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John Locke—& Five City Teachers—Win Election
by Allan Appel | Mar 19, 2010 11:47 am
(2) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Schools
An election took place the other day at Career High. It wasn’t American Idol, or McCain versus Obama. Instead, students voted on whether Thomas Hobbes or John Locke was the better philosopher.
The winner? Locke.
That didn’t surprise sixth-year history teacher Justin Boucher (pictured with his wife Fiona), who conducted the election.
“We expected it,” he said. “Kids like freedom more than control.” The kids also liked the subject so much, a philosophy club was soon formed.
Down the hallway at Career, Latin teacher Derk-Michel Strauch was bringing another philosopher into his classroom. On the first day of class he wrote a quotation by Aristotle on the blackboard: “The purpose of education is not to learn what others have taught, but to learn how to think.”
These were some of the examples of inspired instruction that helped the two Career High teachers, and three others in the city, win a different election: the 2009 Teacher Excellence Awards. (Click here for a story about past years’ winners.)
Thursday evening more than a hundred admirers, including family, colleagues, and students gathered at the offices of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to do the honors for the ninth annual awards: recognition, bouquets, champagne, and a thousand bucks a piece, care of the sponsor NewAlliance Bank.
The other three winners were Susan Baldino of Davis Street School, Deidre Prisco of Edgewood, and William Slusky of Mauro-Sheridan.
Quebec-born Strauch is multilingual. He uses that experience in his classes. One of the contest judges, who visited Strauch’s class as part of the competition, said one particular group of kids Strauch was teaching spoke a combined total of 11 different languages. Strauch had them write the same sentence in the 11 languages on the board; then he proceeded to translate it into Latin.
“Latin is organized, predictable, orderly,” he said, because unlike English it’s inflected with the logical case endings. He uses that to help kids parse or diagram sentences, a skill rarely taught these days in English. In other words, “Why does it have to be in the ablative!” he said in a conversation before receiving his award.
Learning such old-fashioned structures is a key to “higher-learning skills” that put students in good stead when they seek jobs in business and medicine, Strauch said. One year of Latin is mandatory at Career for all students, two years for medically oriented students. It’s one of the fastest-growing foreign languages being taught in the secondary schools, he said.
For those of us who long ago studied agricola, agricolae, agricolae, agricolam, agricola ... who would have thought! The difference now is that memorization is not the pedagogical modus operandi. Contest is, Strauch explained.
One of Strauch’s former students recently came up to him from behind when he was at the food carts near Yale-New Haven Hospital, and hugged him. Strauch had taught her Latin at Co-op. Now she was a 25-year-old MBA with a job at the hospital. He pronounced that the “joy” of being a teacher.
He also pointed to his knuckles, where the nuns, he said, had taught him how to parse. “That’s not arthritis, that’s education,” he said.
One of his current students, sophomore Wen Jaing, came to cheer, calling Strauch a great teacher who “always is telling [us] what society is like ‘out there’.”
On top of his teaching, Boucher was cited for mentoring six new history teachers and developing the city’s ninth grade world civilizations curriculum.
“He breathes on Wednesday between second and third periods,” said contest judge Leslie Rascati, one of the foundation’s education subcommittee members .
The five winners were selected from a field of 25 nominated by colleagues, parents, or students.
Post a Comment
Comments
posted by: Mary K. Snyder on March 19, 2010 1:54pm
Hi Fiona and Justin,
CONGRATULATIONS on a job well done - and a lovely photo of the two of you! Here’s to all the minds you are helping to make the future a brighter place!
Cheers to you both .... *clink*
xoxo
Mary & Doug
posted by: Josiah Brown on March 20, 2010 12:50pm
Congratulations to the five recipients of the award and to their schools, as well as to the other nominees whose accomplishments made them contenders. This recognition speaks to the professional dedication of hundreds of educators across the New Haven Public Schools, with these five representatives particularly honored here.
Both Justin Boucher and Deirdre Prisco have recently been Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute Fellows.
It happens the lesson on Locke and Hobbes that Justin Boucher used with students comes from this curriculum unit that he developed:
http://www.teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/search/viewer.php?skin=h&id=initiative_05.03.03_g
A Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute Fellow in each of his first seven years as a teacher (2004 through 2010), Justin Boucher this year is part of a team of colleagues from Career High School who are participating in a seminar led by historian Jean-Christophe Agnew on “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consumer Culture.” The team consists of teachers of Spanish (Maria Cardalliaguet) and of mathematics (Kathleen Rooney) as well as of history.
Beyond the Locke/Hobbes unit linked above, Justin Boucher’s prior (New Haven or national) curriculum units can be found below:
http://www.teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/search/viewer.php?skin=h&id=initiative_06.02.02_g
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2009/1/09.01.04.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2008/4/08.04.02.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2007/2/07.02.04.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2006/6/06.06.06.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2005/3/05.03.06.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2004/3/04.03.01.x.html
Both Justin Boucher and Deirdre Prisco were Fellows in a 2009 Institute seminar that English professor Janice Carlisle led on “Writing, Knowing, Seeing.”
Deirdre Prisco’s unit was called “Visually Speaking: Using Visual Journaling to Build Elaboration Skills in Writing”:
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/guides/2009/1/09.01.03.x.html
According to her synopsis of the unit, “Worn out, overused verbs and adjectives fill students’ writing. This unit is designed to develop elaboration skills through the use of visual journaling which combines images and text. For many students who have a dread of writing, visual journals can increase the flow of words by providing images. The visual journal is a creation of observations and reflections designed to increase awareness of details in order to build better elaboration skills. Research has shown that strong visual-verbal connections develop better thinking skills, expand vocabulary and improve the quality of writing with elaboration. This unit addresses the needs of all learners with the opportunity for differentiated instruction. The unit promises to be highly motivating to all students, especially those who struggle with writing. It allows students and teachers to move beyond standardized test instruction. Although the unit was created with middle-school students in mind, the unit can be adapted for any grade level. It can be implemented as weekly or monthly supplemental lessons to the language arts curriculum or as a unit autonomously.”
