FTGOTS - For The Good Of The School

By Julian Whelan

FTGOTS-or ‘For The Good of the School’ is an all school meeting that happens two times each month at Project Learn School (PLS). The eighth graders run FTGOTS where students can get together, share ideas, solve problems and celebrate. FTGOTS allows students to have time to appreciate friends and share their talents.
    Debby Pollack, a former PLS art teacher, and Lisa Pack, current 9, 10, 11 year old teacher,  started FTGOTS about 10 years ago. FTGOTS stands for “For The Good of the School.” If there is a problem, the FTGOTS representatives in the planning meeting will bring it up. “We have FTGOTS so kids can also find out what some decisions have been made at Town Meeting,” Lisa said.
    Each group sends two representatives to the planning meeting. The reps bring ideas and concerns to be discussed by the whole school. The planning meetings take place in Aubrey’s room and the actual FTGOTS meeting, with all of the students, takes place in the Community Room at 8:45 a.m. every other Thursday.  During FTGOTS the reps announce things like the rules so that everyone can hears them at the same time and to prevent arguments.
    At these meetings the decisions are made using consensus. This is when everyone agrees on the proposals being presented. If there is not agreement from everyone, then the discussion continues until everyone can agree. This sometimes takes only a few minutes, but can also take a really long time. The advantage of this way of deciding is that everyone gets to hear everything, and then can’t say, “That’s totally unfair, I didn’t agree to that!”
    Students also get a chance to have the whole school sing happy birthday to them at FTGOTS. The children who have birthdays in the month of the meeting get to stand up in front of the school and say when their birthday is. Then, “everyone sings a special birthday song that Debby taught us,” Lisa added.

Front and Back Gardens at PL Get a New Look

By Dylan Allender

Front Gardens at Project Learn School

Backyard pergola at Project Learn School

Flowers and shrubs, vegetables and more flowers are all in bloom at Project Learn School (PLS).The front and back gardens had major work done to them over the summer.  Lucy Miller and her family and Anna Herman worked on the PLS gardens to make them look better.
    Lucy, her son Graham, and her husband Russell worked on making the front garden look nicer.  They planted four crepe myrtle bushes and one tree, three kinds of grasses, many flowers and about twenty or so lirope plants down the front of the garden along the edge of the sidewalk. She has been working on this garden for about three years and she decided to go all out this summer so it would look really nice. Lucy talked about why she decided to do this project.  “It makes me and my family feel good.  It makes PL families feel good,  and all the neighbors feel good.”  said Lucy.  “Over the years many kids of PL have planted things in the front yard.  The rose bush was planted by Sarah Decker many years ago.  It is a pink rose which reminds us of her spirit.”
    Anna Herman did most of her work in the back yard.  She planted a vegetable garden which has turnips, radishes, lettuce,kale, and herbs in planting boxes.  There are some green beans left to pick.  The summer vegetable are all gone. The only ones left are the fall season vegetables. Anna also had a wooden structure built in the backyard meant to be a gateway to and from the gardens. It is located closer to the climber and is called a small pergola. Anna also built planters on the sides of this structure so some plants can climb up and over the structure.
    On the right side of the  backyard, there are pollinator plants. They provide pollen, nectar and habitats for honey bees, native bees, butterflies, moths, and other pollinator insects. The pollinator plants are dill, coriander, mint, phlox, sunflowers and mirinda.There is also a  metal wind structure in the pollinator garden, that moves when it is windy. Anna wanted to add an element of movement when she decided to bring that piece into the yard.
    “I think it is beautiful and fun.” said Anna when she was talking about gardening. “I think it is important for people to see where and how plants grow.  It is important to understand how hard it can be to care for food, to make food happen. When you plant a few radish seeds and three weeks later you have something to eat, it’s magic.”
    Lily Waxler, a student in Lisa’s Group said, “I think it’s neat that the school grows things.”
  Some of the teachers have used some of the veggies from the  garden to make dishes with the kids. Joan made a cream cheese spread with the radishes with Lisa’s Group and Pam Chaplin-Lobell also made some things for snacks for the AfterSchool kids.
    

New Poetry Teacher for Jr. High Students

By Surya Bromley

Hideko Secrest teaching poetry to a Jr. High class.

She hangs from trapezes, she loves Shakespeare, she speaks 4 languages, and she is a Project Learn School (PLS) parent who is also teaching a poetry class this semester at PLS. Meet Hideko Secrest, a PLS parent for nine years.

    Hideko is teaching a junior high poetry class at PLS for the fall semester.  She started teaching in grad school at Yale University, where she taught an undergraduate section of a Shakespeare course, and a year-long freshman literature survey course in drama. She also tutored a creative writing class called "Daily Themes" where students had to write a two-page story every day and meet with her once a week to discuss their writing. In addition she taught literature, journalism, and writing at Tsuda College in Japan, and French and creative writing at the Clinton Middle School for Writers and Artists in New York City.    In her class, Hideko has her students read poetry as well as help them find different techniques for writing poetry. “I definitely prefer reading it. I find poetry very difficult to write.”  she says, “Because of that, I am doing the writing assignments along with my students so that I can be more sympathetic to the problems they encounter.”     ”I like teaching poetry because I love seeing the flash of insight come over a student's face when she or he suddenly understands what a poem is talking about,” Hideko shared. “I like to talk about poems because there is so much great stuff jammed into such a little package. Analyzing a poem is like decoding a secret message. And I like teaching creative writing because I find young adults are in some ways the most open to the creative process: they're unaware of the rules and they're not yet trying to impress.”

“Poetry class is fun because we get to write in new types of poems,” Elya Kaplan commented.

Hideko has many other interests like sewing, gardening, circus aerials, reading and writing. In addition to Shakespeare Hideko enjoys other authors and poets. Her current favorites are Kate Atkinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Elizabeth Bishop.
 To be or not to be? It is definitely ‘to be’ when it comes to Hideko’s poetry class.

Opening Group Skills Days - Growth is the Theme

By Zoe Gold

Cece picking apples at Linvilla Farms 

Opening Group Skills is a week, at the beginning of the school year, where older and younger kids get mixed together to do fun activities, like painting or going apple picking.  It has been going on at Project Learn School (PLS), for 42 years, since the beginning of the school.  Opening Group Skills is when the  staff sets aside time to allow all the students, new and returning, to begin to develop a sense of community. It also lets everyone to get to know each other in an informal, safe way.  

     For the new kids it is when they get to meet  teachers other than their group teacher and it helps everyone get to know the building in a different way.  The way it works is the staff talks about a theme or topic and then they rotate taking turns to plan each Opening Group Skills.  This year it was Lisa Pack and Aubrey DiSanto who chose to plan the activities.  Lisa teaches the older middle group students and Aubrey teaches the younger ones. “In June, during staff meeting, we were talking and Aubrey came up with the idea of Growth as a theme.  Over the summer she and I planned it.  Joan helped us come up with the name tags for the kids to know each other’s names.” said Lisa

     “I believe that a big part of children working in a school and together is so people can grow in many different ways,” said Aubrey, about why she picked the theme.  Every year opening group skills have a cool new theme, and Lisa said, “I wouldn’t change how we have younger and older kids working together during these days.  I think it is vital to the development of each child to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone and for some, that means going to a different teacher and being with a different group of  kids. It’s so great to see the young and the old members of the community get to know each other.  For me, the thing I worry about  is whether my ideas for these days will keep all of the kids interested and involved.”  Each year Lisa admitted everything goes well and so far, her favorite theme was when the group skills focused on Rube Goldberg.  Rube Goldberg, was a man who drew cartoons of complicated machines that could work for simple things.  “We’ve done Rube Goldberg twice, last year, and in 2001,” Lisa said.      Lisa said that her favorite part of Opening Group skills this year was the apple picking trip.  “I love that all school trip,” she said.  Lisa also thinks that making the partner pages into leaves and putting them on the bulletin board as part of a tree let everyone see them, which is better than in a book that no one looks at.  Partner pages are pages that the kids write about their partners.

Mixed up Groups working on a poster .

   Nasya Howard, a student in the Jr. High said, “I like how in Group Skills you can hang out with kids who are older or younger who you wouldn’t normally hang out with.”    Zack Waxler, also a student in the Jr. High said, “I like how in Group Skills you can meet all of the younger kids and the new kids.”

    Cassandra Bracero-Rivera, a student in Lisa’s group said, “I like how we get to meet new people in the school.”     This year's Group Skills was awesome, and everyone can’t wait for next year's theme.