Forthcoming Calendar Dates and Deadlines
Q&A
Support Resources
- Progress reports are due this Friday (Dec. 6) at 8:00 a.m.
- GC teachers will be sending their presentation teams to the State House on Dec. 11. Please support them any way you can. Ann, Phil, Joe, Jen B., Steve, and Jamie will be traveling with our young, informed student activists. We wish them all well!
- On Dec. 13, Congressional Representatives Lori Trahan (LHS 1991) and Ayanna Pressley will address a number of our students during periods 6B and 7 in the Irish Auditorium. If you have either of those periods off, feel free to visit.
Q&A
- Question from a department member: “I just realized that every single computer lab and cart is booked for ACCESS testing the last 2 weeks of the semester (Jan 7-17). This puts me in quite a bind and I need to shuffle some of my plans around to get some computer based assignments done before Christmas. First, you might want to send a department wide email so that other teachers are not blindsided at the last minute. Second, can this be addressed going forward? The Copy Center is barely functioning so they encourage us to rely on Google Classroom and then they take away every computer in the building during the final 2 weeks of the semester. This doesn’t seem right or fair to the teaching staff here.”
- My answer (after talking with Stephen Gervais): You are the second to mention it. I’ve already addressed it with that other teacher and the simple answer is that the trade-off for not having general education teachers proctor the ACCESS tests — which requires extensive government mandated training and is the norm at other gateway schools — is that the ACCESS tests end up being done in smaller groups over a longer period of time… This is the reason for the labs being tied up. I remember that when there was the initial WIDA training there was a backlash from general ed teachers having to go through a very demanding training for this, so Stephen retreated and adopted a methodology to avoid dragooning those teachers into the testing. That requires a longer testing window for something that could be accomplished in three days. It would be similar to MCAS, however, where some teacher would be pulled out of classrooms, classrooms combined, etc. Also, if I understand correctly, this is the year when we’re seeing how that plays out now that ACCESS is completely computer driven. If the lab issue is critical across the board, teachers will need to resign themselves to participating in ACCESS training. We then would need to figure out how to make the demand on teachers equitable, since ACCESS involves about half the numbers that a full MCAS test does and, therefore, requires fewer teachers. I am open to your thoughts and suggestions and will convey them out to the other department chairs and up to Marianne.
Support Resources
- In case you missed it, the procedures for getting copies and classroom supplies have been updated. There are new forms in front of the Copy Center. You still need to go through the department head to get the form signed off, but otherwise the operation should run more smoothly. Amanda Perrin is in charge. Text of her announcement reads:
- The Copy Center will be open Monday-Thursday Periods 1& 3. Deliveries will be made Monday-Thursday Period 6. The Copy Center will be closed on Fridays. Please help me welcome Mr. Chris Badessa and his Vocational Education Class on Mondays & Wednesdays Period 1, Mr. Rick Lawrenson and his Vocational Class on Tuesdays & Thursdays Period 1, as well as Monday, Period 3. As always, please email me with any questions or concerns, as I will continue to oversee Vocational opportunities within the Copy Center. We appreciate your business and look forward to an exciting year!
- The forms for getting copies or supplies are here (copies) and here (supplies). You can fill out forms electronically and e-mail them to me, in order to save yourself a trip to the Teacher Center. You will need to come here, though, to get the copies/supplies.
- I have mentioned it before, but I’ll repeat here that the Bill of Rights Institute has a great series of short videos on important Supreme Court cases. The YouTube channel for them can be found here.
- We have several new resources on teaching Slavery from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance program. The author is Kate Shuster. They are in the DeVincenzi Library. Click on the images to be taken to the catalog. Also, note that we have been given several dozen important books on the Civil War, Lincoln, Grant, and others as a bequest. These include rare volumes. Look in the catalog under the tag “Charles Dana Palmer '44 and Jane Willard Palmer '46 Bequest.”
- iCivics has an online, classroom game entitled “Win the White House!” The premise is that students create and manage presidential campaigns and compete against one another, both inside the classroom and outside of it. If you want to check it out, click here. Also, if you don’t follow their blog, I recommend it. Click here for the iCivics blog and news.
- I have put five Gilder Lehrman fully built-out U.S. History lesson plans into our departmental curriculum folder. Each is in its appropriate content folder. The five topics are: Civil Rights (long history), WWI and immigrants, Women's suffrage, WWII war crimes trials, and the Vietnam War. You need to be signed into your LPS Google Account to gain access to these documents.
- Along those lines, please don't forget that there is a lot of material in our departmental drive that you can use. If you have materials that can be added, please do add them. Shout-out and kudos to Dave Casey, who is still the reigning champ of sharing out materials. Feel free to give him some competition. The general drive is here.
- Suzanne Keefe (English department chair) put out a lovely and informative e-mail to her department on navigating sensitive material. In this case the focus was on the N-word, but the resources she cites apply to many different things. A copy of the e-mail is here.
Some Thoughts (mine and our colleagues) on The Rule of Law (protocol alert)
As someone who spent a lot of time watching as the Soviet Union fell apart, it is difficult for me not to have a knot in my stomach with this moment in history. That country fell apart in part because it had no fidelity to the rule of law. It had an instrumentalist sense of the law — you use the law to achieve a goal, even if it is an otherwise lawless goal. In larger terms, this meant that it had no capacity to peacefully evolve and address the inner contradictions that came to light with the Chornobyl disaster, economic stagnation, ecological blight, rampant cronyism and corruption, a government that used the press to misinform and mislead the population, attacks on truth-tellers, etc. With that in mind, I'd like all of us to figure out how to work the material below at some point this year. The current focus on the misuse of foreign aid to promote a political campaign’s objectives is technically correct, but the larger story is one of legal instrumentalism that is pervasive in many parts of the Executive, Legislature, and even in SCOTUS. It is chilling for those of us who did what I used to do, since we’ve all seen the results. I knew Fiona Hill back in the day (she was my boss’s student at Harvard) and I am confident of how she and the others feel. We need to take this seriously. We are building the infrastructure that will get the Republic back on track. Our students must respect the authority of the Constitutional rule of law. It is a sacred duty that we hold in the present day.
MATERIAL FOR STUDENTS
The rule of law means…
- Consent of the governed: People allow government and laws, because the government will protect their natural rights. They have to give up some freedoms in exchange. (You cannot just beat somebody up because you don’t like them.)
- Equality before the law: No one, even the President of the US. or the richest person in the country, is above the law. The law is applied equally to everyone.
- There is a fundamental (basic) law that makes all other laws possible: The Constitution is a “fundamental law” against which all laws are judged to be “lawful” or “unlawful.” This keeps the government from making arbitrary or unreasonable laws that take away the natural rights of the people.
FURTHER TEACHER TALKING POINTS -- Rule of law is…
- Restriction of arbitrary and unreasonable use of power (autocratic power, tyranny, despotism).
- Means that no one is above the law; everyone is accountable to the law, even those with the most power within society.
- The government is accountable to the law, too.
- All members of government from the President (federal level) to teachers (municipal level) are accountable to the law, too.
- Rights and responsibility can be discussed under the idea of accountability before the law.
- Means that laws are just, transparent and easily accessible to the people, and are equally applied to all people.
- The fact that people are part of society by choice means that there must be a social contract, an implicit agreement between people and the government that says “The government will protect you as long as you obey the just laws of the government.” If the government becomes tyrannical, then you have the right to walk away from that social contract and either leave society or rebel against tyranny.
- We have natural rights that the government must protect to maintain its part of the contract. These include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
PD & Misc. Opportunities
- There are a number of webinars and opportunities for professional development in the support docs that I’ve provided above. If you haven’t gotten into webinars, I highly recommend them. Some of them will give you PDPs for your active participation.
- If there is interest in a coffee discussion after school to go through the particular issues of the Russian government and the Ukrainian government in the current impeachment investigation, I’d be happy to host it. My mentor in Soviet studies was Karen Dawisha, who studied Putin extensively and wrote one of the most important books on him to date. (see here) I worked on Ukrainian corruption when I was the president of the American Assoc. for Ukrainian Studies.* For both reasons, I’ve kept up closely with the Putin/Russian Federation/corruption side of the current “troubles” and, of course, the Ukraine side. As an added bonus, I actually knew Fiona Hill in my previous work, and worked with Bill Taylor on a project, so I can vouchsafe, at least from a two decade reserve, their respective characters. If interested, let me know. I’ll supply the coffee and goodies, and maybe even put out a rushnyk as decoration.
- *The anti-corruption work was before I left the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard and pivoted to urban teaching; see here and here - with regard to the latter, I can also discuss international political activism, since we managed to involve US media (“60 Minutes,” WHYY in Philly, among others), foreign media, and several US government agencies, along with universities, etc. -- examples of this sort of strategic process might be of use when you talk about what grassroots efforts can achieve at the national and international levels with your students.
Kudos & News (please contribute!)
- We have a new district Social Studies & Science coordinator! I will profile Elaine Santelmann in the next memo. She comes to us from Westford. We have met several times and am certain that we will be well supported by her talents and efforts.
- $750K in civics grant support money has just been released. Elaine, Robin Desmond, Mike Neagle (Pyne Arts), and I will be writing to get $45K (the maximum available to schools) for our district program. This money will ensure continued robust support for the civics program at the 8th and 11th grades. I will keep you posted on it.
- See the shout-out to Dave Casey above. That shout-out could be yours. Jus' sayin'.
A final note...
There is no beating around the bush that morale is low and everyone is on edge. I am seeing more and more sharp behavior among colleagues, between students, staff and students, among leadership, etc. We are seeing a rise in Social Media outbursts across the spectrum and WCAP and the Sun alternately lionize us and then eat us as if they were lions and we were unarmed martyr-meat. And we lost John Diamantopoulos this fall to Central; he was the most intensely nice person that we had after Mary Lou left for Central. I bring this up because applications for the Lyceum are down and that could be a bellwether for how kids with choices about where they go see the high school. I’m not sure at this point. But I do know that we need to work on our culture.
The ILT and school leadership are working on this, of course. Aside from that, in my class, during the abbreviated period before the pep rally, I asked my kids to give their thoughts on what would inspire students and staff. We spent a few minutes exploring the phrase esprit de corps, so the prompt was “What do you think raises/would raise esprit de corps at LHS?” Remember that these are kids who spend the semester thinking about the history of public education and the nuts and bolts of how a school (our school) ticks. Here are some of their replies. I think it is important for their thoughts to inform my work with you and with leadership/ILT:
Lots there to mull over.
As always, thank you for keeping your shoulder to the plow.
RD
Back to main memos page for AY2020
There is no beating around the bush that morale is low and everyone is on edge. I am seeing more and more sharp behavior among colleagues, between students, staff and students, among leadership, etc. We are seeing a rise in Social Media outbursts across the spectrum and WCAP and the Sun alternately lionize us and then eat us as if they were lions and we were unarmed martyr-meat. And we lost John Diamantopoulos this fall to Central; he was the most intensely nice person that we had after Mary Lou left for Central. I bring this up because applications for the Lyceum are down and that could be a bellwether for how kids with choices about where they go see the high school. I’m not sure at this point. But I do know that we need to work on our culture.
The ILT and school leadership are working on this, of course. Aside from that, in my class, during the abbreviated period before the pep rally, I asked my kids to give their thoughts on what would inspire students and staff. We spent a few minutes exploring the phrase esprit de corps, so the prompt was “What do you think raises/would raise esprit de corps at LHS?” Remember that these are kids who spend the semester thinking about the history of public education and the nuts and bolts of how a school (our school) ticks. Here are some of their replies. I think it is important for their thoughts to inform my work with you and with leadership/ILT:
- Getting engaged with school clubs that represent the spirit of our high school.
- When our diversity also means equality, it gives us a sense of belonging.
- The fact that we can select the classes we want. (mentioned several times – rd )
- Having people point out opportunities to us.
- Being a diverse population. (mentioned over and over – rd )
- Seeing other people wearing school gear.
- Not focusing just on our school colors, but other parts of our school that represent our spirit.
- Field trips.
- Art, murals, posters in the halls.
- Sports.
- NHS (mentioned several times – rd )
- Working in teams in our classes.
- Friends.
- The atmosphere in the classes has a huge impact.
- When teachers ask for input in what we’re doing and use it in their teaching.
- We should have more pep rallies. (mentioned several times – rd )
- The school needs to do more direct work getting us involved in our communities.
- Help our social life by finding constructive ways for us to be with our friends during the day, like working together in classes we choose. (mentioned several times – rd )
Lots there to mull over.
As always, thank you for keeping your shoulder to the plow.
RD
Back to main memos page for AY2020