Note from Author: Yes, my handwriting may look as though I’m an eleven year old who includes hearts instead of dots on her “i’s”. But I promise I’m not eleven. . . . and I only use hearts over my eyes when I write notes to my five year old.
So I’m a relative newbie as an employee at St. Andrew’s. And in this new teaching and learning gig, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of popping into an incredible variety of classrooms. I cannot say this with enough emphasis: “OUR FACULTY ARE AMAZING.” Oh hey, that’s you.
Anyway, I know the word “awesome” is pretty much a hot button issue. People that use awesome are probably too young and too enthusiastic and are likely contributing to the ruin of the English language. But listen: if you saw what I saw and heard what I heard on a daily basis, you might accidentally let an “awesome” slip out your own mouth. Here’s just a smattering to wet your whistle:
- David Bramlett’s use of wix to help with visualization and video making to show off student understanding of parabolas.
- Margaret Taylor’s well-designed characterization centers, my favorite of which asked youth to choose which beautiful postcard best exemplified a character from their summer reading.
- Marks McWhorter’s use of animal toys to serve as springboards for students doing incredibly complex diagramming of the relationships between the traits of different animals.
- Karyn Kunzelman’s escape room activity that engaged youth in a review of all things space-related and had them focused and in complete delight at 2:30pm on a Friday afternoon.
- Price Chadwick’s use of the cup throwing in the fountain and this “Ok Go” music video to illustrate the magic of physics.
- Toby Lowe’s use of expert tables to enable youth to both teach and get peer to peer support on four math skills in preparation for a test.
- Nancy Rivas’ ridiculously well-organized group project which required youth to audio record directions (in Spanish of course) to a mystery place on campus for other students in the class to later guess.
- Grace Pei’s Chinese class writing a script for a version of Romeo and Juliet and then memorizing their lines and performing the play with great gusto on the stage in the Commons.
Here’s the thing . . .
I COULD KEEP GOING.
And I don’t know about you, but I think that’s kind of awesome.