The Upper School Student News is an online publication written by students Alia, Olive, and Lily S., with help from faculty supervisor Jonell.  Pi Day! Pi, Pi! Many people around the world celebrate Pi Day on March 14 (3/14) each year. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The ancient Chinese used 3 as the value of pi about 1650 B.C. The Egyptians improved on the approximation during the AD 100’s. The first Pi Day celebration happened in 1988 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The US House of Representatives designated March 14th a National Holiday in 2009.  We celebrate Pi Day because it is an excellent excuse to learn about pi. Also, pi is just a really cool number. The number pi is 3.14159 etc... Pi has over 1 trillion decimal numbers in it and cannot be written as a simple fraction or decimal. That means it’s an irrational number! The symbol for pi is the Greek letter  𝛑 .   This year on Pi Day, students...

Science In science we have moved from the structure and replication of DNA to the study of Genetics itself. Gregor Mendel and his pea plants have taken center stage as we go through the different kinds of inheritances from simple dominance to codominance which dictates our blood type. Genetics is at a crossroads between biology, and probability and statistics. One never truly knows exactly the outcome of a pairing, but we can guess at the probability of the traits of the offspring. The students have been flipping coins to model this, and we are moving towards doing pen and paper problems to predict the offspring of different pairings with traits that follow different inheritances. Farm - by David It's been cold and wet at the farm, so we have been engaging in other work as we try to stave off "spring fever." Thanks to Emerson, Katie, Ahna, and Jack, we have the first of many sprouts in the greenhouse. Lettuce, kale, broccoli, ...