Core Values

First of all, a huge thank you to those families who joined me in the past two weeks for “Dinner with Bruce.”  I quite enjoyed a chance to meet with you in a more informal setting.  I also enjoyed the chance to connect over something that is so important to me personally and to our school.  That is how our core Quaker values support and inform what we do and impact our students in such a positive way, both while they are here, and after they graduate and go on to confidently lead purposeful lives.

It is so important for us to be clear about what our core values are as a Friends School, and what this really means in terms of the benefit our students and families receive.  For example, how does the transcendent belief of “that of God” in each of us reflect in how we approach and reveal it in our interactions with the 11 members of our brand new class of three-year-olds?  How does inward reflection in weekly Meeting for Worship translate to a child’s growing self-awareness and self-knowledge?   How does that in turn translate into graduates who are not only academically prepared, but also know more about who they are at their core, and who are inclined to contribute to their local communities and work to change the world for the better?  As a school community we cannot reach the full potential of being a “Friends” school without taking our own time to reflect inwardly, listening for that still small voice that can guide us when we are ready to hear it.   Our teachers are also taking additional time in faculty meetings this fall to reflect on how we can make meeting for worship more accessible for our students.  I’ll have more to report on this in the future.

Online Competition!

Keep your fingers crossed!  The national results come out later today or tomorrow!  Last week we had over 50 students online at one time competing in the American Math Challenge.  This is a national challenge where students log-on to the AMC site and solve math problems.  They get points for correct answers, and the longer they compete, with correct answers, the higher their score.  The unofficial results on the website, as of the time one of our students logged-off at midnight, suggested that TWO of our students, one sixth grader and one seventh grader, MIGHT be in the top 40 in the country.  We have also been told that Friends School finished 19^th nationally for Math Counts schools.

 

It is great to have so many students so charged-up about math.  The right to friendly bragging rights means that our students were both competing for the school and for themselves.  Individual strengths united for the team!  I am told that very shortly we should be able to confirm how our individual students did.

Regardless, however, they had a lot of fun.  (Remember what I shared with you before – Math is Fun!)  Now I do know that the sixth grade teachers did note some lethargy from one of our potential top scorers when he arrived the next morning. I can’t officially condone skipping a reasonable bedtime, but it is exciting to see this level of engagement with a subject some of you may not recall as fun.

On a related note, one of our goals this year is to increase and improve the ways we incorporate technology into our curriculum and lesson plans.  Students are graduating into a digital world and often they are already the leaders in their families in the use of technology.   Thanks to generous support from the Parents' Association we have been upgrading our network and hardware infrastructure to support this work.  Last week we put this to the test with so many students online at one time for the competition.  Many thanks to the PA for helping us engage with the challenge so fully!

Oh, and our potential individual top scorers are sixth grader Alex and seventh grader Justin.  I won’t tell you which one had the higher score.  You can ask them.

Can Studying Art Help a Student Be a Better Doctor?

You may read in the Bulletin this week that our Fifth Graders are working in metal in art class with T. Diane to make Mexican tin suns inspired by Aztec Sun Calendars.  They are doing this in preparation for our annual Dia de los Muertos celebration on October 31.  (That’s “Day of the Dead” in Spanish.)  Besides being part of a multi-sensory integration of our Spanish, Social Studies and Art curricula, and I’ll bet T. Joseph will work in Math as well before we get to the actual celebration, why might this be important to your child’s future?

According to Dr. Gary Christenson, President of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, medical students with visual arts training demonstrated improved observational skills.  In a 2001 study, medical students who participated in forms of visual arts training, such as life drawing and art observation exercises, showed stronger visual diagnostic skills than those with no arts training.  In short, they had sharper powers of observation and were more likely to pick up visual cues that helped them diagnose a patient.  They looked at things more closely.  Studying art is not just to explore a possible career in the arts, but to become better prepared for many things a child may do in the future.

Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein expanded on this thinking at the annual conference of New Jersey Art Educators earlier this month.  He shared research that sustained arts and crafts participation over a lifetime correlates with being an innovator.  Training in observation and practice visualizing things teach skills that chemists and geneticists, amongst others, can call on when performing scientific research.   A lifetime skill of seeing what is important and detecting changes and patterns converts to many future fields.  Art education contributes in preparing a student to be better at just about anything.  Addressing particularly careers in science, technology, engineering an mathematics or “STEM” Dr. Bernstein went so far as to report that adding “Art” to STEM gives it STEAM!

I hope many of you can join us on the 31^st for Dia de los Muertos.  In the meantime, keep an eye out for a display of Aztec style tin suns!  Between now and then we’ll see what other visual creations will emerge for the celebration.

Baseball is Fun, So is Math! GO Phillies!!

This week some of our fourth graders have had a particularly fun homework assignment.  Follow the Phillies!  The students in T. Patti’s class are playing fantasy baseball during the post-season to learn statistics, decimals and long division.   If you have not heard it from your student yet, math is fun!  This is an important step in helping students not fall into a struggle with math anxiety.

Connecting mathematics to real-world experiences promotes learning and retention of new concepts.  Middle School parents also got a chance to hear about this from Teacher Joseph at Back to School night last week.  Brain research has revealed that students learn better when their lessons address four things:  Why, What, How, and What-if?  In math, “Why” is the connection of a concept to a student’s past experience, such as mixing concentrated fruit juice, which involves fractions.  “What” is the nuts and bolts of how do to the problem.  “How” is the practice and experience of working the problem and “What-if” is directly applying new learning to something concrete in the “real world.”

When most of us were growing up we learned the “What” and “How” of mathematics.   Many of us did not benefit from learning as much about the “Why” and “What-if.”  Statistics, fractions and long division are essential elements to master baseball statistics, and statistics are a useful way to determine how a player may perform.  This connection adds the why and what-if.  Besides, it’s fun, and bringing students back to math class year after year is the foundation of advanced learning.

So, GO PHILLIES! And GO STUDENTS!