Beyond King's

Last fall King’s Academy joined forces with the Blake School in Minnesota and Columbus Academy in Ohio to offer ninth graders an exciting opportunity to learn about the origins of existence from an all-encompassing lens that spans billions of years.

It was a warm November evening in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Eric Widmer, the founding headmaster of King’s Academy, had come all the way to my hometown of Udhailiyah in the middle of the desert to interview me. We sat in the computer lab in the elementary school wing of my ARAMCO school and he pulled up some photos of King’s.

At first glance, Lina Samawi’s King’s Academy classroom looks like a nicely decorated space for first graders. Colorful illustrations and textiles animate the walls. Bulletin boards feature student hand-drawn self-portraits. Small baskets of brightly colored plastic fruit line a bookshelf.

Back in 2009, when I was a sophomore at King’s Academy, a guest sat through my English literature class and asked us a question at the end of class that left me puzzled: “What is the most important thing to remember about your experience on this campus after you graduate?”

Dina Kuttab is not a “C” student – not by a long shot, according to her. But when she walked out of her AP Seminar teacher’s office last October with exactly that grade on her first paper of the school year, she couldn’t have been happier.

Joshua Claxton AY’14 packed his bags and left the United States to start the Arabic Year at King’s Academy program in fall 2013. Now a freshman at Middlebury College, Joshua wrote the article below for his college newspaper, The Middlebury Campus, and shared it with Beyond King’s.