Acing the Test

Four NMH students did well on the PSAT. Really well. The National Merit Scholarship semifinalists were among the top half-of-one-percent of the 1.5 million students nationwide who took the test. They are eligible to become finalists this spring if they keep their grades up, get a good recommendation from the head of school, and do well (really well) on the SAT. They also have to write an essay and provide information about participation and leadership in school and community activities.

Congratulations to the semifinalists: Brodrick Childs ’09, Margaret O’Leary ’10, Nolen Royalty ’09, and Julian Tryba ’09.

Alum’s Priority: Public Health in Haiti

Malaria kills between one and three million people a year and was the fourth-leading cause of death in developing countries in 2002. An NMH alum is helping residents of a rural Haiti town prevent malaria, as well as other public health threats, using prize money he was awarded upon graduation from Brown University in May, and through fundraising on his blog, willinhaiti.blogspot.com.

Will Perez ’04 deferred his acceptance to Brown’s medical school to work for ten months in Les Cayes, Haiti, where he is the public health director and liaison at a clinic that serves an orphanage called Pwoje Espwa, or Project Hope. Perez recently developed a program for the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis, malaria, scabies, and ringworm.

“My work with public health spreads outside the orphanage and into the nearby villages,” Perez says. “It is impossible to draw boundaries around public health and for this reason; treating the children in the neighboring villages is just as important as treating the children in the orphanage.”

While a student at NMH, Perez founded Operation Happy Birthday, which throws birthday parties for children in homeless shelters. Perez was homeless for a time while he was a child. He was the winner of NMH’s highest honor, the Cambridge Award. At Brown, he registered OHB as a 501 c3 nonprofit organization, coordinating up to 200 volunteers at any given time, while working three jobs—about 40 hours per week—and taking a full load of courses. He hopes to bring OHB to several large cities. While a college student, he also participated in ballroom dancing competitions.

Upon graduating Brown, Perez was awarded the David J. Zucconi Fellowship, Brown’s largest and most prestigious award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize. He also won the Howard R. Swearer Service Fellowship. Both of these prizes helped fund his stay in Haiti. While his public health duties take up considerable time, he has written on his blog about holding English classes for Haitian people and learning Creole, and about giving lessons in ballroom dancing. Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

“My work in Haiti is playing a critical role in my inspiration for completing medical school and attaining my master’s in public health,” he says. “I want to be a doctor, but also an advocate for the poor, homeless, disease ridden, disadvantaged, and suffering.”

New Faculty
Thirteen new faculty members started teaching at NMH this fall. They bring to the classroom experience in a range of disciplines, and share a commitment to educating adolescents. In addition, NMH Summer School was proud that 17 alumni were on faculty during the summer. They are listed below.
 

• Andrew Bowersox received an MS in fisheries and wildlife resource management from Montana State University in 1998. He has been teaching at Bellows Falls High School in Bellows Falls, Vermont. This summer, Andy participated in a two-week workshop at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. He teaches in the science department.
• Grant Gonzalez earned a BA in both government and Middle Eastern studies from the College of William and Mary in 2007. For the past year he has been studying for a MA in Near and Middle Eastern studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He teaches both history and Arabic.
• Corinne Hagen joins the mathematics department from Cincinnati Country Day School where she has been teaching for the last four years. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, where she earned a BS in mathematics in 2003.
• Gardner Howe, a member of the NMH class of 2003, joins the history and social science department as an intern. Gardner received a BS in secondary school education and history from the University of Vermont this year.
• Lucien Koonce, a member of the visual arts department, received an MFA in studio arts from the University of Iowa in 1981. He has been teaching in Charlotte, North Carolina for the past six years.
• Li Li teaches in the world languages department. She recently finished defending her dissertation for her MA in modern Chinese literature at the University of Massachusetts.
• Karena Ness joins NMH’s visual arts department. She earned an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2005. She has most recently been teaching art in Keene, New Hampshire.
• Julia Nickles is a 2008 graduate of Brown University with a double major in mathematics and classics. This summer and last Julia worked in the NMH summer school. She teaches math at NMH.
• Matt Pennie joins the physical education and athletics department as an intern. Matt is a 2007 graduate of UMass and is currently pursuing a master's degree in education. He will coach JV football, varsity basketball and track and field. In addition he will be the director of sports information.
• Justin Porter is a 2007 graduate of Hobart College. For the past year Justin has been living in Manchester, England, coaching lacrosse and playing in the English Lacrosse Premiership League. Justin joins the visual arts department as an intern.
• Science teacher Scott Robison is a 2004 graduate of Dickinson College with a BS in physics. For the past two years Scott has been doing graduate work at Clark University and working there as a teaching assistant.
• Jennifer Stern is an intern in the history and social sciences department. She earned her BA in psychology from Kenyon College in May.
• Ashley Zanca, a 2008 graduate of Wells College, teaches mathematics and computer science classes.

NMH alumni who served as summer school faculty: Nat Simpson ’89, Loren Hodgkinson ’05, Nelson Lebo ’56, Kelly Griffin ’05, Cody Lounsbury ’04, Rose Guiltinan ’04, Megan Buchanan ’91, Megan Gibbons ’95, Jim Burstein ’87, Jeff Neill ’97, Peter Evans ’05, Pieter Naeff ’05, John Kaleczyc ’05, Michael Stetson ’90, Sudi-Laura Gregory Overstreet ’95, Annie Neill ’97, and Gardner Howe ’03.

Exploring Gullah Life in the Low Country
The Gullah people of coastal South Carolina and the islands off the coast are African American descendants of slaves who retain many traditions from Central and West Africa. James Greenwood, director of multicultural education at NMH, spent two weeks in the Palmetto State this summer as part of a federal Department of Education Teaching American History grant researching the Gullah people, and helping public school teachers from Cleveland incorporate lessons about Gullah history and culture into their teaching practice.

Here’s a dispatch James sent from South Carolina’s Low Country:

“We’re reading several books written by folks studying Gullah culture and memoirs by Gullah people themselves. We’re looking at culture: from food, to religious practices, to education, to folk tales (most people know the Brer Rabbit tales or the song “Kumbaya”—Gullah for “Come by Here”). We’re studying the many things these people were able to retain in the culture from Africa, and why it happened specifically (and in some ways, could only happen) in the Low Country.

“We spent five days at St. Helena Island at the Penn Center—the site of one of the country’s first schools for freed slaves and one of the most significant African American historical and cultural institutions in existence today. We toured the Sea Island with local folks, really trying to create a mental image of what life was like there, both under slavery in the antebellum period and following the Civil War.”

Rice Cultivation
“South Carolina was a major hub for slavery, with some estimating that 50 percent of African slaves brought to North America arrived in Charleston. South Carolina was known for its rice (and later indigo) cultivation. The climate here (not unlike parts of West Africa) allowed rice to flourish. However, the conditions were ideal for malaria, which many African slaves had more natural resistance to than did those of European descent. Because of that, there were more absentee-landlords, with overseers running plantations while the masters lived elsewhere in more hospitable climates. South Carolina became one of the places in the South where we actually saw a black majority, which created a very specific slave experience that was different from slavery in other areas, such as North Carolina or Virginia. Also, because of the specific skills required to cultivate rice, slaves were sought from particular regions in West Africa (largely Sierra Leone) where rice cultivation was already an established way of life. So they maintained a more enduring connection to Africa, which allowed elements of African cultures to be retained. Ironically, the skills and knowledge of the Africans in America reinforced their enslavement.

“Though many were from Sierra Leone, there were slaves from multiple regions and ethnic groups in Africa. Gullah, therefore, as a language, developed as a method of communication, blending bits of these various African languages with bits of English.  Over time, after emancipation (and after other states such as Texas became competitors in rice production) the plantations died out and many whites left the region. On some of the islands, there were black populations left to their own devices. Some of the Sea Islands didn't even have bridges to the mainland until as late as the 1940s. Much of the Gullah culture was allowed to grow in near complete isolation.”

Teaching the Culture
“As part of the program, we’re working mostly with history teachers, so we're hoping they’ll be able to present this as a case study of one of the many ways that slavery existed in the US. We also hope they’ll be able to communicate the strength and resilience of black slaves. Despite slavery being such a devastating force—and it was terribly destructive—people were able to retain elements of their culture: both in language and in practice. In fact, in trips from the Gullah islands to parts of west Africa in recent years, Gullah speakers were still able to communicate with (both understand and be understood by) certain speakers of various African ethnic languages. That's remarkable. This was shown in the PBS documentaries “The Language You Cry In” and “Family Across the Sea.” Other Africanisms include naming practices, quilting, burial practices, and, probably one of the most widely studied skills, basket-weaving— particularly the weaving of what are called sweetgrass baskets. When placed side by side with baskets made in Sierra Leone, they are nearly identical in craft and technique. 

“There are also art and math teachers who plan to incorporate elements of Gullah culture into their lessons. It’s truly multicultural education at its best! Math teachers spoke about using the baskets as examples when studying measurements or patterns. English teachers talked about writing narratives and autobiographies. Science teachers can teach the biology and environment of the area, so there are dozens of applications across disciplines.”

The Penn Center
“The house we stayed at in the Penn Center was also the house that Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed at when he was in South Carolina in the 1960s. To think that we walked the same places that Dr. King walked was amazing. For me, working with teachers from the Cleveland Public School System, the school system that I went through, was a rewarding experience. In fact, one of the participants was a former high school teacher of mine, so it was great to be working together as colleagues now.”

Oligopoly in Action
Finding a way to illustrate to teenagers in the summertime how oligopolies work may seem a daunting task. But James “Hutch” Hutchison is up to it. In economics, oligopoly is a type of market, such as the airplane industry, dominated by a few major competitors—in this case, Boeing and Airbus. Reminding students of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand (the theory that every one operates out of self-interest, and that this benefits the community as a whole), Hutchison lays the groundwork to convey that companies in oligopolies have to take both their own self-interest and their competitor’s interest into account, eventually finding a way to compete that benefits them both, using a little game theory.

With a purple marker, he creates a two-row, two-column graph—a rectangle bisected across and down. Hutchison then names the axes: “you” and “random other person.” By plotting two kids’ hypothetical choices to either “go big” or “play it safe,” he generates a score for each when matched with a classmate (think paper, scissor, rock) If you go big but your partner plays it safe, you get zero and your partner gets 22 points. If both go big, both earn 18 points. If both play it safe, both earn 14 points. Each student silently writes either “go big” or “play it safe” on an index card and tucks it into a bag.

Dmitry writes, “go big.” Jackson writes, “play it safe.” So Dmitry earns a zero and Jackson earns 22 points. Hutchison pulls out each student’s index card, reads the strategy, and pairs it with another student’s, earning a score from zero to 22.

Next, students are allowed to strategize together before making their choices, but write their decision in private. They say they will all “go big,” thus earning a decent score (18), but not the powerhouse score they could earn if they “play it safe” and others “go big” (22). Suspense builds as Hutchison pulls out the cards one at a time. Does everyone “go big” as they said they would? Of course not! Some “play it safe,” burning their comrades and raking in the big play money. Hutchison notes that this is exactly what happens in an oligopoly: “You are not the only one who decides how well you do,” he says. Cartels such as OPEC decide to band together to “go big” but there’s incentive to cheat. Eventually, all parties are tired of getting burned, so they “play it safe” for decent, but not blockbuster, returns--a state called Nash equilibrium, after John Nash, the mathematician who shared a Nobel prize in economics for pioneering the theory, and who was the subject of the film, A Beautiful Mind.

After the game ends, Jackson, with 44 points, asks hopefully, “Does that really count toward our grade?”

“No,” replies Hutchison with a smile. “I made that up.”

During the school year, James Hutchison teaches AP economics at Boston College High School, where his students averaged 4.59 out of 5 on the AP Microeconomics test and 4.44 on the AP Macroeconomics test (the national averages are 2.8 and 3.1, respectively). The class he teaches at NMH is the equivalent of Introduction to Macroeconomics and Introduction to Microeconomics at the college level.

Down to the Sea
Every summer a schooner leaves Boston harbor and, fueled by heady coastal winds, sails for Martha’s Vineyard. That image is poetry enough. But the sailors are not old salts; they are young writers. The tall ship Harvey Gamage’s crew includes the 20 teens who take the class Down to the Sea with Paper and Pen. Students not only learn to sail a ship, but also attend daily writing workshops; get a chance to film, narrate, and edit a short video; and receive one-on-one mentoring time with R. Jim Stahl ’73, the editor of Merlyn’s Pen, a magazine that publishes writings of teen authors. NMH’s director of college counseling, Peter Jenkins, coleads the week-long expedition.

Jenkins reports that the sailors saw pods of whales, swam in the ocean out of sight of land, and shared delightful writing. The 3-am watch was tough for this veteran sailor, he says with a laugh.

Jenkins has worked with young people both in and out of the classroom for more than 30 years. As a teacher, his favorite topics include film and filmmaking, modern American writers, and the English poet and painter William Blake. An expert in helping teens see their own potential, he’s coached many successful seasons at NMH of girls crew, boys soccer, tennis, and football.

Also aboard was writer-in-residence Amity Gaige, who appears on the “5 Under 35” list of promising authors selected by the National Book Foundation.

And They're Off!
When classes resume in the fall, several NMH faculty members may have interesting answers to the age-old question: How did you spend your summer vacation? Three dozen teachers are taking advantage of funds set aside for professional development and are traveling to locales from Vermont to Turkey for in-depth study or training. Spanish teacher Sue Borland is heading to Barcelona for classes in Castillian. English teacher Bob Cooley flies to Dublin to study modern Irish literature. Charles Raffetto, technical theater director, goes to an art educator’s forum in Savannah, Georgia.

"We are proud of our faculty and invest deeply in the continuing learning and growth of teachers," says Hugh Silbaugh, dean of faculty. "NMH teachers model lifelong learning for our students."

Dig It
He’s gotten to wield an axe, shoo away scorpions and vipers, and hike for miles in the 100-degree heat of central Italy, which is really good for building character. But for Ben Tobin, who is fascinated by mythology and ancient cultures, the best part of his summer vacation is being a high school student among professional archeologists and college and graduate students attempting to unearth an Etruscan temple at a site called Poggio Civitate.

Ben was part of a group from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, home of the Center for Etruscan Studies, living and working together in an area south of Siena that was the seat of power for the Etruscans. The Etruscan civilization, which predates the Roman one, erected buildings at the site in the late 8th century BCE, some of which were ornately decorated with life-sized terracotta statues of people. According to UMass, the site, first discovered in 1966, hosts international scholars who conduct research and study the region. Participants engage in hands-on work: from clearing trees (hence, the axe) to digging with archeological trowels (participants bring their own from home), to cataloguing, illustrating, and photographing any finds. Ben, who instead of spending his senior year at NMH will attend the early college program at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, stayed for four weeks with scholars and fellow archeological students in a converted villa in the small town of Vescovado di Murlo, about a 25 minute walk from the hill where the group was excavating.

 

Reaching for the Stars
Astronomy class is starting in Cutler 103, but instead of talking about stars and planets, students are discussing senior quotes, due to yearbook staff in a few days. The teens are tossing around ideas, some wondering aloud why the quotes are relevant. Teacher Hughes Pack turns the question around, asking them why a senior quote might be important.

"It’s something to remember you by," offers one student.

Another suggests, "It's something to inspire you."

“To inspire you now or ten years from now?” asks Pack. The students chew on that idea.

Josh Throckmorton ’08 is gravitating toward a quote from the 1993 movie The Sandlot, where the wise figure of the Babe says to the protagonist, Scotty Smalls, “Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either because they’re too scared, or they don’t recognize it when it spits on their shoes.”

Josh ought to know. This class has done something great. Its nine students, led by Pack, have discovered four asteroids, using images from a telescope in Texas. The group is part of a national project in which high schools and colleges search for comets and asteroids, so-called Near Earth Objects (NEOs). The class uses images from large telescopes to take several pictures of a region of the sky during a given time frame, then overlaps the photos and uses computers to search for any moving objects. Typically, a comet or asteroid will appear as a blurry gray dot moving in a constant, straight path.

This October class members found K07TN8K, K07T73P, K07T73O, and K07T15N, asteroids moving through the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The students compared their findings with a database of known objects at the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see if their NEOs had been discovered by anyone else. They hadn’t.

Pack explains what scientists can gain (besides a heads-up before an asteroid plummets to Earth) by cataloging asteroids. “By counting how many there are, we can begin to build statistical models on what the solar system might have looked like right after it formed—which can help us understand what we see today and what to look for as we find other stars with planets or debris orbiting them.”

Greatness aside, the class today is buckling down to do the grunt work of astronomers: spectral classification—looking at certain measurements of a star (e.g., luminosity or mass) to make estimations about other features, such as its distance from Earth.

Pack presents a graph measuring the luminosity and absolute magnitude of stars. A band across the middle represents regular stars, while giants and supergiants reside where luminosity and mass are greatest. Pack notes that stars like those in the constellation Pleiades are born hot and big and look blue. But they don’t live very long. In 10 million years, they’re gone.

“Are they going to go black?” asks Rebecca Gruening ’09.

“No, these blow up,” says Pack matter-of-factly.

Chelsea Bunker ’08 asks what will happen to our sun.

“It will vaporize the Earth.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. That’s recycling,” quips Pack.

Rebecca follows up: “What about our species?”

“That’s why we need to get off this planet. We need to build a colony on Mars or on the moon,” says Pack.

Then something shifts for Chelsea, and she offers an idea for a senior quote: “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”

Open Mandala
Mandala, the student-produced literary journal that has been published for 37 years, contains striking images and writing by NMH students, faculty, and staff members. Click here to see it in PDF form. Mandala is produced by Galen Anderson ’09, Christina McCausland ’08, Liana Satenstein ’08, Danny Shin ’10, Jahyun Song ’10, Angus Wan ’08, and Stephanie Yici Zhao ’08. Philip Calabria, the chair of the visual arts department, is the faculty advisor.

Here’s a poem from its pages:

Oubliette

Seen as a shroud moving across a field
the grey barrier waits,
as if to reveal
our unspoken language.

A bird, a branch, a tree
our native sight, our forgotten face.

S.J. Clayton

Human Guinea Pigs Sniff Vanilla Extract,
Eat Candy, and Chug Coffee
Beth Buyea’s Human Physiology class took over the third floor of Cutler Science Center May 2 and 5 as 27 student, faculty, and staff volunteers subjected themselves to experiments that students designed.

At one table, Daisy Letendre ’09, Sarah Heist ’08, and Meredith Storrs ’09 were sticking three electrode pads to the legs of their subjects and then whacking them on the patellar tendon just below the kneecap with a reflex hammer, which was also wired to a computer. The purpose? To measure reflexes before and then after a walk down to the basement of Cutler and back up to the third floor. They were comparing the results of students with those of adults in the community. Elizabeth Arthur ’08, barely winded, offered her knee after the climb.

David Rome ’08, Nick Clough ’08, and Chris Brown ’08 offered snipped straws that subjects stuck into a bottle of vanilla extract to see how long it took for “olfactory fatigue” to set in. Testers sniffed peppermint next until they could smell no more. The boys’ hypothesis was that all smells took about the same time to dissipate in the smeller’s nose, and it was being born out by Outreach Director Annie Neill ’97, who said she has a “terrible sense of smell.”

Across the hall, Philippa Sanbongi ’08 was pouring coffee from a carafe into Styrofoam cups while students took tests before and after swallowing down a cup or two to test the effects of caffeine on academic performance. Chris Ackley ’08, Martin Tarintino ’08, Molly DeLallo ’09 and Philippa thought the joe would enhance the test-takers’ abilities. In the lab, another group with a bag of Skittles was testing the effect of sugar on the brain’s ability to solve problems.

Buyea says that this type of investigation is important in teaching science. “This is their way of saying, ‘Let me actually see what happens instead of just being told what happens.’ … They are able to really see the scientific method through from beginning to end.”

Students also see first-hand how difficult it is to design, experiment, and obtain results. “It becomes a great discussion for errors—did their testing prove or disprove anything is a great conversation to have,” Buyea adds.

Here’s a list of the students’ experiments (results were posted in Cutler at the Science Symposium May 14):

• olfactory fatigue with varying smells
• academic performance with caffeine use
• comparing lung capacity and height and weight
• effects of caffeine and sugar on blood pressure and pulse
• effects of multiple external stimuli on heart rate
• muscle fatigue and reflex response
• brain dominance testing

 

They’re at the Top of Their Class
Julia Mix Barrington ’08 and George Posner ’08, the valedictorian and salutatorian of their class, are headed in opposite directions, career-wise—she wants to be a food writer; he’s undecided, but is leaning toward studying “how people work, and why people on a societal, macroscopic level, do what they do.” But they share two traits in common: families that supported intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to work hard.

For Posner, who heads to Claremont McKenna College this fall, time management has become an art. He offers this advice for those wishing to boost their effectiveness: “Adjust your habits according to your past performance. If you need large time chunks, find them; if you have work you can break off at any point, carry some with you for free time. Work in your room if that works for you; if it doesn't, find someplace that does. In the end, though, your work will only get done if you care enough.”

Mix-Barrington, who’s off to Barnard College of Columbia University, prescribes beauty rest, but not in place of studying: “Just bite the bullet and get it done. Then you’ll have time later to do other stuff. And never, never cram—get as much sleep as possible. There’s nothing better than a good night’s sleep.”

Read George Posner's Baccalaureate speech.

Biology on the Farm
Biology teacher Rob Buyea grew up in rural upstate New York, hanging out at his best friend’s family farm; during college he worked summers on a larger dairy operation. So it’s no coincidence that when the NMH science department expressed a desire to integrate the farm into the curriculum, Buyea’s name came up (his wife Beth, a fellow science teacher, volunteered him, he says with a smile).

The program began in spring 2007 and involves all students in Buyea’s Biology I class. Working in pairs or trios, they design and carry out their own research, and then present their results to the class. Experiments have included how best to distil oil from rosemary plants; investigating plant germination using several variables, such as the growing medium and pH of the water; propagating plants from clippings using root hormones; and monitoring a cow who gave birth to a calf. Farm director Richard Odman, farm assistant Rachel Onuf, and science lab technician Bill Nordstrom all work closely with the group.

Buyea says the farm is a great learning tool, allowing the students hands-on experience, an appreciation of how the farm works, and of how difficult real-life experiments can be. “Things get broken. The kids make mistakes. And as all good scientists do, they end up with more questions than answers.”