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Tag Archives: Teaching
Commitment to Athletics in Education
By Patrick Travers, History Faculty
Hopefully you will never have to outrun a bear in your lifetime. If you do find yourself running away from a grizzly, physical fitness might save your life. But there must be other reasons to exercise, right? The sports tradition at St. Mark’s and many peer schools has deep historical roots. In his May Head’s Reflection, John Warren focused on the importance of athletics at St. Mark’s and the school’s continuing commitment to athletics in education. School athletic teams foster lifelong skills for students that can be transferred to a family (more…)
On a Teacher’s Life
By Kimberly Berndt, Science Department Head
I have taught in East and Central LA, rural North Carolina, a small Catholic day school in Massachusetts, in Newton, at Choate, the cross town high school highlighted in Friday Night Lights, a K-12 private school in Midland, Texas, and at St. Mark’s. I have worked with students struggling to understand physics in suburban Cleveland and watched students cling to their one spiral-ring notebook on the top of a mountain in Haiti. What I have gleaned from this experience in a diversity of settings is that kids are kids wherever you go. (more…)
Seeing Is Believing: Learning to Draw in Studio I
By Barbara Putnam, Art Faculty
An Interview with Our Resident Poet
Julie Geng, V Form, Interviews Sarah McCann, English Faculty
Q: Hi Ms. McCann. Thank you for letting me interview you. To start off, could you please talk a little bit about when and how you discovered your passion for poetry?
A: Sure. I actually love words always, and my parents read to us. And we told stories to each other, and all sorts of things. But I didn’t really know anything about poetry until I was forced to write a poem in fifth grade. And it was really my teacher that opened up that territory for me because I needed that encouragement. And he wrote (more…)
Doodling and the Mind: Drawing Your Attention
By Samantha Wilson, English Faculty
I’ve been a doodler as long as I can remember, and for just as long, I’ve been accused of not paying attention. I even wrote a piece about it for my elementary school newsletter entitled “It’s OK to Doodle” or something to that effect. Basically I’ve been defending doodling and explaining that I AM listening and paying attention for a long time now. I’ve been claiming for decades that this type of multitasking is not an indication that the mind has wandered off topic, and there is finally strong evidence to support my position. (more…)
The 5 Minute Professor
By David Baek, IV Form
In Ms. Millet’s AP World History class, students were given an opportunity to showcase a topic to their class that they had chosen themselves to teach, for an exercise called the “5 Minute Professor.” Such topics were, “How is steel made?” and “The philosophy of Adam Smith (capitalism).” Given approximately a week to prepare, I scrambled the Internet and books in the library to search for any information on the philosophy of Adam Smith and its impact in world history. Using all my free time, I was able to understand Adam Smith’s ideas by reading some of the articles in his major work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth (more…)
Why I Do Not Grade “Class Participation”
By John Camp, English Department Head
I am a vehement opponent to class participation grades. I am fully cognizant that I am in the minority in my department, perhaps at St. Mark’s at large, and even in the teaching profession. Despite the self-imposed peer pressure to grade for this, I refuse, based on both my life personally as an introvert (and the value I place on my introversion as a healthy and necessary part of my identity) and my pedagogical beliefs about participation overall. (more…)
Why You Should Study or Take Anthropology!
By Dr. Laura Appell-Warren, Director of Global Citizenship
Ever since I graduated from college I have been faced with the challenge of explaining what it is that I do. When I tell people that my field is anthropology, they almost always say something like this: “Wow, that is cool, what do you dig up?” or (and this is even worse) “Oh, just like Margaret Mead.” Now, I am NOT an archeologist so I never dig anything up (well maybe some worms in my new garden in Maine). And, while Margaret Mead may be a well-known female anthropologist, she is very controversial within the field and I would rather not be associated with her. Sometimes when I have energy I say that I am a psychological (more…)
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