At first, Jean-Gabriel “Gabe” Lacombe couldn’t quite get the hang of the sport he now captains. “I didn’t like [hockey] in the beginning…I couldn’t skate very well,” he admitted. Lacombe was 2 years old when he started skating.
His father encouraged him to keep at it and, eventually, “all my friends started liking hockey so I felt like, ‘I might as well start playing,’” he said. The rest is history.
On a blustery day in late fall, science teacher Paul Rutherford herded a class of physics students onto a school van. While Rutherford clambered behind the steering wheel, the students put blindfolds over their eyes.
The van started moving. Could the students tell how fast the bus was going? Rutherford asked. They could not. He turned a corner. Suddenly, his passengers could feel the movement, even if they couldn’t see it.
The students had just learned a lesson in the physics of motion, and had learned it in a way that kept them actively engaged.
Science Department Head Bill Berghoff relishes this type of hands-on learning. By next year, he hopes to see quite a bit more of it happening around campus.
“There’s going to be a lot of physics experiments, a lot of light and sound and dropping objects,” he said, adding with a grin, “There’s going to be lots of weird stuff going on, I think, next year.”
An outbreak of fungal meningitis. That’s the problem that University of Massachusetts Professor of Chemistry Dr. Scott Auerbach asked AP Integrated Science students to solve when he visited The Williston Northampton School on November 15.
As the students settled into groups of three and four, Auerbach outlined the grim statistics: 438 cases in 19 states with a death total of at least 32.
“Today’s goal is to understand the role science plays in making sense of understanding this outbreak,” Auerbach said. “Your job is to be Beth Bell, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.”
This was one problem that the students weren’t going to be able to solve by looking in the back of their textbook—and not being able to immediately find the solution is the point. When Science Department Chair Bill Berghoff put together the pilot program for the integrated science class, his aim was to encourage collaboration and scientific creative thinking.
“I’m really big into inquiry-based learning,” he said. “You have to do experiments, you have to do activities, to really understand what’s going on.”
Bend it Like…Parker?
She’s been called the traffic controller, the distributor, a worker bee, and the cog of the girls varsity soccer team wheel.
A junior from Amherst, MA, Gia Parker has been playing the game since she was five. Parker, who has worked very hard to improve her game over the past two seasons, says the trait that has stuck with her throughout the years, and countless practices, is discipline.
“I take good care of my body, I eat well and I have learned good habits,” she said. “It’s something that I’ve worked really hard at. It didn’t always come easily.“
Monique Conroy is Parker’s advisor, Algebra II teacher, and coach, and has enjoyed watching her advisee develop, both on and off the field.
“Gia came in as a freshman and became a starter at the key position on the field,” said Conroy, adding that that was true even though an older player played ahead of Parker.
In subsequent years, explained Conroy, Parker continued to improve her game, her physical strength, and her endurance.
“She is the fittest girl on the team; nobody will ever question that,” said Conroy.
“This day was not so much a surprise to those of us who knew her well,” said Peter Gunn as he introduced his former student, Jennifer duBois ’02, author of, A Partial History of Lost Causes and recently named one of the National Book Foundation’s Five Under 35.
It was a night of memories as duBois, who participated as a student in the Writers’ Workshop series, became the first alumna to also return as a guest author in the program.
As a student duBois studied The Odd Sea, written by Frederick Reiken, and was greatly influenced by something he said at her Writers’ Workshop. She was having trouble grasping the truth in writing something she hadn’t experienced firsthand and Reiken said, “You write what you know, but you know more than you think you know.” Continue reading
