claimed. A friend sees courage beneath our uncertainty. A parent notices the fascination we keep returning to.

Sometimes they give language to something that, until then, has existed only as a feeling:

You have a gift for this.

Have you noticed how alive you become when…?

That question you just asked matters.

These moments can seem small. But I wonder if they are among the most consequential things human beings do for one another.

Perhaps we do not develop our identities entirely from the inside out.

Perhaps some part of becoming ourselves happens because somebody else was paying attention.

SO WHAT

We talk a great deal in education about knowing students. Usually, we mean knowing their readiness, interests, learning profiles, strengths, and challenges. All of that matters.

But being deeply known is something more.

It is the difference between collecting information about a person and becoming genuinely curious about them. What captures their attention? What gives them energy? What do they notice that others miss? Where do they become wonderfully complicated? What might be emerging in them that neither of you fully understands yet?

This matters especially during childhood, when young people are constantly gathering evidence about who they are.

Am I capable? Do my ideas matter? Am I strange? Do I belong here?

The people around them become mirrors.

A child repeatedly reflected back as difficult may eventually understand themselves as difficult. A child reflected back as curious may begin to protect and cultivate curiosity. A child whose intensity is treated only as a problem may learn to suppress it. A child whose intensity is also recognized as passion, depth, or possibility may learn something very different about themselves.

This is one reason one of the ideas we have been exploring at Mack Boulder is deceptively simple:

Gifted and twice-exceptional learners are known deeply.

That means understanding learners well enough to challenge and support them appropriately. But I think it also means refusing to reduce a human being to the most immediately visible version of themselves—a score, diagnosis, behavior, talent, struggle, or even a strength.

To know someone deeply is to remain interested in the person who is still becoming.

NOW WHAT

There is a reciprocity here.

We need people who know us. And we have the opportunity to be people who know others.

Teachers can do this for students. Parents can do it for children. Leaders can do it for colleagues. Friends can do it for friends.

Mostly, it requires attention.

Notice what someone returns to. Notice what gives them energy. Notice the questions they ask. Notice the contribution they make that nobody acknowledges. Notice the contradiction that makes them more interesting, not less.

And occasionally, say what you see.

Not as a verdict. As an invitation.

I noticed something about you…

Those six words might help another human being discover something about themselves.

Maybe that is one of the quiet ways we become who we are:

Someone sees us.

Someone names a possibility.

And eventually, we learn to see it too.

The view from here:
Before we can fully know ourselves, sometimes we need someone else to notice us first.

The Alpine View

What Are We Training Ourselves to Notice?

Dear Mack Community,

For 1,001 consecutive days, I kept a gratitude journal.

Every day, without exception, I stopped and recorded things for which I was grateful. Some were significant. Many were wonderfully ordinary: a conversation, a meal, a person, an opportunity, a moment I might otherwise have passed without noticing.

By the end of those 1,001 days, something felt different.

I cannot prove that I had literally rewired my brain. But it certainly felt as though I had retrained my attention. I had become better at noticing what was good.

And I increasingly wonder whether attention is one of the most important things we practice.

What

Human beings appear to have something psychologists call a negativity bias. Across many kinds of experiences, bad news tends to command our attention more readily than good news. Problems demand action. Threats are hard to ignore. One influential review of the research summarized the phenomenon rather memorably: “bad is stronger than good.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes some sense. Missing the beautiful sunset probably did not endanger our ancestors. Missing the predator in the bushes might have.

But there is a cost.

If we are not intentional, our attention can become remarkably skilled at detecting what is wrong while becoming surprisingly poor at registering what is right.

Years ago, I decided to experiment with that idea in a slightly unusual way.

I began calling companies that probably received far more complaints than compliments simply to thank them.

One day, I called Georgia Power.

When the customer service representative asked how she could help me, I explained that nothing was wrong. My refrigerator was running. My air conditioning was working. The lights came on when I flipped the switches.

I just wanted to say thank you.

There was a pause.

She was so surprised by the call that she eventually asked whether I would repeat what I had said to her manager. Before long, I was sharing my gratitude with more of the customer service team.

The electricity had been working all along.

What changed was that I noticed it.

So What

Chip and Dan Heath describe a related idea in Switch. When we encounter a problem, our instinct is often to study what is broken. The Heath brothers suggest that we should also find the bright spots: look for places where things are already working and ask, What is happening there, and how can we do more of it?

That is not ignoring problems.

It is widening the field of vision.

Gratitude does something similar.

It does not ask us to pretend that everything is wonderful. Schools are messy human communities. Families experience hard things. People make mistakes. There are problems that deserve our attention and injustices that demand action.

Gratitude is not denial.

It is the discipline of refusing to let what is wrong become the only thing we can see.

And perhaps that is why gratitude can be practiced. Research on gratitude journaling suggests that deliberately naming what we appreciate can shift attention and improve aspects of emotional well-being over time.

The practice begins to train a different question:

Not only, What went wrong today?

But also, What went right that I might otherwise have missed?

Now What

This matters in schools because there are bright spots everywhere.

A student who included someone at recess.

A teacher who noticed the child who needed a little more time.

A parent who extended grace.

A colleague who quietly solved a problem before anyone else knew there was one.

A child who tried again.

A classroom filled with laughter.

Hundreds of small things happen every day that make a community work. Most will never generate an email, a phone call, or a meeting.

Maybe that is precisely why we should train ourselves to notice them.

What if, this week, we deliberately searched for a bright spot?

What is working?

Who made something better?

What ordinary thing deserves to become visible because we chose to say thank you?

The problems will still be there. We will attend to them.

But perhaps gratitude helps us see the whole landscape.

For 1,001 days, my journal asked me to practice noticing.

Years later, I still believe the repetitions mattered.

Because what we repeatedly pay attention to has a way of shaping what we see.

And sometimes the bright side was there all along.

We simply needed to turn toward it.

With appreciation,

Bo

P.S. About The Alpine View: Each Sunday evening, I use this space to explore an idea connected to learning, leadership, childhood, or community through a What, So What, Now What lens. My hope is to offer something worth thinking about, talking about, and perhaps passing along.

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