Dear Parents,
It was good to have so many of you join us for the Back to School Night on Tuesday evening. Parents and teachers that I spoke with were in good spirits and optimistic about the coming school year. I enjoyed meeting with you and sharing some of the things we are doing to meet your children’s needs and interests. The teachers also appreciated the opportunity to share their approaches to learning. We all look forward to get to know you and your children better throughout the school year.
Student Leadership -Last Saturday about 30 of our student leaders from the Student Council and the National Honor Society engaged in a Student Leadership Retreat on the school campus. The theme of the workshop, led by consultants from MindVisa, was “Discovering How to Lead.” the workshop consisted of five mini-lessons:
- Authority is not the same as Leadership
- To lead you have to perform both technical and evolutionary leadership work
- Evolutionary leadership work begins with learning about our own mental models
- To lead, you have to win the trust of your group members; embrace first followers, give voice to those who are not being listened to; and be able to see patterns that are not obvious
- To lead, you have to be willing to experiment and fail – perhaps a lot!
News from the Athletic Director - In an effort to provide our community with information about the activities and athletics programs at AISC, we will be having two Parent Orientation meetings in the next few weeks. The first meeting will be during the middle school Parent Coffee on Tuesday Aug. 20th at 8:45 AM and the next on Tuesday Aug. 27th at 8:45 AM during the high school Parent Coffee. There will be a lot of information to share with all of you, so please come out and join the fun.
In other news, the Athletic Department will soon be launching the new AISC Athletics Weebly web site. Once our web site is up and running, you will be able to access information regarding all middle school and high school sports at AISC. That's it from the desk of the Athletic Director. Ron Thomson
I had a very enjoyable and productive meeting with this year’s High School PTA representatives on Monday morning. They are Aditi Vasu, Virginie Vlaminck, Stefania Scardigli and Susila Jeyaratnam. I am very thankful for their willingness to share their time and to work with me to ensure that parents have a voice in our school.
High School Parent Coffee – Mark your calendar! On Tuesday, August 27 we will hold our first High School Parent Coffee to help parents learn more about our Week Without Walls and about the high school Athletics Program. This will take from 8:45 to 9:45 a.m. in the Black Box Theater. I hope to see you there.
Do you Moodle? AISC uses NESA Virtual School, commonly known as Moodle, as our learning management system. This system consists of web pages that contain extensive information about our programs. Each teacher maintains a separate Moodle page for each of his or her classes. These pages provide important information for the students, including assessment calendars, learning resources and interactive learning tools. Parents have access to these webpages as well. For information about logging in, see the Moodle Information link in the sidebar.
Food for thought – Last year our Strategic Planning team identified three Student Learning Objectives, one of which is that “By 2018 all students will evaluate real world situations, identify problems and design innovative solutions.” The importance of this objective was reinforced by an interesting article I came across this week that shared an interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, about the company’s personnel policies. The author stated that “Google has found no correlation between [employees’ college GPAs and test scores] and job performance, except for people right out of college, where there is only a slight correlation. ‘After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school,’ says Bock, ‘because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.’ He also believes that academic environments are artificial and only certain types of people thrive in them. ‘One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer.’” Working toward our Student Learning Objective will help guide us in preparing our students with the skills they will need in their lives beyond college.
As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or matters you would like to discuss.
Have a
great weekend.
John
McCandless
High School Principal
High School Principal
hsprincipal@aisch.org
