An alumna checks in

TBS alum Julia Hannafin is a junior at Columbia studying creative writing and Chinese. She's also an intern at Poetry Genius, and she just wrote a pretty cool article about learning to memorize poetry in my English class many years ago. Wow. Thanks, Julia!

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did

Those lines still ring clearly in my head. I was thirteen, almost fourteen, awkward. A seventh-almost-eighth grader with six inches worth of height I had gained in a year and didn’t know what to do with, I walked into almost everything I could see in a room. I had hands bigger than my face and shoulders that could not hold themselves up no matter what I tried. I wore that tall girl slouch like it was my favorite coat or favorite oversized sweater, maybe…I had just given up wearing velvet drawstring pants and clogs.

I loved to read, though, and some other kids around me thankfully did too. I had written a 120 page novella to which I couldn’t find the perfect ending, a spiraling sci-fi story of two friends that fall in love and must make it through an alternate world once there is a major power shift from human to alien-slash-robot. Half of the dialogue is in French, and I handled the translation entirely on Google Translate.

My middle school English teacher, Zachary Roberts, who is to this day one of the best teachers I have ever had, read my entire novella cover to shittily illustrated cover. He gave me notes, encouraged me to send my short stories out to literary magazines, and continued reading even when it looked like there was no chance of the story ending. As it spiraled into future worlds, more Google Translate (this time, German), and the tragic death of Heroine A, he continued reading.

Click this link to read the rest...

Images from the first day of school!

Sweet Briar Creek is the name of the new stand-alone Kindergarten classroom.

In Blackberry Creek (one of the mixed 1st/2nd grade classrooms), students created their own placemats for lunch, which were then laminated.

In Laurel Creek (the other mixed 1st/2nd grade classroom), students got busy with stretching their writing muscles and thinking about the stages of the writing process.

In Temescal Creek, the new stand-alone 3rd grade classroom, students jumped right into their science curriculum with their first experiment: creating compasses out of magnetized needles floating in bowls of water. 

Cerrito Creek students (one of the mixed 4th/5th grade classrooms) were given time to explore the room and then asked to draw conclusions about what they'd be studying based on what they found.

Strawberry Creek students spent some time decorating the name tags that were then attached to their cubbies.

Making Learing Visible

We had three great presentations of student learning in the last 12 hours at TBS!

Last night the students in Strawberry Creek (4/5) shared their Famous American research projects with the community. Each student stood by his/her display and essay, and answered questions from parents and visitors. The room was alive with a joyful buzz. As a parent, I was thrilled to watch my child speak confidently to other adults about what she had learned, and the choices she made creating her project.

At the same time, the students and families in Wildcat Creek (6th grade) gathered for a class feast in the depot, where a student band performed.

Finally, this morning the students in Blackberry Creek held a publishing party. The event began with a class performance of "Octopus' Garden"; children and families then split up into groups, and each child presented and read from his/her "All About" book on a marine mammal. The event finished with a gallery walk of the great animal models that were hanging around the room.

5th Grade writing contest announcement

Booklists!

Nancy Nash (Temescal, 2/3) and Kellyne Darrow (Strawberry, 4/5) went to a literacy workshop put on by the Bay Area Teacher Development Collaborative yesterday, and this morning sent out this link of good booklists to faculty, which they learned about at the training.

8th Grade Graduation

Today's graduation ceremony was a touching and powerful event. My hat goes off to the students for their insightful, articulate reflections on their experiences at TBS, expressed through song, poem, story and speech. Though the themes of change that these 13-year-olds have lived through are fairly repetitious - overcoming shyness, making new friends, accepting oneself, learning what it means to truly work hard, becoming inspired by a teacher, etc - I am always amazed at how each one is able to find a unique and original approach, if not an entirely new story,  to tell about how s/he has changed during her/his time at the school.


The centerpiece of the TBS graduation event is the student presentations, which meld exhibition as an assessment device with the entire range of school-wide learning outcomes, and especially our emphasis on meta-cognition and reflection as essential skills for effective learning. This six-week unit begins with a variety of activities that help students remember and recall information about their time at TBS, starting with the creation of a timeline of their time at TBS filled with dozens of details about each year on the line. Students then move into creating Top 10 lists on various topics about their time at the school, followed by the construction of an extended metaphor ("My time at TBS has been like a ________, because __________"). This is a very public and interactive phase of the project, where students relive their younger years and share laughter and memories, and thus begin the process of moving towards closure with their time at TBS, for which the graduation event itself is merely the formal signifier.

At this point, students are ready to move into the next, more individual phase of the project, which is thinking about their own presentations. They first are asked to select a topic in response to the prompt, "What is a major way that you changed in your time at TBS?" This is followed by my personal favorite part of the project, which is a lesson on the nature of form/content relationship; by reading and discussing the poems Swan and Shadow by John Hollander and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by ee cummings, students learn that the form of their presentation (speech, poem, story, song, etc) should have some connection to the content of the poem, and that the two need to work in harmony to reinforce the central meaning and message of the project. Armed with this understanding, students are able to make discerning choices about how to proceed with drafting their texts, in both form and content.

Rounds and rounds of drafting, editing and revising follow, sometimes right up until the day before graduation, which is a little nerve-racking for teachers and students alike. During this last week, lessons about the actual delivery of the project are provided through watching video of, or having read-alouds of, graduation projects from previous years. Verbal and non-verbal topics including pacing, intonation, enunciation, posture, gesture, and eye contact are analyzed and discussed, and then practiced in a variety of settings, from alone to with a partner to on a live microphone. And though most students admit to being nervous before and during their presentation, the love, laughter, insight, and presence that these young adults bring to the event create an environment of joy and renewal just at the moment that we need it most.

Writing Workshop in Strawberry Creek

Today I watched a writing workshop in Strawberry Creek. While many workshop periods follow a formula of mini-lesson and then open work time for writing, editing, and conferring, this particular workshop moved from a mini-lesson on a particular rhetorical concept to a directed work period.

The first 20 minutes of the period featured a lesson on analogies. Jeff introduced the idea with the analogy go:green as ______ : red. Student ideas initially focused on surface similarities, such as the first letter of each word, before moving on to a nuanced understanding of the concept. The open-ended possibility of the conceptual linking was explored in further examples; for instance, wheel:bike as tire:_______ was answered by motorcycle, car, and truck - all of which have a claim to being right. The example meow:cat as _____:_______ further raised the issue of conceptual connection; when talking:humans was proposed as an answer, the class discussed the idea of onomatopeia and whether blah blah blah:humans would be a more accurate answer.

In the next phase of the period, Jeff introduced a worksheet for students to gather information for the bibliography of their science research reports. He reviewed the different information necessary from different types of sources (books with one author, books with many authors, articles, and websites being the four primary types used by students for this project), and also where and how to find that information within each source. Students then returned to their seats and compiled the necessary information. This is a great example of how our teachers use the writing workshop to explore writing ideas across the curriculum.