“Language is life,” says French teacher Sue Michalski, “and I believe that language in the classroom should be alive as well.” With that goal in mind, all of her French classes, from French I through AP French, are conducted entirely in French. She notes that many of her students speak to her in French even outside of class, and says that in some cases, “I have never heard their voices in English.” Michalski graduated with highest departmental honors from Dartmouth College and taught French at Dartmouth with John Rassias and at the Walnut Hill School before coming to Williston in 1999.

Sue Michalski brings high energy to her students

In order to help her students learn intensely and wholeheartedly, Michalski incorporates music into various projects throughout the French curriculum. “Music is key for memory and repetition,” she points out. “A great song is fun, and gets into your head. The grammar also gets in there, often without the students realizing it.” Her AP French students still sing the “silly” yet usefully songs they learned in earlier classes.

Michalski’s French IV: Conversation class recently produced music videos for popular songs through which they had learned important grammar points. The requirements of the project were to memorize the song, show all students singing equally, and visually represent an understanding of the song’s message. Following the submission of the students’ music videos, the class then watched the musician’s video and compared the two approaches.

The song in the video below (read the lyrics and translation) is about what the singers would do if they were to die tomorrow: the refrain answers the question with, “I would love you.” Michalski points out that studying popular songs also gives a glimpse of Francophone culture (this song is sung by a Frenchman, Pascal Obispo, and a Canadian woman, Natasha St. Pierre). The students who produced this video are Nick Halbach ’11, Addison Morse ’12, Vicky Vazquez ’11, and Sarah Wilkie ’12.

In another musical project, the students wrote their own songs. They were required to include a certain number of grammar points and vocabulary words, to have stanzas and a refrain, and then to set the words to music. “Writing a song has students playing with language, incorporating vocabulary and structures we have studied, and using technology,” Michalski says. “Creating a tangible final project, ‘their’ song, is a great reward as well.”

One group (Debbie Andres ’11, Vicky Vazquez, and Sarah Wilkie) wrote a song called “Jour” (Day) to the music of Prince’s “Kiss.” Read the lyrics or listen to the song (left click to play or right click to download their song). Here is an excerpt of the refrain:

Michalski is happy to say that her students “love trying new and fun things,” and she uses this positive energy to help them progress toward fluency in French. She says, “Seeing them do something they never thought they could do, but I always knew they could—it’s a beautiful thing.”

Sarah Hubbard ’12 recently won the national tune-writing contest sponsored by Strings Without Boundaries. She was by far the youngest of four winners. Certainly a rising star in the musical world, Sarah has placed in the top three in every fiddle contest she has ever entered as a young adult. She was the first place winner of the Blandford Fiddle Contest in 2009 and 2010, and she won second place in the Ethnic Division at the 31st Annual Lowell Fiddle and Banjo Festival in September 2010. She also had the opportunity to perform at Tanglewood with noted clarinetist Paul Green.

Sarah performs regularly with a number of groups. She is a soloist with the Pioneer Valley Fiddlers, a local intergenerational group; she is the Klezmer violinist for Paul Green and Friends; she is a first violinist with the Springfield Youth Orchestra; and she was featured at a master class with Rachel Barton Pine, performing Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor. She is also concert mistress of The Williston Northampton School’s Chamber Orchestra, recently performing the Barber Concerto.

Sarah says she is committed to mastering and performing a variety of music styles for strings. Her musical interests and repertoire include jazz violin, gypsy jazz swing, Klezmer, blues, classical, electric and a wide variety of fiddle styles including New England, Ottawa Valley, Cape Breton, Irish, Texas Swing, bluegrass, old-time, and Metis, a style developed by Canadian Native Peoples.

Watch a short video of Sarah performing at a Williston assembly.

Emily Vezina’s enthusiasm is infectious. “I love language, and I love words,” says this teacher of Latin and English in Williston’s Middle and Upper Schools, who transmits daily her excitement to her students. “I’ve been told my vocabulary tests are fun,” she boasts.

And the school can boast that we have an editor of the dictionary as a member of our faculty. After graduating from Vassar College with a degree in Latin, Vezina worked for four years at Merriam-Webster in Springfield, MA, as a general definer before she started teaching in 2005. Now she brings the same level of care and attention to teaching that she once spent on word defining and editing.

Emily Vezina reviews vocabulary during Family Weekend

“We use words to describe everything,” Vezina points out. She found the process of researching for the dictionary infinitely fascinating, such as when she was tasked with revising the definition of “theremin” for Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition and learned all about this “purely melodic electronic musical instrument typically played by moving the hands in the electromagnetic fields surrounding two projecting antennae.”

Vezina even has her picture in the dictionary under “pince-nez.” When she heard that the staff illustrator was in need of models, she volunteered. The resulting picture is a combination of Vezina in her reading glasses and a woman from an 1800s Sears Roebuck catalog.

Vezina taught Latin at Worcester Academy for three years before coming to Williston. Now she enjoys “getting to know kids and supporting their experiences in learning about language and literature as well as life.” Her approach to teaching vocabulary is based on the fact that, “when you come upon a word, it’s not isolated from other words and ideas. You want to look it up because you heard or read it somewhere and you want to know what it means.” So her seventh grade English students help her to pick words out of the texts they read in class. Using a calendar and webpage in WillyNet, Williston’s intranet, students receive a schedule for their words, then post definitions and example sentences for their classmates to review.

When it’s time for a test, Vezina includes questions that ask students to demonstrate nuanced knowledge of a word, such as writing a pep talk telling a friend not to “defer” their dreams. “This is a more realistic test of their knowledge, since words always occur in context,” Vezina emphasizes. “I want them to show me that they know what a word means, not just tell me.” She credits her conversations with colleagues, as well as the inspiration of her own teachers, as contributing to successes such as this in the classroom.

Like many Williston teachers, Vezina believes learning extends beyond both the classroom and the topic at hand. In addition to teaching, she is an advisor for PRIDE (formerly the Gay/Straight Alliance) and a dorm parent in Logan House. Early on her teaching career, she “realized pretty quickly that teaching Latin or English is good and fulfilling but the most important thing is to teach kids how to be happy good people.”

Club members with Easthampton police officers

The Community Service Club at The Williston Northampton School has collected over 400 new and used stuffed animals that will be given to children experiencing traumatic situations. The club teamed up with the Easthampton Police Department, which has agreed to distribute what they can to local children. Any excess animals will be given to other charitable organizations such as the Red Cross.

Senior Jeff Eichenberger, a boarding student from Midland Park, NJ, is the community service club president. He got the idea for this project because he had a pile of stuffed animals that were “no longer getting love” in his house. He researched what to do with them and found a group called Stuffed Animals for Emergencies (SAFE) that collects stuffed animals to be distributed by law enforcement personnel and firefighters to children in emergencies. Jeff says, “Though I myself have been fortunate enough to never have experienced such a situation, I found the concept of donation very appealing.”

Since there is no Western Massachusetts chapter of SAFE, and the club had decided they would like to make the effects of the collection accessible as locally as possible, they worked with members of the Easthampton Police Department, who agreed to take the donations. Jeff says, “This is a prime example to the giving nature of the Williston community, and I imagine many children will be delighted to have a companion in their time of need.”

From November 2010 through January 2011, a total of 408 stuffed animals were generously donated by Williston students, parents, faculty, and staff members.

As February draws to a close, a number of Williston athletes will be competing in conference and national championships, and the varsity hockey teams will play their last home games of the season.

Tony Alvarez ‘11

Two Williston wrestlers, Tony Alvarez ‘11 and Connor Adams ‘12, qualified for the National Prep Wrestling Championships taking place February 24-26 at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. They are the first Williston wrestlers to qualify for the Nationals since 2008. Tony qualified by finishing 6th at the New England Championships in the 160-lb weight class last weekend. Coach Matt KaneLong says, “Tony is a two-year captain who struggled all last season with shoulder injuries, but honed his craft and has come back strong after off-season surgery. He lulls opponents into a sense of security and then pins them.”

Connor Adams ‘12

Connor qualified after successfully petitioning for entry after he was unable to compete in the 2011 NEPSAC Wrestling Championships held last week at Brooks School. Coach KaneLong says, “Connor has been our most-winning wrestler over the past 2 years.”

Other Williston teams competing in championships this weekend include the boys’ and girls’ squash teams competing in the New England Squash Tournament. The girls will be competing at Westminster and the boys at Brooks. Peter Gunn coaches the girls’ squash team and Stan Samuelson coaches the boys’.

A number of Williston swimmers will be competing in the Western New England championships at Hopkins.

Finally, the last girls’ ice hockey varsity home game is tonight at 5:00 at Lossone Rink against Winchendon. The last boys’ home game is tomorrow at 3:30 against Pomfret.