Chicks and Ducklings!

If you’ve been on the Upper School campus any time in the last few weeks, you will certainly have heard the students buzzing about the chicks and ducks.  US science teacher, Ms. Mytko, gets chicken and duck eggs from a farm in Placer County.  Not all of the eggs produce hatchlings, and this year, some chicken eggs got mixed in with the duck eggs.  Though the chick eggs mixed in did hatch in the duck egg incubator, any duck eggs that might have been in the chicken egg incubator would not have hatched.  The eggs have different tolerances for temperature.

The birds serve to complement the seventh grade life sciences unit on cells and development.  Students started the units with an egg lab to study osmosis; students found that the cell membrane is semipermeable, which allows substances such as water through, but keeps other substances out.  Osmosis is a key element as eggs form in birds’ reproductive tracts.  Students learned that calcium crystals make up shells, and that the pores are visible in the microscale level.  Seventh graders have been working with the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to use tomography and visualization at the micron level, so the work on egg shells  was a great intersection.  Furthermore, students explored cell devision, as well digestion of cells of food to create new proteins to build tissues and, well, grow!  Seventh graders also were able to tie in concepts from evolution and the Tree of Life, considering the question: Why do birds lay eggs and have feathers?  Students also considered ethics in food production.  Of course, the Lower School kids took advantage of the hatching birds as well.  They got to learn the parts of an egg and how the egg develops.  They observed the hatchlings’ behavior and compared structural differences between chicks and ducks.  

So what now?  Usually, Ms. Mytko allows members of the BPC community to adopt the chickens or ducks to keep in their own yards.  Any birds remaining get to go back to where they originated--a farm in Placer County.  This farm is unique in that it will take back its birds that do not find homes.  This year, our garden teacher, Ms. Frycke, worked with science teacher, Mr. Cohen, to build a home for chickens here on the US campus at BPC.  On Saturday, students, parents, siblings, teachers, administrators, and other members of the community cleared out a space in our garden and built a coop for some of the chickens.  We won’t know if we’re getting any eggs yet--though professionals can sex the chicks earlier, we won’t be able to sex them for another three months.  We are lucky to be able to keep the chickens on our campus, where they will continue to provide lots of learning opportunities for our students!

Thanks to Ms. Mytko for helping me write this blog post!

Field Studies 2017

Approximately half of our eighth graders went to Costa Rica with the phenomenal Catalina Lacy and Michaela Garcia for a Spanish immersion experience.  The eighth graders staying at Black Pine Circle for the week were treated to a series of field studies.

On Monday, students learned that people first arrived in the Bay Area in 17000 BCE and the Ohlone started settling in villages in the Bay Area around 4000 BCE.  For context, note that the first human remains near the Seine River date back to 8000 BCE and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was finished in 2560 BCE.  Started in 800 BCE by the Ohlone, the shellmound in Emeryville was an area where domestic wastes were deposited for generations.  The Ohlone had no written language, instead relying on an oral tradition to transmit their histories.  As time passed, and as the precise location of objects were forgotten, the remains of the departed were placed in the same area; eventually the shellmound was 350 feet in diameter and 60 feet high.  Much of this was eventually bulldozed for landfill, to expand the surface area of Emeryville.

Eighth graders talked to journalist and documentary producer Andrés Cediel, who created Shellmound: The Documentary.  Released in 2004, this documentary traces the history of the Bay Street shopping area in Emeryville--from its Ohlone past, through its time as an amusement park, fertilizer and paint factory, and as a developed retail center.  The developers at Bay Street found hundreds of human remains, and removed the remains to an unmarked grave somewhere on the property.  They built a small memorial area as well, and mention the history on their website.  Students discussed whether the developers responded appropriately to concerns of local activists and Native American descendants.  Since Berkeley’s 4th Street shopping area is currently in a similar situation.  Students took a walk over to examine the general area where human remains were found, and where developers plan to add retail and residential space.  Activists have proposed an alternative.  With all this in mind, students worked in groups to design their own Ohlone memorial at Bay Street that they felt would be better suited to both history and contemporary responsibilities.  The goal for this lesson was to learn about the history of the Bay Area before the arrival of the Europeans, but also to think about how we treat our past.

In the afternoon, eighth graders took the bus to Albany Bowl, had pizza, and bowled.  Students who were not in class splits together enjoyed the freedom to play, tease, boast, chatter, yell, and goof off in the lanes.  

The next day, Tuesday, students separated into groups to volunteer in San Francisco and Oakland.  In San Francisco, Glide Memorial Church offers three square meals daily to people who are hungry--in 2014, they served nearly 800,000 meals.  Students were included in the 85-strong contingent of volunteers needed to run the meal program.  They bussed tables, served meals, and more.  Later, eighth graders said they said it was fun helping out where it was needed, and many enjoyed meeting so many people in such a short amount of time.  Other eighth graders visited the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Oakland.  The Food Bank organizes and provides food for 240 nonprofits throughout Alameda County, and distributed over 25 million meals in 2015 alone.  The eighth graders here were no less busy than their comrades in San Francisco; they were set at huge boxes of fruit, where they bagged and tied the fruit into smaller bags for distribution to local nonprofits.  They enjoyed the time, chatting with each other, the adult chaperones and teachers, and were surprised by the huge number of fruit they bagged by the end of their time.  Both groups of eighth graders learned more about the needs of the community around them, and discovered that fulfilling those needs was made easier with coordinated effort.

Some students came back to school early enough to watch Sneakerheadz, a documentary about the sneaker collecting culture.  They took some time to design their own custom sneakers, with the goal that the teacher should be able to look at the sketch and easily identify the identity of the creator of the sneaker.  Students relished the creative challenge, joshing each other about the quality of their drawings and praising each other for their ingenuity.

On Wednesday, students received a quick and dirty lesson on Bay Area architecture.  They learned the aesthetics and materials used in Victorian, Art Deco, Arts and Crafts--specifically Mission Revival, Tudor, etc.--as well as Neo-Gothic, Neo-Classical, and Neo-Renaissance architectural styles.  Architecture is art that is publicly accessible, and all of these styles would be visible in Downtown Oakland, where the Oakland Museum of California had an exhibit on sneaker culture.  Students were put into groups and then tasked with finding examples of these different kinds of architectures as they found their way to the museum by themselves--teachers and chaperones followed with first-aid kits and very little advice.  They were given addresses, a paper map of downtown Oakland, and instructed not to use their smartphones for help.  They had to learn how to use local transit maps and timetables, as well as figure out transfers.  Some students realized that an address of 1807 Telegraph Ave. meant that 18th St. was the cross street, just as 2025 Broadway meant the nearest intersection was at 20th St.  Eventually, after identifying the style of many buildings, all groups made it to the museum to see the exhibit, and then a park for lunch.  Students, teachers, and chaperones sat in the shade, climbed the tree, played games, and generally relaxed their tired feet for a few hours until it was time to take BART home.  It was a gratifying day that allowed students to make choices, learn street smarts--literally--and pick up some architecture and history along the way.  On Wednesday night, some students attended the Giants and A’s season opener.  (Kudos to the students, teachers, and adults who made it through such a long day!)

On Thursday, as an extension of the sneaker culture activities, eighth graders watched a clip from The Devil Wears Prada.  In the film, Miranda stingingly informs new employee Andy that aesthetic decisions driving the whole fashion world were made in that room, and that she--as a consumer--did not make any of her own choices.  We discussed the merits of Miranda’s claim, and discussed youth culture, as well as black culture, fringe culture, and culture of those in marginalized groups, as forces that drive designers.  Students took some time to describe their own fashion aesthetics.  They were then placed into 9 groups of 4-5 students each to play the 2nd Annual BPC Runway Games, a non-lethal combination of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Project Runway, and The Hunger Games.  Eighth graders were tasked with creating two looks in two hours, using everyday materials such as garbage bags, receipt tape paper, electrical tape, packing tape, paper plates, doilies, coffee filters, sticky notes, etc.--and disregarding gender constructs.  Looks needed to be driven by a specific designer, who included:  Stephen Burrows, Craig Green, Betsey Johnson, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, Yoshi Yamamoto, and Yiqing Ying.  Students raced to the “cornucopia” twice: once to get their designer and again to collect their weapons (materials).  At the end of the two hours, eighth graders walked the runway and presented their fashion to other BPC students.  Some audience members--teachers, especially--were surprised because they didn’t expect certain students to walk the runway so willingly (and so well).  8th graders learned to prioritize and cooperate, work with the material and limitations, and mimic but also individualize a fashion style.  They were creative, efficient, and good-humored in this experience.  Students followed the runway walk with a delicious potluck at Aquatic Park, with some time messing around on the play structure.  They returned to Black Pine Circle for a short lesson from Mr. G on physics and rollercoasters.  The next day, Friday, eighth graders went to Six Flags.  There’s not much to report back on that--most people know how that goes.

We are grateful to the chaperones and teachers who made the week possible for the eighth graders.  You can enjoy pictures here.

Educating Educators

A couple weeks ago, the Upper School Faculty took a professional development day the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  We reached out to educators at peer schools in the area to see who could host us, and we visited individually or in groups of up to six teachers.  A total of 22 US faculty members made the visit.  Schools we visited included: Bentley, Berkeley High, Head Royce, Lighthouse Academy, Prospect Sierra, Redwood Day, and St. Mary's College High School.  One of our faculty members even reached out to the curriculum coordinator for the South San Francisco School district.

Many of us met each other for carpools in the morning.  This logistical choice ended up being a fruitful way for us to discuss our practices with each other.  While we have meetings every Wednesday, between planning the upcoming week and prepping our own classes, we don’t have time to talk to each other as often as we’d like.

After the meeting, we came together to share a luxurious lunch provided by the parents in our community.  Later, at a staff meeting, we further discussed the models we had seen, reviewed our own practices, and worked through fresh ideas for invigorating our curricula and programs.  A few teachers considered the ongoing problem of scheduling classes, given what we had observed, as well as the possibilities and limits of block scheduling in the Upper School.  We thought about how many minutes core subjects were given and how often they met each week.  Some considered the role of advisory and the time given to advisory daily or weekly.  I heard one teacher discuss the resources offered by a veteran teacher in the same subject at the high school level.  Many of us came away with new possibilities for different texts and approaches for assessment.  And in the few weeks after the school visits, our school therapist has already implemented some ideas she observed, improving our own learning services procedures by increasing transparency for teachers.  

While we recognize the best practices in other programs, we were happy to find reasons for why we love Black Pine Circle so much.  Our classrooms really are student-centered rather than teacher-directed.  Teachers at Black Pine Circle prioritize collaboration in the classroom--a true 21st century educational priority.  The administration at Black Pine Circle gives the teachers a great deal of power to drive their own curricula and develop professionally.  Our students shine because they have their own voice.  Moreover, our students’ skills in inquiry drive their academic success and nurture curiosity.  Our Socratic practice is undeniably unique, remarkable, and effective.

Many of these schools are ostensibly our rivals--we are competing for the same pool of students--but true educators believe in educating all students, whether in our own classrooms or elsewhere.  This was evident in the joyous and welcoming attitudes we felt from our colleagues at different schools.  Truly, we educators are at our best when we have a chance to be students, to continually question our own work, to grow, and to learn.

Juvenelia

I taught Wuthering Heights at Black Pine Circle for many years as part of my traditional English literature survey.  Eighth graders love to hate the characters in Wuthering Heights, and they love the drama in the plot even more.  (As my partner puts it, “Every night is 8th grade drama night,” as a comment on Andra Marziano’s fantastic production with our graduating class every year.)  I never found a way to shove Jane Eyre into the curricula, though I am still trying.  This is all to say that I was thrilled to be able to see the exhibit, Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, at the Morgan Library recently.  

This exhibit was created to honor the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth.  It was a treat to see the original manuscripts, first editions, portraits, etc.  However, I didn’t expect to be so taken by the juvenilia on display.  Brontë illustrated and painted as a young teen, but she also doodled fashionable ladies and dashing men.  In some cases, the young Brontë made a copy of another artistic work, but in many cases, she created her own unique pieces.  She created imaginary worlds with her siblings and made tiny magazines or books, with microscopic lettering.  Museums don’t typically show off the juvenilia of famous artists or writers, and I was struck by how similar her juvenilia was to the products that our middle school students create at Black Pine Circle.  

A different Charlotte, my eighth grade student, has been writing stories and drawing since the age of six. She doesn’t confine her work to class assignments--rather, she finds writing and illustrating fun.  While her parents are not writers, she points out that she was exposed to arts at a young age in her grandmother’s studio.  I was talking to Charlotte about the advantages of being dedicated to this kind of art at a young age, and she said, “Children can be more creative.  They are not as influenced by culture and they have more to explore in their minds, which is a catalyst.”  She doesn’t like that it is hard to convince adults that her work is good, because they sometimes “dismiss [her work] as childish.”  Still, she continues to write.  Charlotte is a voracious reader, and finds that the act of writing helps her understand authors better.  As her English teacher, I have found that she has a deep understanding of authorial intent and literary concepts, which she proves in our Socratic seminars.  I am confident that what we do in the classroom informs her art as well.

Recently, I heard from our science teacher and K-8 STEAM coordinator, Cris Mytko, that a seventh grader, Elan, one day decided that he didn’t have turn signals on his bike.  After the weekend, he showed Ms. Mytko the results.  He is a programmer, has been using Arduino for years, and he has built a drone as well as a pedal car out of PVC.  Elan is a maker through and through, and I appreciate how he advocates for this kind of learning by going to events to represent our school.  Certainly, his juvenilia is different from that of Brontë’s, but he is still imitating and using pre-existing designs as well as creating his own unique pieces.  His performance of mastery is exciting not only because of what he is able to accomplish in his youth, but also because of his dedication and joy in these works.

Parents and educators know that learning comes from both imitation as well as independent creation; both Charlotte and Elan are proof of this, and their energy  The exhibit about Brontë’s juvenilia reminds me that students are creating all the time both in and outside of school.  The teachers at Black Pine Circle facilitate this for the students by giving contexts and questions to inform their passions.  The Masterworks program, implemented by former faculty member, Nico Pemantle, is one of the best examples of this process.  8th grade students create a capstone project of their own choosing, and faculty members serve as advisors.  The students just confirmed their projects, and the field is wide-ranging, including: reporting on homelessness; studying and exploring solutions to child labor in chocolate production; studying immigrant stories; creating a role-playing game, a podcast about innovation; and building a surfboard, a wooden bike, a brainwave-controlled helicopter, a bomber jacket, and more.  This project will take many months and requires student commitment, resilience, cooperation, and communication with faculty advisors, but the results are always stunning.  I look forward to updating this blog with the progress with their juvenilia.  Who knows--maybe you’ll be seeing their juvenilia in a museum one day!

Inside and Outside

As a photographer, I have always loved the works of Diane Arbus.  Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, an exhibit at the Met Breuer, gives a glimpse of the earlier works of the photographer.  Arbus is noted for having photographed members of the circus, female impersonators, dwarves and giants, and others perceived to exist on the edges of society.  Her work humanizes those we see as different from ourselves.  And though she is known for documenting the marginalized, she also photographed those we consider normal--children on the street, couples, cinema audiences, well-dressed older women, and young patriotic Americans.  Within her oeuvre, placing these disparate people together makes us question the very concept of normal.  Are we all freaks?  Are we all outsiders?  Who am I and where do I belong?

These are questions that resonated with me as an Asian American woman, but also a teacher and Academic Dean in a middle school.  One assumes that early adolescence is beset with these kinds of questions.  If I can guess by the responses when I tell new acquaintances that I teach middle school, then middle school is recalled as encompassing an awkward coming-into-being.  That which makes us different can be a point of pride, or it can be the germ of self-doubt and desire for invisibility--our differences are related to whether we feel like insiders or outsiders.  This is true for adults, but it seems especially marked in adolescents.  Do I love Arbus because I love middle schoolers?

Certainly, at Black Pine Circle, the teachers and the leaders--our Head of School, Division Heads and Dean of Students--are always in conversation about making our community more inclusive and supporting students’ individual voices.  We have students who feel nurtured when belonging, as well as students who love being different and being on the outside.  In our classrooms and in our advisories, we find ways to honor all different kinds of people.  After viewing the Arbus exhibit, I realized that this is evident in many our classrooms and since I am most familiar with English classes, it felt most obvious in our English classrooms.

In eighth-grade English, students finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and then watched Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic version.  Gatsby wanted to be a part of a world he couldn’t belong in, and recent critical analysis suggests that Fitzgerald might have intended Gatsby to be bi-racial--complicating his outsider status due solely to class.  Luhrmann’s film emphasized the narrator Nick’s observation that he “was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”  As the narrator, and as someone with the high breeding Gatsby sought, but none of the wealth, students observed that Nick felt both within and without.  Next, students read Dasha Slater’s New York Times article, “The Fire on Bus 57,” describing the story and sentencing behind an agender student whose skirt was lit on fire by another teen.  8th graders noted that the victim and perpetrator were both insiders and outsiders in their respective words.  The curricular themes in 8th grade English class are past and present, forgiveness, revenge, and reparation, but it could very well have been about the idea of insiders/outsiders, especially with upcoming studies in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In seventh-grade English with Stephanie Piper, the curricular theme is the American dream but, again, it could have been about insiders/outsiders.  In fact, the first full text they studied was S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, which focuses on the ways in which individuals and groups feel both within and with-out of belonging.  Seventh graders are beginning work on Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, in which the protagonists (yes, there are three), struggle with differences and belonging.  Later, students will read Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a variety of short works by African American authors, and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, all concerned with the same themes.  Even sixth graders are starting work with Maria Palmer on Cynthia Kadohata's Weedflower, which tells the story of a girl and her family’s experiences with being Japanese American during World War II.  (Maria Palmer offers this text to her sixth graders every year, but it seems very timely given the recent public discussion about requiring Muslims to register themselves in the United States.)  In all of these works, the struggle of being inside and outside is highlighted.

Why do English teachers use these texts?  Do we, as teachers, choose them because we feel our middle schoolers can relate to the feeling of being an outsider, or because we feel that they should be able connect with characters who feel excluded?  Perhaps this is a struggle that begins in childhood or adolescence, but is never resolved even when we are adults?  Since before the election and certainly after, the concept of the outsider has played a key role on our national and personal dialogues.  There is the anti-establishment, but also the marginalized, the disenfranchised.  Discussion after the election, among students and other members of the BPC community has been centered around making spaces for differences and finding ways to protect those whose differences might mark them as targets of bullying.

As always, our Admissions Director, Greta Wong, and our Board look for ways to make the BPC community better reflect our West Berkeley community.  How can we get those who are considered outside of the typical independent school inside our school?  What about a more inclusive faculty?  Recently, teachers Stephanie Colker, Cheryl Sumsion, and Rachel Fryke recently attended Gender Spectrum workshops and they are putting together a proposal to bring their new understandings to the other educators at BPC.  A student and a teacher, Cris Mytko, are starting our first GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) in the Upper School.  Teachers Sandi Tanaka, Coach Gerry Branner, Carwai Seto, and Chris Chun will be attending the NAIS People of Color Conference next week.  Inside and out of the classrooms, we are exploring what inside and outside means in our BPC community.

Diane Arbus wrote: “There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on Earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different…. That is what I love: the differentness.”

Connections

In John Carlstroem’s welcome to prospective BPC families last Saturday, he quoted John Phillips, educator and founder of Phillips Exeter Academy: “Goodness without knowledge... is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.... Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."  In various classes at BPC, we see our current John’s reference to that past John.  Through the support of their teachers, students are thinking about how elements of their lives connect to the lives of others.

In history class, Aly Mitchell examined the labor movement with the 8th graders, learning about labor movements such as the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in US history, which resulted in improving  factory conditions and workers’ rights.  They also studied the Singing Strike of 1912, where people of different ethnic backgrounds came together--women, in particular, had a strong and effective role in improving conditions.  Students then read Bertold Brecht’s 1935 poem, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads.”  Brecht asks, “Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?/ And Babylon, many times demolished/ Who raised it up so many times?  In what houses/ of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?”  

As a response, the 8th graders wrote their own poems, examining the labor and people that comprise our everyday lives.  A student, considering the Starbucks holiday coffee, asks, “How much do these elves in orange get paid?  90 cents to 4 dollars a day!”  Another student’s writing--“With a nice name like Hershey/ We could never see” that there are “people working with cut-up feet/ While Hershey makes money off our feast/ They are struggling to eat/ Now doesn’t that sound bittersweet?”--evokes the lawsuits, since dismissed, brought against chocolate makers Hershey, Nestlé, and Mars related to packaging and the use of child slave labor in harvesting cocoa.  Recalling the ongoing farmworker-led boycott of Driscoll’s berries, another student writes,  “Back bending, back breaking/ Toiling for hours in the scorching sun/ Arms aching/ Sweat staining/ Picking strawberries one by one.”  

Echoes of the same lesson are evident in Rachel Frycke’s gardening classes.  In the Permaculture Tea Party, 7th graders enjoyed two types of herbal tea blends from a local--very local, being only half a mile away--tea distributor, Leaves and Flowers that sources its products from Northern California farms.  Ms. Frycke said, “Students created a diagram to represent all of the resources, processes, and people that went into their cup of tea. We discussed the difference between an industrial system and a permaculture system: whole system perspective, closed loop, etc.”  She noted that students were surprised by how complicated these systems were.  She is going to work with students to grow and process their own herbal teas at BPC.  

Similarly, science teacher Jonathan Cohen is also working with 8th graders in workshop class.  All students in 8C are building chairs out of a limited amount of wood.  Students worked with partners to draw designs, make models with toothpicks, and ultimately build the chairs.  The model part was so easy, but actually constructing the chair was another story.  A student reported, “It was harder.  We couldn’t even get the drill in.  Sawing took way more time than we expected.  Being precise was hard with the limited amount of wood we had, and it ended up wobbly.  We had to use the very last of our wood to make it stable.  I don’t think differently about a plastic chair, but if I see a wooden chair these days, I feel differently about it.”  An 8th grader noted that it felt “weird that other people do this for a living.”

It is clear that students are acquiring knowledge here at BPC.  What makes this knowledge good is that they are considering perspectives and experiences outside of their own.

Finding our Footing and Starting to Run!

In my new role as Academic Dean, I have taken on the responsibility to work with teachers, understand what is happening in their classrooms and help them to plan for professional development opportunities both within BPC and outside. This blog will be updated regularly to let the BPC community know what is going on in the Upper School.  

Teachers have been letting me know what is happening in their classrooms by completing an online form. The first batch of responses were astounding!  How lucky to work with passionate and skilled colleagues!  John Carlstroem always says we have the best faculty around, and the updates on the events in the classroom are proof.

More than a month has passed since school started, and students are finding their footing at BPC.  From learning the BPC birthday song to getting a handle on the homework load, and figuring out who gets to eat lunch first to learning how to approach teachers for help, students are getting the routine down.  

True to the claim that BPC is a Socratic school, you’ll find Socratic seminars in classes ranging from 6th grade study skills with new faculty member, Mr. Cotman; to 6th and 7th grade history class with Mr. Ogburn, discussing the Caves of Lascaux and King Arthur, respectively; and in 8th grade English where the 8th graders have been leading seminars and coming up with the Socratic questions on their own.  In all English classes, time spent learning history provides the context for the 6th grade text, The Green Glass Sea; 7th grade’s The Outsiders; and The Great Gatsby for the 8th graders.

BPC was initially seen as an arts school and the arts remain not simply electives--they are a major element of the BPC education.  The world language teachers have been integrating grammar lessons with storytelling--either stories of their own or that of others, often conveyed in poetry or song.  Students are well into producing their own scenes at all grade levels with drama teacher, Ms. Marziano.  Musical theory and practice are prominent in Mr. Kennedy’s classes, with ukuleles and “The Girl from Impanema,” as well as in Ms. Sumsion’s class--where even an online hockey game gives insight on rhythm.  Ms. Dutcher, the art teacher, is exploring watercolors with 6th graders, paper sculpture and mandalas with 7th graders, and abstraction and clay with 8th graders.

The students will be starting running in PE class with Mr. Branner.  At this point, I would say our students have found their footing; now, they are running intellectually as well!