Greetings,
GreenMount Community,
I am sure that everyone
is aware of the fact that we often describe ourselves as a school that is
“experiential”. We tout this term in
virtually every piece of our marketing and we discuss it often during meetings
with parents and among ourselves at staff meetings. Well, just to make sure you know that we walk
the walk, here are a few examples of what our middle school students have been
“experiencing” very recently:
Last week,
Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Elizabeth took the seventh grade students to Washington,
D.C. to participate in a program called the Youth Service Opportunity Program
(YSOP). The students spent two nights
sleeping on the floor of a church at night and during the day they were out and
about helping the homeless and poor of the District. The students cooked, served meals, and
engaged their “guests” in conversations about their lives and their wishes,
hopes, and dreams. Our students engaged
the homeless and the poor in the church center and they also ventured out into
the city to meet people “on the street”.
Some of our kids even went to the home of a 93-year-old woman to clean
her bathroom and other parts of her house.
I understand that the students were enthralled with this lady’s
experiences over her 93 years. The
feedback we got from the YSOP people was that our children are exceptional
beyond what they could have imagined.
Our thanks to Mr. Fletcher for his passion about this opportunity and to
Ms. Elizabeth, who now has proclaimed that no one else will accompany Fletcher
on this trip in the future but her!
Today, our
eighth graders are in a small village in Costa Rica working hard to paint a
fence that surrounds the village to protect it from rusting in the wet jungle
atmosphere. They are also getting to
know their host families and taking strolls through the rainforest and climbing
up to the top of an active volcano. Ms.
Elaine and Mr. Luca are making sure that the students not only provide service
to the families that live in this remote village, but that they experience a
habitat that is very different from that of good old B’More.
Also today,
sixth and seventh graders went to court.
As a result of a book they had read in language arts, they have been
practicing and preparing a case for a mock trial to emulate one that could have
taken place in the story. Ms. Allison
arranged with Ann Kehinde, a Baltimore County parent and judge, for her to
preside over the mock trial in a real courtroom in Baltimore County. Another judge who presided over one group
commented to me that this must be a pre-law class based on the performance of
the students. She congratulated our
students for following procedures and for presenting convincing arguments. The verdicts in both trials of the main
character were the same. To find out
what you think that verdict should be, read Private
Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.
Cheers,
Steve
