Charles Skidmore, principal of Arlington High School, welcomes parents and guardians to the 2007-2008 school year with comments about teachers at the high school -- and his summer reading.

Electronic Update #1 September 3, 2007

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Goings On at AHS

Teacher Days, Sept. 4 and 5
We use the first two days of the school year to allow teachers time to see their new schedules, organize their classrooms, meet with departmental and school colleagues, and spend some time in large and small meetings to set goals for the year. It’s an ambitious two days and some teachers are here well into the evening on both days as they prepare classes and assignments for student Opening Day, Sept. 6.

 Staffing
I am very pleased to say that all teacher positions are staffed and we will not have to use long-term substitutes to begin the year. Dr. Judith Sumner, the APS Science Director, has taken a position at the college level and she will no longer be with us. Shelly Brugman, a recently retired science teacher, will oversee the science department at the high school and middle school until a replacement can be found. Our new Social Studies Director, Kerry Dunne from the Framingham Public Schools, will join the APS administrative staff on September 10 and we are very pleased to have her on board. We will begin interviews to replace Dave Johnson, who resigned from the Athletic Director position over the summer, very soon and should have a candidate in place by mid-September. I am indebted to Dean Robert DiLoreto who has taken over the major duties of the position in these intervening weeks.

 Student Opening Day, Sept. 6
Most families should have received thick enevelopes in the mail with a letter from me, various forms to be filled out and returned, and a student schedule in list form. Students should report to the homerooms named on the list before 8:00 on Thursday, September 6. They should bring their completed forms to their homeroom teacher on the first day or as soon after that as possible. During homeroom all students will receive a new schedule that reflects the final changes made to the master schedule and individual schedules. Students who have problems with their schedules will be able to see counselors both during the school day and after school. The Deans have done a tremendous job this year in creating lists for the counselors of all students who are starting the year with incomplete schedules. At this iteration of the schedule, all students with blanks in their schedules have been assigned to studies. Deans and counselors will work with students who have large numbers of studies to reduce those by adding electives or fulfilling community and school service requirements by helping in various offices around the building.

 Facilities
Our custodial staff has worked tirelessly over the summer to clean the building, move furniture, maintain the grounds, and make minor repairs. I am indebted to the custodians and the students who joined the custodial crew as summer workers for all of their hard work in getting the building ready for a smooth opening.

My summer reading

According to the internal clock that is lodged in every educator’s head, the little hand is on September and the big hand is on Labor Day, so it’s time to start back to school again. I hope you and your children had wonderful summers and benefited from the less frenetic pace of July and August. At the end of every August I am full of regrets for what I have not accomplished, and, I can almost hear Tom and Ray Magliozzi from Car Talk saying, “There’s another two months you’ve frittered away,” just as they ironically remind us every week after spending an hour with them on their wonderfully entertaining radio show. Although I would have liked to complete more around the house and school projects, I am very pleased at the summer reading / listening I accomplished. I read: Orwell In Tribune, As I Please and Other Writings by Paul Anderson and The House That George Built by Wilfrid Sheed, and I listened to three excellent books on CD: Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, Outposts by Simon Winchester, and The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.

 Orwell’s non-fiction writing is the writing that inspires me most. He writes simply and clearly and is consistently on message about our need to be alert against fascism, hypocrisy, and the subjectivity of history and reporting. This book of his 1940s editorials from the Tribune, an English newspaper contains several timeless examples of these important themes. I also read The House That George Built, a gossipy book about George Gershwin and other songwriters of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s who wrote the jazz songs and standards that have become known as the American songbook. I read a review of this book earlier in the year, and, although the music is much “before my time” I was amazed at how many of these standards I recalled and liked very much. As I thought more about these songs, I realized that they were the soundtrack to my life as a child in the 1950s when WHDH was an important news and music radio station and DJs such as Jess Cain and Norm Nathan played these classics, along with newer 1950s rock and roll tunes, from their “lush but not overly ostentatious” radio station headquarters.

 Simon Winchester, the author and reader of Outposts, is one of those Englishmen who radiate brilliance and perfection. Trained as a geologist he seems to know everything about the Earth and a large smattering of history, other sciences, and popular culture to go along with it. This CD, Outposts, is about his visits to the surviving outposts of the British Empire and it is very informative. Other CDs I’ve listened to of his are: Krakatoa, The Madman and the Professor, and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each one is a learning and listening pleasure. 

 If you have a child in elementary or middle school, I would very much recommend Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. This book is the grown-up version of Readers’ and Writers’ Workshop, the methodology that is now being used in many K -8 schools to help students become better readers and writers. The essential strategy in this methodology is for students to turn on their “inner reader and writer” and react to text by connecting the ideas they are reading to other information they know from their own experiences or from other text they have read. The book also emphasizes close, slow reading, and imitating the style of various authors for use in one’s own writing. This book, as well as the Readers’ and Writers’ Workshop materials, is essentially saying that many, many students read text at a distance. They don’t get involved in the reading, and don’t know that they are supposed to challenge, question, and appreciate the author as they read. This book is an invitation to reading as an interactive activity where both reader and writer are both contributing to the interchange.

 What I liked most about the final CD I listened (and re-listened) to, The Lessons Of History by Will and Ariel Durant, was that the CD included taped interviews with the two historian / philosophers. The interviews allowed the authors to comment on each of the chapters in the book. The interviews were done in the 1980s shortly before the husband and wife team died, so some of the opinions might be seen as somewhat as politically incorrect twenty plus years later, but the astonishing intelligence and optimism of the work (and the love and admiration between husband and wife) make it a joy to listen to. The Durants state that all history is a great “systole and diastole” of progress and regression, but always with creativity and civilization finding a foothold to move forward despite the obstacles. They are very positive about education and insist that the job of educators is not only to transfer the knowledge from generation to generation but more importantly to transfer the culture and values of a civilization. When education does that work, in tandem with families and religious organizations, then societies invariably move forward. I believe that we will be doing that kind of work very specifically this year as we implement our new mission statement and our 21st century goals.

I am sure there is more, but I wanted to get a first letter out before the bustle of the first few days. I am looking forward to an exciting new year, and will keep you informed about what’s happening at AHS with these regular updates.

Sincerely, 

Charlie