Lost Treasures...

One of the bright sides of teaching in an older building are the surprising things that can be learned about the uses of the building as the history is revealed, for example, my current classroom used to serve as the children's playroom. Another is the amazing treasures that can be discovered throughout the building. This week, as Jo Parson's was preparing to put up a new display of student work in the corridor outside the library, she discovered a fabulous jungle mural underneath some old bulletin board paper, which had been painted some years ago by a former Fairfield student. Who knew...

My 44th in the UK!

I've never been one to be embarrassed about my age... I think teaching high school students and spending so much time involved in their activities, in and out of the classroom, along with having children of my own who are high school age or just starting college, has always kept me young in mind and spirit. I also never thought I'd ever be so far away from home celebrating a birthday. Combine my birthday with the Thanksgiving holiday, and I've had a bit of homesickness this week, because this week is traditionally quite a busy and fun-filled one for me. Short week at school, pub hopping at home and seeing all the old friends from high school, Northbridge Rams football game, turkey dinner with friends & family, Christmas shopping and decorating the tree are all traditions for me, so I was pleasantly surprised today when so many people at Fairfield remembered my birthday.

I had cards from many friends, and two signed by all the faculty and staff. I had a few gifts from the ladies in the English department and even my form sang Happy Birthday to me, as well as my Year 8 students. At break, when I went downstairs to get a cuppa and a flapjack, I entered the staff room to find just about all the staff gathered, the room decorated with American flag and birthday decorations, a chocolate cake decorated in a New England Patriots theme, complete with mini replica #12 jersey with "DeJong" on it, a likeness of myself as a football player (photo taken off my blog or facebook) and candles, other cakes and a CD mix of Bruce Springsteen playing "Born in the USA"! Everyone sang happy birthday and I discovered that one of the ladies who works in the office, Mandy, also had a birthday today - Happy Birthday, Mandy! It was nice to be remembered this way by people and it truly made me feel like part of the Fairfield family.

The day continued with some successful poetry presentations and comparison discussions, along with some "meaning of Thanksgiving" lessons to the younger age groups. They all made their own "thanks" turkeys!

At the end of the day, doing a favor for Ian, I rode the bus with the Year 7 U14 boys to Hereford, where they were scheduled to play in a 5 on 5 football tournament - the winner of this tournament advancing on to the Midlands League tournament in early February. Ian was unable to ride the bus to the tournament, so Micaela and I gladly offered to accompany the boys to and from the match. I am so very glad I did. Three of these very talented players are boys in my form group, and I was able to see a very exciting series of games. It is easy to see that football (soccer) is a sport that children play here, probably from the time they can run, and the spirit of competition and level of talent I was able to watch, even for such young boys, was excellent. Even though they were not my own children, I found myself anxious as the final minutes in the third game ticked off, hoping for the Fairfield boys to hold their lead. Indeed they did...and they are the first group of boys from Fairfield who will advance to the regional Midland's tournament. Well done boys! I am glad I was there to see such excellent team work.

It was a wonderful birthday on the whole... so thank you to everyone here who helped make it special and memorable. Thanks also to all my friends at home who sent messages and well wishes through the email and on my facebook; it is nice to know I have so many people in my life who care about me and I am very thankful for all of you to be in my life.

Year 7 Football team photo printed with permission of Fairfield administration.

Charities Afternoon: The Thanksgiving Challenge!

Part of the Fulbright Experience is to share cultural traditions, in addition to educational experiences. Part of this sharing and exchange process is also meant to culminate in sharing experiences with our school communities once the partners return home. Yesterday was a hole-in-one!

One of the best traditions from America, which is somewhat directly connected to our English ancestors, is the celebration of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in the month of November. It stems from the harsh realities of a New England winter for the Pilgrims and the aid they received from the Native American Indians, specifically the Wampanoag tribe and their adopted brother Squanto. It was a joint celebration of the harvest and the friendship that developed between the Pilgrims, who left England with permission of King James I in search of a place to worship freely and establish their own colony in the New World. They set forth on their way aboard the Mayflower with 102 passengers; in the end only half survived both the journey and the first hard year of settlement. They landed far north of the first settlement in Jamestown, on what is now known as Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and established the first colony known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in what is now known as Plymouth. Plimouth Plantation, (not a typo, as that is the traditional English spelling) on Cape Cod is a working village which celebrates the original life of the Pilgrims. It also had once served as an Indian settlement. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated on 1621. It was first encouraged to be celebrated nationwide by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as a way to unify the country. In 1941 it became an official federal holiday. Schools typically have a half holiday on Wednesday afternoon through the entire weekend. Officially known as Thanksgiving Break... please note: I will be working on Thanksgiving Day this year! However, a wonderful family has offered to host a very large Thanksgiving Dinner next week, so I am very much looking forward to it when school is dismissed for the afternoon. Instead of a football game, I will attend a basketball game and then feast on turkey!

This holiday has always been one of my favorite, not the least reason being that I was actually born on a Thanksgiving Thursday! It is fitting, being a native New Englander, that this would be a culturally rich tradition that I would seek to share with students and staff from Fairfield. Not many of these students were familiar with Thanksgiving, so Mel and I decided that we would use "Charities Afternoon" to introduce two house groups of Year 11 students to the experience of feasting on turkey,mashed potatoes, corn, peas, cranberry sauce, gravy, pumpkin pie and apple pie & ice cream! (Usually, people here do not eat turkey until Christmas, but there were af few whole, frozen birds to be found.) The students also watched several videos, courtesy of United Streaming - a resource I have been very happy to have at my disposal on this exchange,as my full bag of tricks is safely abiding in a cabinet in a classroom back home - which taught them about the history of Thanksgiving, the traditions and foods involved from the first Thanksgiving to the present day, and also an animated feature on Squanto and Governor William Bradford. Students also made their own turkey craft and colored cornucopias pictures. It was a pretty fun time. It also was typical of many Thanksgiving dinners - from arguing relatives, food that was gobbled far too quickly in relation to the preparation for such dinner, loud dinner talk, overstuffed bellies, and a giant mess to clean up afterwards! The only thing lacking was a good American football game to watch on the telly!

Charities Afternoon is a tradition at Fairfield. It involves a full day of students wearing their street clothes - no uniforms- but they must pay one pound to have the privilege of doing so. This also raises money for the various charities that benefit from the afternoon activities. For the first time I almost felt like I was in an American high school - with all the kids dressed to match their personalities. After lunch, students are taken off timetable and are put into house groups, by year (form groups) and they are guided by faculty in some fun activity, for which they have raised money from sponsors to be donated to various local charities - hence the name of the day. I like the concept of this day, and it reminded me a bit of the full weekend of activities put together by the National Honor Society at NHS last year when they were raising money and locked in themselves in the field house for the 30 Hour Famine. There was no fasting involved, but it was all in the name of charity.

With the turkeys roasting in the ovens and Mel peeling all the potatoes (sorry about that Mel) - I joined the Fairfield female faculty in a traditional British game of Netball vs Fairfield girls. This is a sport played by only girls in this country. (They don't have any laws here requiring matching girls and boys sports.) It is a game somewhat similar to basketball. It is played 7 on 7 - there are only certain areas of the court (divided into thirds) that certain positions can play in. Only two people on each team are designated as shooters and the nets are about the height of regulation basketball nets, but do not have backboards. It is a fast paced game, as you only have three seconds to pass the ball, no further than one third of the court. There is no dribbling and no running with ball. You are allowed only one step on a pivot foot, or can throw the ball while you are still in the air. Defenders are allowed only to be within one meter of the person with the ball, allowing for room for a person to run in between a defender and a teammate in order to get the ball.

The rain let up, Ellie swept the water off the court and the teams gathered during the lunch hour. The faculty ladies blew the trousers off the girls,with a score of 7-2. Somehow I ended up being a designated shooter, and for a rookie, did not play too badly- scoring 2 of the seven shots. We also played short handed for 1/2 the game, and then recruited an injured Year 10 student to help us out...we still won! It was great fun! It is also a game I would be interested in bringing back to NHS - even if only as a physical education activity, an intramural sport or a spirit day activity- it will be a piece of England to bring home.

I think that the concept of Charities Afternoon would work well back home at NHS, as community service projects are part of the fabric of our school culture - and it is a way to ensure participation by the entire school. There were very few students who could not participate because they had not raised the minimal amount of donations required - which was 3 pounds per student.

It was a really fun afternoon and I enjoyed sharing a bit of home with all the students!

Writing Class Sonnets: Here & There

One activity that both my colleague, Matt Reilly, and I do when teaching our sophomores at NHS about sonnets, is to write "class sonnets". Several years ago Matt introduced this idea to me and since then both of us guide our full, individual classes into creating class sonnets - usually a parody of a Shakespeare sonnet. I have started keeping a record of these sonnets and a very funny collection is starting to take shape.

This week, during a lesson on sonnets with my Year 8 students at Fairfield I decided to try this same activity. At first, I divided the class into small groups of five, mixed boy and girl groups, and directed them to try to create their own. They were instructed to do the best they could to keep to the iambic pentameter rhythm of a sonnet, but more importantly they should follow the rhyme scheme. I opted for the small group, rather than the full class group, as emphasis is placed on cooperative learning in small groups of mixed genders and abilities. This task, however, proved too difficult for this set up, coupled with the fact that these students are three years younger than the students at home - so I returned to the first philosophy of the large, whole class group.

I decided to give them the first line - a similar one to that used by one group of students from home. I wanted to see if any similarities would arise from the two groups. From there the ideas flew around the room, and as we repeated the lines out loud we eventually were able to edit the sonnet to a pretty close rendition of iambic pentameter and a correct English sonnet rhyme scheme - complete with rhyming couplet. As with any piece of writing, editing can always improve it, but neither are bad for a first try in a short lesson. Below you will read a Year 8 Monnow original sonnet, and a sonnet written by a group of 2008 Year 10 students at NHS, who happen to be Seniors this year- some of them may recognize their work.

Fairfield Year 8 Monnow 2009

Shall I compare thee to a pair of smelly trainers*?
Thou art more stinky and more horrible.
Your rough worn soles do pierce large containers.
Oh, get far from me, thou art so intol'r'ble.
Sometimes too sweaty; sprinting far from you.
Oft your odors worship in the temple of my nose.
If to heaven I with you go, I'd smell eternal poo.
You ne'er will e'er smell of a red, red, rose.
Although thy eternal stench shall not fade
Ne'er the rubbish bin shall you go in.
Etern'lly thankful, I am, you were made.
To throw you away would sure be a sin.
So long as you don't choke my healthy lung
I shan't wheeze or sneeze, nor toss you in the dung.

Period 5 2008 Sophomores

Shall I compare you to a pair of gym socks?
Thou art more lovely and more putrid.
Rough feet are calloused, flaked and hard as rocks
And season's scent is much too hard to rid.
Somtimes too much a toe doth show from holes
And oft the nails do seem untrimm'd,
And every hair and mole do cover o'er the soles;
In their own moist sweat the soles doth swim'd.
But thy eternal scent shall never fade,
Nor lose possession of thy fungi stump,
Nor shall detergent's scent obeyed
As thy forever do remain amid the gym bag dump.
So long as sports are played and socks are worn
So long live gym socks; sweaty, disgusting and torn.


*smelly trainers = smelly sneakers!

Reading in the Graveyard...

Yesterday I took my small class of five Year 10 students to the nearby Peterchurch graveyard to read the first chapter of Great Expectations. It was a brilliant idea, if I do admit it. From the first time I stepped foot in this graveyard I could not help but picture a "small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all" in the character of Pip.

The whipping wind,the damp, cold air, the wet ground, the squawking crows, the briers, nettles and mud we trudged through on the way to the graveyard, all helped provide a 3D experience that could not have been realized in the classroom. Surrounded by tombstones covered in moss, brought Pip's story to life. We practiced deciphering who these buried people might be and what we could learn about them from their tombstones, like Pip does with his father - assuming a square and stout man due to the shape of his tombstone.

The eerie atmosphere and the vulnerability of a young child frightened by a man all "dressed in coarse gray" could truly be experienced by sitting in the graveyard and reading this story...another successful experiment!