The Courtyard: An Upper Division Newsletter

Dear Garden Families:

I hope this finds all of you well and enjoying the week. February has brought a good amount of snow and cold temperatures, but at Garden we are still getting outside, embracing new concepts in classes and welcoming back to campus increasingly more students. This month also brings us a chance to celebrate Black History, send students to virtual conferences on global affairs, and reach out to those in need through service. Moreover, our teachers are expanding existing curriculum and growing it to fit the needs of students, who, despite the obvious challenges of the year, are learning a great deal.

To be at Garden each day is a gift for all of us. Being open has allowed us to inject a small dose of normalcy into the lives of our families. While the challenges of staying open and safe are far from small, they are worth taking on, for the interactions that occur in the classrooms each day help bring a light to students and faculty alike. We are so thankful for these opportunities. And for those students learning with us remotely, we thank you for your patience and your commitment as we regularly tweak our processes to improve your daily experience. Who could have imagined a year ago so much was possible across a digital divide? Thank you.

As we head into break, let us hope for plenty of time to rest, relax and re-energize. There will be challenges ahead but we know we can meet them and overcome. In the meantime, we wish you warmth and happiness.

Until next time,

Brad Battaglia
Upper Division Head
Director of College Counseling

Note From the Nurse

As you know, each week we hold on-campus COVID surveillance testing. Because of the volume of PCR tests from outside clinics representing students and staff across the school that we received this week, we did not hold on-campus testing yesterday. In fact, the "pool" was actually larger than ever this week. Testing continues on campus the week after break.

As we evaluate all of our other measures, we are also evaluating risk on campus after our upcoming break. Thank you for completing this week’s survey. If you have not yet competed it, please do so here. Our goal in all of this is to limit exposure to students and staff, and thus every family in the community, by understanding travel plans and reducing the risk of COVID on campus after break.

We again will ask any family traveling outside of the five contiguous states, flying, or spending time outside of their “bubble” to meet the following criteria before returning to campus:

Self-quarantine and go remote for 14 days from the day after you return to your bubble or
Self-quarantine and go remote for 10 days from the day after you return to your bubble with a PCR test administered between day 6 and 8.

We have all worked so hard and limited our activities, so now is the time to double down on our efforts. The bottom line is we need to remain aggressive in our approach to keeping COVID off campus and reducing spread when and if we do not. We thank everyone in the community for the sacrifices they have and will continue to make to achieve these ends.

A key tenant of our Strategic Plan is to grow the offering of Visual and Performing Arts across the school. Garden School is pleased to announce that we are officially partnering with Revolution Me Media Labs, an organization that seeks to bring Media Arts, Digital Photography, Film Making, and Screen Writing to teens.

Courses, offered by media industry professionals, begin in March, and Garden School Upper Division students will have special access to the first seats in these classes! Garden will offer a quarter credit for courses completed and grades will be added into GPA calculations. These courses are a great way to learn new skills, exercise creativity, and also boost your GPA.

In case you have not yet checked, re-enrollment agreements are waiting for you in your inboxes. A few new features include e-signatures, the option for tuition refund insurance, and an early signing discount for families who reenroll by the February 14 due date. We are thrilled to see how many families have already enrolled for next year. We have record applications for next year and enrollment contracts for new families have begun going out, so be sure to secure your child’s seat at Garden as we enter the exciting Road to 100! Any questions regarding re-enrollment or admissions can be sent to Kat Sullivan.

February marks Black History Month and our students across the school have been learning about some of the most celebrated artists of past 75 years. Of particular note, students have viewed the works of Jean-Paul Basquiat, a neo-expressionist painter who was the youngest ever artist to have their work displayed at the Whitney Bienniel in New York. We have also studied Kehinde Wiley, a portrait painter known for highly naturalistic representations of African American figures, and James Van Der Zee, a photographer, who was a major force behind the Harlem Rennaisance and photographed the likes of Marcus Garvey and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

As most if not all of you know, with the pandemic there hasn't been much time for hanging out with friends let alone clubs/extracurricular activities. It's been a challenge but over the past academic year we have been able to keep Model U.N. not only running, but thriving. I joined this club in ninth grade and have been the captain of it for the past 2 years.

Model U.N. seeks to provide students with knowledge of public speaking, world affairs, and allows kids to meet new people ranging from a 10 mile radius to all the way across the world. At the beginning of the year Mrs. O'Sullivan and I knew that we wanted to have at least one conference this year and we started looking into virtual conferences led by some of the most prestigious universities in the country. The first one to respond and allow us to attend was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who held a 3-day virtual conference starting on Friday, February 5th and ending on Sunday the 7th.

A few weeks before the conference, we received the topics and countries that each member of our group would be responsible for researching. The topics included the World Health Committee’s handling the spread of Covid19, and the Security Council handling of the Rohingya refugee crisis. On the first day of the conference, everyone attending logged onto the opening ceremony. There were over 300 students zooming from countries like Turkey, South Korea, Bulgaria, Germany, and many more. The keynote speaker at the opening ceremonies was Dr. Mark Esposito, a noted economist who taught at Harvard University, delivering his address from Dubai.

This was a great experience. We met new people and will surely be doing more virtual conferences this year.

Our current members include: Tsewang (junior), Rebecca (sophomore), Keane (junior), Gloria (junior), Anastasia (senior), Wilson (senior), and myself, Abba. I graduate this June.

Many times in math classes, the actual math you have to do isn’t the hard part. “What is the question asking” and “how do we know what to do next” are two of the questions I hear the most in my classes. My goal is to teach students how to think through each question, because I know that they will understand the math involved. Procedures and structure are big parts of students’ lives, but you also need to learn how to adapt on the fly and assess the information around you and formulate a plan.

My geometry students in particular have been learning and practicing these skills recently. They first have to practice drawing a diagram based on the information given, a helpful skill in itself that requires a student to pick out useful information from a wordy question. After that is the sometimes-unsettling part: what next? Students have learned to cope with this uncertainty, and to follow the information they have. I have seen and heard many of my geometry students thinking their way through questions recently, drawing diagrams on the board and asking each other what they should do next given the information in the problem. Class has become a dialogue, either between me and a student or between groups of students, until they arrive at an answer. " It’s a pleasure to see them progressing so well through this curriculum.

In 7th grade science, students have officially started the human body systems section that will see them through the remainder of the third quarter and well into the fourth. Students began with the skeletal muscular system and have learned all about how their body coordinates movement - from tendons and ligaments to the form and function of the spinal column, they’ve done it all! Next, students will be starting their introduction to the circulatory system with many exciting dissections to come…

In 9th grade students kicked off a psychology unit, learning all about mental disorders, their signs and symptoms and how to look after one’s own mental health in the process. What is a stress disorder? When should we seek treatment? What makes an obsession an obsession? All of these questions are being explored as the group heads toward their next exciting topic, health! 9th graders will be kicking off this brand-new unit here at Garden after February break. Students will be taking a progressive and proactive stance regarding their own bodies and health. Stay tuned!

As we evaluate measures to limit risk, we are looking at in-home cross over between siblings and family members. Please review these notes below.

When a sibling is in close contact to a person who tested positive:

It is disruptive, however, one way to drop risk factors across the school is to keep siblings of close contacts home in the event of a positive case on campus.
This means that if you have more than one child here and one was a close contact, the other sibling(s) do not return to school until the affected (the actual close contact) child is symptom free and has a negative PCR test on day 4 or later after the last contact.
For example, AA was in contact with a person who tested positive on January 15th, he can get tested on Jan 19th or after, and if AA does not have any symptoms, his brother can return to school in person while AA remains home for a 10-day quarantine.

Isolating at home:

If anybody in your household tests positive for COVID and cannot isolate, the duration of the quarantine for the whole family increases.
For example, if BB tests positive, she isolates for 10 days and, during that period, she is considered infectious as she may transmit the virus to those around her. Her sister shares a bedroom and the whole family shares a single bathroom and kitchen. Therefore, the rest of the family is a contact for the duration of BB’s isolation period and they begin their post-contact quarantine after 10 days. Thus, the whole quarantine period for BB’s parents and her sister is 20 days from BB’s positive test or onset of symptoms.

If someone gets sick at home:

If someone in the family experiences COVID-symptoms or was in contact with someone who has tested positive, do not send your child to school.
Isolate the affected individual in a separate bedroom, contact your health care provider, and get tested immediately if there are symptoms (wait until day 4 without symptoms)
Your child may return to school after negative test results.

As always, please send any question to Elena Sokolova if you would like to learn more or have a more nuanced question that we can address.