March 7, 2007

Dear Friends,

As we grow, what is the moment we encounter the "real" world? At birth? When we start to walk? When we move from parallel to interactive play? When grades and test scores begin to affect our future options? When we drive a car, go to college, get a job, get married? And what kind of a place is this world we are encountering?

Whatever our age or stage, it can be a dangerous and mysterious place, a place of darkness as well as light, of joy as well as sorrow. The larger it gets, the more complicated it becomes, until we reach the stage of recognizing that we will never comprehend it all, that some problems are intractable, that there are pockets of awe and wonder wherever we turn.

During the high school years, judiciously organized, we can take an important step into the wider world within the context of a relatively safe environment. We can introduce and begin to de-mystify issues of world affairs, environmental issues, religious conflict, and poverty. We can celebrate the beauty of the universe from the microscope and the telescope, and everything in between. We can relate what we observe in the great world, as in our own little world, to overarching ethical principles.

We try to do all of these things at the Bay School. The articles in this newsletter give you a taste of what is being explored and considered. During the second trimester, juniors in Robin Workman's Global Issues course chose in-depth studies of many social, political, economic, and ecological problems that challenge the peoples of our world today. It doesn't end there. The 'Global View' extends to mathematics as well, as our freshmen and sophomores are asked to apply their emerging graphing and statistical skills to examining global warming and analyzing case studies involving loan repayment in the developing world.

This approach comes at a price. Quite early in their development, we are asking our young people to deal with ambiguity and doubt. Illusions of a perfect relationship, a perfect job, a perfect family were common in my youth. (Indeed, I was forty before anything substantial went wrong in my life.) There was a kindly innocence in those illusions which our students do not enjoy in the world of the 21st century.

We try, not always successfully, to be good stewards of students' time, giving them the opportunity to reflect, to talk to one another, their teachers, even their parents. Our hope is that this process will help these wonderful young people grow in wisdom and courage as they prepare themselves to lead a world which sorely needs these things.

I embark on a two-month sabbatical in mid-March and look forward to seeing you all again in late May.

All best wishes,

Fr. Malcolm

Education with a World View

Global Issues – Patterns and Problems in an Interdependent World

The junior year level elective course Global Issues introduces Bay School students to the patterns and problems that face citizens and leaders in the increasingly interconnected world of the 21st century. The course is designed to provoke students to think critically and creatively about the larger social, economic, and environmental issues that will impact their futures–requiring their understanding and involvement. During the second trimester, Robin Workman's class focused on three major areas from an interdisciplinary perspective: economic development and poverty, labor and migration, and globalism and particularism (global vs. tribal culture).

In order to encourage students to develop the habit of being informed about current international political and economic events they were required to read two articles of their choice each week in specified newspapers and/or weekly news magazines such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the BBC online. In response to the readings, students kept news journals in which they were asked to react to the stories by analyzing them in connection with material being covered in class as well as suggesting possible strategies to resolve issues. Frequent student led small group discussions and formal class debates also gave students the opportunity to work with, and react to, the course materials.

"I enjoyed the units of Economic Development and Climate Change the most out of all the units. Economic Development was fascinating because the class got to learn economic jargon, the impacts of development, the players who play with world development, and the writers who influenced who played with development. The issue of Economic Development led the class into geo-politics, the Washington bubble, and the growing giant of China."
– Katie Shepherd, Class of '08

As a final project at the end of the trimester students were asked to choose a contemporary topic related to international relations or globalization for extensive study. Their research was synthesized into an analytical essay and an open editorial in which they made a persuasive argument for a solution to their issue or problem. Each student was also responsible for teaching a class about their topic that involved assigning class background readings and included leading a class discussion. Students chose a wide range of subjects that ranged from economic development issues in sub-Saharan Africa, NAFTA and its impact on illegal immigration, Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and a debate over Iraq policy options, to child labor problems in Southeast Asia, and the Fair Trade movement.

"The ability to choose my own topic was very important. I had been curious about Fair Trade for a very long time. This project gave me the chance to both learn about the topic and then teach my classmates how to join in the struggle for Fair Trade. Most importantly, the project emphasizes getting the full perspective on your issue, which is paramount with Fair Trade. How do we know the policies are foolproof? This was an important lesson in getting balanced information."
– Vicky Holt, Class of '08

Charting and Plotting Global Issues

Building global awareness extends across all disciplines at Bay as two recent examples from mathematics courses illustrate well. In Math I, students have recently completed end-of-course Capstone projects that challenged them to consider the mathematics of global warming from a number of perspectives. In one project students analyzed data sets containing yearly temperature and hurricane severity ratings. The students examined the trends in global warming; both the overall trend towards increasing global temperatures, and the cyclical temperature changes based on El Nino weather patterns. Students examined the ways in which the setup of a scatter plot can affect the way that graph is interpreted by an audience; in this case, to make the trend of increasing global temperatures appear either as a dangerous trend or a slight anomaly. They also used their data to create models and make predictions about global warming trends. Students who worked on this project gained a greater appreciation for the ways in which the presentation of a graph can inform or mislead an audience.

Math 2 students used their knowledge of exponential growth to study the mathematics of loan repayment from both the personal and global perspective. Thinking locally, they modeled the financial implications of carrying a balance on a credit card from one month to the next, paying only the minimum payment required, and were often surprised at the long-run cost of maintaining credit card debt. Shifting to a more global perspective, they then examined the issue of Third World debt. Through background research they familiarized themselves with the historical and sociopolitical issues involved, and then explored how accruing interest ties up larger and larger portions of a developing country's resources, thus acting as a hindrance to economic development and progress. Finally, they were asked to write personal statements about whether or not they believe that Third World debt should be forgiven, offering possible solutions to the economic crisis.

"The fact that I became aware of the current Third World debt issue is important. Before this project, I was aware that poor Third World countries must be somewhat in debt, but I never imagined the actual numbers to be so high. It saddens me that these countries are paying off their debt–in ways which affect the health and welfare of their people…. Third World debt affects both my parents because my entire family lives in an extremely poor Third World country, where people are struggling to live everyday and put food on their tables. My parents send both my grandparents some money each month to help out. Although I would never have realized that if my parents hadn't told me, we are still helping them because their own country can't afford to."
– Andrea Hernandez, Class of '09

A Culture Valuing Difference

If our students are to graduate with a world view, then they need to grapple with difference. One challenge is that we often don't understand difference until we are faced by it. We don't recognize how diverse a community is until we explore our own values, perspectives, and backgrounds, and then compare them to others.

During these past few years, Bay School faculty and staff have been designing activities and opportunities for conversation with the goal of creating a culture that allows for honest self-reflection such that our students can come to know who they are and in which ways their world view is different from that of their peers. Our goal is not to create divisions or re-enforce categorizations, thus we have rarely designed activities that separate one type of student out from another, instead, we have looked for opportunities for each student to bring their whole self, their full world view, to the conversation–recognizing that each student adds an important piece to our world view.

We hope that five important questions will be explored by the time our students graduate:

• 1. Who am I?
• 2. How does my identity affect my perspective on the world?
• 3. How is that perspective different from another's?
• 4. How do the world and the perspectives of others affect my sense of identity?
• 5. What privileges and responsibilities do I carry now that I understand my personal world view?

The freshman class begins by exploring their multiple cultural backgrounds through the writing of "Where I am From" poems and by bringing in and writing about a family photo that is meaningful to them. They also create a paper identity quilt exploring the ways in which their identities are formed by race, class, sexuality, ability, gender, and personality. The sophomores spring from this initial inquiry and take it a step further, by considering the ways that their gender, race, and sexuality influence their perspectives on the world. Their class activities focus on the questions: What are the expectations placed on girls to "act like girls" or on boys to "act like boys"? What does it mean to be a white person? How does it feel to be part of a minority group? The juniors have taken these conversations one step further and explored the ways in which class influence their identity and perspective. We are looking forward to their senior year when we will begin to really tackle the question "What are my responsibilities now that I understand my privileges more fully?" All of these activities and questions take place during community wide gatherings and advisory periods and are fantastic supplements to classroom conversations about similar topics.

Read selected "Where I am From" poems (PDF)

Moneeka Settles
Dean of Students

Spring Athletics Now in Full Swing

The 2007 Bay School spring sports season is up and running with 5 competitive sports being represented by 6 teams. Our girls' soccer program has just begun its third season of competition; with our varsity and JV gearing up for exciting seasons with head coaches Chandra King Lombard and Nic Fiszman.

Our inaugural varsity baseball team, coached by former professional baseball player and Bay Athletic Director, Steve Glass, is scheduled to play its first game against Washington H.S. on Thursday, March 8th. Bay School girls' softball is also off to an exciting first season. The girls have not yet played their first game, but are working hard, under Coach Cassie McKeown to make our first season a memorable one.

A real highlight of the spring 2007 season is the launch of the first ever Bay School boys' track and field team, coached by former Ohio State track star (and Bay Spanish teacher) Shellie Banks. This year the Breakers will field runners in the 100, 200, 400, and 800 meter races, the 300 meter hurdles, the long and triple jumps, the shot put, discus, and the relays. Their first meet is scheduled on Wednesday, March 14th at The College of San Mateo, with subsequent meets scheduled for April 18th, April 24th and May 12.

20 boys make up the first Bay School Varsity Boys' Track and Field Team. Cross-country standouts, Neal Fong, Hubert Jiang, and Wes Messino will lead the field of milers and 800 meter runners, while Craig Yamamoto, Gabe Galvin-Klein, and "Sir" Isaac Schwarz will head the list of throwers. John Tompkins and Henry Matarozzi will combine their speed with soccer standouts, Jay Arellano and Joseph Guadarama to produce some fast relay times. Varsity basketball players, Blake Lawrence, Danny Idzkowski, and Lawrence Khuu will add their speed and versatility to the sprints, jumps and hurdles. Coach Shellie Banks, along with assistants Stephanie Hamilton and Darrick Broudy, are excited about the athletic potential and ability of this year's team. As Coach Banks says "This season will serve as a spring board and great learning experience for all of our Bay athletes; they will learn about all of the events and will have an opportunity to experience a variety of races and field events. Even though we’re young, my gut feeling tells me that we will win races and make our mark!"

Boys' golf has gotten off to a soggy start due to recent rain storms making practice difficult. But, with Head Coach and resident golf enthusiast Miles Chen calling the shots, the boys have been practicing everyday in anticipation of their first match in early March against University H.S. at Lincoln Golf Course.

GO BREAKERS!!

Bringing Culture Alive through Language

Two recent creative projects in the Spanish language program clearly illustrate that learning a foreign language at Bay goes far beyond memorizing vocabulary and conjugating verbs. The study of languages also includes an important cultural objective—building understanding of different cultures through literature, art, and every day customs. Whether it be celebrating Chinese New Year at all-school gatherings, creating student family trees in Spanish, cooking Latin American food in the school kitchen, or performing and filming a Spanish play. Language comes alive to students as they use it to express themselves in a variety of experiences.

The Spanish V class began the academic year by viewing and analyzing a wide selection of Spanish language films—then critiquing the social issues that the films depicted. During the second trimester, we moved from the screen to the stage with the reading and consequent performance of Federico Garcia Lorca's La Zapatera Prodigiosa (often translated in English as The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife), a lively farce that opens windows to Spain's Andalusian culture of the 1930s. The class then decided to film their final performance, and added English subtitles to every scene.

Through Lorca's hilarious drama we were able to transport language and make it our own by using Spanish in a contextualized way. Through the process, students learned to translate meaningfully (as opposed to literally) while engaged in the creative process of group work, enjoying the dramatic process of putting on an entertaining show. They were able to study and familiarize themselves with a Spanish speaking culture through examining human behavior, and learned to appreciate Lorca's individual literary style and the time in which he wrote his play.

Ana Bayat
Spanish and French Teacher

Spanish I Family Tree Project

Each year in Spanish 1A during the first trimester, students are asked to create an illustrated family tree in large scale on a poster board. They then present their family tree to their peers speaking in Spanish. They are given a great deal of flexibility in deciding who to include in creating their trees; they are asked to list at least 15 family members (pets count, too!) and can have as many family relatives on the tree as they choose. Many students mention their grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews, as well as their parents, siblings, dogs, cats, horses, serpents, and of course, themselves.

In addition to their family trees clearly showing the relationships between their family members, students also use photos and the descriptive adjectives and grammar that they have learned to further celebrate and share their family. The project gives each student a special opportunity to celebrate their family and the uniqueness of their background. As students are reminded that families come in all different shapes, sizes, and forms, bonds are strengthened between them.

I have been so impressed with how eager our students are to share their diverse personal stories with their classmates, and also how accepting and supportive they have been towards their classmates who have different backgrounds and family structures.

Julie Taufaasau
Spanish Teacher

Bay Jazz Onstage at the Red Vic

The weight of my bass dug against my back as I brought it off the bus to the Haight. I began to set up for the gig like any other night, but tonight I was more excited than usual. The Red Vic, the club where we were playing, is known for its jazz jams where respected professionals often play as featured artists. Tonight, our Bay School quintet was the featured artist.

Our Bay students crowded onto the small stage and turned on their amps. Katie Yielding picked up the microphone and carefully checked the sound. Gabe Golvin-Klein and Canek Martinez strapped their guitars to their shoulders. Meyer Jacobs laid his bass across his knee, and Jonathan Hunt fitted the reed into his clarinet and blew a few notes into it, checking its intonation and volume. They knew what to do. We had been rehearsing these tunes during the semester, four days a week. They not only knew their parts, but they knew how to improvise. They had also taken several hours of recorded music home to listen to–great jazz artists like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Jelly Roll Morton. They could recognize a Charlie Parker lick in mere seconds.

Katie counted off the first tune. It was a blues, and they played through it with confidence and in a way that anyone would enjoy. And then Katie took a vocal solo, easing long notes over the chords, with a quiet force. The clarinet and guitar came in, pushing her notes along, giving them momentum. Katie's solo got louder and louder until she was belting out the blues, the whole band chugging along behind her. They ended the tune to thunderous applause.

After the applause died down, with no nonsense, no discussion of what to play next, they counted off the next tune and showed that they know more than just the blues scale, working their way through intricate progressions, keeping a solid groove through some tricky rhythms. Satisfied with their sound, I began to look at the audience. I had warned them about jazz audiences: how they talk through the music, how either they don't applaud, or clap at inappropriate times. But these students held the audience spellbound, and no one in the club so much as whispered.

After the show, the professionals who had opened for the jazz band came up to me to give me their opinions. "Your bass player has great time!" "Did that guy who played the guitar and sang really write those songs?" "They played some pretty fine licks," and so on. But I was more interested in hearing what the students thought of their own performance. As I approached, I saw them smiling and heard their excited voices and I knew that they had gotten their first taste of professional music, and they loved it.

Colin Williams
Music Teacher

From the Stacks – Library News
Rachel Shaw, Librarian

The library collection continues to grow. Many of the most recent acquisitions have been related to United States History as the juniors are completing their end-of-term research papers on a variety of topics. Additionally, we have been expanding our collection of books that deal with contemporary world conflicts.

Following are a number of recently published books that offer a number of different perspectives on the Iraq War and religious divisions within Islam. All books are available at the Bay School library:

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
This book is on many "best of 2006" lists and is a current National Book Award finalist.

What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It
Trish Wood
Heart and gut-wrenching first-person accounts.

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
Riverhead
An inside look into the experience of the war from an Iraqi girl's blog.

Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
Jeffrey Goldberg
From the book jacket: "They met in 1990 during the first Palestinian uprising—one was an American Jew who served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel, the other, his prisoner, Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Despite their fears and prejudices, they began a dialogue there that grew into a remarkable friendship—and now a remarkable book. It is a book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle East, but one that also shines a ray of hope on that dark, embattled region."

The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
Niall Ferguson
"...thought-provoking, highly engaging, and nearly impossible-to-put-down book, he challenges readers to think outside the box—even if they disagree." Library Journal

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr
"So enlightening and perspective altering that no one concerned about the Middle East should miss reading it." Booklist

Dying for Jerusalem: the Past, Present and Future of the Holiest City
Walter Laqueur
An examination of Israeli history through its most conflicted city.

March 2007 Events Calendar