(4 of 4)
At their best, the electives have the intensity and ferment of Kelly Wise's novel and drama course. Wise's teaching style is vastly different from that of Georgie Hinman, a legendary Latin teacher of an earlier Andover who stabbed penknives into his peg leg to express disapproval and made students flush bad translations down the toilet. Wise, in contrast, has a more casual attitude toward the 14 seniors in his class. "I don't act as a sage," says Wise. "Sometimes I lie and dissemble and distort to provoke them, to make it impossible for them to sit there neutrally." He succeeds. The class bubbles on about a Flannery O'Connor story, oblivious to a bright spring morning outside and even to the end-of-class buzzer. "I don't sandbag or bluff them," says Wise. "I try to challenge them."
So does the venerable but still vigorous school that Sam Phillips founded 200 years ago with his gunpowder profits and his grand hopes.