-
100 Years Ago ... And Today
By Andrea Glowatz, Dean of Teaching and Learning
One hundred years ago, teaching young people involved the transmission of knowledge, and only a fraction of the American population remained in school beyond the elementary level. It is certainly true that society has come a long way in 100 years’ time—and so has Tower Hill School, a place where transmission is less often the modus operandi because another activity more accurately defines behavior in today’s classrooms: facilitation. The evolution of Tower Hill’s robust academic program over the last century can be touted as a move toward the facilitation of critical thinking, a key aspect of which is metacognition, or the understanding of the thought processes involved in learning. Couple this with the research neuroscientists of late can offer us, and we have an entirely separate, and important, academic undertaking. Metacognition and neuroscience alone, however, do not fully substantiate a need for 21st-century institutions to create programmatic changes. The need to evolve a Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) at Tower Hill School, venturing into a new academic subdivision, comes from the individual needs of Tower Hill students and teachers themselves.
Read More
-
Effort, Energy and Enthusiam
by Drew Keim, Music Department Chair
Mission statements, mottos, slogans, philosophies … Every great organization has at least one of these in some form or another. Music ensembles are no different, either spoken, written or only in thought and practice. I once worked with a group that desired to create a statement that described what it took to be a successful band. The process started much like one would expect: brainstorming all of the positive attributes of groups that they hoped to emulate. Students began by identifying key characteristics through simple descriptive language that answered our key question, “What makes a band great?” After a plethora of ideas were written on the board, the student leadership focused on three simple words: effort, energy and enthusiasm.
Read More
-
Haunted Minds: Why I Teach Horror Literature
By Coleen Hubler, Upper School English
When I first interviewed at Tower Hill, Hugh Atkins, then English Department Chair, asked me the department’s favorite interview question: “If you could develop an elective, what would it be?” I answered enthusiastically, “A course in horror literature.” I think my response surprised him for more than one reason. First, my primary focus in graduate school was Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton and John Ford, playwrights of an era before the rise of Gothic fiction. Second, horror as a genre is often viewed as “non-literary.” A reader might select The October Country for entertainment on a dark, autumnal evening, but rarely do serious students of literature concentrate on horror.
Read More
-
Making a Positive Impact
By Marina Attix, Lower School Faculty
A smile in the morning, a genuine wave in the afternoon or a twirl from a little girl passing in the hallway: Making a positive impact on someone’s day is a lot easier than you might think. I went into teaching because I wanted to shape the lives of others. Soon after I began, I learned how much others touched my heart, shaping me. This past June, I was lucky enough to watch seven of my first-ever students graduate. I felt so proud to know that I had a little part in their upbringing. Despite the relatively short time I spent with these students, keeping in touch with them and all my students has brought me years of happiness and influenced the person I have become.
Read More
-
Room for Art
By John Bartlett, Art Department Chair
The art rooms at Tower Hill embrace a long tradition of providing environments where kids are empowered to create and learn in a wide spectrum of ways. The art rooms are places where students feel free to experiment and take risks that lead to unforeseen paths of discovery. As we celebrate the past and dream of the future, we teachers talk a lot about how to best prepare our students to reach their potential and to develop tools for successful and fulfilling lives. We are very lucky to pursue such goals as part of a community that values the arts as an integral part of an exceptional education.
Read More
-
Skills to Work at Google
By Tara Fletcher, History Department Chair
Each year as our seniors begin to finalize their college decisions and look to their next chapter, the inevitable question arises: What do you want to do with your life? Societal pressures can rear their ugly heads in presuming that certain majors won’t translate to getting a job and being workforce ready. However, according to Cathy N. Davidson, founding director of the Futures Initiative and author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, it is time to rethink these norms, especially if you want to work at Google.
Read More
-
Students Front and Center
By Megan Cover, Head of Upper School
I love stories. They tell me the how, what and why of life’s different pathways: It might be a small decision, a career opportunity, a calling from within or a mutual connection that brings people from all over to a common place. Throughout my lifetime, that draw has been school. As both student and educator, my “home” has been consistently within the community where I have studied or worked, and it is community that fuels my passion for and commitment to education.
Read More
-
Success in Chemistry
By Liz Brown, Ph.D., Upper School Science
I still remember the first day that I set foot in a chemistry classroom my sophomore year of high school. My best friend was my lab partner, I had a brand-new TI-84 calculator—the height of technology at the time—and a deep-rooted fear that this would be the class to bring me down. It didn’t take long for me to fall hopelessly in love with the subject, with its nuanced vision of a sub-microscopic world and with the elegance and absurdity of how perfectly my previous science knowledge nestled into place, the central, illuminating piece to the puzzle. It was also the dynamic and fearless woman, Mrs. Lang, at the helm of this class, who so unapologetically offered herself up as a guide to me and my peers, that drove me to college and then graduate school to soak up every ounce of chemistry I could find. Ultimately, I returned to teach high school chemistry in the hopes that I might, in some small way, pay tribute to her enormous impact on my life.
Read More
-
Teaching Self-Advocacy
By Jessica Douglass, Learning Specialist
The world is rapidly changing around us—social media has led to always-connected living, smart speakers answer our questions and predict our needs, and technology allows for immediate access to and manipulation of information from nearly anywhere. Our schools are changing, too. Gone are the days of the teacher-centered classroom, where the students sit as empty vessels waiting to receive knowledge poured in by their teachers. And gone also is the traditional ideal of the model student as one who follows rules and processes, takes good notes and asks the “right” questions.
In a true student-centered classroom, rather than the student adapting to the structure of the teaching, the teacher and the curriculum respond to the learner. What an exciting time to be an educator! And what an exciting time to be a student, also.
Read More
-
The Art of Theater
By Matt Kator, Theater Department Chair
Well-respected arts educator Kelly Pollack said it best: “The true purpose of arts education is not necessarily to create more professional dancers or artists. [It’s] to create more complete human beings who are critical thinkers, who have curious minds, who can lead productive lives.”
It’s an exciting time in the Theater Department at Tower Hill. Through improv, movement, public speaking, story telling, construction, painting and a whole host of other disciplines, we continue to borrow from many to create something new. Be it in the classroom or after school in rehearsal, the students, through the art of theater, continue to develop skills they will carry with them forever.
Read More
-
The Delight and Power of Mathematics
By Noreen Jordan, Math Department Chair
Yahtzee, Monopoly, gin rummy, scat, hearts, dots and boxes, checkers, backgammon, Rubik’s cube, poker and Clue: These games remind me of childhood road trips, weekends and lazy summer nights of family rivalry. In those days, my singular focus may have been defeating my siblings, but I am grateful today because the underlying skills required to be a successful player—strategizing, visualizing, analyzing and making calculations—have stayed with me. As I grew older, my record started to improve incrementally, but little did I realize at the time that my reasoning skills and critical thinking skills were evolving too. I may have lost many more times than I won, but I learned from my experience that in order to get better at these games, I had to take chances, make a lot of mistakes, play a lot of games and surround myself with other skilled players. Sound familiar?
Read More