I went to Thomas College on Tuesday and attended my first Dual Enrollment meeting. Some folks from my school and Thomas are meeting together on a program that would allow High School students to earn an Associate's Degree from Thomas College through some classes offered on our campus, a few on Thomas' campus, and a few online. All of this at no cost to the students. I will be teaching 4 classes next year that are Dual Enrollment classes, and I am very interested in College level work in particular. This is all very interesting to me as a result. Who knows, I might consider moving to that level on a permanent basis some day?
I also met with the Maine Council for the Social Studies on Wednesday evening, for our regular Board meeting. We discussed our plans for the Fall Conference. On May 30 we will be hosting our annual conference at the Morgan Hill Event Center in Hermon, ME. We are still receiving proposals form folks who like to present, but we will also have vendors set up and are very excited to have a guest speaker. Jenny Buccos has given talks nationwide, including TED talks. Her goal with her Project Explorer work, is to spread educate to all around the US about cultures in other parts of the world. She is very energetic and will be a great Keynote speaker for our conference. I met her through the Twitter chat on Monday nights at 7pm. Anyone can participate with the #sschat. This is all very exciting work, and keeps us very busy.
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| (Jenny Buccos from a TED talk) |
In my U.S. history classes, we are studying World War Two. This includes the causes of the war, and the impact of the War on people in the US. We looked at Japanese- American Internment, the Holocaust, and the use of the Atomic Bomb as well. It was a great week as I am very interested in all of these topics!
In Sacrifice for Freedom, we continued our work to plan for an assembly to honor Lewis Frelan Goddard. Our school's Leadership Team approved our proposal for May 13, and WCSH 6 News will be here to cover it. This is the announcement I sent to our Staff:
"Hi Staff,
We wanted to give everyone a heads up about an assembly coming up on May 13. The Sacrifice for Freedom class has received permission to hold an assembly on Wednesday May 13th from 2 to 2:30 pm for the whole school.
We have been working on gathering many stories of people who lived through the World War Two years and will be posting these stories on a website (link will be shared later this spring). Some of these folks were German POW’s in Houlton, ME, some were from the area and served in the war, some participated in the resistance in Europe. We have been working with a man who lives nearby, Mr. Goddard saw the media coverage from two years ago around the project we did on the Maine soldier buried in France. He came to the school as his brother is buried in the same cemetery. He has shared with us a scrapbook and sat down to do several sessions of oral history. Mr. Goddard’s brother, Lewis Frelan Goddard, was a First Sergeant in the US Army during World War Two and a member of the Highly secret Operation Jedburgh. His “Team Ivor” parachuted into France in August of 1944. Goddard was killed while parachuting in. His body was recovered by locals in a small town and they hid him from the Nazi’s. This story is documented in the scrapbook and was learned by Mr. Goddard when he traveled to France in the 1970’s and met some of the veterans of the French Resistance.
So moved by this story, we have received permission from the Superintendent to erect a permanent monument here on school grounds to Lewis Frelan Goddard and the sacrifice he made. We are still working on getting the small monument constructed, but the plan is for it to include a hawk and a small plaque with basic information about Lewis Goddard.
So we are very excited about this as well! I will be blogging about it and posting links to our website and any news coverage! Now for a nice week off to get rested for the last 6 weeks of the school year!
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