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Leslie
6:30- 7:45 Rise and shine and help my sleepy daughter out the door for school. My sleepy son, who is a student here, will hopefully get himself up in time for class.
7:45- 9:15 I begin with Observation and Taxonomy class and it's a double block. I co-teach this with Brian Cohen, our brilliant art teacher, and today we will look at optical illusions and go over the structure of the eye to see why optical illusions are so effective. I love this class and it seems to fly by. Time's up already?
9:15-9:30 Milk Lunch - This is my favorite time of day, even though I've always thought the name was silly. I love having tea and whatever goodies are hot out of the oven. This is the first chance of the day to see everyone and it's an active beehive of 100 conversations at once.
9:30-10:10 Assembly - What a show! You never know what will happen in assembly, which is why I love it. Today we hear the most amazing a cappella singing directed by a student. If you closed your eyes, you'd never guess you were listening to a high school performance. And later, to everyone's complete delight, a fencing/sword fight demonstration is performed by the fencing group. The crowd is cheering the medieval fighters along as the whole group has an all out fight for the last one standing. There are rules, apparently, and no one loses a limb. What fun!
10:10-11:40 - Time for my double block chemistry class, and today we will finally check our clay crucibles to see if we were successful in making bronze nuggets out of ceramic glaze. As the students smash the crucibles, some are elated, others disappointed as the heavy nuggets emerge; or don't. As we continue our metals study, we immerse pennies in zinc and acid to make them silver colored, then heat; voila, they are bright shiny gold as we make brass. In the end, the students are happy with a copper, a silver and a gold coin all made out of pennies. One student says he'll try to spend his. Good luck!
11:45-12:30 Molecular Genetics - The students file in and say that the assigned reading was really difficult and could I translate for them in English? Of course, the reading is in English, but the text sometimes uses advanced scientific terms. I translate for them, and them we cut our DNA out of the gels and get it ready for cloning the gene for bioluminescence into sunflowers. Since no other high school in the country has done it, it's pretty cool. We're shooting for glow-in-the-dark flowers. It's a very long project, though.
12:30- 1:30 Lunch - Today I have a Diversity Committee meeting and we discuss ways to heighten awareness of diversity issues on campus. Four students, Robyn Scarth, (our ESL teacher), and I have just returned from the Student Diversity Leadership Conference in Dallas and we talk about what we learned there.
1:30-3:00 I'm off to teach a different section of Chemistry. This double block class tends to be sleepy right after lunch, so it's a challenge to razz them up a bit. Smashing crucibles wakes them up.
3:15-4:30 Off to the Educational Planning Committee meeting, where we discuss senior exhibition proposals. Some of them are so exciting. Our seniors are a wonderful. I love the fact that students sit on this committee also.
4:30-5:30 I MUST go for a run or play Frisbee!
6:00 Dinner - delicious, as usual.
6:30 I have dorm duty so I hang out with the girls, chat, and sometimes make dorm snacks. Check in is at 10:00 and many of them are in their jammies and sitting by the fire. Cozy.
11:30 - I finally go to bed. I'm a bit tired.
Why Putney? I think this school is unique because foster dissent in a healthy way. We ask our students to question, to push, to wonder. This provides for wonderful classroom discussions about, for example, the ethics of stem cell cloning, or issues closer to home like the most recent Standards Committee decisions. Either discussion is certain to have strong opinions from both sides of the street as we hone our skills in civil discourse. It energizes me. Nothing in the classroom makes me more pleased than when students take off on their own, make connections, formulate excellent ideas and are genuinely excited. But it's not all about discussion. The "doing" part is an integral part of being a student here. Lately, I've been very excited about the progress we're making in my Molecular Genetics class as we work toward making our recombinant sunflowers glow in the dark. These students now know exactly what is involved in genetically engineered food because they know how to clone a gene into a plant. This is not a kit one orders from a science supply house, they're doing it from scratch the way real scientists do it. It's a good way to learn.
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