Weekly News and Notes

Greetings!

First off, sorry that last week's notes never got posted. I apparently clicked save instead of publish, didn't realize it until Monday, and by that point, felt like I could just wait. At any rate, there's a possibility that we will be publishing this on a bi-weekly basis, but if there are announcements specific to the week, we will make sure those get out to everyone, particularly if there are any hot-button issues.

Activity Updates:

• Congratulations to the Science Olympiad team, which competed at Oliver Ames last week in its first matchup of the season; in addition to the host school, B-R and Stoughton were also present. Some of the highlights:
• For the Scrambler event:
• Gold Medals went to John Eisenstadt and Devin Rose
• Silver Medals went to Jason Sutherland and Connor Galvani-Campbell
•  For Bungie:
• Silver Medals went to Erica Carbone and John Williams
•  For Anatomy and Physiology
• Gold Medals went to Lauren Getz and Alyssa Whitaker
• Silver Medal went to Alex Callahan
•  For Experimental Design:
• Silver Medals went to Ben Lagan and Kevin Torchia

In particular, kudos to Mr. Hoek, Mrs. Pereira and Mrs. Colace, who advise the Science O team. Great job, all!

• The National Honor Society held its induction this week. While Mr. Nassiff served as the emcee, the roles of the student officers deserve accolades as well, as President Amanda Pollack, Vice President Vi Pham, Secretary Devon Murphy, and Treasurer Corrie Brown also played a role, as did publicists Colin Trainor and Elaina Bliss. As the new inductees were introduced, a brief biography of the students was read, and the litany of service projects and community leadership examples was truly humbling and impressive.
   
• Special thanks to Mr. Nassiff  for all of his effort and energy in creating a truly memorable evening, which Dr. Evans shared in her email to district news posted earlier this week.

• The Community Service Club, which is starting to go by the name of the "533 Club," in an effort to connect the organization to initiatives ongoing in town, will be conducting a Penny Wars fundraiser for the victims of the disaster in the Philippines. 10% of the proceeds will be donated back to the class that raises the most money (who hopefully will donate it back to the cause), with pennies counting toward the club and silver coins and paper money penalizing. If you have any of those large plastic water jugs lying around, please see me or Ms. Parrella and we can get them to the students. The proceeds are being donated to the Red Cross.

• The 533 Club is also collecting food and non-perishables during advisory before Thanksgiving.

• SADD and Peer Counselors will once again be conducting the giving project/toy drive in December.  The flyer can be seen here; see the High School Conference for more details.

Taking Risks

- Shanley Heller, STEM Leader

In walking through classrooms we have been paying attention to well-structured lessons and safe classrooms.  Having a "safe classroom" includes proper use of tools and instruments in labs and shop, and  having defined classroom rituals so students feel safe.  So why is this segment entitled "Taking Risks?"

A safe classroom will encourage students to take academic risks.  Learning to take academic risks is critical in teaching students to be good problem solvers, as well as helps empower students.  Often we, as teachers, are guilty of trying to do too much scaffolding.  We only ask questions that have a clearly defined answer, often creating scenarios that are not realistic.  The unintended outcome is that students are afraid to try to solve a problem they haven't seen before, or imagine alternatives solutions and scenarios.

How do you teach risk-taking?  I don't recommend pushing them out of a plane (a metaphor).  You need to build opportunities into your lesson plan.  I love to use Think-pair-share whenever there is silence to one of my intensely interesting questions.  I ask each table to share one idea, and I write the list on the board---no judgement.  Then we go through the list.  For math, I ask :  is this statement always true?  Thumbs up, down or sideways (for sometimes or IDK).  Students are asked to defend their positions.  We always have interesting conversations, and I uncover lots of misconceptions. 

For more ideas, here is a quick article to read.

Field Trip and Service Project!

Mr. Collins' English classes took a trip to the Community Farm as part of a service learning project!

 

Classes of the Week!

Lots of highlights this week from classrooms - a couple of note:

• Ms. Buscio had pretested and was using the results from the pretest to pair up students and work through problems, a great use of data to support what was taught. She had also created her first test on ItsLearning following Ryan Camire's workshop on writing tests in Its Learning.  
• Mr. Aylward's students in Project Physics have been working on a rocket launch:
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• Mr. Jacobs' sophomores were working on understanding tone through the staging and interpretation of the text of Shakespeare's Othello. Their goal was to pick apart individual lines, describe how they would stage them, and articulate to their peers what the emotion conveyed by the text should be for the audience. Students were completely engaged and were working diligently on paraphrasing and analyzing the emotions of the text!

Please don't view being left off this list as a slight - there were many classes visited this week, and there were many, many positives!

Late Buses

To help accommodate students staying after school for clubs and activities, as well as extra help, we will have late buses running from Medway High School each week on Wednesday and Thursday. The bus will leave from the main circle in front of the building at 4:00.

Athletics Postseason

I've learned over the past year or so that there are a great many things that are the norm at Medway High School. Fortunately, one of them is to plan on teams advancing in the postseason.

The boys soccer team makes a bid for a state title for the second straight year on Saturday evening at Foley Stadium in Worcester, when the squad faces Belchertown. I have two good friends who work in Oriole country, and we know that the match will be a difficult one for the Mustangs. Whatever the result, the team has played a fantastic tournament, winning its second straight Sectional and Eastern Mass title and, most importantly, has deported itself with class.

The girls soccer team captured the TVL title but fell in the second round of the tournament to an upstart Hanover team. Two of our girls earned Eastern Mass All-Star honors (Vanessa Bussberg and Shannon Simmons).

The field hockey team played its way to the Sectional semifinals, where it dropped a heartbreaking overtime decision to arch-rival Dover-Sherborn. Coach Hass was incredibly proud of her girls, and coaches from around the league that saw us play in the tournament consistently complimented her on the way this team came together at the right time!

Our football team plays one more home game, facing Foxboro tonight. They barely missed out on the winners bracket of the playoffs, but have dominated both Wareham and Middleboro in the "non-playoff bracket." If you don't understand how they decided which teams made it to which side of the bracket, and which teams did not - don't worry about it. Most people don't. The Thanksgiving battle with Mills-Hopedale looms in a couple weeks in Millis.

All in all, if you see students wearing any of the many garments depicting their allegiance to a particular fall sport, including Cross Country, Golf, and Cheerleading, congratulate them not only for their on-field successes, but for the way they have competed this year, which is a credit to their captains, their coaches, Mr. Pearl, and their collective sense of team. As someone who has been involved with athletics for most of his life, at a number of levels up to D-1 college, our student-athletes have represented this school very, very well this fall.

Finally, our school's current fight song, first as an instrumental and then sung by the immortal Bea Arthur - sorry, Ms. Webster!  

Service Distinction

A proposal was pitched this week regarding a Service Distinction for graduates at the School Council meeting. The full proposal from Student Government can be found here. While School Council did not vote to approve, the hope would be to move forward on it in the next couple of months for implementation before year's end.

If you have comments, questions, or feedback, feel free to send me an email, or you can also share your thoughts with Ms. Pereira, Ms. Bliss, or Mr. Brandon, who are the faculty representatives to School Council, or Mr. Christie and Ms. Ryan, who are the co-advisors to the students.

Videos of the Week:

So, depending on your generation or which show you prefer to watch in rerun, these two videos show a look at Bloom's Taxonomy through Seinfeld and the Andy Griffith Show. Both are pretty cleverly done. And for those of you who did not know, Mr. Murphy is an Andy Griffith aficionado!

The weekly resources can be found here. There's a thought-provoking piece on the importance of ninth-grade, though the headline is a bit misleading, as we know that there is no single "most important year." I also recommend the piece on "How to Remain a Teacher for more than five years," which is more about pursuing context, and may have some advice for those who are feeling some tension.

Be assured that the stress that everyone is feeling - staff, students, teachers, counselors - is a regular topic of conversation. We don't have all the solutions as of yet, but the message is being heard!