South Middle School
Staff Weekly Newsletter: November 4th - November 8th
Week at a Glance
- Annual IEP for JH (Room 4, 7:45 p.m.)
Tuesday, November 5
- IEP for IH (Room 4, 7:45 a.m.)
- MS Admin Meeting (District Office, 9:00 - 11:30 a.m.)
Wednesday, November 6
- Staff Meeting (Band Room, 7:37 a.m.)
- Parent Conferences (SMS, 4:00 - 7:30 p.m.)
- Dinner served at 3:15 p.m.
Thursday, November 7
- Change of Placement Mtg for AA (Room 4, 7:45 a.m.)
- Parent Conferences (SMS, 4:00 - 7:30 p.m.)
- Dinner served at 3:15 p.m
Friday, November 8 (Day Off)
Supervision Schedule
Supervision Schedule (8:10 - 8:25 a.m.) - 15 minutes a day as assigned.
Team 2:
6th Grade Hall: Sutton
T @ 7th/8th Grade Hall: Butler
8th Grade Hall: Kriz
Large Gym: Bigelow/Baertschiger
Parking Lot AM: Snyder
Parking Lot PM & Buses PM: Owen & Reid
Daily Supervision Schedule:
Parking Lot/Exit AM: Aguilera, Huerta, Karbowski & Admin
Parking Lot/Exit PM: Aguilera, Kindrick, Karbowski & Admin
Cafeteria AM: Miller/McCarty & Hopkins
Bus PM (3:09 - 3:25): Hopkins, Admin & Team Teacher
Staff Shout-Out
Thompson, Hall, Hull & Alderson
We've got a lot of talent at South (and around the district). Hats off to the above individuals for planning great learning experiences not only for their students, but also for their peers last week during our Professional Development day. Thanks for working hard to share the wealth of knowledge!
Weekly Article
Staff-
Although it's an article on teaching history, I think the message Neumann makes is true regardless of the content we're covering! Kids enjoy class (and you!) and are more susceptible to building nuerons in their brains to help them learn and 'cement' information in their brains when you let your passion show.
Teaching History with Feeling
“Engaging emotion is essential to effective history instruction,” says David Neumann (California State Polytechnic University) in this article in Social Education. But getting students engaged at an emotional level has not been emphasized in recent decades’ focus on historical thinking and content. Neumann believes a shift is needed, quoting Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotions.” Neumann suggests five ways history teachers can improve teaching and learning by getting students more emotionally involved:
• First, the opening lesson of a curriculum unit is a golden opportunity to connect the content with students’ real-life experiences. Well-framed essential questions and provocative “hooks” can “convey a sense of drama, intrigue, or weightiness,” says Neumann, “– all appeals to the emotions – to heighten students’ sense of the topic’s significance.” For example, at the beginning of a unit on the colonial period in U.S. history, the teacher might play the two-minute introduction to the documentary Africans in America to get students wrestling with the central role of slavery in the character and future of the nation.
• Second, teachers can point to the role of emotion in historical topics that are usually treated with dry analysis. Bhakti Hinduism, for example, is characterized by “unmotivated, spontaneous, and ecstatic love of God.” Industrialization resulted in smaller families for many, accompanied by a dramatic increase of parental affection toward children. Modernity also prompted “a strong, visceral revulsion toward animal and human smells that people had found completely unobjectionable in the past.”
• Third, teachers can choose texts in which emotions play a central part and pose discussion questions that surface these components. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is usually analyzed for its use of rhetoric, but students can also discuss its emotional appeal on the urgency to engage in immediate, direct action to address racial injustice.
• Fourth, students need guidance reading primary source documents in which historical figures don’t clearly state their emotions. “Presentism” is often an issue when students study a time or place distant from their own and project their own emotions onto a text. Neumann suggests using short secondary excerpts to alert students to “the historically situated nature of many emotions.”
• Finally, teachers should not be shy about showing their own curiosity, enthusiasm, outrage, or grief about pivotal historical events, which increases the chance that their students will get emotionally involved. Teachers can also help students understand unexpected reactions; for example, it’s not uncommon for documentaries on the Holocaust to be greeted with inappropriate giggles because students aren’t ready to handle such troubling material. Explaining and talking through such moments is a vital part of good teaching.
“Wading into emotions in history may draw teachers and their students into uncharted waters,” Neumann concludes. “Despite some legitimate concerns, it still seems clear that, as one historian of emotions put it, to ‘strive to know how history felt to those who lived through it’ remains a profound learning experience worth cultivating… Most important, exercised properly, empathy can help students understand people very different from themselves.”
“A Feeling for the Past: The Role of Emotion in History Education” by David Neumann in Social Education, October 2019 (Vol. 83, #5, pp. 276-279), e-link for members only; Neumann can be reached at djneumann@cpp.edu.
November Birthdays!
- Cindi Long - November 9
- Tabitha Curry - November 17
- Robert Lingo - November 20
- Laura McGarry - November 23
- Marcus Karbowski - November 25