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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 10th
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
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