Model UN Practice: WHO Committee

In preparation for our Model UN conference in just over a month, the students participated in a World Health Organization Committee, representing nations ranging from Japan and China to the US and France. 

Gathered together, they worked to address what the nations of the world can do to destigmatize mental health, working to stay within the mandate of the committee and their nations' policies.

Throughout the process, they also practiced following the rules of procedure and using Model UN terminology.

While we have much work to do to prepare for their actual committee, this first run showed that their public speaking and conflict resolution skills will serve them well.

After a long morning of work and a short afternoon session, the presented a draft resolution that was unanimously approved by the committee.

Recycling Right!

Community experts are frequent visitors to Seabury Middle School. Whether they come as part of a community outreach or are here to help us evaluate student work or to be a real world audience for student presentations, experts are a welcome benefit to learning in downtown Tacoma.

Featured here is Preston Peck who was a recent visitor from the city's residential recycling program. He is a project specialist focused on community education about recycling. He provided our students with a presentation on where our recycling goes, what is safe to recycle, and how recycling is a business that is affected by the community's knowledge of what and how to recycle. We learned how important to the environment it is to sort our recycling properly. Our student's were highly engaged and shared great ideas about recycling now and in the future.

The knowledge and connections students gain from expert visitors, is part of an integral part of the education you receive at Seabury School.

Presenting to Experts: Authenticity when Crafting Fictional Worlds

This week, the middle schoolers had the chance to present their prototype societies to a panel of experts. This process of presenting their ideas and receiving in-person feedback on those ideas is a little nerve-wracking, but the middle schoolers were brave and thoughtful. They confidently presented their societies and fielded a wide range of questions.

We were so lucky to have so many thoughtful and interesting experts volunteer their time on our two days of panels.

Here are the expert's bios:

January 21st

Sandi Wollum

Dr. David Muller

I graduated in 1988 from Stanford University with a bachelors in sociology and honors in humanities.  For my undergraduate studies, I had specialized in organizational behavior, thinking that I would go into the business world as a management consultant or advertising executive.  However, my plans were waylaid by an opportunities to milk dairy cows in Belgium and to teach beginning piano in Seattle. Both experiences led me to think that perhaps teaching would be a better profession for me, and so I attended the University of Washington for a few years to earn minors in both mathematics and English, as well as a teaching certificate in both subjects for grades 4 thru 12.  I took some more time off to bicycle tour California, Arizona, New Mexico, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, and Alaska. Promptly after returning, I moved to Colorado, where I taught high school mathematics for 1 year, then 1 year in New Mexico at a Preparatory School for Native American Students, 1 year in Arizona on the Hopi Indian Reservation, and then for six years in Tucson, AZ, also at a high school for Native American students.  While teaching in Tucson, I earned a masters and then a doctorate in math education, and married a math post-doctoral assitant (not necessarily in that order). I moved back to Washington in 2008, where my wife began her professorship at Pacific Lutheran University. For the past ten years I have had a practice in house-husbandry, as well as mathematics tutoring. I bring to this panel my expertise in having pursued for the past 30 years my own imagined Utopia.

Cameron Seib District Scheduler for Representative Kilmer 

(he/him)

I went to the University of Washington and graduated in 2015 with an English degree. A few months after graduation, I moved to DC for an internship in Rep. Denny Heck’s office, where I eventually came on as a full-time Staff Assistant. After about a year, I moved back to Seattle and began working at the UW, helping with career services for information science students.

I was there for three years before joining Rep. Kilmer’s office in July 2019. As his District Scheduler, I help plan and implement the Congressman’s schedule when he’s back in the state. This involves liaising with community members and constituents to set up speaking engagements, roundtable discussions, town halls, school visits, etc.

Peter Plastrik (Skype) 

he/him

Peter Plastrik, an educational and environmental consultant and former speech writer for the Governor of Michigan, has written several books. He studied journalism at the University of Michigan and completed graduate students in Education at Michigan State University before pursuing other fields of work. He as written several books: Banishing Bureaucracy, Life after Carbon, and Connecting to Change the World: Harnessing the Power of Networks for Social Impact. In addition, he has helped start and run University Prep, a charter school in Detroit, MI. Peter has traveled the world and seen many different societies. He also works with groups and organizations to help people work together better and more efficiently.

Robert Zwirner

he/him

Robert earned his B.A. in English from the University of Michigan. He is a world traveler and a soccer fan. He is an avid table top gamer and a student of the world. Robert has written travel narratives and has done literature graduate work at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Vicki Pastore

she/her

Vicki’s areas of expertise are managing a workforce of 70, marketing, event planning, interviewing, with some expertise in music. Vicki attended Eckerd College, where she earned her B.A. in Humanities; Literature, Philosophy, and Theater. She is one of the associate directors of admissions at the University of Puget Sound. She is also Isaac’s mom and the owner of two dogs.

Dr. Jessica Lensch Falk

she/her

Jessica Lensch-Falk is a scientist and educator who teaches hands-on science and engineering to K-8 students. She believes that all students are naturally scientists and are capable of  amazing and difficult accomplishments when given the opportunity and resources. Her previous work includes research on nanomaterials for energy applications at Sandia National Laboratories. She has also been involved in non-profit management as a current board member at her synagogue and former president of her children's PTO. Jessica holds a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from Northwestern University and a BS in Materials Science & Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.  In her free time Jessica loves spending time with her husband and two children, playing board games, reading, and baking.

January 22nd, 8:45-9:45

Tiffany Price

Jenn Parker

I graduated from the Univ. of Massachusetts at Dartmouth with a BFA in Art Education in 1994.  Upon graduation I was an art teacher at St. Mary’s Catholic School (a private school in Melrose, MA- a town outside of Boston).  During my summer breaks I did a little traveling -I rode a motorcycle across the country going East to West one summer and then rode my bicycle across the country going West to East the following summer.  So, to make a little extra “travel cash” I started working part time at a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop on Newbury Street in Boston scooping ice cream after school. During this time the owner of that scoop shop asked me if I would consider managing a new scoop shop that he was opening.  After much consideration I chose to leave teaching and jump into business management. Over the course of 6 years at Ben & Jerry’s I won the “Best Promotions Ever” contest, was awarded the “BIG-O” award for having the best franchise in the world, trained several perspective franchise owners from around the world, taught workshops at corporate meetings, and was promoted to the highest honor, which was to manage the corporate Ben & Jerry’s “Flagship” store in Burlington, VT (home of Ben & Jerry!) 

Over the years I traveled a bit more, managed a few other high profiled VT businesses, and participated and graduated from a continuing education program called, “The Women’s Small Business Program” at Trinity College in VT. This is where and when I wrote a couple of business plans.  One plan was to open my own bakery café which is what I did in 2005. In 2010 I hung up my apron and sold my shares of the bakery to my business co-owners and became a full time Mom. In the summer of 2016, my family moved from Vermont to Washington. That fall I began to work as a substitute teacher at Seabury and in the Tacoma School Systems.  In 2017 I started to work full time at Seabury doing what I am currently doing.

Dr. Toska Olson

she/her

Toska (Sulli's mom) is a social scientist who teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. She studied anthropology in college and earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Washington. Toska teaches about a variety of topics, including criminology and criminal profiling, gender and sexuality, privilege and oppression, and health and well-being. She and her students have explored dystopias and utopias in many classes, especially as they relate to gender, race, and the body. Her students have researched, designed, and built 3-D models of their utopian visions in the forms of games, playgrounds, toys, and museum exhibits. 

Dr. Diane Bartels

she/her

My name is Diane Bartels and I’m a pediatrician In Gig Harbor, Washington (and Marc’s mom).  I grew up in Austin, Texas. I attended Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas for my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I then attended UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and completed a Pediatric Residency at Dell Childrens Hospital in Austin, Texas. After completing training, my family moved to Gig Harbor. We live on a 10 acre farm and have dabbled in homesteading including vegetable gardens (unsuccessfully), beekeeping (successful until they attacked me and I got stung 100 times), and (successfully) raising meat and egg chickens and turkeys and larger livestock (goats, sheep and now horses). We love to travel especially by boat and I love to read. I will be most helpful to your Utopia project with advice in public health and agriculture. 

Mark Friedman

he/him

EDUCATION

Oberlin College, B.A. 1975

Georgetown University Law School, J.D. cum laude 1980

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, MSFS, 1980 (Joint Degree Program)

Columbia University School of Business, MBA, 1986

PROFESSIONAL AND OTHERWISE

I am a retired attorney whose twenty years of practice encompassed a variety of legal specialties and practice areas, mostly in greater Los Angeles. These included commercial litigation; negotiating and papering transactions for corporate clients at a major law firm; acting as regional counsel to Mitsui (U.S.A.), the subsidiary of a gigantic Japanese trading company; and serving as the general counsel of Core-Vent Bioengineering, one of the nation’s leading dental implant manufacturers. I have lived in Port Orchard with my wonderful Aracelly since 2004, and we now have two Seabury kids, Judah and younger brother Asher.

Steve Plastrik

he/him

Steve grew up in Michigan, but lived in Japan, Switzerland, and Vermont before settling in Seattle. He studied Political Science and Japanese at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate and then went back to Michigan to obtain a law degree. Steve has worked in immigration law as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a Project Specialist for Amazon, and in private practice. In his free time, Steve loves to travel (which led him to a career in immigration law), go hiking in National Parks (he's looking forward to Joshua Tree in a few weeks), and play Nintendo Switch (Mario Maker 2 right now).

One of the most powerful aspects of having experts ask questions in person is the way that the students refined their ideas in advance of the presentations. I saw some students pacing in circles, talking to themselves about their utopias, some students gathering with others to hash out their ideas, and some students digging into resource and reference material. One student wrote all over the white board walls, and another filled pages of a journal. Students had a chance to develop their ideas in ways that felt natural and useful to them. They also refined them mid-presentation, adjusting language and wording as they fielded questions.

Hearing their presentations one after the other also helps me, as their teacher, notice trends across their societies and target particular instructional needs. After their presentations, the students are focusing more on using the language of the discipline to be more precise with their terminology.

Creative Freedom: The Independent Writing Project

During first quarter reflections this past October, many students chose to reflect on their independent writing projects. These self-determined, goal-oriented projects were also a highlight of most parent teacher conferences. For me, independent writing projects are the genius hour of the English Language Arts classroom. The students learn so much when they have creative freedom and a scaffolding of support.

Just before winter break, the students shared excerpts of their independent writing projects with one another in a coffee-house style setting, and I had the pleasure of sitting down to read their final, full projects over break.

Students created historical fiction novels, lyrical literary works, hero stories, humorous short shorts, works of science fiction, a graphic novel, a biography, a manual on bike tricks, a poetry collection, and a collection of photographs with accompanying writing. No two projects were similar.

While writing during their hour of class time each week, I saw students sharing their writing with one another, listening to each other's feedback, joking about the writing process, and engaging in the work of being creative together.

One of my favorite aspects of the project is that the students determine three major goals for themselves as writers that they can work on through the project: "I will improve at writing believable dialogue" or "I will try to outline chapters before writing them" or "I will practice self-compassion while drafting." Then, they work with me to determine steps to accomplish those goals.

When I returned the final projects, I met with each student, conferring about the process and about how they felt about their work, looking back on it now.

The students and I are looking forward to the next independent writing project, which we'll start in February.

The Mindful Pause

Someone slams a door. We hear the sound, and we react. We turn. We look. We might become angry. We might ask about what is happening. We may run. There is a stimulus, and in the matter of miliseconds, our brain makes a decision, and we react.

Mindfulness tools give us a chance to pause between the stimulus and the response. That pause can be life altering. Really.

Drawing from social thinking training and mindfulness training, we have been using that pause as a moment for values-based reflection before action. 

Here's what that might look like:

Option 1: RAIN - Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identify (Read more about this at https://www.mindful.org/rain-a-mindfulness-practice-for-welcoming-your-emotions/)
           -Walking through "RAIN" with Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird might look like this:          

1. Scout punches her cousin for calling her father an inappropriate and racist name
2. Recognize: anger, frustration
3. Allow: It is okay to be angry. She can sit with that anger. The anger is a guest visiting.
4. Investigate: Why is Scout angry? She loves her father. She feels that Francis is doing her father an injustice. She feels a larger injustice and is saddened and confused. She also hates Francis. She also feels the anger in her hands. In her shoulders. She sets her jaw.
5. Non-identify: Scout is not an angry person. She is angry with a particular person for a particular thing he has done. She has the power to decide what to do now that she has thought it through.
6. Scout w/ RAIN might not make the choice to punch Francis. If she does punch him, she is making the choice, not her anger.

                      

                  
Option 2: Stop, Opt, and Go





Parents and teachers need to model these types of mindful pauses for students to help them see that we don't always have it all together and that we have to work hard to decode our emotions and respond to stimuli.

A week or so ago, I asked the students if some emotions are bad. Some of them said they were. Some of them said they weren't. We are trying to help them move toward an understanding of emotions as data points: Emotions are our bodies trying to label a pattern of responses to a stimulus. It is more useful, perhaps, to put emotions on a continuum from comfortable to uncomfortable than to label them as positive or negative.

David Brooks has written several articles about emotions and neuroscience. You may find them interesting. Among them, is one where he argues that "work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions" (Brooks, The New York Times, January 2019).

Some of the most important work we do in school is about helping students understand what they value and how their emotions interact with their values and their actions. 

Here, at Seabury, social and emotional learning are not happening on the side of learning. They are happening all the time, not just in advisory or morning meeting, but also during English, Social Studies, Science, and Math--perhaps especially during breaks, lunch, and recess. 

All of our students are learning and growing. All of our students make mistakes and are learning from their mistakes. All of that is 100 percent as it should be. They are in the process of becoming themselves, and we are inspired by their journeys every day.

The North Korea - US Conflict Resolution Summit: A Social Studies Simulation

The students have been studying conflict resolution and peacebuilding largely using a curriculum developed by the United States Institute of Peace. That work has been supported by their study of current events and our work preparing for Model UN.

Several weeks ago, students completed negotiation preparation sheets, detailing the positions of the parties involved in international conflicts of interest to them. Using their research, new information, and a bit of dramatic flair, I developed a conflict resolution simulation.

Each student was assigned a role:
-Lead Mediator
-Senior Advisor to the Mediator
-US Lead Negotiator/Diplomat
-North Korean Lead Negotiator/Diplomat
-US Businessperson
-North Korean Industry Captain
-Chinese Diplomat
-South Korean Diplomat
-Japanese Diplomat
-North Korean Refugee Leader
-North Korean Liberation Leader

We completed the simulation in each social studies class, so two summits took place.

In the end, we had two very different results, but both summits were able to find resolution:

• In one class, the students used South Korea as a bargaining chip with North Korea to denuclearize North Korea and ensure the safety of all Korean civilians.
• In one class, North Korea presented a conflict resolution package that started a series of negotiations that eventually resulted in the removal of sanctions and economic support in exchange for denuclearization.

The students were thoughtfully engaged in learning throughout the simulation. They developed conflict resolution skills, learned about sanctions and their power on an international stage, learned research skills through the questions they asked and answered in order to develop and refine their positions, and engaged in dramatic play. 

Neuroscience at Seabury MS

Neuroscience

Why does the brain have grooves? Why does the cerebellum look like a tree? Why does our heart beat slow when we submerge our face in warm water and increase when we put our hand in ice water?

These are the types of questions middle school students in our Psychology/Neuroscience course are wrestling with. They get to use tools real scientists use to investigate the brain. They dig into the past and make connections with Renaissance Philosophers and Ancient Egyptian mummification practices.  

Some students love memorizing facts and others love illustrating their understanding with their artistic minds. Students engage in hands-on science and then look for new and creative ways to apply their knowledge. Experiences like the ones pictured below challenge them and allow them to use their gifts. 

Students dissecting a mammalian brain to better understand what different parts of the brain do

Observing electric potential of the heart and brain

The Mammalian Diving Impulse triggers the parasympathetic nervous system

Identifying the temporal lobe

Pointing out sulci