Moki Was Right

Earlier this evening, my son called me up from boarding school, asking for help with an essay for his sophomore English class. He had read the story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and his teacher had approved his basic question about how three of the characters were developed and how they fit with common stereotypes. While we were speaking, I did a Google search and found an online version of the story, which I first read in 8th grade and had last seen about 10-15 years ago. In the story, 300 inhabitants of a village gather for an annual ritual. At first, there seems to be a festive atmosphere, but barely perceptible hints at foreshadowing suggest everything may not be as it appears. As an 8th grader, I experienced the ending as utterly shocking and horrific, barely managing not to throw up. The story stuck with me for years as an example of how people can be unthinkingly and brutally cruel to each other; even tonight, tears sprang to my eyes as I reread the final two paragraphs, though admittedly residual sadness, anger and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach from reading aloud from the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird earlier today had left me in a somewhat delicate emotional state.

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Currently, Humanities 8 is wrapping up their Antebellum South unit. The class just finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and they will now be putting together their final project. The class is in the process of creating a blog, in which they will provide a summary, analysis, and multimedia to accompany the text. Once the class has completed this project, Humanities 8 will move on to totalitarian governments by researching and reading Animal Farm. Here the students will once again select a relevant topic to research and present. This provides the entire class a larger context while reading Animal Farm. This particular unit will take us to the spring break.

 

In our new chapter, the class is beginning to apply what we learned about fractions in the last chapter. To learn about proportions, each student created a scale drawing from a picture of their choosing. In addition to working on scale and proportion, each student is working with neatness, accuracy and integrating creative applications. As we work to connect percents and fractions, the students will continue with real world applications and projects.

MOCA has been extremely busy these past two weeks with a number of projects. In Student Council business, our representatives reported that Spirit Week, which will take place February 15-19, will include the following days: Pajama Day, Twin Day (dress like one or more other students), Decade Day, SBS Spirit Day, and Color Wars. Green was MOCA's second choice for Color Wars, and the choice we were granted. In future meetings, the students will come up with a skit celebrating their chosen colour, which they will present to the school. On Decade Day, the middle schoolers will be dressing in 1960's style.

For weekend activities, we have heard back from Eaglebrook, who says their students are not very interested in having a dance this year. Bement's 9th grade class is away on a school trip, so we are still awaiting a response from them. Meanwhile, Eaglebrook has invited us to go disco skating, and about 10 students expressed interest.

Fund-raising projects for four different causes are moving forward. Each group met, and the group raising money for the Dakin-Pioneer Valley Humane Society made an excellent presentation in housemeeting. Families who wish to donate money or supplies for the animal shelter are encouraged to contact Bill for more information. There will be more news on the other three groups in a future newsletter.

The MOCA leaders chose "opening the school store on weekends" as the first topic for discussion in following up on the student survey. After a lively discussion in which the students honestly and caringly weighed their needs against the perceived needs of Lisa, the school store manager, they decided to suggest that the school store not be opened up on weekends, noting that if there were a way for them to take money out of their accounts that didn't inconvenience anyone, that would be nice.

Finally, new MOCA leaders were elected for the next two meetings. It was a busy and productive two weeks, especially given that one meeting was dismissed early so that the students could enjoy the delicious muffins and other breakfast food the parents so kindly provided and for which we would like to thank them!

The middle school instrumental classes continue to rehearse for their May concert. Now that we are well into the winter term, it is exciting to hear how the beginners have progressed. With the increase in practicing (yay!), the beginners have really improved as an ensemble. We have had a chance to combine the beginners and advanced players a couple of times to give them a chance to rehearse together. Once we figured out how to fit them all in Bonnie's House, the two groups did very well playing together. The students' favorite piece we are working on is "Thriller." The saxophones have really taken the lead on this piece, and all are having a lot of fun. The advanced class is also doing very well. They have started rehearsing an excerpt from Mussorgsky's "Pictures from an Exhibition." Congratulations to Tulsa Douglas who has graduated from the beginner class and moved up to the advanced group. Keep up the great work SBMS!

In Humanities 7, the students have wrapped up their reading of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Jane Eyre." We have been watching videos of the Shakespeare, both the 1999 film featuring Michelle Pfeiffer and Kevin Kline and a 2005 production staged by Stoneleigh-Burnham. In preparation for writing their own scripts, the students have been thinking and writing about how professional script writers handle characterization, setting, plot and conflict; they have also begun creating character sketches. There will be three script-writing groups, each responsible for producing a short one-act play which will be rehearsed and produced in Theatre 7 class this spring.

We have also been making progress on our Harlem Renaissance project. The students have completed their wiki pages presenting biographical information and images on their Harlem Renaissance person, as well as a Works Cited section. They have also exchanged emails with their partner students at The Cathedral School in New York City. With their partners, they have begun making VoiceThread presentations. Each student is responsible for uploading several images of her Harlem Renaissance person to a VoiceThread strand unique to her and her partner. They will then role play an interview, with one student recording and posting questions of the other student regarding each of her images, and the second student role-playing her Harlem Renaissance person in her recorded responses. When they have finished, the images and the recorded sound clips will play as a continuous presentation. For the culminating activity of this project, our other partner school,The Children's Storefront, will travel to The Cathedral School for a presentation on the Harlem Renaissance by a professor of African-American studies at Cornell University. Our goal is to be able to Skype our students in to enjoy and participate in the presentation.

To introduce our new topic, physics, the students are designing experiments to measure and study motion. To prepare, they are familiarizing themselves with the appropriate vocabulary and formulas. They are testing their new background information using animations and graphs on physics websites. With all of this, in a group of three, they are to choose what they would like to measure and how they will measure it. They will present the information to the class in the mode of their choice. Each group or individual will choose the focus of their assessment so they can develop skills they need to work on.

The students have looked through their Winter Term Progress Reports, and these have now been mailed home. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact your daughter's advisor or Bill.

On Thursday night, February 18, the Middle School Vocal Music class will join with private lesson students in presenting an informal concert and recital. The performance takes place in Geissler Gallery and begins at 7:00 P.M. Families and friends are welcome to attend.

On Thursday, February 18, we will celebrate our Day of Awareness and February Thaw. The Day of Awareness, which begins at 9:00 A.M. and lasts through the morning, will include a presentation by the Community Alliance group on "What is Culture?" and feature a variety of workshops offered by students and faculty on a wide range of topics related to different ideas of culture and connected by a sense of promoting social justice for all. February Thaw will take place after  lunch, from 1:00-4:00 P.M., and is our traditional chance to take a break to get off campus and do something fun. As with the Day of Awareness, students will sign up for an array of possible activities. We are looking forward to what promises to be a great day!

The School maintains an online calendar of events for use by parents, students, and other members of our community. You may access this calendar at:

http://www.sbschool.org/home/calendar.asp

You may also access a copy of the academic calendar through the parent portal, signing in at:

http://www.sbschool.org/home/content.asp?section=parents

If you ever have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us . Thank you!

Our exploration of the countries of Asia has been enhanced with our video interview project and the approach of Lunar New Year. Each student was paired up with an upper school student from Japan, Korea or China in order to ask the students questions about their home cultures. We are presently compiling the results into a short film entitled, “Foundations in Language and Culture Presents, Wasabi, Kimchi and Dumplings: Interviews with students from Japan, Korea and China.” The film will be presented to the Stoneleigh-Burnham community as a workshop for the February 18th Day of Awareness. We are making Chinese lanterns and learning Lunar New Year riddles as part of our exploration of various traditions across Asia and in communities in the United States. The students are also encouraged to take part in the Lunar New Year celebration in Brattleboro, VT on February 13th, where they will have the opportunity to join the students from Ms. Tsou’s Chinese classes and join the annual parade of a thirty-five foot long Vietnamese dragon puppet through the streets of Brattleboro. Coming up, we look forward to practicing our Chinese language with guest students from China, as well as picking up a few phrases in Japanese and Russian from some of our very own middle school students.