Opinions2

oline Lehman uses worksheets to help her students who have difficulty processing information heard solely in lectures. “Work-sheets help students who aren’t necessarily auditory learners be-cause they’re able to see and hear the information at the same time,” she said.

I identify myself as a visual learner, and after having took Lehman’s Chemistry class Sopho-more Year, I can assure you that the worksheets she assigned truly enhanced my understanding of the complicated material in the course. Lehman’s worksheets ef-fectively consolidated informa-tion from a class-long lecture into a two-sided piece of paper.

History Teacher Karen Brad-ley has a similar approach to her teaching style. “I have my students make posters to increase their visual literacy and to help them translate their ideas into images,” she said. Instructing students to make posters is a technique that many teachers at the School have used to break the barrier between kinesthetic and visual learning. When making posters, students are both physically engaged be-cause they are actively drawing images and are able to express information in a way that is ap-pealing to visual learners. Addi-tionally, a creative activity, such as making posters, is often a pleasant break from the traditional class lecture, which some students find

Does the School Acknowledge Different Learning Styles?hard to comprehend. “Teachers should spice up lectures with fun stuff!” suggested Junior Rebecca Shoptaw. “Some classes are very lecture-heavy, which works well for some students, but completely doesn’t work for others.”

There are plenty of other methods that the School’s teach-ers have adopted to accommodate different learning styles. Among those methods are collaborative group work and changing the format of class discussions to en-courage more input from students who process information slower than others. Another technique that has recently become preva-lent in the High School is the idea of “flipping the classroom,” which encourages lecture-based learn-ing outside of the classroom, and allows more time for students to interact with their teachers in class.

While the School certainly tries extremely hard to meet the needs of students with different learning styles, I believe there is much more room for improve-ment. Many classes at the School, specifically our advanced courses, are heavily lecture and textbook based. One on hand, this imbal-ance is understandable because in these classes we are expected to process an abundance of infor-mation in a short amount of time. On the other hand, it seems that in these classes students who do not easily process auditory infor-

mation or have difficulty compre-hending textbook reading are at a disadvantage.

“The very nature of the way the School is structured goes against teaching to different learning styles. There’s so much to teach, in so little time and so much pressure from outside sources to prepare for exams. If we take these pressures off, we could do things differently,” ex-plained Lehman. Bradley added, “The goal of education is to learn, not to remember just enough in-formation for the SAT or ACT. The more I’m aware of different learning styles, the better I’ll be able to help students achieve this higher goal.”

Students also have a respon-sibility to ensure that teachers are accommodating their learning styles. Students need to take the initiative to talk to their teachers and explain to them what would help them learn better in the class. English Teacher Margaret Yee stated, “I depend on students to check in with me if they have a different learning style. I can’t really help unless I’m aware. So, students should really learn to ad-vocate for themselves.”

Overall, the School is clearly making big steps forward in ac-commodating students with dif-ferent learning styles, but much more growth must occur before we reach fully achieve our greatest potential of academic excellence.

Have you ever spent an entire class listening to a lecture, but just could not grasp the concepts be-ing discussed? Or have you ever read a textbook for hours, but never precisely understood the information you were studying? Many students experience situ-ations like these because every-one has a different way of learn-ing. There are numerous learning styles, but the most common ones are visual, auditory, and kines-thetic. Visual learners prefer us-ing images and pictures to express their ideas, while auditory learn-ers learn best through sound and music. In comparison, kinesthetic learners prefer a more “hands-on” and physically interactive learn-ing experience.

Our school strives to provide its students with the best possible academic experience. The most effective way to achieve this goal is by accommodating each stu-dent’s learning style. Personally, I believe that the School makes a diligent effort to ensure that all students are able to get the most out of their academic experience at the School, regardless of their learning style.

In many of our classes, teach-ers combine several different methods of communicating in-formation to their students. For example, Chemistry Teacher Car-

BY OLIVIA LUCAS Features Editor

Why We Need So Much Homework

All students at the School knows those nights where the pile of homework just seems endless. Having to stay up late and just barely finishing the as-signed work, people wonder: what is the point of homework?

While homework may seem excessive and time con-suming, it is assigned for a reason. Without afterschool work, students would not be able to learn all of the mate-rial. History Teacher Peter Reinke stated, “There simply is not enough time during the school year to cover that body of knowledge in a serious enough manner unless you are asking students to do [some] of the work at home.” With many tenth graders planning to take the advanced place-ment exam at the end of this year, Reinke pointed out that without any homework, it would be hard to give the students all of the knowledge they need in order to succeed on the test.

Homework not only allows for students to learn the material at a reasonable pace, but it also al-lows students to achieve a deeper understanding of the course. Re-inke continued, “If you didn’t have [homework], you [might] still get through all the material, but it would be at a very quick, bird’s-eye view. You’d have a very shal-low understanding of…history.”

Without homework, there would be less time for in-depth discussions and creative projects. English Teacher Jane Shamaeva stated, “I assign homework to have students do at home things that wouldn’t be productive for us to do in class…. I just think for ex-

ample with a book like The Great Gatsby, it would not be productive if we sat here and read it quietly together. So I have students read at home, so that we can discuss in class and use our time collectively. I also assign essays [at home] be-cause I think it’s a solitary proj-ect that requires focus at home and again, I think that wouldn’t be fun for us to sit together and write.” Teachers assign homework for the benefit of students, and homework allows for a fun class.

BY LAURA COOK Reporter

Shamaeva summed up, “I as-sign things that need to be done in order to have a good class.”

Teachers keep in mind that students have a busy schedule with extracurricular activities and other schoolwork in differ-ent subjects. They understand the

large amount of work we have, and many teachers try to give an appropriate amount of home-work. Reinke stated, “I try to give students no more than 30 to 45 minutes each night. I really try to stick with that and many stu-dents think that I’m a teacher who veers on the side of giving less homework than that.” Shamaeva, like Reinke, tries to give a reason-able amount of work. She stated, “I’m actually a fan of not a lot of homework…. I try if I can, not to

assign too, too much homework.”While many students do not

like homework, like their teach-ers, they feel that homework is essential. Junior Nora Sheeder stated, “No [I don’t enjoy doing homework], but I think it’s nec-essary.” Sheeder admits that it would hard to progress through all of the material in the course and have an enjoyable class pe-riod without the homework.

I agree with Reinke, Shamae-va, and Sheeder. I would rather be assigned 20 pages of The Great Gatsby than spend the whole class period silently reading. I also believe that homework al-lows for more fun activities and deeper knowledge of the course.

By watching presidential de-bates and reading pages in history textbooks The American Spirit and The American Pageant, U.S. Histo-ry classes are focused on delving deeper into the material. Home-work allows for fun activities, like having a Great Gatsby-themed party, in a class that would oth-erwise be spent reading. By doing math problems and writing out lab procedures at home, I can get a firm idea of the concepts and be prepared for the upcoming class.

While late nights spent on completing homework is no fun, without it, the teachers could only briefly cover the mate-rial and class time would have to be spent doing the work that could easily have been done at home. Homework is a neces-sity for classes to remain fun.

ALYSSA APILADO

3Opinions

performance. Teachers argue that they can relegate more basic and repetitive material, which often requires more memorization than analysis, to the online lessons, and spend class doing more collabora-tive and interesting activities with the grounding in the online lec-tures.

However, there are also a number of dangers inherent in the flipped classroom. First of all, online lectures can be less engag-ing than physical ones. It is much easier to ask clarifying questions about a topic in a lecture in class to a teacher than to ask them without the same context the next day. It is all too easy for students to understand the general gist of a concept – often enough to cor-rectly answer simple problems – and skip over the specifics they don’t understand that may only become evident in later units, when students are faced with more challenging problems. The flipped classroom makes home-work a necessity – and shouldn’t one of the benefits of having a good teacher be that homework is easy and minimal, at least in math and science classes? (Of course, this does not mean that home-work should be abolished, merely that for strong students it should not be a huge load of busywork.) Another questionable effect of the flipped classroom is an increase in the already heavy reliance on the computer, bringing up the ques-tion of the degree to which chil-dren should rely computers.

Almost all supporters of the flipped classroom agree that the model is most useful in math and the sciences. Upper School Math Teacher Chris Davies pointed out that the humanities already, in

effect, use the flipped classroom: teachers ask students to read at home and then come to class to discuss the material. Especially given the discussion-based nature of humanities classes, it would make little sense for teachers to post a lecture and then discuss that lecture in class – in the hu-manities, reading, not a teacher, usually conveys the material. Some proponents of the flipped classroom see opportunities for application in foreign languages; for instance, according to Davies, Lower School French Teacher Sarah Sharp was so inspired by the idea of the flipped classroom that she flipped much of her first-semester curriculum.

Over the summer, three teachers at the School – Science Teacher Jennifer Brakeman and Math Teachers Chris Davies and Shahana Sarkar – took a class on the flipped classroom. All three

have applied the techniques they learned in this course to their own classes, and have received a range of student responses. Senior Ra-chel Bachman is very enthusiastic about the flipped classroom, say-ing that it “is very useful because you can get more feedback and help from more one-on-one time with the teacher.”

One of my own classes makes use of the flipped classroom. I be-lieve that the flipped classroom is an interesting and exciting idea in the early stages of its development; however, my experience with it thus far has not been positive. The concept behind the flipped classroom is that it will improve the learning of students across all levels. I believe that it will do the opposite: students at the top of the class will breeze through a lecture in five minutes online that would have taken half an hour in class and will exploit the resource

One of the hottest topics in pedagogical theory

at the moment is the idea of the flipped classroom. In the flipped classroom, basically, students watch lectures online at their lei-sure, and then come to class to pose questions and do practice problems, with access to an ex-pert, their teacher. Flipping the classroom is a direct result of the overall progress in technology due to the opportunities for inter-active learning computers open. First fully implemented by chem-istry teachers from Colorado, the idea was profiled by industry magazine Education Next in the winter of 2012, and many teach-ers are starting to test it, especially at the secondary-school level.

Supporters of the flipped classroom concept say that it of-fers a multitude of advantages. Advanced students can spend more time on challenging prob-lems given by the teacher in class, whereas weaker students can work on more basic problems; both groups of students can get more help from the teacher. The flipped classroom, then, promises the opportunity of a more per-sonalized curriculum.

According to Education Next, one of the Coloradan chem-istry teachers who kick-started the flipped classroom movement also finds that the flipped class-room increases the level of hu-man contact in his classroom, as he talks to every student ev-ery day. This contact gives both greater context in which to evalu-ate a student and a better under-standing of a student’s level and

Do Flipped Classrooms Lead to Backward Learning?of their teacher in class to go on to more exciting work. Average and weaker students will engage even less in online lectures than they do in classroom lectures. They will fail to ask questions in class because they will have caught the general gist of the lesson while missing key details. Most impor-tantly, they will simply be bored by online lessons: I personally find that I learn about half as much from online lectures as I do from classroom lectures. I remember having to randomly click on the screen in order to keep my mind at all focused on what was being said during the lecture. This is not to criticize the teacher: I was com-pletely aware that the lecture was interesting and would have been quite informative in class. But I believe that online lectures fail to utilize the greatest strength of the School: the enthusiasm for a sub-ject instilled by a good teacher.

Sixty years ago, corporal punishment was socially accept-able; students were liable to be paddled and caned for their un-ruly behavior. Over time, the so-cietal standard for discipline has veered away from such draconian measures. Today’s customary form of punishment is detention, a disciplinary action that has been clichéd by teen movies such as The Breakfast Club and numerous other high school sitcoms. As the School’s faculty seems to be dish-ing out detentions at an alarming rate, I began to question whether this form of discipline is even ef-fective

Searching for answers, I sought out two experts on the matter: Dean of Student Life Barry Barankin, and the School’s active leader in detentions Ryan Diew. Barankin explained, “To most kids, detentions are an an-noyance and reasonably effective. They are a small punishment for a small crime.” Despite Barankin’s 37-year tenure as a faculty mem-ber, I wasn’t convinced. I needed an answer that wouldn’t be tainted

by the dust of a long time employee of the School.

In need of an honest opinion straight from the mouth of a student, Diew stated, “Detention is not effective at all; it’s pretty much like a party. You play board games, you do homework, you talk, and you joke.” When asked if this punishment has en-couraged him to change his ways, he responded, “No. If anything, it makes me mess around even more.”

Even though I had my answers, I felt like they were coming from people who had spent too much time on their respective sides of the disciplinary battle. It was necessary for the issue to be analyzed by a fresh set of eyes. I needed somebody to go into the belly of the beast, perform some simple reconnais-sance, and return well in-formed on the matter. The perfect person for the job?

Me. Throughout my three years in high school, I have some-how fallen off the detention radar,

passing the blame for whoever left their lunch out and convinc-ing my teachers that I was tardy

for reasons of the utmost importance. All it took was a fac-ulty accomplice, to write me up on a fab-ricated charge, and I was in.

October 24th at lunchtime, I com-menced my un-dercover mission, blending in amongst the other offenders sentenced to 25 min-utes in the detention room. During the first couple of min-utes, Upper School Head Carl Thier-mann came into the room. He explained to us that although detention seems to be a laughing mat-ter to many students, it is a serious mat-ter, and can result in parents being con-

tacted and even an in-school suspen-sion; however, my

fellow detainees seemed unfazed by Thiermann’s forewarning.

Once he left, upbeat conver-

Undercover in Detention: A Glimpse into the School’s Disciplinary SystemBY JOEY CHIPMANReporter

sation filled the room, followed by an intense game of cards. I realized that Diew, not always a reliable source of information, was right. Detention was indeed a barrel of fun. Once the clock struck 12:40, I was wholehearted-ly disappointed that I had to leave.

In retrospect, no longer on the mental high of playing cards and socializing with my peers, I acknowledge Thiermann’s con-cerns. Detentions can pile up like parking tickets, forcing students to suffer the consequences of re-peat offenses.

Yet, it is all too easy to dis-regard school rules, enjoying the “punishment” for your crimes, and then walk the tight rope of discipline once your actions near their tipping point. While I in no way believe that our educational system should revert to corporal punishment, I do believe that the status quo must change. Deten-tion has developed a connotation that doesn’t evoke the slightest fear or remorse. A new disciplin-ary measure must be invented as a means of maintaining order in schools by striking fear into the hearts of the student body… but not until I graduate.

BY ALEXANDER LUCKMANNContent Editor

ALYSSA APILADO

Senior Ryan Diew is a regular in Mr. Davies’ deten-tion, which he has proudly been running for years.

ALYSSA APILADO