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 I took a sojourn up to Eugene this past weekend to visit my daughter at Oregon.  Long drive there and back, especially with Open House on Sunday, but it was a wonderful weekend.  

We sometimes lose sight of the wonderful things we provide for our students at Carondelet.  Students do tell us every now and again, as do parents, but as we move through the day to day things we do, I think we fall into the “same old stuff” mindset periodically.  And then, just when we least expect it, we get reminded of why we do what we do and how amazing we are at what we provide for our young women.  A few examples from my trip:

  • Cassidy knew everything that has been going on at school, and not from my sharing with her; she checks our social media accounts to see what is going on
  • Her roommates, who are a wonderful, told me repeatedly that they wished they had gone to Carondelet-clearly they are checking on what goes on with Cass and she has shared some of her experiences…evidently we need to start some outreach to southern California Jess.
  • While walking around on Saturday, I heard, “Mr. Cushing, what are you doing here” from four of our graduates.  They love Oregon and are doing great, and they all stated how much they either missed Carondelet or how much fun they had here, and they asked about some of their teachers and staff members.
  • I got back her for Open House and had at least a dozen families come up and tell me how amazing our campus is, how friendly our students are, and how great our teachers and staff are…and they are right.  
Nice that if took 15 hours of driving and a whirlwind weekend to hear these things, but it is good to be reminded that you are doing an amazing job, that you are appreciated and loved, and that your work is noble and good….that’s a Thanksgiving reminder worth the drive 🙂

Blogging 101!

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Instead of writing about differentiated instruction that I have been exploring in my Crew I thought I would try to demonstrate differentiation (click this link for a reminder on what differentiation is) as if I was working through the topic of blogging with students…this can’t look the way that I would want based on the functions of this website…and based on my knowledge of how to use this site… but you can see where I was going with this…I hope!
Class Question#1: Can anyone tell me what a blog is?
Class Question #2: Raise your hand if you have ever read a blog.

Continue reading →

DEI Meeting My Students Current Needs

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During the past couple weeks I met my students needs of wanting to know more about what happens after high school. Seniors where struggling with what to do in their college process and younger students had not yet started thinking about what comes next. Students wanted to see how math can be applied in the real world. This section met the students needs and was relevant to their current lives. 

Hello! 

I just wanted to share a few things with you that your student has been learning about and engaging with these past couple weeks. As a class we discussed what our plans are for after high school including options like trade school, community college, private and public four-year colleges and more. The overall theme was figuring out how we would finance our dreams ahead. 
We discussed the pros and cons of all higher education options, specifically the overall cost and how to create a monthly budget for those expenses.  We had Mrs. San Miguel from College and Career visit our class to explain the critical topics such as FAFSA, grants, scholarships, and loans. Your students have now applied for at least two scholarships! Every student participated in the Create-A-Greeting-Card Scholarship and also applied for another scholarship of their choosing.  I included some examples of the greeting cards below for your reference. We donated these cards to a senior living home to enjoy the holidays. 
As a final assessment your student was given an alias and had to budget one year of college for them. The goal was for students to understand how to budget for big expenses in their future. The alias given to your students was able to show them the variety of circumstances each person faces in the world. One alias was a single mother making $40,000 and another was a student whose family made $275,000 a year. Not only did students learn about the different circumstances families face and their needs but they also explored different job careers. 
I hope your student shared what they learned and are able to apply what they learned. FAFSA is currently open for the seniors to apply. For juniors and sophomores this was a great chance to get them familiar with the college process and thinking about what is to come next. Please let me know if you have any questions from the lessons we discussed.
Best,
Ms.Lawson

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How many words…

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About 6 million words

What could be more exciting than learning about the causes of the Great Depression? This is a question our best historians and economists are still pondering. It is an important question because today’s economy is edging closer to several of the tipping points that caused the Great Depression.

After giving my marvelous introduction to this research project I asked for questions. The first question was, “How many words does it have to be?” Before I could answer, another student replied, “Word count doesn’t matter. You need a robust answer.” This was my answer to another word count question a few weeks ago. Students loved the word “robust” and repeated it around the room. We discussed things like fully answering the question, impressing peer reviewers, and making the writer feel proud. Students actually remembered the discussion and repeated back these parameters.

The original questioner then asked, “So does that mean about 500 words?” There were groans from many classmates. My response was, “If you are doing a good job, you will not be able to stop at 500 words.”

The word count person is one of my students who has learned to believe that meeting a minimum word count should result in an “A” paper. It is the same student that can’t understand how a hundred or so extra words will not automatically result in an “A” paper, especially when a neighboring student got an “A” for a shorter essay. This is one of my students who has difficulty distinguishing quality from quantity. This same student thinks all paragraphs must be five sentences long and that a two page response to a question does not require paragraphs so long as it is answering the question with however many claims are included.

I must admit that I still often provide minimum word counts. I would like to get away from it, but, when I do, students like the one above want me to explain why I believe their 150 words did not fully answer a question like, “What were the causes of the Great Depression?” This is something I really do not have time to debate. It does make me ask, however, why so many students are focused on quantity rather than quality.

Is this a problem for anyone else? Have you found solutions? Have you found ways, like using the word “robust,” to make the quality v quantity differentiation stick?

Ethnic Studies

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Among the many new laws that Gavin Newsom has signed into law over the the past couple of weeks none have touched closer to a social studies teacher than the requirement for all public schools to begin teaching ethnic studies by 2025. Check out the New York Times article if you want more context. 

While this requirement does not mandate us as a private school to fulfill this requirement we have, as a department and with admin, been talking about this as a potentially very viable class at Carondelet. As we continue to expand our DEI initiatives as a school and within our department’s curriculum, as we recognize the ways that Catholics have been responsible for being exclusionary, an Ethnic Studies class (be it an elective or mandatory) feels right for the times. 


That being said I have many questions and feelings about the class:


  • Do we need Ethnic Studies to be its own class or should we just integrate the content into our normal history scope and sequences (World History, US History, etc)? Im some ways It is sad ethnic studies even has to be a class. If history texts were written more inclusively ethnic studies would simply be part of the scope and sequence of any history class. 
  • How much parent push back are we potentially looking at? I enjoy a salty conservative parent email from time to time but how many are we talking about here?
  • Who should teach this class? We have a very competent but very white department. We have to recognize that in an honest way and seek out new colleagues or mentors outside of our school and/or department in order to do this class the justice that it deserves AND to make sure all of our students feel as seen as possible.
  • What groups should be covered? This is a really heated topic right now even among supporters of Ethnic Studies curriculum. 
    • Should we only focus on those groups indigenous to the Americas?
    • How can “Asian-American” given the VASTNESS of the continent culturally, religiously, and linguistically be covered in a single unit?? How do you pick and choose groups within a group?
    • If we follow the norm of highlighting the African American, Asian American, Latin American, and Indigenous American experience who are we leaving out? What about Middle-Easterners, Jews, etc.?

Any way these are my wonderings for now…..do you have any insights, wonderings, or answers about this class? I would love to hear them! 

Back in the classroom

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When DLS lost a teacher last semester and threatened to close two sections of the very popular elective, Criminal Justice, Jen and I saw this as an opportunity to jump back in the classroom.  “We will team-teach it,” we said; “coming back from a pandemic won’t be that hard,” we said; “it is a subject we are interested in and have a grain of knowledge about,” we declared…

Nevermind that many trusted colleagues said we were on drugs to take this on right now…

Flashback to this summer and our frantic realization that a “grain of knowledge” does not a teacher make… this led to the purchase of textbooks and content material to provide us with foundation support that would keep us — we hoped — a few steps ahead of the students.

So we are a quarter in, and I find myself channeling the first lines of the Dickens classic…

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

That probably sums up our first quarter — and teaching as a profession.

My takeaways so far:

  • My biggest sense of conflict is fearing that I am doing either the Admin piece or the Teaching piece injustice.  They both take time and they require different brains — even if some skills transfer
  • You get attached to your students.  I love the connection a classroom provides.  They frustrate me, they make me laugh, I find myself cheering for them on the sidelines
  • I think about the class ALL THE TIME…
  • Sometimes the stuff that worked best with my middle schoolers is not “too childlike”
  • Picking a subject I have never taught as a step back into the classroom was hella stupid
  • Teaching takes a bunch of time… it’s good time but there is no escaping that it takes ALOT of time if you want to do it right
  • I love the high you get when everything lands and the classroom energy is humming.  It almost makes up for the pit of despair when everything flops
  • I can’t let go of my forever defaults.  I have always believed that students need constant feedback and a lot of formative assessments… that their grade can not depend on just a couple summative assessments
  • I am conscious that I am much more conscious of the SEL piece than I was back in the day.  I always tried to put myself in their shoes to try and anticipate how lessons would go and what they needed… but I did that as a collective.  I find myself scanning the room and feeling how things land differently for different groups. I am very aware of the body language of our students of color and their absolutely not taking the bait about engaging in difficult conversations about racist policing
  • I have a lot of boys — 26 students of my 31 are DLS.  They are lovely.  They require many middle school strategies.  I would have preferred having a class with many more girls, only because I wanted to have a bigger sample size of what a Senior Student of Carondelet at the end of 4 years of the innovative curriculum can do
  • I like team teaching.  I have a great partner.  This may not make sense, but when I raised my boys I was a single parent and what I felt was the hardest thing about single parenting was about the horrific loneliness of not being able to talk to someone about “your project” — someone who gets it and would not get bored of the topic.  I have never team-taught but I enjoy the process.  The conversations, the compromises, the debriefs  
Maybe the most humbling takeaway came from our end-of-unit evals.  The feedback Jen got from her period 1 was pretty much identical to my period 4.  The team-teacher thinks “wow that is great, we are building something that allows students in each group to get a similar experience.”  My personal ego would love to feel that who delivers the content makes a difference :-).
I have no regrets about having jumped back into the classroom.  Jen and I are still measuring the sustainability of keeping this up — you will get a different answer from us on different days.  

DEI in action in the Modern Language Department

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Although teaching language through rich and authentic cultural content has been an ongoing practice in Carondelet’s language classrooms, it has become ever more imperative to ensure that these efforts are truly inclusive, diverse and widely representative of all members of those cultures. Just as we have (mostly:) left behind mindless and ineffective conjugation drills, we must take a close look at the “culture” we are teaching. Our department has been hard at work examining our content and resources, and including cultural contexts that reflect the speakers/signers of the languages that we teach.
Here are some examples of our work: 

In our French 2 classes, our students learned about the rituals of Rosh Hashana, and its enduring significance in French Jewish culture. 
In French 1 classes, students watched a video about breakfast preferences, and compared them to their own and that of other French-speaking countries. 
In ASL, all classes discuss audism (the belief that one’s ability to hear or behave as one who hears is superior) and how it affects Deaf people in their everyday lives.
Kristin is preparing a fascinating unit for ASL 3 about BASL (Black American Sign Language) and its origins.
When black and white students went to separate schools, there were also separate Deaf Residential Schools. The Black-Deaf schools developed their own way of signing. These signs and culture are still passed on today in many families and communities. 
In Spanish, Kerry’s students discussed the importance of language diversity after watching and reacting to a video of a young woman who sings in Quechua an indigenous language of Peru, and parts of Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. 
In French 3, students explored the culture of protest of the disenfranchised through street art in Paris and Brussels. We explored graffiti and murals, discussed Art Vs. Vandalism, and created a wall mural to commemorate with words of love, courage and compassion, the victims of 9/11. 
These are just a few of the many ways we show students that the world’s diversity comes in many hues and tones!

DEI and CRT Are Poison

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 It’s time for a confession. I love watching PragerU videos. Imagine Fox News with evidence and logic instead of ranting and raving. They make me pause and question. They make me realize there are some pretty smart people out there who are not on my side of the fence. There are so many lessons I could open with a viewing of a PragerU video.

Watch the video, “Miseducated: The Decline of America’s Schools.” Here are some essential questions posed by PragerU. After watching the video, how might you answer each of these questions? 


“Why are schools obsessed with race and gender issues? Why are children learning revisionist history? Why are America’s schools teaching children to hate America — and each other?”

Your answers might come in handy the next time a parent or neighbor asks the same questions.


Exploring Patterns to Spark Curiosity

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My lofty (and somewhat nebulous) goal this year is to teach students to be curious.  This is particularly challenging in a subject that is often presented as “Memorize all of these patterns (formulas) that people figured out hundreds of years ago.  You will need them for a future test or class, but (probably) never again.”  With all of this memorization, what is there to be curious about?  And since that future test and future class are still looming realities, where is the time for curiosity?

Enter Algebra Readiness.  My Algebra Readiness class is designed to be a bridge for students between their middle school math experience and their high school math experience.  My goals are simple.  

  1. Understand that math is a creative subject.  

  2. Apply Growth Mindset strategies to shift your math experience.

  3. Explain foundational math concepts in a variety of ways (i.e. verbally, visually, numerically, etc.)

In an effort to show the inherent creativity in mathematics, I created a unit in which we are exploring patterns 一 lots and lots of patterns.  The first pattern we looked at was the Hailstone Sequence.  The Hailstone Sequence starts with any whole number and follows this pattern: If the number is even, divide it by 2.  If the number is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1.  Keep applying these rules until the pattern appears to end.

 

For example: If you start with 7, the sequence looks like …

7 – 22 – 11 – 34 – 17 – 52 – 26 – 13 – 40 – 20 – 10 – 5 – 16 – 8 – 4 – 2 – 1 – 4 – 2 – 1 …

 

This is called a “Hailstone Sequence” because hailstones go up and down like this – they start in a cloud as drops of rainwater, then they are pushed higher in the atmosphere by wind where they freeze, sometimes several times, before eventually falling back to Earth.  These number sequences are called hailstone sequences because they go up and down like hailstones.  In 1937 a mathematician proposed his conjecture for these Hailstone Sequences, that for any number you pick, if you follow the procedure enough times you will eventually get to 1. Since then lots of mathematicians have been trying to prove or disprove it. So far every number that has been tried has followed his conjecture, and powerful computers have checked enormous numbers of numbers, but no one knows if there is a big number out there that might break the rule.   So this is classified as an unsolved problem in mathematics.

This, in and of itself, is pretty cool.  Since most problems we give students in math are problems that we (as teachers) already know the answer to, giving them an “unsolved problem” shifts the dynamic away from the cliche “sage on the stage”.  Students were simply asked to pick a starting number and run the sequence.  Then repeat this enough times until you are convinced of something.  I didn’t tell them where to start.  I didn’t tell them where to end.  I simply told them to figure it out.  As expected, some of them were super frustrated (as I would have been).  But they asked questions, they tried different starting points, they collaborated with each other and they all eventually came to the same conclusion as that mathematician did 80+ years ago.  But the coolest part was that after we concluded our time with this pattern I had multiple students ask me, “Ms. Levesque, are there any other unsolved problems in math that we can do?”  

So my question is this: In a world where students can get answers to most of their questions through a quick Google search, how do we teach them to be curious?


DEI in the midst of pushback

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    In our Modern Language Department meetings, we’ve been discussing this year’s focus on incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion into our curriculum. As we talked about some ideas with Rosh Hashanah and Hispanic Heritage month coming up, I grew excited about the prospects for our students to dive deeper & have meaningful reflection as they learn about the rich diversity in cultures and languages around the world. While a part of me is already chomping at the bit to do research and brainstorm with my colleagues, I have to confess that I’m also hesitant about how this could potentially rub some parents the wrong way. I think about the parent email Kevin received relating to our Symbols & Ethics course and how curriculum that is aligned with our school’s mission has already been called into question. Just as schools all around the country are implementing DEI initiatives, there are also countless incidents of parent pushback and even calls for legislation to ban curriculum pertaining to this topic. As fate would have it, the topic of DEI has been on my mind all week and popping up everywhere. A few days ago, on my afternoon commute back home, I listened to the latest episode of NPR’s CodeSwitch podcast. *Some explicit language was used*

    The episode summarized a lot of what I’ve been anxious about and presented historical context to this sense of “outrage” that has happened many times throughout our nation’s past. While the episode mostly focused on parents’ accusations of teachers pushing an agenda for Critical Race Theory, it did also touch on a similar panic happening over school’s developing DEI and anti-racism curriculum. While it was sobering to hear, it is indicative of the fact that we have a LONG way to go with reframing conversations around these topics. As we close this week out, I have a lot on my mind and heart about how I will teach Spanish this year with a focus on DEI. To my core, I believe this is a natural direction to lead with; as our students acquire a second language, they become aware of the wider world and what it means to be a global citizen.