There’s a rising star among the new faculty members at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.
There’s a rising star among the new faculty members at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.
They are called guinea pigs, seven promising middle school students in Edgartown who are testing the proposition that learning algebra early will let them reach greater math heights in high school. Now educators in other Island schools are mulling ways to bring their own students up to speed.
Matthew D’Andrea hated third grade. But in fourth grade he was assigned an inspiring teacher, Mr. Mansfield, who made learning fun and positive. “For the first time, I looked forward to coming to school,” Mr. D’Andrea said in a recent interview.
After heartfelt discussion about the cost of education on the Vineyard, the all-Island school committee approved a $5.4 million budget for superintendent Dr. James H. Weiss Tuesday night.
Midweek at the Edgartown School an elementary student was squealing in delight. He had just communicated to his teacher, Serena Santinello, that he’d like her to draw him a tiger. But he hadn’t used his voice to make the request. Instead he scanned the library of zoo animals on a speech output app, Proloquo, with a pointer finger, and had pressed on a small picture that was labeled “tiger.”
Ms. Santinello obliged, sketching a friendly tiger face next to a pretty young lady he’d requested minutes before.
A typical math lesson taught by Sue Miller, a fifth grade teacher at the West Tisbury School, begins with a joke.
“What do you call a crushed angle?”
But the jokes aren’t delivered in school. Instead, they precede a video lesson that students watch online for homework.
