TWA 1 October 2012
Thank you for working through the frustrating delays in order to upload your marks to Edline. That aggravation came on
top of additional burden of comments for struggling and new students. Your efforts are greatly appreciated and we
know that for many teachers the work did not end with grading:
 Special thanks go to grade 11 advisors, Ms Raza and Ms Bendick, for assisting with the bake sale on Friday.
 The MUN advisors and MS track coaches deserve thanks for running their weekly Saturday sessions without fail.
 Mr. Raza, Mr. Farhan and Mr. McIntyre get thanks for chaperoning the Grade 8s who organized a greatly successful
Soccer Tournament for grades 4 - 6 all Saturday afternoon at LAS.
 Shukria to Mr. Anderson who spent from 4:30am to 9:30pm with the Boys Volleyball team at a Pre-Convention
Friendly Tournament at ISOI, which LAS boys won!
 Congratulations as well as thanks go to the female LAS Teachers team who beat the HS Girls volleyball team in a
practice match on Saturday! Well done Ms Jess, Ms Fazil, Ms Wolfenden, Ms Agard, Mrs. Bramstedt, and Ms Howell!
Staff who take on events like these make LAS a rich school experience and cannot be thanked enough!
Duty Schedule: I very much appreciate your timely arrival at your lunch duty assignments. While teens pretend to
project otherwise, your presence provides reassurance.
Location day
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Field and Grill
L. Raza
K. Maloney
F. Auffret
M. MacMillan
Gymnasium
PE 1
PE 2
PE 3
PE 4
A. Khan/A. Rudholm S. Fazil/S. Khosa
Middle School
F. Butt/T. Jafar
M. Bramstedt
Cafeteria
Z. Hassan
E. Bendick
A. Sajjad
J. Steinmetz
High School
S. Shahryar
B. Ehsan
J. Anderson
B. Halliday
Supervisor
Freeman-weeks with 3 (A) days; M. Anderson-weeks with 3 (B) days
Week of 1 October 2012
Monday Blocks 1, 3, and 4: MS Maps testing continues
Seminar Blocks: Grade 9 Maps goal setting
8:30 Emergency technology meeting
9:30 Secondary Leadership Team meeting
3:00HS and MS Probation Study Session in Dr. Khan’s room
3:05 Staffing meeting in room 425, Ms. Anderson’s office
Tuesday Blocks 1, 3, and 4: MS Maps testing continues
Seminar Blocks:Grade 9 MAPS goal setting
3:05Secondary faculty in MS ICT
Wednesday Blocks 1, 3, and 4: MS Maps testing continues
3:00MS Probation Study Session in Ms. Jess’s room, HS in Guidance
SAISA Boys Volleyball team travels
Thursday Blocks 1, 3, and 4: MS Maps testing continues
Block 1: Grade 9 begins Maps testing
2:25-2:55 Buffs Block: Advisory and SAT Prep
SAISA Girls Volleyball teams travels
Friday Block 1: Grade 9 continues Maps Testing
PLC plans and PGP plans
Saturday TBA: SAT & Subject area tests
9:00 MS Track and Field
12:00 MUN
5:00pm Campus spraying
Middle School MAPS testing schedule
Period 1
Monday
Math
Class: 7B
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: J. Snedden
Tuesday
Math
Class: 7A
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: A. Khan
Wednesday
Language
Class: 7B
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: T. Jafar
Thursday
Language
Class: 7A
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: A. Khan
Math
Class: 8F
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: F. Butt
Math
Class: 6H
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: B. Khan
Math
Class: 8E
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: A. Rudholm
Math
Class: 6G
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: K. Howell
Language
Class: 8F
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: J. Steinmetz
Language
Class: 6H
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: Z. Hassan
Language
Class: 8E
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: A. Rudholm
Language
Class: 6G
Venue: 303
Setup/Proctor: S.
FazilAsst: B. Khan
Period 2
Period 3
Period 4
Grade 9 MAPS testing schedule
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Monday
Tuesday
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Setting MAPS Goals in
Seminar (Myna)
Wed.
Thursday
Language
Class: Various A
Venue: ES Lab
Setup/Proctor: M. RanaAsst: D.
Freeman
Friday
Language
Classes: Various B
Venue: ES Lab
Setup/Proctor: M.
RanaAsst: D. Freeman
Administrators will meet first thing Monday to consider solutions to our on-going internet and related
technology problems. Last Friday’s cancelled staffing and programming meeting moves to Monday after school
in room 425-Ms. Anderson’s office. Significant decisions about staffing for next year are afoot and your input
remains crucial.
Tuesday’s meeting will be combined in MS ICT. An agenda will be forthcoming but the highlight will be the
presentation of the Buff by Mr. Auffretto a deserving colleague.
Our high school volleyball teams travel Wednesday(boys) and Thursday (girls). Safe travels and Go Buffs! Mr.
McIntyre, Athletic Director, will provide the names and SAISA absence dates to all. Remember to mark students
‘absent’; the main office will change this to CO for ‘convention’.
Friday after school is scheduled to be PLC meeting time in order for the groups to plan goals for the year. This is
meant to provide time for collaborative work in developing PGPs as well. PGPs will be due on Monday, 8
October 2012.
Saturday’s schedule includes SATs, MS athletics and MUN.
Article of the week:
Why We Should Teach Empathy to Improve Education (And Test Scores)
John Converse Townsend, Contributor
Empathy matters. And it needs to be taught in schools. I’ve seen, read and written this before, but I wasn’t quite convinced until
earlier this week when I plugged into an episode of “This American Life” on a bus to New York City. Episode 474: Back to School.
Cognitive development has been the absolute focus of education for as long as I, or host Ira Glass, can remember. Test scores for
reading and math are not just how students are graded, but also how their schools are evaluated, most notably since 2001 with the
passing of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates universal “proficiency” by 2014 with penalties for those schools which are
unable to reach state standards—standards many schools seem unable to reach. This has to change.
Education writer and broadcaster Paul Tough broke it down on air for Ira Glass like this: “Well, I’m definitely not saying that none of
that stuff matters at all. I’m saying that we have put way too much emphasis on it, and especially in the early years.”
A new skill set to improve the old one
Tough added that psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, and educators have envisioned a new direction for education
emphasizing on a different set of qualities, that are—for a lack of a better term—“non-cognitive skills.” In other words: soft skills or
social skills. It’s empathy. And empathy pays off, according to researchers at McGill University in Montreal. They studied parent-pup
interaction among rats.
“What they discovered is that there were certain mother rats called ‘dams,’ who, in their laboratory, tended to lick and groom their
pups more, especially in stressful situations,” said Tough. The rat pups that did get a little T.L.C. from mom in their first few weeks in
the lab lived better: they were more confident, better at mazes and less fearful than the pups which did not.
Stress is a troublesome issue for humans too, but empathy can help; in this sense, perhaps we’re not so different from our furry rodent
friends at McGill University. In humans, stress negatively affects learning and brain development in children, mostly affecting the
prefrontal cortex which manages non-cognitive skills like self-control along with memory and reasoning. Poor children, who are at
greater risk of adverse childhood experiences, are disproportionately affected. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris who opened a clinic for poor
minorities in Bayview-Hunters point in San Francisco has studied the effects of stress on young minds.
“For our kids,” Dr. Harris told Ira Glass, “if they had four or more adverse childhood experiences, their odds of having learning or
behavior problems in school was 32 times as high as kids who had no adverse childhood experiences.”
Tough introduced listeners to what’s called a secure attachment relationship, a concept that’s been around since the mid-20th century.
Secure attachment in rat pups is built through grooming, but in humans it is provided by an adult (usually a parent) comforting a child
during tough times.
“Researchers say that about two-thirds of American kids have a secure attachment, one-third don’t,” said Glass. “And the two-thirds
with a secure attachment are more socially competent and confident through their lives. They’re better at dealing with other people
and making friends. They’re better able to deal with setbacks. They’re more likely to be engaged in the classroom. They’re more
likely to graduate high school.”Empathy can help reduce the damaging effects of repeated stress in human children—like it did for the
rat pups in the McGill University laboratory—which seems to suggest that empathy has tremendous implications for achievement,
both socially and intellectually. Empathy isn’t just something for youth, either. It’s a skill that can transform a community and build
social capital.
It is not too late to learn
James Heckman, Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago, is a leader in rethinking education in the 21st century.
He joined Paul Tough and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris as a guest on the podcast, noting that it is not too late to learn these skills:“What
we’ve learned is that [human] capabilities can be shaped,” said Heckman. “And as an economist, what I like about it is that it has this
possibility of reducing inequality, but not doing it through the standard mechanism of just handing out money and transfers from the
rich to the poor. That’s ancient”.
“The idea is you make the poor highly capable. That there really is a possibility of giving people more possibilities. That there really is
the chance of improving their capabilities,” said Heckman.
Facts: new skills = better scores
Chicago has a social program called One Goal which works with about 1,300 high school kids in the city, helping them to develop
non-cognitive skills and leadership principles—Paul Tough described a One Goal classroom as a sort of ongoing group therapy
session. But it’s more than that, and Tough admitted as much.
KewaunaLerma, once an aggressive 15-year-old girl who was arrested for punching a police officer, was one of the students helped by
One Goal’s social-emotional learning program. As a freshman in high school she had a GPA of 1.8. On her first practice ACT, she
scored an 11, which put Kewauna in the bottom one percentile of everyone who took the test that year. By sophomore year, after she
enrolled in One Goal, her GPA had jumped to 3.4. She graduated high school with a GPA of 4.1 and scored a 15 on her ACT and
enrolled in Western Illinois University.
One Goal isn’t the only program changing the future prospects of youth in Chicago. This summer, I wrote a piece on Changing
Worlds, a program that’s bringing empathy and the arts to Chicago’s low-income schools with both tangible and transformative
results.
“At the end of the third year of the program, test scores for students in Changing Worlds’ program were greater than control group
students, with an average positive difference of 11.5 points across all schools for composite scores,” Executive Director Mark
Rodriguez told me in a phone interview.
Looking at the numbers, it is hard to accept that standardized testing is still the norm, when it is clear that we are failing our students
by only emphasizing cognitive skills. Higher curriculum standards don’t correlate to higher student achievement, according to a study
by the Brookings Institution; empathy does.
The capacity for empathy builds the socio-economic potential for individuals, and, further, likely holds the key for the success of
business in the 21st century. Empathy isn’t just about hugs and pats on the back. It is a skill that can make young people more
productive in work environments that require cooperation and in a global economy that becomes more complex with each passing day.
It is what turns them into future leaders.
Reprinted with permission from ASCD News Briefs.