Report from the Academic Coordinator

10/5/02


We have had a wonderful first block at Scattergood this year! I’m very excited to be the new Academic Coordinator and have enjoyed working with students, parents and guardians, and staff to help make this a successful year. Although I’ll miss teaching history, I will continue to be the College Counselor and teach Senior Seminar. This spring we will focus on revising our curriculum guide for the ISACS re-accreditation process, which will allow us the opportunity to reflect on our curriculum and provide even more depth to our vision of the educative environment at Scattergood. I am currently collecting materials to compile an online repository of syllabi and major class assignments and projects to help parents and teachers become familiar with past academic courses at Scattergood. We will also be creating a curriculum map that will help staff, students, parents, and prospective members of the Scattergood community gain an idea of the typical progression of academic courses for our students.
We have several new teachers this year that we’re very excited about:

  • Sara Karbeling is a Carleton graduate who is teaching Physics, Trigonometry and Statistics, and Geometry.
  • Shannon Pingenot is a high school teacher from Kansas who is teaching Chemistry, Algebra II, and Stained Glass this fall and will be teaching US History in the spring.
  • Victor Garcia Garza is a native Spanish speaker who has trained in movie production in Hollywood. He is teaching Drama this year, and the students will perform the play The War of the Words on Scattergood Day. Victor is also teaching Spanish 3, 4, and 5 and World History.
  • Kyle Maher is a Colorado College graduate who trained to be an EMT, has been working with Outward Bound, and was an outreach librarian. He is teaching several ESL classes, Spanish 1 and 2, and will be starting a music project next block.
  • Amy Scattergood is a published poet and former Scattergood staff child and staff member. She is teaching ESL and Humanities this year as well as Field Hockey and 10th grade Skills.
We are very excited that teachers were able to move back into classrooms in the Science Building this block. Near the end of last block, the last of the explosive hazardous chemicals were removed from the Chemistry room, and we felt comfortable re-opening the building. Over the course of the last month, we worked with a Scott County and Chicago facility to have the chemicals cleaned up, and we had materials representing almost every classification of hazardous waste, some dating back several decades. We have joined a government program to ensure that we will evaluate our inventory on a regular basis and this kind of buildup will never happen again.
Over the summer we developed a new orientation format adapted from Beloit College. Everyone read the same book, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, before arriving to school in August. Students were placed into mixed-grade groups to discuss various orientation issues and begin exploring a theme relating to the book. These groups continued through the first block as a Humanities course. The topics included studying ideas of Heaven and Hell, comedy, survival and coping strategies, and ecological sustainability.

Respectfully Submitted,
Heather Godley