The Concord Review - Will's Blog

ST. MAUR INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

From: Glenn Scoggins
Date: September 5, 2010 7:44:12 PM EDT
To: Will Fitzhugh
Cc: College , Timothy Matsumoto
Subject: RE: Singapore Emerson

Dear Will,

Thank you for sharing this letter with me. I enjoyed [Ms.] Wei Li’s paper immensely and learned a lot from it that I had never known, even though I have been teaching about this time period in medieval Spain as part of the middle year in the three-year World History course at Saint Maur (Grades 8 through 10) which I oversee. I will be able to use this information in class to make more sense of the era and its impact on modern Spain and relations between Islam and the West.

Kaya Nagayo [Ainu Trade, 1650-1720, Spring 2010 issue] graduated with honors from Saint Maur in June and is entering her first year at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she will major in History with a concentration on Russia and other Slavic countries of central and eastern Europe, as well as Russian relations with Japan. She has been interested in this area for several years, and wrote about 2000 words of her Extended Essay (on trade relations between the Ainu and the Wajin of Tokugawa Japan) on Ainu trade with Russians and other people of Siberia, Sakhalin, the Kurile islands, and the Kamchatka peninsula—all of which had to be cut out to make the IB 4000-word limit. This was a valuable experience for her in editing her own work and sharpening her focus.

I continue to support and congratulate you and The Concord Review for your valuable work in maintaining and raising standards and expectations for young scholars around the world. It has a ripple effect—when Kaya’s paper was published, every student at Saint Maur realized that the hard work they put into their research and writing in History, English, the Sciences, and other subjects can be recognized by a worldwide audience. I hope there is another budding student in a lower grade whose work will be worthy of publication as well.

Thank you again for keeping me abreast of the impressive work of which our students are capable!

Sincerely,
Glenn Scoggins
College Admissions Counselor
Social Studies Department Head
Saint Maur International School
Yokohama, Japan