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March 07, 2008
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PHS Photos: Snow Day Buddies
Upcoming events 3-7-2008
ALL SCHOOL EVENTS:
• March 6–7–No LS Classes, LS Parent/Teacher Conferences
• March 13–People in Profile (3rd and 4th grade) - 6:00-8:30 PM
• March 13–Parents Association Meeting 8:00-9:00 AM
• March 14–MS Faculty In-service - No MS Classes
Click here for a downloadable calendar of events for March 2008
Click here for a downloadable 2007-2008 School Year Calendar
Please click below for a copy of the DRAFT 2008-2009 School Year Calendar. Please note, the later start date is due to construction on the second floor (installing new flooring) which predicates a three-day later start to the school year.
Click here for a downloadable DRAFT 2008-2009 School Year Calendar
Announcements 3-7-2008
From Brian Thomas, DirectorStaff News/Hiring Update--March 7, 2008
We are proceeding at a steady and deliberate pace with hiring at PHS! We have some news for you that we all are very excited about. Wendy Furry, our former middle school math and science teacher, will be Jennifer Franklin's long-term sub for her maternity leave this spring. Wendy will also serve as Jennifer's sub next the fall until shortly after Thanksgiving. Wendy, who has a solid background in middle school curriculum in general, will be working very closely with Jennifer to implement the 7th Grade Humanities curriculum. Wendy has jumped back into the school with both feet, agreeing to chaperone the 8th grade trip with Trevor McNeil and Todd Ditto. We are also talking with Wendy about being involved with Follies next year.
Also, please join me in congratulating Paola Nou, one of our Spanish teachers, who will be having a baby this summer. We have already begun advertising for a long-term sub for the fall for Paola. We will begin seeing
candidates soon and having demonstration lessons in a few weeks.
Stay tuned. More exciting news awaits...
From the Parents Association:
Parent Education Event
PHS has been invited to a parent education event at the Katherine Delmar Burke School. Unconditional Parenting: Beyond Bribes and Threats with noted author Alfie Kohn will take place on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 9:00 a.m. in Burke’s Gymnasium. Click here to download a flyer for this event.
Parents Association Meeting!
Please come to the next Parents Association meeting to learn more about this group, find out what's going on, and just enjoy some PHS camraderie! Our next meeting is on Thursday, March 13, from 8 - 9 a.m. in the Library. Hope to see you then!
Snow Day Thanks!!
The Parents Assocation would like to thank all the parent volunteers who helped make Snow Day such a wonderful, wintry success! The following people provided supplies, loaned equipment, and donated their time to make the day great. So, here's a great big THANK YOU to Mireille Schwartz (and her mom!), Amy Sparrow, Kyoko Watanabe, Stacie Velton, Claire Barnum, Susan Haller, Scott Chase, Arline Klatte, Jennifer Braun, Louise Gregory, Irene Sung, Audrey Yee, Kimberley Spears, Kathy McBride, Irene Merry, Gaby Jackson, and Peter Renstrom.
From Amy Pearson, Director of Admissions and Financial Assistance
Admissions decision letters will be mailed on Wednesday, March 12. Please bear in mind that the Bay Area admissions directors have agreed not to contact the families in the admissions process during the week that prospective families have to make their decisions. This is known as a "silent week," meaning that parents at PHS are asked to not contact families in the admissions process. If families contact you first, then it is absolutely fine to return their call or email. We are not supposed to initiate contact. Please contact Amy Pearson, Director of Admissions and Financial Assistance, if you have any questions.
Check out the Middle School Sports Page
You'll find it in the Community Section of the website or by clicking the website below.
http://www.presidiohill.org/classroom/sports/
Check out the page for information on upcoming Futsal games. Come out and support PHS teams!
Follies DVDs are here!"The Secret of Sparkly Shine" is now available on DVD!Much thanks to David Donnefield and crew, who shot and edited the video.Each DVD is $9.; You can pick up your Follies 2007 DVD from Martin at the front desk. (There are plenty to go around).In case you did not get a copy of the 2006 Follies show (Follywood), we also have some available for $6.
Curriculum Spotlight: Kindergarten 3-7-2008
Kindergarten Curriculum Spotlight
by Steve Manseau, Kindergarten Teacher
The kindergarten class has spent the last few months consuming our latest unit of study – food! My teaching partner, Shericka, came up with the idea last fall of having the class work on a project involving the creation of a restaurant, and we are setting the table by reading, tasting, and drawing and writing about many different kinds of food.
We began the unit by brainstorming and listing our favorite foods, and after coming up with a “sweet tooth” oriented list, we moved on to fruits and vegetables. A trickster tale by Janet Stevens, Tops and Bottoms, involves a hare tricking a lazy bear out of the best parts of various plants (for example, the hare gets the bottoms and the bear gets the tops of carrots). After listening to the story, the class tasted six parts of plants: root (golden beet), stems (broccoli stem), leaves (red butter lettuce), flowers (the broccoli crown), fruit (navel orange), and seeds (corn), and I would say there was about an 85% approval rate!
The “stop that pickle” theater company stopped by our classroom for a performance of the book of the same name as the company, and we tasted the actors after the show. Even though the pickle escapes in the story, we ate it up anyway.
The class helped out with several cooking demonstrations, as we kneaded them to help make pizza and bagels from scratch. Boiled bagels are the way to go! Students listened to a book, Bread Bread, Bread, which shows many different kinds of bread from around the world (chapatti from India, baguettes from France, horno bread from the American Southwest, etc.), and we followed this with a bread tasting session.
In the spirit of Chinese New Year we read two books about special foods from the holiday, The Runaway Rice Cake, and The Story of Noodles, both by Ying Chang Compestine. The “rice cake” story is similar to the “gingerbread man” tale, as it tries to escape being eaten. Using the handy recipe from the back of the book, we made the rice cake, chased it down, and ate it. The noodle story explained how three brothers, who liked food fights with rice but not the cleaning up part, accidentally invented noodles out of dumpling dough.
Finally it was time for dessert – and we got The Scoop on Ice Cream (a book by Gail Gibbons), which describes the step-by-step process of making ice cream, including the origin of ingredients. All in One Cookie goes through the same pattern of how a chocolate chip cookie is made (and the book also has a great cookie recipe in the back which we took advantage of!). One more book about a sweet topic – How Chocolate is Made – traced the course from cocoa bean to chocolate bar. The class tasted a variety of chocolate, from non-sweet baker’s chocolate (I warned them before tasting!) to milk chocolate.
We are now in the stage of designing menus with the help of our sixth grade buddies, and will soon begin work on creating a feasible menu to present for our “Kinderant” restaurant (Shericka helped the children to think of restaurant names, and “Kinderant” came up a winner). The class is being assigned various restaurant jobs, such as servers, hosts, coat checkers, etc., and we will hopefully begin serving sometime in the next few weeks.
Bon Appetit!
Steve
From the Director 3-7-2008
Creativity
by Brian Thomas, Director
Last week Adra, Lisa J., and I attended the National Conference for the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) in New York City from February 27 – March 2. One of the featured speakers was Sir Kenneth Robinson; I had heard him speak when I worked at the Agassi School in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I was captivated all over again by Sir Kenneth’s engaging oratorical witticisms, which were Monty Python meets George Carlin with a dash of Jon Stewart.
Indeed, Sir Kenneth’s thesis promotes creativity as a transformative element in our society today, particularly in schools and in business—much like Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, last year’s summer reading book. So much of what Robinson said resonated with the NAIS audience at Radio City Music Hall as we listened intently to his overall premise, which is: NAIS member schools have a moral obligation to shift the national conversation away from our new (national) obsession with tests and towards a more sane and rational focus on creativity. Independent Schools—schools that have their own Boards, missions, accept no money from the government, and are not connected to religious or other institutions—represent less than 1% of our nation’s schools. Robinson’s book, Out of Our Minds, tells us that the only thing that can save us from ourselves as a society is to develop divergent thinking (in our students and in ourselves as educators) and offer solutions that have more than one answer.
So, what would this look like in our schools, especially in our nation’s Independent Schools? Well, it would look much like Presidio Hill School or other schools where children’s interests are taken seriously and developed, producing life-long learners who have a penchant for thinking differently.
Sir Kenneth argues that in the United States, No Child Left Behind is a scourge on our national landscape with testing being at the center of public education. This obsession is backwards looking, according to Robinson, with its focus on the memorization of facts, which leaves many children behind, or “what we do in the future is what we did well in the past.”
Sir Kenneth goes on to say that any high-stakes tests such as the ones that most states promote under No Child Left Behind, or even the SATs, which most students take in order to get into college (or the SSATs, which many students take in order to get into private schools) have a narrow focus and are poor indicators of future success according to most studies about K-12 testing. Sir Kenneth piqued the interest of the Independent School audience by saying SATs are actually only 24% successful in predicting success later in life.
Sir Kenneth is not completely against testing. To illustrate, he gave two examples of testing—one negative and one positive. In the first example, Robinson says that the fast food industry has made standardization the norm in its industry to no real gains in terms of society. He argues that if you go into a McDonalds anywhere in the word (Paris, Texas or Paris France) the Big Mac will pretty much be the same: bad. The McDonaldlization of the world (hamburgers, coffee, etc.) is one form of standardization that, according to Sir Kenneth, adds no real value to our living on the planet. Yet, he gives a positive example of the Zagat Guide where readers independently rate restaurants. In other words, you know what restaurants are good because of people who eat at restaurants. He says this independent rating is quite useful in determining an eating establishment’s standards because the criterion is clear and easy to understand, thereby adding value to our world.
Sir Kenneth’s last line about schooling and creativity stuck with me because it is what all educators should live by when they are thinking about educating children. He said, “The problem in education is not that we aim too high and fail, but that we aim too low and succeed.”
Words to live by to be sure.
Namasté,
Brian
From the Director of Technology 3-7-2008
March 7, 2008
by Greg Beuthin
As you know, Russ and I will be leaving at the end of this school year. Russ will return to Los Angeles and continue his studies, and I will move to France with my wife to be closer to family who need care. As excited as we are about our new ventures, it is bittersweet, since our time at PHS has been marked by growth, challenges that have made us rise to the occasion, and great memories.
I'm in the middle of looking at job applicants to replace Russ and me, and interviewing people over the phone (and in person in the next couple of weeks). While I often wish Russ and I could have done more during our time here, it's during this new hire process that I realize just how much we actually have accomplished. We standardized student login, upgraded and maintained a sophisticated mail and calendaring system, and, this year, moved it in-house which saved us a lot of money. We acquired new hardware in the form of new computers for faculty and staff. We bought projectors, color and high-output black-and-white printers, and (finally) 6 student laptops.
This last is a small step towards the full classroom laptop cart that has been a dream at PHS for almost a decade, according to some teachers who have been here long enough to know.
We've introduced and supported a lot of new technology. The Filemaker database was just being implemented when I came aboard, and I've figured out that we increase our use of its features in leaps about every three months. We enroll students, print directories, take attendance, and reports grades with the system. Our use of the fundraising tool has expanded this year, and has made Namrata's reporting to the board easier and more reliable than ever. We're using, or introducing, several open-source applications, including Gallery2 for our image server, WikiMedia for our upcoming PHS History Wiki, and Drupal for our website revision.
We've focused on the basics, such as the infrastructure and daily use of technology, mainly because you cannot build an educational technology program if the technology doesn't work. We are in great shape now todevelop a supportable technology curriculum for the classrooms. So my focus for the new hires is to see what educational technology background they bring with them, their experience developing curriculum, and supporting teachers and students with tech projects in the classroom.
I see three roles that support the technology at Presidio Hill. The firstis tech management, making smart decisions about the technology priorities at PHS. The second is educational technology support, including supporting technology in the classrooms and the development of a technology curriculum.
The third role is tech support, maintaining and fixing the computers. No single person will be an expert in all three, and so we will have to identify which candidates are well rounded enough to do a great job with the skills they do have. Russ and I will put in a lot of effort during the slow tech period towards the end of the year (after Spring Break) to document and build-out a robust transfer plan for the new Director of Technology to ease the transition.
It's been a fantastic two years at PHS. I feel like I've learned as much as I've been able to contribute to the school. This is an amazing community, and I am as moved and touched by the students as the teachers are. I want all my TechSquad students to sign my PHS yearbook, for sure, and I know Russ wants their signatures too. I know that seeing the eighth grade graduation will make me cry. I've developed some deep friendships I know will continue past my sojourn here. It's not over yet, but so long and take care.