RE Log Magazine

New courses are added to the RE Course of Study every year, reflecting the evolving needs of students as well as the passions of RE faculty. But there’s something a little different about this year’s crop. Advanced African Politics. Biology and Ecology of Sharks. Advanced Machine Learning. Virtual Reality. In a “self-study” report examining RE’s offerings in 2022, the faculty determined that the school’s top academic priority would be moving student “inquiry” into “new intellectual spaces.”

Since its debut last November, ChatGPT has lost a bit of the show-pony sheen of its early days. For months, the software, a “chatbot” interface developed by OpenAI that can produce rivers of text in response to virtually any prompt, made headlines and dazzled the world as it seemed to crush ever-more-elaborate intellectual benchmarks. GPT-4, the newest version, passed the multistate bar exam in the 90th percentile; received a 5 on AP US History; even scored a 77 percent on the Advanced Sommelier Exam for professional wine-tasters, despite not having taste buds at all.

Those who know me know how much I love Ransom Everglades. I started at RE as a student in the late ’80s, returned as a mathematics teacher, worked as Dean of Students, and I now serve as COO and Interim Head of the Upper School. Yet few people know the real history and depth of my connection to this great school. The symbolism in the story I’m about to share leaves me filled with pride.

Owen Paris, a.k.a., Mr. Paris, Coach, Dean, O.P., is a treasured faculty emeritus who served at Ransom Everglades from 1976 until his retirement in 2008. He was inducted into the RE Athletic Hall of Fame in 2017, and he faithfully returns to campus each year for events, such as the annual RE Athletic Hall of Fame induction, the Holiday Party and Alumni Weekend.