Presidio Hill School Weekly News

May 14, 2004

From the director:

Dear Families,

An end of year spirit is definitely in the air. Kids are exuberant, classrooms are comfortable places with well established routines, and teachers are experiencing the bitter sweet feelings of year’s end. May Festival always marks a turning point in the year. Other spring events – corporation meeting, step-up day, individual class celebrations and graduation – are just around the corner.

One of our year-end events, the corporation meeting, is Tuesday evening from 7-9pm. The business portion of the meeting will focus on the strategic plan and an overview of other important school business. The class portion of the meeting will be your first peek into your child’s classroom for next year. Please come a few minutes early and watch the wonderful video made two years ago that tells all about PHS. We’ll have it playing in the art room.

May 25th is another important year-end gathering for our current seventh grade families – High School Information Night. Please be sure to read the column in this newsletter on high schools.

Kudos to all of us for our hard work with traffic, noise and other items impacting our neighbors. The most recent edition of the Presidio Heights Association of Neighbors (PHAN) newsletter paints the school in a very favorable light, and states we are showing “every evidence of wanting to be a good neighbor”. No one of us could have done this alone, so thank you to the continual thoughtfulness and adherence to traffic and noise guidelines of all PHS community members. A comment made by one neighbor indicating how polite our students are has me smiling from ear to ear. Keep up the good work!

Summer Camp deadline has been extended one week. We have received a few more registrations and are still hoping for a few more. However, we must have all summer camp registrations by Wednesday, May 19th. Thanks for your help in publicizing our program to your friends and colleagues.

See you Tuesday at the Corporation Meeting. If you are not able to attend, please be sure to return your proxy to Martin’s office.

Ann Meissner
Acting Director

From The Deans

Dear Parents,

It’s the end of the school year and PHS is buzzing with excitement about all sorts of things…social events, meetings, graduation, and next year planning. We are now well into the final semester and involved in the usual end-of-year activities. Work that began earlier in the year has culminated in many successes including the admittance of a new cohort of sixth graders and the location of next year’s eighth grade trip. Currently we’re working on the school’s yearbook, scheduling ERBs, and making graduation plans.

The Educational Record Bureau’s (ERB’s) standardized tests will be administered to all middle school students May 24 - 28. We ask for your assistance in helping us provide optimal testing conditions by ensuring that your child has a good night’s rest, an adequate breakfast, and arrives at school on time. Please contact your child’s advisor if special accommodations are required.

The spring Corporation Meeting takes place on Tuesday, May 18. It’s business as usual from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. At 8:00 p.m. parents will meet their child’s teachers for the 2004 - 2005 school year. Concurrently, eighth grade parents are invited to a dialogue with Charlotte Worsley, Dean of Students, Urban High School. Ms. Worsley will speak generally about transitioning, freshman year, and high school life.

Next month, current fifth grade students and newly admitted sixth graders will meet at the Sixth Grade Social. The event, scheduled for June 3 from 4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., is planned as an informal, fun way for students to get know each other. Games and snacks will be provided.

The eighth grade class will begin rehearsing on June 7 for their big day – Graduation! Students are finalizing their yearbook collages and are preparing to write their graduation speeches. Graduation is on June 11 and begins with a breakfast hosted by our current seventh grade families at 9:00 a.m. The ceremony takes place from 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. on the yard.

You will be receiving much more in-depth information about graduation and other events in the near future. Should you have specific questions about any of the middle school events, please contact me.

This is it…only one month left to the school year! I’ll talk with you soon.

Karen Amaker
Middle School Dean

Lower School - First Grade - Kelly McDonough

Curriculum Spotlight Middle School-Africa - Mohammed Soriano-Bilal

As I sit down to write my piece for the whole-school newsletter, I find myself fending off thoughts of “I don’t know what to write…” and worse, “What if it’s not good enough?” Then it strikes me that the children in my class so seldom say those words to me, despite having a Writer’s Workshop four days a week, where they have the responsibility of choosing their own topics all the time. So I draw my inspiration and courage to write for an audience from them.

Every day I ask so much of the kids in my class and every day they amaze me with their willingness to try. During Writers’ Workshop, for example, the children have become completely adept at choosing a topic, writing, getting themselves and each other through tough spots, revising, reading their pieces aloud to the class, and offering each other feedback on it all. They know how to conduct research independently, work cooperatively and solve conflicts by talking to each other and stretching enough to forgive. They take risks in many big and small ways every single day, and it’s so amazing to me.

Adults, and teachers in particular, consistently ask kids to step out of their comfort zones. Not just in writing, but in a myriad of ways every day. As a teacher I try to remember what I ask of these kids, and to keep practicing it myself, by finding ways to be a learner at something new. It reminds me to encourage the learners in my midst gently and with patience.

The statement “Practice Makes Better” is posted on our wall in the classroom, to remind us to let go of our perfectionist tendencies. It was a student who coined this phrase as an alternative to the more popular one. It was said to encourage me when I dramatically told the kids that I would never knit again after my first attempt at a sweater was fumbled. I shared my knitting disaster with the kids to model perseverance, and to let them see that I, the teacher, stumble along at new things, and need to keep trying too. I didn’t know that I would come away from the experience so moved by the wisdom of the six year-olds. Yet I have these kinds of experiences all the time.

One day a child came into the class crying because of a bump on the nose. Another child approached us and said, “I think I can help, I know how to heal”. I stood back and watched this child place her two little hands gingerly on the cheeks of the other. They looked into each other’s eyes and almost immediately the crying stopped. The child who was hurt sniffled and said, “I think it worked”. It was such a remarkable and tender moment and I was so lucky to have witnessed it.

What a joy it is to work with your children in this lively community of risk-takers!

Last week, seventh grade humanities finished our unit on Africa with an Africa Union lecture series. Lisa and I divided the entire seventh grade into a number of smaller groups; these groups were then assigned an African countries with membership in the new Africa Union (a coalition of African country modeled loosely on the United Nations). The student-groups researched their assigned countries and used the information to construct persuasive arguments detailing ways in which their country could support the Africa Union’s four main policy issues—unity, military, election, intervention.

The speeches were sensational: Matthew, Kate, and Jordan presented the Democratic Republic of the Congo address over the straight-ahead melody of the country’s anthem, while Kerrigan, Megan, and Kyle, as Zimbabwe, firmly and unequivocally declined an offer to be added to the Africa Union all together. They claimed, convincingly, that Zimbabwe was self-sufficient and did not need help from or camaraderie with any other nation-country. It was a magical, fun moment where curriculum became collective and performative.

On another note, Dante Cardone represented PHS as a youth facilitator at the POCIS (People of Color in Independent Schools) Middle School Conference on May 1, 2004. Dante spent his Saturday training other youth around issues of multiculturalism and diversity. Dante stated that “It was great to represent PHS at the conference and mix and mingle with middle school students from Marin, East Bay, San Francisco, and as far away as Camel. I hope to go next year and bring other PHS students with me.”

The Friday Archive

Presidio Hill School | 3839 Washington St | San Francisco CA 94118
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