Williston’s admission decisions went live today, via email and official letters to applicants congratulating them on their acceptance to The Williston Northampton School. The Admission Office reviewed a record number of applications this year, and Director of Admission Ann Pickrell predicts that the applications will translate into a strong student community for the 2011-12 school year. “Our applicant pool this year was filled with terrific students interested in a variety of opportunities available at Williston. The admission committee has offered enrollment to 39% of those applying. We look forward to welcoming new students to our Second Visit Days in April.”

Applicants were drawn to Williston’s strong academic program, its location in the Pioneer Valley, and its Williston⁺ Program, which brings the outstanding educational, cultural, and artistic resources of the area onto campus and into the curriculum, and our fantastic offerings in athletics and the arts.

In addition to an email and a letter, accepted students were congratulated by the entire student body and new Head of School Robert W. Hill III in a special video produced by Williston’s Film Club.

“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.”