Thousands of athletes from all over the east coast competed on the last weekend of 2018 at the third preliminary of the nation's largest women's amateur track and field series, the Colgate Women's Games. Junior, Isabel Stronski, won the 1500 meters with an impressive time of 5:00.09. Grade 8 student, Rowan Houston, won the high jump with a personal best of 5'4".
Click here for more information on the event.
Thank you to RCDS alumni Hugh Reynolds '16, Hanna Kopits '17, Charlotte Fleischman '16, CeCe Payne '17, Nicole Reindel '16, and Jarvy O'Neill '17 for returning to campus to meet with prospective families.
As RCDS students, each took full advantage of the many opportunities offered on campus to uncover their passions. They spoke about how they have carried these passions - for Chinese, drama, French, singing, athletics, writing, leadership, etc. - to college and beyond. The young alumni also spoke about how the transition to college was made easier because of their RCDS experiences developing mentorship relationships with teachers, learning how to study effectively, how to write, and how to self-advocate. The alumni spoke, most of all, about the influence of RCDS faculty who coupled their high expectations with their belief in each student's capacity. It was wonderful to have these young alumni back on campus, to hear about the ways RCDS has left a lasting mark on their lives, and to see the many ways they are carrying what they learned at RCDS into their futures.
Jon Leef, Interim Upper School Principal
One of the reassuring aspects of life as an educator is the cycle of school years. Student orientation leads to the first day of class, which leads to the first athletic contests, which lead to the fall play, which leads to the first marking period, and you get the idea. Sometimes I forget that our students and their parents and guardians don't go through as many of these cycles as my colleagues and I do!
Now we are two weeks away from wrapping up a semester. In a few weeks, grades and comments will be sent to you through the parent portal. That is a part of the school cycle with which I have empathy for you. Currently, my two sons are in college, and when I log onto the parent portal I find invoices, but no comments. But when they were in high school, at semester's end, when comments arrived, I had to remember to take off my teacher hat and wear my dad hat. Getting my two adolescents to reflect on the semester in conversation was difficult. Is it challenging for you, too? I would remind myself: "Don't ask yes or no questions!" "Don't lecture." "Make sure to leave them in a 'good place.'"
Ask your students about something from the semester that they are particularly proud of or something that they might do differently during the second semester. Which comments resonate most strongly with them and why? Ask your students whether there were any surprises in the comments and what made them surprising? Ask good questions and wait patiently for the answers. Listen to understand and not to respond.
This stage of the school cycle sees the beginning of a transition for my colleagues in the College Counseling Office. Seniors begin to make decisions, and juniors begin to wonder about opportunities. For seniors, the pending separation inches closer. Second semester milestones seem to approach suddenly and quickly disappear in the rearview mirror.
Many years ago, I was talking with two mothers at a second-semester reception for the parents of seniors. One was the mother of Michael, one of the better football players that I have ever coached. The other was the mother of Geoff, a young man that I had the good fortune of teaching in two math courses during his high school career—though Geoff had the ability to teach himself math! These moms told me that their sons had been best buddies during the elementary and middle school years. As the teenage years progressed, the boys had moved to different social groups. They considered themselves friends, but did not have much to do with each another.
Michael's mom then confided in us. "I can't tell you how many times Michael cried while struggling to do his homework. He used to ask me why he couldn't be more like Geoff." Geoff's mom followed by telling about the numerous teary conversations that she had with Geoff as he lamented not being able to "throw the ball like Michael can." We laughed and got a bit sentimental.
I will always remember the passion that these young men brought to the table. Michael liked his intellectual pursuits even if they were a challenge. Geoff knew more about the minutia of athletics than most hosts of sports-talk programs, even though he couldn't heave the ball downfield. Michael was thoroughly loyal to the teachers who challenged him most, and Geoff loved the coaches who worked with him on throwing the elusive spiral. One thing they had in common were loving, nurturing, patient moms who asked great questions and then listened. I learned a great deal from them.
As you have your conversations reflecting on the first semester, please remember that we are ALL lifelong learners, and our children are works of art in progress, not finished products. The cycle continues.
Barbara Shea, Lower School Principal
This New Year brings a new member to the Lower School faculty. We are very happy to welcome Andrea Rackow as a math specialist who will work two days a week with small groups of students in Kindergarten through Grade 4. Her role will be similar to that of the learning specialists in providing extra support for students. For the past four years, Ms. Rackow has been a mathematics consultant, providing math coaching to teachers, developing curriculum and pacing guides for Singapore Math-based programs, and creating and leading demonstration lessons to showcase mathematical content and pedagogy. Prior to that position, Ms. Rackow was a teacher and associate teacher at the Town School and an associate teacher at the Allen-Stevenson School. Ms. Rackow graduated from Cornell and has a J.D. from the New York University School of Law and a masters degree from Bank Street in Early Childhood and Elementary Ed. Ms. Ingrassia will continue her work as the Lower School math coordinator and work closely with Ms. Rackow and the classroom teachers.
Dr. Debra Pager, the school psychologist and director of Student Support Services, often works with Lower School students in various grade-level friendship groups to help them develop the necessary skills to nurture and maintain good relationships. Dr. Pager also leads classroom discussions on a variety of health and wellness topics. Since December, Dr. Pager has expanded her program in each of the grade levels to include more lessons on health and wellness, which are gathered from a variety of sources. Some lessons come from the Great Body Shop, which offers a variety of topics. While the focus of the lesson is on the discussion with students, this program also provides students with pamphlets to reinforce their understanding and allows them to share this information at home. In addition, Dr. Pager emails families to let them know the topics that she has shared with their children. This is done to keep families abreast of our curricular topics and to encourage conversations with their children.
On our professional day in November, RCDS was fortunate to have Cindy Foley, executive assistant director and director of Learning and Experience at the Columbus Museum of Art, talk to us about "creativity." This talk was applicable to all three divisions and fit in beautifully with our Lower School choice art program, the Question Formulation Technique, (the process of generating questions that are important to the individual student and serve as a guide in their research) and the greater emphasis on STEM projects that support student innovations, to name just a few! A dynamic speaker, Dr. Foley, makes the case that art's critical value is to develop learners who "are creative, curious, that seek questions, develop ideas, and play... and to stop the pervasive, problematic and cliché messaging that implies that creativity is somehow defined as artistic skill." Her view of creativity transcends art and is an approach that focuses on three critical habits. The first is "discomfort with ambiguity:" how do we work through the initial disequilibrium we feel when dealing with a new challenge; how do we break down a task and approach it as a problem solver. (This is a key skill that Lower School students learn as they build three-dimensional art or as they try to put on paper what they envision in their minds.) Creativity is the tool in defining this new perspective. Rarely is there one path to problem solving, but rather many different paths - some more successful than others. How comfortable students are in being flexible in changing gears, generating new ideas, and working through disappointment will determine how successful they can be in finding solutions. All the things we work on with our students on a regular basis!
The second is idea generation: there is potential to jump-start ideas in "play." In order for ideas to emerge, one has to allow the brain to roam in many directions and to make connections, no matter how divergent the connections may seem at first. Artists will play with materials in their search to find a new way to express an idea. Providing students with the opportunities to use play as a way to generate ideas is one that needs modeling and support. Talking students through their play and helping them make connections to new activities lay the foundation for their own creative process to develop.
Lastly, interdisciplinary research serves our curiosity and not the reverse. The various disciplines should be used as tools in the service of an idea. "Ideas are king," and creativity is the tool to make the ideas come to life using information from across the subject areas. For more information about this topic, please visit Cindy Foley's TED Talk, "Teaching Art or Teaching Art to Think Like an Artist."
Fueling the creative mind in our students is critical. Helping students to understand that their education across the disciplines provides the tools with which they can create their own new ideas and innovations is even more important. As part of our "Curricular Conversations" across the school, a group of faculty members gathered last Tuesday to discuss in greater depth the ideas that Ms. Foley shared with us and how we can incorporate more opportunities for students to develop and demonstrate their creativity.
Thank you to the Parents Association for hosting the RCDS Family Skating party. It was a fantastic afternoon of skating, hot chocolate, and fun!
For the first time, Rye Country Day School will host the United States Invitational Young Physicists Tournament (USIYPT), an annual physics research and debate tournament for high school students. On January 26-27, thirteen teams from throughout the country and the world will compete for the title. The entire RCDS community is welcome to attend this special event to cheer on the School's delegates as they present their research and battle to earn Rye Country Day's third USIYPT championship (previous titles were won in 2012 and 2017)!
Over the course of the last year, school-based teams have investigated several undergraduate-level research problems in preparation for the tournament. Teams then compete in "physics fights," or student-led debates over the quality of each team's solution. Each round begins with the reporting team giving a ten-minute summary on one of the four official tournament problems. Next, the opponent and reporter engage in discussion about the problem, just as members of competing research groups at a conference might discuss a presentation. Teams are evaluated by a team of judges, mainly physics professors and professionals, on their demonstrated understanding of the problem, as well as on their ability to ask and answer questions.
1. Extraterrestrial Rainbows: When it is both sunny and rainy, we see rainbows.What if, rather than water, it rained some other clear liquid, as it does on Saturn's moon Titan? If, some day, future astronomers took a picture of a non-water rainbow, could they determine the chemical composition of the raindrops from the image? Investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the physics of rainbows caused by a variety of clear liquids.
2. Faraday's Homopolar Generator: Michael Faraday set up a round copper plate in a magnetic field and used it to generate current, which he measured using a galvanometer. Reproduce Faraday's experiment. Investigate how it works both experimentally and theoretically.
3. Juggling Hammers: Hold a typical carpenter's hammer with the claw up. Throw it in the air, catching it by the handle after a single rotation. The claw will still be up. Paradoxically, if you turn it 90 degrees and throw the hammer again, the claw will now be on the opposite side. Investigate this both experimentally and theoretically.
4. Pneumatic Tube Mail Systems: Up until the mid 20th century, pneumatic mail systems were installed to quickly transport small items over short distances, but they sometimes exploded when scaled up over longer distances. Design, and build, a working pneumatic tube mail system. Investigate the feasibility of using such a system for high-speed travel.
In addition to providing students with the opportunity to showcase the considerable work they have completed on their research projects, the event also features a keynote by RCDS alumni Dr. Alfred A. Rizzi '82, Chief Scientist at Boston Dynamics, on Saturday, January 26 at 3PM. RCDS community members are welcome to attend any or all of the events throughout the weekend.
Saturday 26 January
Sunday 27 January
*Playoff rounds will run back-to-back-to-back. As soon as jurors are ready, the next round begins.
School | Location |
Pioneer High School Menzah VIII | Ariana, Tunisia |
Nueva School | Hillsborough, CA |
Woodberry Forest School | Woodberry Forest, VA |
Rye Country Day School | Rye, NY |
Phillips Exeter Academy | Exeter, NH |
Shenzhen Middle School | Shenzhen, China |
Vanke Meisha Academy | Shenzhen, China |
Qingdao No.2 High School | Qingdao, China |
Phillips Andover Academy | Andover, MA |
Cary Academy | Cary, NC |
Spartanburg Day School | Spartanburg, SC |
The Harker School | San Jose, CA |
Pioneer School of Ariana | Aryanah, Tunisia |
Written by Jay Gerlach, Drama & Dance Department Chair
As part of the annual Strong Family Dance Assembly, RCDS welcomed Urban Bush Women (UBW), a modern dance company based in Brooklyn, N.Y., for a series of on-campus performances and workshops. UBW had performed last year for the RCDS community and was so warmly received that a repeat performance was scheduled. The troupe weaves contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of African Americans and the African diaspora. UBW's performance impressed students, faculty, and staff in all three divisions with its bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting style that challenged assumptions about people of color, body types, movement styles, society, and history. We are immensely grateful to Roger, Nancy, and Sarah Strong for their continued support of dance education at RCDS and for bringing this meaningful experience to the community.
After reading Frankenstein, students in grade 10 English were tasked with conceiving an idealized form and bringing it to life in the makerspace. Through this process they explored, as the main character of the novel did, the relationship between lifeless matter and animation, and the relationship between aspiration and reality. Grade 10 English teacher Sarah Land explains the project and how working in the makerspace helps support collaboration, problem solving, innovation, and creativity.
Connections to RCDS Learning Goals:
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Students in Honors Spanish 4 brought characters from the play "La Casa de Bernarda Alba" to life through hand-made diaries created in the makerspace. Shoshanna Victor '19, Kate Rochat '20, and Tess Asness '20 reflect below on the process of creating the character journals.
In Honors Spanish 4, we read the play La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca. Upon finishing the play, Ms. Kubish asked us to impersonate a character from the play by creating diary entries on their behalf. We were encouraged to take as many creative liberties as we found fun and meaningful while incorporating various themes of the play and key vocabulary terms we learned in class.
After writing our diaries, we brought them to life in the makerspace. With the help of Ms. Sestito and Ms. Kubisch, we constructed diaries using cardboard, fabric, string, paper, and lots of Mod Podge. We made deeper connections to our characters by carefully choosing different papers and colors to use for our covers and pages, revealing information about our characters' personalities and backgrounds.
Our diary entries reflect the themes presented in the play and the development of our characters throughout the work. We are proud of our final projects, which demonstrate our wide-ranging creativity and hard work, especially since everything we did was in Spanish!
Two Rye Country Day School FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Teams, the "AstroDucks" and the "Cosmo Geese" participated in a regional competition on Saturday, January 19, 2019, at Crompond School in Yorktown.
This year's theme, "Into Orbit" celebrates NASA's 60th birthday and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Each of our teams, comprising students from the 5th and 6th grades, prepared for and competed in three judged presentations: a robot design executive summary that explained how they designed and programmed their robot to successfully complete missions, a research project on a space-related topic of interest to them, and their reflections upon the Core Values learned throughout the season.
The AstroDucks' research project, proposed the creation of an app, "Space Time," that demonstrated empathy for the astronauts who spend so much time away from "family, friends, quality food, and so many other things we take for granted." The Cosmo Geese project, presented in a talk show format, proposed 3D printed food in space that "looks better, tastes better, and retains more nutrients than NASA space food does, no offense to NASA...!"
Both teams put a tremendous amount of time and energy into preparing for the competition and delivered their presentations confidently, effectively, and with the perfect amount of humor. The team members, who worked after school,, during flex times and on Saturdays in preparation for the tournament, are:
The AstroDucks
Grade 6: Allison Bauer, Joshua Greene, Stephen Mulderry, and Leah Steyn
Grade 5: Natisse Marrero-Cruz, Sofia Monterroso-Rodriguez
The Cosmo Geese
Grade 5: Tyler Hatstadt, Harrison Moss, Teddy Pettit, Devon Smith
Coaches: Joanne Ciuccio and Katie Sandling with support from Gail Sestito
Thank you to the parents, administrators, faculty, and staff who helped make this positive experience of learning, growth, and teamwork possible!
On Friday and Saturday, RCDS remembered and honored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. through dance, music, listening, critical thinking and discussion, and service to others.
On Friday, students in grades 3-12 participated in an assembly that featured special performances by the WildScats and Cedar Street Dance Company, as well as an address by alumna Eliza McCurdy '13. Afterwards, students, faculty, and staff, gathered in small groups to participate in empathy exercises that focused on perspective taking, leaning into discomfort, standing up for justice, and using the power of one's own voice and actions to create a change. Every student in grades 3-12 was asked to analyze this quotation from Dr. King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
During Friday's morning meeting, Lower School students also heard from nine-year-old Max Lazarowitz. Over the past three years, Max has created and built arcade games out of recycled materials and hosted a "game day" fundraiser for Maria Fareri Children's Hospital as well as his own school. His message inspired our youngest students to participate in service work that could have tremendous impact on their community. Students in grades Pre-K-2 then engaged in a craft activity centered around the heart and the feet, during which they discussed something they cared about (the heart) and what they were going to do to make a change (the feet). Their projects will be on display in the Lower School next week.
On Saturday, over 160 RCDS students, families, faculty, and staff attended the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service event at Building One Community (B1C), a resource center for immigrants and one of Rye Country Day's valued community partners. B1C has supported over 8,100 immigrants from 87 different countries over the past seven years as they integrate into the Stamford area. Gathering at Building One Community, participants assembled care packages with toiletries and notes inspired by the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. The care packages will be distributed to clients of B1C, as well as to families at a local homeless shelter.
Thanks to those who participated in these activities that honored Dr. King's legacy.
