Future Teacher, Forever Student

February break is on the horizon here at EMS, where Team Nova is actively preparing for an eighth grade wide debate day to be held in mid-March. Appropriately titled “We The People,” the debate unit focuses on First Amendment rights based on the U.S. Constitution and the subsequent Supreme Court cases related to students’ rights in schools. “We The People” is designed to function as an easily differentiated unit of study, featuring tiered research and debate groups, varied debate topics, and grounding lessons that detail three major court cases all students are expected to use when forming their arguments and counterarguments. As our introductory week comes to a close, students are wrapping up their research on our foundational SCOTUS cases: Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), and Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986). Each of these cases asked the Supreme Court to better define the rights of students attending public schools, particularly those rig...

Happy Wednesday! As Team Nova wades knee-deep in our new “We The People” first amendment debate unit, students are still thinking about westward expansion in the United States, likely because the closure that a graded summative assessment brings to a unit did not arrive until today. After nearly six weeks of readings, discussions, and a screening of James Cameron’s Avatar , Team Nova spent last Thursday taking their first (and probably only) major test of the year. Now, here’s a disclaimer: Mr. J. is not a fan of assessing student learning by an individual’s performance on traditionally styled tests (like those including multiple-choice questions, short essay responses, matching sections, true or false, etc.). I myself prefer to assess student progress and learning via writing prompts, performance assessments, personal communications, and any other forms of assessment that do not require highly accurate recall on top of reading, writing, and comprehension skills. However, with EMS eig...

In an attempt to combat the sometimes active, other times dormant waves of hatred that possess an unknown number of students on campus, Saint Michael’s College suspended “business as usual” for all students this Tuesday, February 18th; exchanging classes, meetings, clubs, internships, and work-study shifts for a community-wide day of “learning and reflection” about racism. While I am still navigating my own feelings about today’s events in relationship to my role as a student of the college, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the stress and discomfort many of my peers and I felt today, and how I believe that discomfort is entirely necessary if one’s true intentions are to learn and grow in search of Truth. Quite a few of my past posts— particularly those related to lessons I designed about the Native American experience during U.S. westward expansion— highlight my belief in the importance of diverse and equitable representation within a humanities curriculum. Throughout th...

Happy Valentine’s Day! After a long week of wagon building and westward expansion test-taking, Team Nova filled today (Friday) with a fun morning field trip to a bowling alley before our first round of wagon obstacle course runs. As you may recall from some of my recent blog posts, Team Nova teachers attended a three-day conference in Florida at the end of January, leaving students (and myself) to keep business as usual with two substitute teachers for Science and Math while I led Humanities. Reports of student behavior over the three-day span were almost all positive, so Nova decided to reward students for their respectable representation of the team and themselves with a fun field trip– no academics required. Booking 14 lanes at a bowling alley for three hours, Nova spent this morning enjoying competitive bowling matches, arcade games, and laser tag. Admittedly, the two weeks between the conference days and our field trip were a little rough, and I was worried that students wo...

One of the most exciting times I have experienced with Nova’s eighth graders so far is the first wave of preparation for the students’ transition into high school. While our team’s core classes and unified arts courses are running on their same daily schedules, our team has made several arrangements in the past few weeks for EMS and Essex High School faculty and staff to present on what school life will be like for our students after middle school. About three weeks ago, EHS teachers and students involved in the media arts and music programs came to discuss the creative studies options the high school has to offer, and the music groups even performed a few songs as an added buy-in. Last week, students received their high school course recommendation and registration forms at an informational meeting held during Nova’s science classes. Today, the exploration of class/academic track options continued with a visit from a guidance coordinator working at the Center for Technology– Essex (C...

Study halls. The sometimes coveted, sometimes looked down upon free periods where students can work on whatever tasks are currently occupying space in their agendas. While I remember middle school study halls as the free periods only students who did not take band or chorus had the luxury of fitting into their schedules, I have learned that some school systems offer multiple types of study halls for different student needs, and also that some students are assigned to specific study halls for guided studies at EMS. If managed well by both students and teachers, study halls prove beneficial to the academic and emotional needs of students, particularly in areas like work completion, stress and time management, working memory, and attention/focus. Of course, the temptation to aimlessly browse the internet with music playing in one’s ears is rarely irresistible to students who live in school districts with 1:1 technology ratios and/or have trouble finding time to decompress throughout t...

It’s funny how complex math calculations, myths and legends, and even the natural sciences come easier to kids when figuring out the odds of school canceling for a snow day are involved. Granted, I still find myself checking Snow Day Calculator or fighting the temptation to sleep with a spoon under my pillow every now and then, especially since I know a wintry mix may mean slick roads and colder-than-average treks across campus. So as I circled Team Nova’s humanities classroom to help with scale ratio calculations for our model wagon project this week, I was not surprised to see that some students were on Snow Day Calculator or researching popular legends rumored to improve the chances of Zeus’s weather interventions. Considering the weather forecast that predicts Thursday morning through Friday night will hammer Northern Vermont with 8-10 inches of snow, I’d say there is a good chance that EMS will close on Friday for safety reasons. However, that might just be the hopeful eighth gra...

One of my favorite things about my student teaching internship is the opportunity to see how well the quality integration of social studies and the English Language Arts can work in a single humanities classroom. Growing up in a public school district that taught social studies, ELA, most STEAM subjects, and the social sciences as separate curriculums, I was inexperienced with the implementation of an integrated humanities curriculum from both the student and teacher perspectives. Even more, I was skeptical of how successful a humanities curriculum could be without sacrificing essential social studies or ELA concepts and standards. My time at EMS thus far has proven to me that with purposeful planning, expert content knowledge, generous time management, sincere dedication, and crafty unit activities and assessments, teaching the humanities is entirely possible at the secondary education level. However biased my opinion may be based on my student teaching experience this semester, I ha...

Today, students on Team Nova finished watching James Cameron’s Avatar, our main vehicle for discussing the Native American experience of Westward Expansion in the United States. Returning from the weekend break after three days of substitute teachers last Wednesday through Friday, students understandably struggled with the transition back to their normal classroom routines. All the same, today’s humanities class activities fit into a similar lesson plan to the one used this past Friday, which I believe helped students adjust to Nova’s face changes more smoothly. After wrapping up our Avatar viewing, Mr. J and I led a review discussion on how the film compares to the many Native American encounters with white settlers circa 1800-1890. Before diving into the discussion with each class, however, Mr. J stressed one point that carried over from the discussions I led last week: we as individuals cannot and do not speak for a whole group of people or for a single set of beliefs.  ...

As this cold Vermont January comes to a close and I’m welcoming February with a prayer for Punxsutawney Phil to grant us an early spring, I am excited to take a few moments to reflect on the past three days of my student teaching experience. From January 29th through January 31st, the Team Nova general and special education teachers attended a conference led by Ross Greene, an American child psychologist and the author of several books about supporting students with specific needs in the classroom. Having read Greene’s book Lost & Found together , Nova’s driving purpose for participating in the conference was the goal to better support the students on our team with EBD. The last few weeks have proven difficult for students coping with EBD at EMS, and the stress felt by all community members as we try to navigate academics and emotional support together is visibly overwhelming for many. While I have not heard much about the conference and Nova’s takeaways yet, I am eager to hear ...