Week Eight

This Week

Students this week finished up the movie Invictus, wrote an essay on racial reconciliation, and participated in a simulation whereby they re-enacted the 1986 Coca-Cola Shareholders Meeting. For more on the roles they played, you can find the simulation at http://southafricanhistorysimulation.wikispaces.com/. It was a fun experience that allowed students to see how individual, institutional, national, and international decisions interact with one another. Students also got to research primary documents through this activity, and one I'd encourage you to read is the 1986 LA Times article describing what actually happened at the shareholder meeting the students re-enacted.

Today students also had an opportunity to hear from our first guest speaker for the year, Dr. Jennifer Subban, a Wright State University Urban Affairs professor originally from South Africa who is also a parent of a DRSS graduate and current student. She came to speak to the students about South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, specifically about the progress and shortcomings since the end of apartheid. As someone who grew up under apartheid and continues to travel back to South Africa to take WSU students on service learning opportunities, she has a tremendous wealth of knowledge and experiences to share. We only wish we had more time with her! Thank you very much Dr. Subban for coming to speak to the students.

Thanks so much to Dr. Subban for coming to speak to all of the students today!

Finally, students all got to go to the Scholastic Book Fair today. Thanks to the parents who volunteered to help with this.

Students browsing in the Scholastic Book Fair room

Upcoming Week

It's hard to believe, but there are only four more days in this quarter! Next week we finish the quarter, and it seems to be going faster than normal. Our Societies in Transition unit may end up spilling over a bit into next quarter, but there will be no more major projects due before the end of the grading period.

I'd encourage you to check ProgressBook and look at this unit's assignment tracker to see where your son or daughter could still have a chance to improve their grade. If there's nothing left that they can turn in, a conversation may be necessary to see what strategies they may need to implement at school or at home in order to improve their grades next quarter. As a benchmark, the average class grade right now for all 93 students in my class is a 90.3% (A). The single greatest reason for any grades that are below this mark is failure to complete assignments, so please stress this to your son or daughter for next quarter. First quarter often serves as a wake-up call for many of our students who go on to improve their grades over the remainder of the school year.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please email me at arch.grieve@wright.edu.

Have a great weekend!

~Mr. Grieve