Sometimes three-day weekends leave you refreshed and ready to come back to school on Tuesday, and other times they leave you with a bit of a foggy feeling...a sort of, "What? Really? We need to go back to school on Tuesday?" - kind-of feeling. Following the MLK, Jr. weekend, I had the second feeling. I think some of the students did as well. I'm chalking it up to the PF Chang's marathon/half-marathon. But really -it may just have been "one of those weeks!" At any rate, I can't believe it's already Thursday and that we are almost done with the third week of the Spring semester.We have spent a good deal of our subject time this week "in" ancient Greece. Be it mythology, theatre, or learning about early Greek civilization. The students are in the midst of their ancient Greek Social Studies unit, where - unfortunately - we had two days of battling technology (which, we admitted defeat on both). However, the students stepped up to the charge of flexibility and we merged improv with mythology and had an impromptu fact quiz on another.
In Drama, we are learning about the Greek theatre - primarily the playwrites this week, and one of the most famous pieces from the Classical Age: Oedipus Rex. The students have read Sophocles' tragic story and spent this morning retelling the tale.
Being that TPJA/TPA is a Great Books school and we use the Socratic Method, this seemed like perfect timing to really delve in and understand what it is we have actually been doing since August: having Socratic discussions! Hopefully, the students are gaining some further understanding of why I am always encouraging them to be curious and to dig deeper.
This week the students completed rough drafts of their dedication pages for their month-long mythology project and tomorrow they will have their first (out of three) in-class work days. Book and web sources are due in class Monday, so if your student has not had the opportunity to find three books yet, know you will probably be asked for a lift to the library this weekend.
I hope this email finds you warm and dry as we experience Seattle-like weather.
Cheers,
Ms. Nicky Pitman
