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Mrs. Davidshofer’s Grade Five Students Offer Some Good Advice

 

Today’s sunshine warms us against chilling breezes, the lingerings of March. On this first day of April, my retirement gets “realer.” I’m not the only person leaving the Hopkinton Public Schools this year; several educators are joining me on the path to retirement. This blog is for all of us--the nearly departed. And, it’s also to say thank you to Mrs. Davidshofer’s fifth graders at Hopkins School.

 

Recently, I had the opportunity to share a book with Mrs. Davidshofer’s class, the title of which was Just Ask!: Be Different, Be Brave, Be You.  The text is lovely and fosters the idea of celebrating people’s strengths and differences, as a number of people come together to plant a community garden. 

 

When I asked the kids if they knew why Sonia Sotomayor wrote the book, they were able to tell me--in a nice succinct statement--the purpose of the text. And then, when I asked what literary word is used to talk about the purpose of a text, the kids shouted, in unison, “THEME!” I was overjoyed.

 

I chatted with the kids for a bit, and then they announced that they had created some cards for me upon my retirement. Folded in useful origami envelopes, sprinkled with Hopkinton green and orange H’s, and adorned with original artwork, these handmade cards offered enthusiastic advice to me, which I’m extending to all of our retirees:

 

Travel the world. See new places.

(One student suggested the pyramids of Giza, another New York City.)

 

Relax.

 

Spend time with friends and family.

 

Read.

Write.

 

Have a happy life.

The world is waiting.

Soak it up.

You can’t work forever.


 

Thanks, fifth graders, for your smart advice and kind hearts. 

I hope you guys finish strong at Hopkins and love being at the Middle School next year.

And remember to always “be different, be brave, be you.”

 

 

STUDENTS’ REFLECTIONS OF SELF

 

Seven years ago, the Hopkinton Public Schools made a commitment to ensuring an inclusive, welcoming, and affirming environment where every member of our school community is able to be their full selves and feel valued for who they are.

 

Among other things, that commitment included a new position focused on equity and access for all; cultural proficiency work with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE); new instructional materials; a curricular audit; and the implementation of a tool called the CRIOP, which stands for Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol and which, in part, assesses whether classrooms reflect students’ identities. Essentially, the question is, do students see themselves in the learning environment?

 

I’m proud to answer that question with a “yes.”

 

GRADE 2

At the Elmwood School, students in Mrs. Mortarelli’s and Mrs. Marzilli’s classrooms recently assembled “culture quilts.” Beautifully drawn, vibrant in color, these quilts reflect the students’ unique identities, heritages, interests, and more. Students shared with one another the traditions and customs from their family’s countries, and classes discussed what those cultures have contributed to U.S. society; examples included traditional foods, customs, games, and music of the places they, their families, or their ancestors came from. 

 

Take a look at the product of this exercise in expression of selfhood, designed by our seven- and eight-year-olds. 

 

GRADE 12

At the other end of the spectrum, our graduating seniors in the Class of 2025 have been working with Tim O’Brien’s text In the Lake of the Woods, and they designed their own “evidence chapters.”

 

In English Teacher Ms. Ellam’s classroom, the students had to create an evidence chapter about themselves, while imitating how O'Brien did the same. Although the project was closely tied to the text, the instruction focused on composing and compiling small pieces that helped students to define the many facets of themselves; they were encouraged to use varied media and, of course, footnotes that lent context or additional meaning to their evidence--just like O’Brien did. Students spent time artistically assembling parts of their identities. They were advised that “the narrative of ‘you’ can be messy or complex or fragmented.”

 

Some of the “messiness,” the “fragmenting” appears below. The excerpts come from many different students’ work, so you won’t see a total picture of a single student; you will, however, see little pieces of our students’ collective experiences. These particular excerpts from their work focus largely on their HPS experiences, although so many aspects of their selfhood were reflected in their final projects.

 

I hope you enjoy them as well as I did.

 

Jake Garron chucked up the shot from half court, off the backboard and in. Winning the last regular season freshman basketball game, me and Matt Foti rushed the court to celebrate. Tears rushed down from Matt’s eyes as he hugged Jake. Little did I know I was witnessing the best moment of Jake’s life. 

  • Hopkinton High School Athletic Center

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On the second day of school in 7th grade, I forgot to rip out my math homework from our school textbook. I was worried I would make a bad impression by solely writing the answers on a blank sheet of paper, utilizing the online copy. Yes, I could use a printer, but guess whose printer broke the same day? Me. I decided to write every single word problem down with its corresponding answer (my hand was writing in fear of falling off). At least I got a 5/5 on that homework assignment!

 

Parent Teacher Meeting: “ *Introduction to the class” There was a student of mine recently who hand wrote the entire assignment down since she forgot. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  • Ms. Lockwood

 

“That was my daughter (whispering tone).” 

  • Mamta Bathla (my mom)

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Neha is a light in a lot of ppls lives. She may be short in stature, but has like the biggest heart ever and makes everyone around her feel good. She is awesome to be around and the definition of “the right company to be around”. I know her future def shines brighter than a lot of stars in the sky. 

- Anand (Cousin #8)

List:

Queen Victoria (4'11"): Ruled the British Empire for 63 years, during which time the empire expanded and experienced significant industrial, cultural, and political progress.

Mother Teresa (4'11"): Founded the Missionaries of Charity, which provided care for the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying around the world.

Helen Keller (5'3"): Overcame being deaf and blind to become an influential author, activist, and lecturer advocating for people with disabilities.

Simone de Beauvoir (5'3"): French philosopher and feminist, her work, especially "The Second Sex," laid the groundwork for contemporary feminist theory

Neha is loud, demanding, and indecisive. 

- Sanjay (brother) 

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 This was the winter play in my junior year, and I played Snow White. Game of Tiaras made a lot of jokes around the concept of Snow White and her being traditionally white, and it was ironic because I am not white. Also, I am one of the only POC students who does theatre at the high school so it was pretty ironic that I got the role of Snow White. When they introduced my character at the beginning of the play, the narrators said “The fairest of the fair…” and someone in the audience remarked that I’m obviously not white. I honestly found it kind of funny, but whenever I tell people this story they seem to get more offended than I was about it.

 

“In the play last year, I was fortunate enough to play Snow White in The Game of Tiaras, and it has been my favorite role to date. It was also Valerie’s and our costume director, Mrs. Kirshy’s last show. At the end of every show, we have a closing circle where seniors make speeches and A LOT of people cry.  This time, Valerie and Mrs. Kirshy made closing speeches, and during Mrs. Kirshy’s, she talked about how much we had all grown and how she enjoyed watching that process. Then, out of nowhere, she called me out specifically and brought up how I was a shy little girl when I joined theatre, how I had flourished throughout my time in theatre, and how watching that unfold made her so proud of me. I had made bets with my friends that I wouldn’t cry (because I usually don’t in public) and I burst into tears because I was so touched”

 

  • Izzy Thomas

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FOOTNOTES:
4. Swimming is so extremely draining, in the most beautiful way. I love it, but it hurts so bad in the inbetween parts, the space that sits in the middle of starting the season and success. Unfortunately, the more it hurts, the better you’ll be in the end. So, I’ve learned to manage the pain, there's the social aspects like my coaches at teammates support, but then there's also the little things, like matching lotion with the girls on my club team (there's only five of us on a twenty-two person team, so we’re extremely close), or wearing bright colored practice suits, and of course some days, it hurts so bad, the only option is to shock my muscles with BioFreeze. 

10. My grandmother is one of the most important loves in my life. I credit her with my adoration for reading. And reading is so deeply intertwined with my understanding of my own mind and being, having her to be able to encourage that love of reading, it built so much of how my brain works. With my grandmother, I learned how to speak about the books I love, to form the feelings and thoughts that my books spark into words to share.

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“Katelyn is a conscientious student”

“I encourage Katelyn to participate in class more” 1

           1Said every teacher I have ever had. Ever. 

Katelyn Lucy: In 2nd grade I would do a “goldfish challenge” where I would bring goldfish crackers into school everyday.

2 My friend and I started this argument of who liked goldfish more, we started bringing them everyday for snack time to prove ourselves. Every single day for snack: a clear ziplock bag full of goldfish. I probably went through two giant bags of goldfish a week.

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It was a Thursday. After eight exhausting hours of the eleventh grade, I found myself in my usual sitting spot: the creaky, wooden steps of our back deck. At that moment, however, I was feeling anything but usual. As I looked out over the lush greenery of the backyard, I was flooded with innocent memories of my childhood days spent in that very space. I had laughed ridiculous laughter out there: my brother’s terrible swings and misses always had me wheezing. I had also played a ridiculous amount of neighborhood “football”. And to my mother’s dismay, I had given myself ridiculous grass stains. Ones even Tide couldn’t fix. But now, staring into the sea of green that was my past, I felt a ridiculous amount of regret.

 

At seventeen, it dawned on me that I was no longer the unoccupied nine-year-old wandering around the house. Nor was I the adventurous ten-year-old exploring the forest, or the competitive eleven-year-old playing kickball at recess. I was a big kid now. While a part of me was glad, another part of me wished that I could go back. That I had enjoyed the slow, simple moments. That I had listened to my dad’s unspoken words. That I had taken those crumpled-up balls of paper for what they were. For what I now understood them to be.

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I’ve always feared my graduation, but now I’m three months away, and man…I can’t wait to go. I’m ready. All ‘my seniors’ said they were ready and I was too blinded by the sadness of their absence to even realize the importance of being ready to let go. But I get it now. I’m ready.

 -- Maeve Reilly






 

While you only see the work of a few teachers and their students in this blog entry, I hope you have every confidence that work such as this--tied to Massachusetts learning standards--is happening throughout the district.  Thank you to these teachers and the countless other educators who have supported children at every level. Our graduating seniors--this year and every year--reflect the culmination of 13 years of academic, cultural, social, emotional, and behavioral learning.

 

Tim O’Brien tells us, “the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.  You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.  And sometimes the remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.”

 

I hope members of the  Class of 2025 (and the Class of 2035) carry their stories, their expressions of selfhood into bright futures.

 

 The other day, a friend of mine says, “I was taking a walk around my neighborhood when I noticed a house that had both an inflatable penguin and an inflatable polar bear on the lawn. Imagine? Everyone knows that penguins live in the southern hemisphere and polar bears live in the northern hemisphere. No way they should be side by side on that front lawn.” Had he been sitting, I’m sure he would have slapped his own knee in the self-satisfaction of his cleverness, his knowledge of animals and their habitats.

Of course, I suppose he’s right. Penguins, save the Galápagos penguins (where the tip of one island--Isabela--peeps above the equator), live entirely south of the equator. And, yeah, Polar bears roam the Arctic.

Having spent many years as an English teacher, I couldn’t help but think of the moment as a symbol in real life, a symbol that as humans we often think about who’s supposed to inhabit what spaces and why crossing those boundaries feels so heavy, formidable. 

Just about the same time that I was perseverating on tendencies toward boundary-drawing and exclusivity, poof! Like magic, it fell into my inbox: Renuka Abbaraju, a third grade teacher and a leader of the Elmwood Diversity team, sent an email to all the second and third grade teachers offering “winter holiday resources 24-25”.  A Kwanzaa StoryNational Geographic Kids - “Hanukkah,”  and “Let’s Celebrate Christmas” were sprinkled among lots of other resources. A warming glimpse of inclusivity. 

And then, like a ghost in a Dickens play, a second story of human connection appeared, a tale of healing--especially at Christmas. Former HPS Assistant Superintendent and friend Jen Parson shared with me a Christmas story that her dad, who is still writing for the Providence Journal even now into his 80s, published last week. The story is entitled “At Christmas--Recalling a seaside miracle.”  The author reminds us: What matters is not how a spray of balsam finds its way to a wreath-makers sons, but, instead, “the healing spirit in which it was left.” Another message of connection, of dismantling the barriers that deprive our lives.

Maybe it’s a product of the season, but I will say that it was truly lovely to feel--even electronically--how the simple care we share with and for one another can dismantle any boundaries between people who inhabit different races, religions, and cultures and who have different lived experiences.

Penguins and polar bears, although it hasn’t really been done yet, might one day live together. For now, however, we’ll simply let those inflatables serve as a symbol of what’s possible.  We can dismiss any doubt and believe in possibility.

I hope that all of your holidays are filled with love and the joy of possibility. 

 

A couple of weekends ago, my husband and I were charged with caring for our two grandsons, one aged four-and-a-half, and the other, two-and-a-half. Their parents were attending an out-of-state wedding. 

Sometimes, when we care for the boys, we plan activities that will keep them going, which on this particular weekend resulted in a trip to Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire.  The meteorologists promised a beautiful fall day.

Once at the park, one of the rides the four of us ventured into was called “The Mine of Lost Souls,” Canobie’s take on the traditional haunted house ride. I was perched with the older grandson in the front seat of our rickety, four-person car, while my husband was minding the younger guy in the back seat. I should share that the older one is very cautious and scares easily, while his little brother is--dare I say--fearless. Without warning, the double entry doors to “the mine” parted and our cart jostled us into the dark ride where miners sang songs, skeletons littered the landscape, and we were confronted with life-threatening falling rocks and unexpected deluges. The four year old is terrified. The little guy says, “I’m not afraid, Gigi.” And, he’s not.

So, fast forward to a recent night riding through our neighborhood with the grandkids in the car. Our made-up-on-the-spot game started with pumpkins. If a house we were driving past had pumpkins out front, we’d shout “pumpkin house!” But if the house had even more extensive Halloween decor, we’d slow the car down and call out what we were seeing: “ghost,”  “giant skeleton,” “scary cob-webs,” “gravestones.” And then it happened. We found a house that had an inflatable shark, sitting on a pumpkin, gobbling up a witch--well, we assumed she was a witch because all we could see were her black leggings and boots projecting skyward from the shark’s toothy grip. You guessed it. The four year old tells us, “I don’t like that shark.” Too scary. His brother seems unfazed. 

Well, Halloween is only a few days away. By now, your kids have likely been planning their costumes for some time. And, given that it’s going to be unseasonably warm this Halloween, without having to cover up with coats, trick-or-treaters will arrive at your doorsteps with their costumes on full display. Hopkinton residents will be offering treats (trust me, that’s better than the trick option) to an assortment of disguises--from the trendy Beetlejuices and Barbies, to the traditional scarecrows and skeletons, to the terrifying Kruegers and Carries, and lots, lots more. 

Those of you who have kids at Marathon may see your children respond to 20-foot skeletons and shark-eating witches with the fear that triggers a strong physical reaction in one’s body. Your five-year-old’s amygdala (a small organ in the middle of the brain) might alert his nervous system to set his body’s fear response into motion.  Or alternatively, your little first-grade skeleton might experience the dopamine rush that makes Halloween fright a pleasurable experience. Hard to say why kids’ (or even grown-ups’) responses are so different.

Students in the Class of 2025 won’t likely be responding to fear or a dopamine rush, but instead to a long-standing call to creativity. The seniors at HHS have historically held a costume event. While that sounds pretty simplistic, I can tell you that I don’t know that I’ve seen more creative costumes anywhere than at HHS. Ever. I look so very forward to their clever, innovative, sassy, scary--you name it--approach to Halloween. These kids are sharp and their costumes are self-created and intricately one-of-a-kind. If HCAM runs pictures of the event, do not miss them!

When the kids wake up on Friday, November 1st, there will be gobs of candy in everyone’s houses. Your kids’ costumes will lie like sloughed off carapaces on bedroom floors. Residual green makeup might line their hairlines. And the happy exhaustion that follows the fright and the pleasure and the creativity of Halloween will linger in the air while KitKat wrappers linger on the floor. To everyone who celebrates the day, have a wonderful, happy Halloween.

Happy  Halloween Blog 10-28-24

As the community knows, Hopkinton High School faced a swatting incident last week. Publicly, we have described it as an unnerving hoax with faculty and students alike experiencing varying degrees of unrest.

 

One thing that hasn’t been discussed with the community is the chasm of disparity between the actual danger and the level of response in a swatting incident; that is, while the Hopkinton Police had the highest degree of certainty that the call that came into the station was a swatting incident, they still approached the situation as if it were “real.” That’s protocol.

 

Therefore, their response time from the call to arrival at HHS was four minutes. They arrived carrying AR15 rifles. Students and faculty were asked via a public address system message to shelter in place--not to lockdown. This is the appropriate first move during a suspected swatting incident.

 

So, in classrooms, teachers, with doors locked, were still delivering lessons on the role of the anti-hero, acids and bases, and the unit circle. Meanwhile “kevlared” officers were sweeping the building carrying very big guns. Now imagine you are a student or a faculty member and you are really not sure what is happening. In our world, where communication is instantaneous and knowledge lies at our fingertips, it must have been a struggle not to access a cell phone and not to know what was going on. It must have been very challenging to trust that the Hopkinton Police and the HHS Admin Team had things under control. 

 

Having been a teacher myself for a very long time, I thought about how it might have felt to be in my classroom unsure of what was happening. Were we in imminent danger? Would we be asked to evacuate? How would I get these kids to safety? Or, for those who had no idea that there were even police officers in the building (which was most of the faculty, staff and students), I might have imagined that we were sheltering in place because of a medical emergency, where a person needed the privacy to leave the building in an ambulance. Either way, there would have been a thirst for information. Human beings need connection. And so, there would have been a desire to connect--whether connecting meant getting information from Mr. Bishop or reaching out beyond the walls of HHS to family or friends to say, “We’re sheltering in place.”

 

And that need for connection works two ways: as a parent and grandparent myself, I understand the desire for parents to feel connected to their kids and aware of their kids' situational safety--at every moment of every day. Period.

 

That said, law enforcement has outlined several reasons why cell phone use, in times of emergency, would prove detrimental. 

 

First, in the event of an emergency, it is critical that students follow the directives of administrators, faculty, and public safety. Cell phones could distract students' attention from directions given by the adults on scene. Additionally, multiple cell phone users, relating their individual experiences and assumptions about what might be happening, could hamper rumor control. The result: multiple and conflicting narratives derailing or delaying an effective public safety response. (That was illustrated last week when students in study halls who had access to their cell phones were reporting to their parents that there was a bomb threat, that there was a computer-generated stunt and the perpetrator had been caught, that there was a medical emergency…the list goes on. As we now know, those assumptions were incorrect.) And finally, with hundreds of students using cell phones to contact parents, there is a potential to overload phone systems in some areas.

 

Let’s say, however, that students were to share accurate information during an emergency.  Depending on the social media platform, images and texts could compromise law enforcement’s tactical advantage, if the assailant(s) is monitoring those platforms. Further, images of what is essentially a crime scene could get out, jeopardizing police investigation and possibly successful prosecution. 

 

In terms of police response, in an emergency, our local law enforcement and their back-ups need swift, clear access to our buildings. Running counter to that need is parental flocking to the school. Very simply, school and public safety officials must gain access to the school, conduct evacuations, neutralize the threat, and bring in emergency medical responders. Imagine if an ambulance couldn't reach a building because hundreds of parents' cars blocked access to a school?  

 

Once the threat is neutralized, the most important action schools and police can take is to slow everything down and allow for proper and orderly reunification with family members, which would be hampered by non-stop cell phone communication between people in the schools and families on the outside. 

 

In a nutshell, schools and law enforcement wouldn't want students using cell phones during an emergency but instead staying laser-focused on their own safety, which may mean an immediate, teacher-led evacuation.

 

Having inhabited many of the roles that people lived in on October 1st--student, teacher, building administrator, parent--I understand how direly people wanted to access their cell phones during the swatting incident. Now, as a district leader and member of the community-driven school safety task force, I can see how putting down cell phones can save lives.