Twenty Five Classes or Bust: AP Latin

During my visit with Mrs. Cunningham's AP Latin class, consisting of four elite Vergil-translating 12th grade scholars and their sage-like instructor, there was an extensive pre-exam review of literary terms, verb tenses, and translations. 

It was a joy to watch the four young men in the class--all of whom are some of Gunston's best athletes--compete with each other to identify the meanings of terms like metonymy, pleonasm, and polysyndeton.  Of course in AP Latin, the laws of Latin and the laws of Mrs. Cunningham are learned hand-in-hand.

Freedom from Chemical Dependency

A core element of Gunston's educational philosophy is a belief in the importance of developing healthy habits and maintaining a healthy body.  This includes assisting our students in making responsible choices in regard to drugs and alcohol, and we are committed to maintaining a substance-free educational environment.

To this end, last week our community was visited by Dr. James Lingo, a counselor from the organization Freedom from Chemical Dependency.  During his four days on campus, James provided our entire community with a comprehensive and dynamic educational experience.  His visit began with an opening address to the community where he shared his own struggles with alcohol, and over a four day time span, each grade level met with James for a full period each day.  There were also opportunities for students to speak with James through informal drop-in sessions, and he provided two workshops for the adults on campus: one for faculty, and one for parents.  Overall, it was an excellent program, and I wanted to provide some follow-up links and resources for our students and families:

1. Several years ago, I wrote an extended essay on the issue of substance use and abuse which I have updated with the most recent research: "Reflections on Substance Use and Abuse"
2. FCD's web resources for students: http://www.fcd.org/content/resources/students.asp
3. FCD's website for Parents/Guardians: http://www.fcd.org/content/resources/parents.asp
4. The University of Michigan completes a comprehensive annual study of adolescent substance use: www.monitoringthefuture.org

FCD's Mission is to:

• Provide educational communities with the guidance and training necessary to implement comprehensive, effective approaches to substance abuse prevention
   
• Educate students, parents, teachers and school administrators on the physiological and psychological effects of alcohol and other drugs
   
• Promote awareness of alcoholism and other drug addictions as a progressive, chronic, and often fatal disease
   
• Teach children and adults how to recognize the early warning signs of substance abuse and to intervene appropriately
   
• Empower young people to make healthy, responsible choices regarding alcohol and other drug use
   
• Encourage and support the non-use of alcohol and other illegal or illicit drugs during the growing years.

Twenty Five Classes or Bust: History of Ideas

I had the great pleasure of visiting Mrs. Everdell's 10th grade History of Ideas course on Wednesday.  The course is designed to introduce Gunston students to the key intellectual movements and concepts that inform our personal, national, and global worldviews.  I happened to be visiting on a day when the class was wrapping up their discussion on Taoism, and beginning a unit on Confucianism. 

Using Huston Smith's The World Religions text, Mrs. Everdell guided the students through an introduction to the concept of "The Deliberate Tradition": the five precepts that guide Confucian philosophy.  Throughout, the discussion was focused on the issues of morality, conduct, and virtue.  At the end of the lesson, in addition to assigning additional reading, Mrs. Everdell gave her students a unique homework assignment related to Confucian principles: she asked them to spend an entire day acting as polite as humanly possible.  She is truly a master teacher.

Twenty Five Classes or Bust: Honors English 9





I visited the 9th grade Honors English class of Mrs. Newell as they were discussing George Bernard Shaw's famous play, Pygmalion, based on the famous myth where the sculptor Galatea falls in love with his own creation.  In Shaw's very funny play--the inspiration for the musical My Fair Lady--the protagonist Henry Higgins, a phonetics professor, wagers that he can teach a Cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, to speak like a duchess at a garden party.

The famous painting:
Pygmalion and Galatea
by Jean Leon Gerome

I sat in on a fascinating seminar discussion that revolved around the nature of idealism, the power of language, an analysis of the psychology of each character, and the oedipal nature of the relationship between Henry and his mother.  Mrs. Newell and the students were nice enough to let me read the parts of Henry Higgins and Nepommuck!

Twenty Five Classes or Bust: Biology

My second stop was to Mr. Everdell's 9th grade Biology class.  Mr. Everdell occupies a spectacular classroom in which to teach Biology--there are windows on two walls that provide a 180-degree view of the natural splendor of the Gunston campus, and now that the leaves have fallen, you can see the river from his classroom.  On this particular day, there was a torrential downpour outside, with forty-five mph gusts of wind.  His classroom includes an aquarium, shelves and shelves of biology books, and nets and buckets for his Corsica River experiments.

The Aquarium

In the class I observed, Mr. Everdell was conducting a review of recently studied material, and he was using his projector and the online resources from the textbook to display an interactive jeopardy-type review game.  He broke the class into two (highly competitive) teams that battled over the categories of Cells, Membranes, Energizers, Product Production, and of course, Grab Bag.  The students engaged in an intense yet collaborative exercise to reinforce their understanding of terms and concepts.  At all times, Mr. Everdell was there to clarify questions and extend student understanding about cilia, flagella, cell walls, mitochondria, etc.

Twenty Five Classes or Bust: Chemistry

My first full-class stop was to the spacious Chemistry classroom on the first floor of AB, where I saw Mr. Rose teach his tenth grade Chemistry class.  He was preparing his students for an upcoming lab on determining the density/specific heat of a metal.  At first, he demonstrated the complex workings of a vernier caliper as a tool to measure thickness and the diameters of various beakers.  However, the magic of this particular lesson was the way Mr. Rose placed the students into the role of working scientists, and asking them to solve the logistical challenges of measuring the temperature of a solid (where a thermometer cannot actually be "stuck" inside the solid to measure the temperature.)  There were a number of creative and innovative guesses, and when Mr. Rose finally revealed the secret of measuring the specific heat--by taking the solid out of boiling water, depositing it into tepid water, and then measuring the rise in temperature of the water--there was a collective AHA! moment in the classroom.

Perhaps most significantly, during the lesson Mr. Rose destroyed my long-held and erroneous belief that adding salt to water makes it boil faster.  In fact, salt makes water boil at a higher temperature, which makes food cook faster.  Alas, for the last thirty years, I've been throwing salt into the water to make it boil faster--to no avail!

Twenty Five Classes or Bust!

Let me first acknowledge my personal friend and Headmaster of the Calvert School, Dr. Andrew Martire, for inspiring the "Twenty-Five Classes or Bust!" concept.  Over the next few weeks, my goal is to visit at least one class of every Gunston teacher, and report back from the front lines about the doings of our extraordinarily talented students and faculty. 

As a warm-up, my visitations began on Wednesday with a brief, twenty-minute stop in Mr. Robinson's AP European History course, where in his map-filled and history book-lined classroom, the students were highly engaged in a discussion focused on the reasons King Louis XVI of France lost his head.