Editor’s Note: Winter is a long, slow time in boarding schools; there’s just know way around it.

The days are short and cold. In New England, the sun rises after 7AM and sets before 4:30 in the afternoon. Along with the seasons, students and faculty can find themselves in a rut- routine wise. The newness of the school year has worn off and it’s too soon to anticipate spring. Lethargy can set-in. The community needs motivation and reasons to get up and out.

Every school has their winter dose of fun- winter carnival, singing groups, a great basketball team. Events that mobilize large swaths of the community to get-up and moving despite the cold- something to break the inertia.

Sherri Bergman at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School sent us this piece about an annual tradition that the school uses to mobilize the community each winter:

The Search is On!

Long before The Amazing Race, before Harry sought out the Sorcerer’s Stone, St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School (SAS), a small boarding and day school in Sewanee, Tenn., had the Search for the Golden Beaker. SAS science teacher and Golden Beaker mastermind Lisa Keith-Lucas concocts vexing clues in this annual cure to the post-holiday mid-winter doldrums.

Keith-Lucas started the school-wide treasure hunt in 1995. The Golden Beaker is hidden on campus, and students follow a trail of 25 clues to find it. The student, or group of students, who solves the puzzle receives the undying admiration of his or her peers, permanent recognition in the annals of Golden Beaker history, and a bit of swag. Past prizes have included Periodic Table T-shirts with glow in the dark radioactive elements and Golden Beaker mugs.

Last year’s puzzles had a theme of “firsts” and included: “Your clue for this are four countries: Great Britain, Russia, Germany and The Netherlands.” The answer was a series of words represented by blanks. Letters derived from the clues unscrambled to spell “Marathon Open Water Swimming”, a new Olympic sport (in which the four countries won medals). The clues involve history, literature, current events, school history and traditions, science, faculty, students, puns, and play on words. One puzzle spelled the full name of a character from The Lord of the Rings. The last search spelled out a geological event (the collision of two tectonic plates that caused the tsunami in Indonesia). The clues are quite easy at first, but get more difficult. Solving the puzzle requires information from all of the clues, so finding the beaker accidentally (or clue 23) does not give a treasure hunter an advantage.

Last year the school’s new Head, Father John Thomas gave it a try. “I started the quest because I thought it might help me to discover some things I didn’t know about the campus,” said Thomas. “I realized, though, that the hunt really gets to the essence of the sort of education we offer here. It calls upon a lot of cross-disciplinary skills. It requires research not just on-line or in books, but also the type of research that requires you to seek out information from people beyond your closest circle of friends or teachers. It’s all about problem solving.”

Last year’s beaker was hidden in a bottle of cupric sulfate. In past years it has been found in a refrigerator, in a cracker box on a shelf, in a trophy, and in a ceramic pot. One year a clue was left on a leased bus, which was returned in the middle of the hunt. Keith-Lucas still wonders what the rental agency thought when they found it. Last year’s Golden Beaker was found in two weeks, but one year the quest went on for over three months.