
Slocum Snippets
April 21, 2017
Into The Deep
On March 28, 2017, Slocum Skewes School had the opportunity to enjoy a short film called, “Into the Deep” through a dome theater that was setup in the gym. “Into the Deep” is an exciting, engaging, and engrossing exploration of Earth’s oceans. The immersive power of the dome theater transports audiences to the spectacular hidden depths of our home planet. Students from grades three to five had a chance to view the film during the school day. The dome theater was also open to the students who wanted to watch it from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Slocum Skewes Robotics team also had several stations setup at the gym while the dome theater was showing. We had a lot of students who enjoyed the presentation by our robotics team members.
Special thanks to REPTA for helping to fund the dome theater for the students.
National Geographic Bee
Our very own Dren Sapunxhiu qualified for the National Geographic Bee by scoring in the top 100 in our school competitions here at Slocum Skewes. The state final Geography Bee competition was held on March 31, 2017 at Rowan University in Glassboro NJ. Dren made it all the way to the state finals, finishing in 5th place! He even got to meet the 2015 national bee champion Karan Menon. Way to go Dren!
Energy and Waves
Catapults
Bergen County Teacher/ Educational Services Professional Recognition Award recipients
Congratulations to this year’s Bergen County Teacher/ Educational Services Professional Recognition Award recipients: Mr. Keith MacDougall for Shaler Academy, Ms. Laura Coviello for Bergen Boulevard School, Ms. Elaine Asciak for Slocum Skewes School, and Mr. Jon Duncan for Ridgefield Memorial High School. This year’s recipients happen to be classroom teachers, but Ridgefield Public Schools have celebrated Educational Services Professionals in the past. We are so proud of those who educate and support our students, faculty, and staff in a variety of wonderful ways. They will be formally recognized at the first May Board of Education meeting and at a County Luncheon held at the Marriot in Park Ridge, New Jersey.
Gifted and Talented Amazing Race
It was truly Amazing! It was a virtual travel adventure. Students "traveled" to 8 different countries and completed a challenge/task in each country. They learned about many different countries and cultures.
Exploring the world expands the mind!
NURSE'S NOTES
Please be reminded of a few important steps you can take to increase your child’s test day experience. On the evenings before and the mornings of the PARCC test:
Please be sure your child gets an adequate amount of sleep. Research conducted at the National Sleep Foundation recommend children ages 5-11 years old sleep about 10-11 hours per night.
No matter how many hours your child sleeps, be sure that they do not stray from their normal routine.
The age old saying “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is scientifically true! Consuming breakfast is associated with better academic performance. Eating a balanced breakfast, one that includes protein and complex carbohydrates, helps boost brain function.
Encourage your children and foster an environment of calmness. If your child is stressed, help them find ways to relieve their stress.
GUIDANCE NEWS
For the month of April here at Slocum our Character Trait of the month is Trustworthiness. The Physical Education Department took the lead on implementing this month’s activity. Each P.E. class was given the challenge of playing “Hot Lava”, a game that requires strategy, communication and members of a group with trustworthiness. The teams were challenged with getting all of their members from one side of the gym to the other using only two hula hoops and a small half tube. Watching the teams work together, some successfully, and some not so fortunate, it was great to see which students rose to the occasion and which became frustrated. In the end the activity was a great way for the students to open up and trust each other. I want to thank Mr. Wroblewski, Mrs. Collis, Mr. Trentacosti, and Mr. Miller for their support of Guidance and their participation in this month’s Character Education Trait.
LEARNING CENTER NEWS
The Slocum Skewes Koi pond is ready for spring. The pond has been under the watchful eye of Ken Fugowski and his students. The class helped with the spring cleaning of the pond and the area around it, and put the pump back in place. The pump was paid for by a grant Ken received from the Bergen County Utilities Authority, and helps maintain the water in the pond during the spring, summer, and winter. The 7 or 8 residents of the pond are alive and well, so please feel free to come and visit the pond in the courtyard with your students when you have a chance.
PRINCIPAL'S CORNER
The False Dichotomy Between Memorization and Conceptual Understanding
By Frederick Hess 11/02/2016
Last week I talked about the nature of short-term, or working memory and how it helps it build expertise. This week, I want to talk a bit more about how that short-term memory builds long-term memory, and what that means for the age-old debate between proponents of “rote memorization” and those of “conceptual understanding.” If you’re interested in all of this, I’d refer you to Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age by the brilliant Bror Saxberg (and the far less brilliant Rick Hess).
Long-term memory is where we store the things that we’ve mastered. It’s really long-term memory that defines “who we are”—given that it determines our immediate, instinctive reactions, and our ability to handle complex tasks. Long-term memory is not conscious; we typically don’t even realize what we’ve stored there. Capabilities stored in long-term memory just seem “easy” and “natural.”
Long-term memory gives us instant, fluid, genuine responses to events occurring around us. As Bror so distinctively captures it:
A kindergarten student was watching the news on television with his grandfather when the initial bombing raids on Iraq were announced in 2003. As soon as a map showing the targets in Iraq came on the screen, the little boy turned to his grandfather, and said, “Is that where they’re bombing? Are they taking care of the old things?” His grandfather, bemused, asked him what old things he was talking about. “That’s the Fertile Crescent—we’ve been studying it. It’s where civilization started—there are many old things there. Grandpa, are they taking care of the old things?”
Repeated exposure to the maps and history of the Fertile Crescent wired the child’s long-term memory to recognize those features and feed them to his working memory, even in an unexpected situation. That’s the point—what’s stored in long-term memory affects how one views the world. By the way, this is the intuition underlying Don Hirsch’s work on “cultural literacy.” The more a student has committed major historical and literary touchstones to long-term memory, the easier it is to make sense of new information and process new connections. Conversely, students who haven’t mastered this knowledge will have a tougher time as they struggle with the limitations of working memory.
Things already stashed in long-term memory seem “simple,” or “obvious,” because our minds can access them without conscious effort. When such mastery is lacking, however, working memory has to work overtime, making everything slower, more frustrating, and error-prone; like running a computer with too many applications open.
Consider how this plays out in a typical classroom. The range of skills that different students have mastered in long-term memory varies widely: at any given point, some students are still learning what nouns are while others are onto the work of crafting paragraphs. If a teacher is teaching how to write a topic sentence for a paragraph, some students will find this a simple question of mastering one new chunk of information while others will be swamped by a confusing mess of words.
As students tackle more complicated tasks and concepts, those who haven’t absorbed key building blocks into long-term memory will find it hard to keep up. Thus, a core challenge for instruction is building long-term memory so as to make it both accessible and useful for working memory. We do this by having students work on tasks and make decisions that require working memory, optimally using repeated feedback and practice to convert that learning into long-term memory.
Understanding the relationship between working and long-term memory helps illustrate the false dichotomy between “conceptual understanding” and “rote memorization.” Learners have to develop certain fast, fluent capabilities if they are to prepare for the next tier of learning—and, in many instances, “rote learning” is an essential tool for building fluency. Students need enough repeated practice and feedback to build long-term memory in order to successfully work towards deeper, more conceptual mastery. Compare the fluency of a teenager typing on a smartphone, steeped in repeated practice, with her less practiced parents, who use such a device in a much more occasional, stumbling manner—as they struggle to “think through their fingers” in this tiny medium.
Ironically—and especially plaguing to advocates of deeper learning and conceptual understanding—experts tend to forget just how much they’ve absorbed into long-term memory and thus take most of their foundational mastery for granted. Research shows, for instance, that when experts train novices, they tend to leave out a large amount of important information—70 percent or more of what’s required to complete a task! Experts have lost track of vast amounts of building block knowledge, because it long ago moved to long-term memory. They haven’t had to think much about these things for years, making it easy to overlook important chunks of their own expertise.
Experts wind up struggling with counterintuitive limitations when it comes to teaching or designing instruction. This is why superstar ballplayers, for whom fluid mastery came more naturally, frequently are less effective as coaches or instructors than are less-gifted former teammates who had to master their craft much more deliberately and haltingly. Those who have had to struggle to achieve mastery are more conscious of what they do, what mistakes learners make, and what kinds of demonstration and practice may help.
When it comes to schooling, most teachers have been successful learners themselves, but, over time, many of the study skills, habits, and academic foundations became invisible to them. One of the values of mentors, tutors, or similar resources is that they can help students focus on skills or knowledge that teachers might take for granted.
That’s plenty for today. I’ll wrap this all up in the next couple posts by talking a bit about what this means for the role of education technology and what it says about the limits of expertise.
– Frederick Hess
UPCOMING EVENTS/ SPECIAL ANNOUCEMENTS
PARCC Test Dates
ELA: April 20 - 25
Math: April 26 - May 1
Grades 6-8
ELA: May 3 - 8
Math: May 9- 11
Spring Recess
Grade 7 Frost Valley Trip
We now have an official Ridgefield Public Schools Facebook page.
PTA AND KPAC
Important Dates
PTA
- Slocum Skewes in the MPR at 7:00pm, May 3, 2017.
KPAC
- Slocum Skewes in Room 101B at 7:30pm, May 18, 2017
Slocum Skewes School
Email: lablanese@ridgefieldschools.com
Website: www.ridgefieldschools.com
Location: 650 Prospect Ave, Ridgefield, NJ, United States
Phone: 201-775-6853