Principal’s Message 

January 2012 

Happy New Year!

 As we get started on 2012, we are in the final few weeks of the first semester of the school year. In the middle school, some courses will end at the end of January—the half way point for the school calendar.

 As always with New Year’s Day, it’s a great time to look back and to look forward. We are well into our ongoing “experiment” with streamlining the focus of each course around a set of learning goals, and we are teaching each other (students, teachers, parents, and community) about how to help middle school students talk about their learning. This year’s Shared Decision Making Team has initiated an ongoing challenge to students to have conversations at home about the learning goals, and in December, we ran our first contest as we asked kids to talk about math. Congratulations to our sixth graders for winning the first round!

 The reason WHY we do this is related to looking forward into 2012 and beyond. Everyone agrees that learning is the number one goal of the school, as it should be, but we also agree that we haven’t really been all that great about keeping track of what we’ve learned. It’s one thing to “present” an entire course’s worth of material to a class, and it’s quite another to say “here is EXACTLY what we’ve learned by doing all this work.” For a middle school student, that’s a very important step. When our students eventually finish this school year, we want them to be able to know what they know. Sometimes I think of it as our Strawberry Festival Test: if you walk up to one of our students at the Ovid Strawberry Festival in June and ask them what they learned this year, what would you hope they’d say? What do we want them to ALWAYS remember about this subject? THAT’S what we’re working for all this time!

 Of course, as we head into the teeth of the winter in Central New York, we also want to keep an eye on our students’ health and well-being. We will always continue to emphasize our kids’ social and emotional education as they learn their academics, and we want them to learn their subjects in the context of a bigger world. We want them to be safe and warm and well fed and clean. We want them to be happy and we want them to love coming to our school. We want them to have fun and to be kids! We hope we’ve learned from our past and can make 2012 as good a year as we possibly can, despite our troubled economic times. The challenge awaits!

 As for the calendar itself, please remember January 10^th is a half day for all students, and on January 13 we are celebrating “Jack Guinan” day to dedicate the new gym. We are hoping for a giant crowd to honor Jack’s memory! Finally, on January 27 and 28 we will be enjoying our first-ever South Seneca/Romulus middle school musical: Letters to Daddy—hope to see you there!

 Steve