COMMENTS 2019 COUNTRY DAY
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is nature. So I have a wave to symbolize what women can do.” On the back cover, birds fly out of a larger wave. A bar across the cover “symbolizes limits that hold down that freedom, but there’s a little crack that gives a little room that says, ‘Hey, you might be able to fly.’ I love it, because I got to visualize it and create something that shows the writing.” In geometry, Andy Talmadge provides students with what educators across the country refer to as “genius time.” Students get one week each quarter to work on “anything you like that helps you connect geometry to your life, or just your interests.” Each student gets to decide what they want to do, and every day during genius week they keep a record of what they did. At the end of each quarter they write a short summary and what they plan to do next. For example, Tre Reginelli discovered there’s more geometry on a basketball court than the visible lines. Using Geogebra software, he investigated “how many types of shapes I could create within a hexagon,” he says. In March 2018, Andy showed Tre a Ted Talk of artificial intelligence guru Rajiv Maheswaran talking about “the math behind basketball’s wildest moves.” Tre decided to analyze all the shots Pelicans star player Anthony Davis made over the 2017-2018 season. He learned to use a 3D printer so he could represent the patterns tangibly. “It will give viewers a second look at where he’s strong, where he makes the most shots from,” Tre says. “I’ve always been fascinated with basketball. It’s amazing, because I’m able to think outside the box and learn something I never thought I would learn about, something I was so fascinated with. It’s amazing what you can learn if you just put your mind to it and allow yourself to think more broadly!” Projects lend themselves to foreign language, not only for basics like learning and retaining vocabulary, but also in understanding a world that is increasingly multicultural, multilingual, and interconnected. Middle school Spanish teacher Courtney Twitchell, inspired by a workshop with Kate Turnbull during fall workshops in 2017, developed a project for her seventh graders similar to one she experienced herself as a second grader. “I was Sally Ride, the astronaut. I have an abysmal memory – I can’t remember anything from my childhood – but I do remember standing on a milk carton, and people would come and push a button,” and she’d speak as Sally Ride and tell them about herself. “I had a little helmet,” she recalls. She wanted to leave her students with something they’d remember forever, as clearly as she remembers Sally Ride. She decided to have students choose significant people from Spanish-speaking countries and called on Spanish department chair Ellen Cohen to help her make the project age appropriate, and on middle-upper school librarian Chris Young to assist with the research and show students how to cite their sources. Courtney made a list for them to choose from; they did their research in English, wrote and memorized their monologues in Spanish, and chose outfits that suited their characters. On project day, parents and faculty members gathered in Country Day’s Bright Library and went from one student to another, pushing the “button” (printed on paper and taped to the wall) to start the students talking. “Their outfits were incredible,” Courtney says, “and their parents kept saying, ‘I never knew they could speak Spanish this well.’ It was fun to see how much more in depth you can
get when you embody the person. They blew me away!” While teachers still give traditional assessments, many have found that project-based learning not only supplements traditional pedagogy, but goes a long way to help students consolidate, retain, retrieve, and apply what they’ve learned. “There’s a big difference between projects and project-based learning,” says Kate Turnbull. Project-based learning “puts the learning back on the student, puts it in the real world.” Increasingly, says Mike Miley, “I’ve moved to the idea that students learn more when they make something.” They also learn from each other, not only when they collaborate in work groups, but also when they see what their classmates have accomplished; then they’re inspired for the next time. Students “get to figure out how a subject is connected” to their lives, says Andy Talmadge. “You [the student] bring your creativity out, and whenever you do that, you’ve actually made your life better.” It works for teachers, too. Project-based learning not only
promotes real-world connections and connections among students; it also inspires teachers to cross disciplinary lines and learn from each other. Before Courtney attended Kate’s design thinking workshop, she “had heard of design thinking, but I’d never gone through the process myself. We were all coming up with ideas, and something just lit up in me.” What benefits teachers benefits students. Ruffin Henry, who worked on creating optical illusions during his genius time in geometry, confirms the value of voice and choice. “It’s cool the way [an optical illusion] forces the perspective on you.” To explore the possibilities, he taught himself the programming language Python in order to represent his discoveries. “It shows you how, especially in 3D, there’s more than one way to look at something – there’s more than meets the eye.” Choosing what to work on was a big plus for him. “It’s so cool that I can take what I taught myself and use it to do something.” At one point he couldn’t make the program do what he wanted it to do. And then he did. “And all of a sudden, it’s seeing something that you did come to life.” h
