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School Blog |
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The following postings have been made to the school blog since the last middle school newsletter: Just a Color, by Bill Ivey, about Breast Cancer Awareness Month and our school. |
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Parent Meeting |
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We covered two topics at the middle school parent meeting on Family Weekend, brainstorming ideas for the new Life Skills course and going over a presentation on young adolescent development as it relates to middle school best practices. Parents came up with a number of wonderful ideas for the "Life Skills" course, and we will be combining those with student- and faculty-generated ideas. The next stage will be to begin to set priorities among all those ideas, and parents will be involved in this part of the process as well. When we have had the chance to solicit student and faculty ideas, we will turn the final list into a survey which we will ask parents to take.
If you have any follow-up questions or thoughts, please share them with Bill. Thank you for all you bring to this school! |
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8th Grade STEM with Brittany |
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The Algebra 1 students are hard at work figuring out my favorite property - the Distributive Property. We talked about how this property is vitally important for anyone who wants to design clothing or buildings or do everyday things like doubling a recipe. They practiced on a chocolate chip cookie recipe and will see if they performed the calculations correctly when they taste cookies made from this recipe at the end of the week. We will continue our work with word problems and using multiple negatives in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Here’s a sample from our problem set this week: 7(c +2d + 8) + 3(9c – 2)
*See the end of this section for the answer.
In Physical Science, we have moved on to elements and the periodic table. Some of you participated in creating the Alien Periodic Table during Family Weekend. The class worked hard to complete them and learned more about how our table is organized. We then explored where all the elements came from. Ask your student - you might be surprised by the answer. Now we’re learning about the unintended consequences when we combine elements in things like cosmetics. The class is excited to work on a PSA to be shared with the school about using safe cosmetics. They are truly a group of confident and caring young women.
Answer to equation: 34c + 14d + 50 |
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French I |
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Several parents were able to join the French I class last Friday during Family Weekend. Those who came enjoyed watching pairs of students present dialogues using vocabulary learned during their first month of class. Some pairs used puppets for fun and some chose not to. They all were confident speakers and made me proud! After performing their short skits, students sang the song "Un Petit Poisson." They even chose to sing without me leading them: proof of their confidence and enthusiasm! We ended with a silly song that substitutes a vowel for all the other vowel sounds, similar to the American song "Apples and Bananas." For example, "Buvons un coup, ma serpette est perdu" becomes "Bava za ka, ma sa pat a pada." We sang each verse with a different vowel sound, thereby practicing the different sounds of the French language. It was silly and made us laugh, but we were learning at the same time. This is one of my goals for this class: to make learning fun. I hope your daughters will sing to you in French; you just might have fun... and learn something, too! |
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Humanities 7 |
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The Humanities 7 class is in the process of designing their second unit. They generated amazing questions and grouped them skillfully in Aesthetics, Ethics, and Psychology, the required three areas of inquiry, as well as the class-generated categories Sociology and Science. They have looked at four of these areas with the largest numbers of questions, prioritized in which questions they were most interested, and then determined what themes might unite popular questions and what other questions might relate. The four themes are: "What is beauty, and what role do judgment and opinion play in determining what is beautiful?" "How does government work and why does it work that way?" "Individual differences" and "Middle and high school issues."
Nearly every year, the most difficult part is in choosing what will be the next unit we study. It leads to discussions about the advantages of voting vs. consensus, and also to a great deal of first-hand learning about voting and consensus in determining how our final decisions would be made. This year's class has had a good many insights into how best to include all voices in the process, avoid roadblocks, and include all voices in arriving at a final decision everyone can live with. Both voting and consensus, they note, are a balance of competing needs with advantages and drawbacks to each system. This year's class hit upon the luminous idea of using straw polls to acquire information to help them decide next steps and was fairly efficient in narrowing the choices down to two, the government question and middle and high school issues. They have identified common elements between those two topics, but are of varied opinions as to whether or not they should be combined. That is where we stand as this newsletter goes to publication.
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Spanish I |
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Students in Spanish I are finding out that there is more to learning a language than merely memorizing vocabulary, conjugating verbs, and making “adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in number and gender (if they can.)” In order to more fully appreciate and respect a language, I believe one must be aware of the history and culture of the mother country and its descendants - in this case, Spain and its colonies. There is a wonderful movie series, "The Buried Mirror, Reflections on Spain and the New World" which was written and produced by the great Mexican philosopher, poet, and writer, Carlos Fuentes, on the occasion of Mexico's 500th Anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” in 1992. I like to begin introductory courses with episodes of this documentary because it covers so comprehensively the complex confluences of religion, art, politics, economics, and language that make Spanish and Hispanic history and language so rich. For instance, most students new to Spanish are not aware that almost a third of all words in modern Spanish have roots in Arabic due to the occupation of Spain by the Moors from 711 until 1492. Likewise, most non-Catholics are unaware of the significance of Semana Santa (Easter Week) in Sevilla but after watching silver and gold altars being borne night and day throughout the city by religious brotherhoods, viewers have to wonder what it must be like to experience that religious festival firsthand and to hear the voices of cheerful Spanish youths yelling enthusiastically, “¡Guapa! ¡Guapa!” as the statue of the virgin of the Macareña passes by. In subsequent chapters, Fuentes describes - as only a poet could - the dichotomy between religious fervor and the passion for bullfighting or, in the case of Columbus, the conflict between a strong faith in a forgiving God and the depths of depravity to which hubris can drive a potential hero. Through Fuentes’s poetic narration, these seemingly contradictory forces become understandable, if not acceptable.
We have almost completed the first episode, "The Virgin and the Bull," which brings Spain’s explorers and conquistadors to the Americas. Future episodes explore the conquest (annihilation?) of many native cultures, expansion and colonization of the Americas, the fight for independence from Spain’s bureaucratic control, and the difficulties of finding independence within such a diverse population. As students memorize new vocabulary and learn how to express themselves more completely, my hope is that they will have a greater appreciation for the rich heritage imbedded in the language they’re learning to manipulate. |
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Theatre 8 |
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The Theatre 8 Antigone project continues its climb toward production. We have finalized cuts to the script and are now organizing costumes. This will energize our thespians! The actors are buckling down to memorization. It is a tough play but they have really embraced the challenge and as we move forward, they will fully inhabit their characters. I love this group - their voices are strong and sure and they are always at the ready with new ideas. We will mostly likely have one or two evening rehearsals and weekend rehearsals on the weekend of the performance which is scheduled for Sunday evening, November 13th. As soon as I know that schedule, I will get it out to everyone. |
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French II |
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The French II class continues to make steady progress through a packed curriculum. Among recent topics are expressions with avoir,
être, and faire, using the present with "depuis" to say for how long things have been happening, using "aller" to express the near future and "venir" to express the recent past, and vocabulary centered around weekend activities. Through activities that begin with fairly guided practice and build to free usage, the students are doing a great job of balancing attention to grammar and focus on keeping the conversation going, acquiring both vocabulary and structures in the process.
In the process of studying these topics, it has become clear that there are both shared and diverse needs in this class. Three students came through our French I program last year, while four others are essentially new to the language although all come with facility with one or more related languages such as Creole, Italian, and Spanish. Accordingly, for an indefinite period of time, we will begin class with whole group activities, and then divide time between the second-year and first-year students as one group pushes their practice deeper while the other has the chance to go over French I vocabulary and grammar in more detail as they become pertinent. Homework assignments will reflect what each group is doing in class. All seven of these students have a wonderful facility for the language, and as we build a strong track record the year shines with promise for all.
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MOCA |
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After missing two straight meetings due to Mountain Day and Family Weekend, MOCA had a packed agenda last Friday. Student Council (StuCo) reps Clara and Victoria did a marvelous job leading us through a series of reports and decisions. Among the topics covered: - Elements of the dress code were clarified. There are definitely varied opinions on certain aspects of the dress code, and there are students who are hoping to bring forth proposals to modify it. There is a perception there may be resistance from some members of StuCo to these proposals, so part of our work will need to be how best to present them from a political standpoint if the students do decide to move forward with their ideas. Clara and Victoria asked that students email them with specific issues on which they wished to work.
- Halloween will be celebrated in our school on October 28 with costumes worn all day, costume judging, pumpkin carving, and the annual Senior Haunted House. Students may also wear costumes on October 31.
- Adopt-a-Family will happen once again this December. We typically "adopt" a family of three children with a single mother who would not have much of a holiday (whatever that holiday might be) without our assistance. StuCo organizes fund-raising; volunteers join together to purchase presents and food and wrap the presents for delivery.
- Secret Snowflake, another long-standing school tradition, was also announced. This is an optional December tradition wherein students, staff, and faculty draw names of people for whom they will be doing kind acts and leaving little gifts, cards, posters, etc. during the last week of December, revealing who they are at an all-school meeting on Thursday afternoon.
During the course of these discussions, students expressed the feeling there may be some resistance among some upper school students to the middle school goal of "integrating more with the upper school." It became clear, both during MOCA and during follow-up conversations in the Humanities 7 class, that part of the issue (as is often the case in such situations) may be assumptions that are not necessarily correct. The middle school, it seems, can help solve this problem both by working to clarify what they mean by "integrating more" and by listening to upper school concerns and working to address them.
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