Meet the Teachers Lynn Hughes has been a teacher at the Miquon School since 1967 and has spent most of those years working with combined fifth-sixth grade classes or a straight sixth grade. As a classroom teacher, she is responsible for program in language arts, mathematics, and social studies. Computers have been an integral part of her classroom since they first came into the school in 1981. Students use them for writing and publication, mathematics, research, social studies, recreation, programming in LOGO and Scratch, data collection and analysis, and anything else that seems to be fun and/or reasonable.
Outside of school, Lynn sustains a lot of interests, some of which are related to education . . .
- She writes a regular column on middle school mathematics for the ATMOPAV newsletter, the publication of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics of Philadelphia and Vicinity. She is the editor of the newsletter and is on the Executive Board of that mathematics teachers' organization. She has conducted many professional development workshops and also led in-service activities for teachers in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey public and independent schools.
- She is an avid student of Irish history and the Irish language and often finds ways to share those interests with her students. She has brought back educational resource materials from her trips to Ireland and the British Isles which are important to her students' study of Celtic and medieval European history. (Like Irish books and art? Try Kennys Bookshop online and in Galway. ) For the past several years, the Miquon School has been the site of a one-day immersion course in Irish, targeted primarily at beginners. It is Lynn's opinion that fluency in Irish is like the horizon, in that it retreats from you as you think you are approaching it.
- She's a musician and performs with her husband Tony (the science teacher here at Miquon), usually under the name Poitín. They both sing, and most of their material is traditional music from Ireland. Lynn plays guitar, tin whistle, button accordion (try the The Button Box to find out more about this instrument), bodhrán, Anglo concertina, and (only in the privacy of her own home) fiddle. Tony, who is the science teacher at Miquon, plays guitar and English concertina. They play on holidays (including St. Patrick's Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Christmas Eve) at The Ship Inn in Milford, NJ, along with other bookings. Lynn often teaches her students to play pennywhistle and uses traditional music to augment her social studies instruction.
- She's a retired (read: impoverished) racing car driver, having held a National SCCA license and campaigned a Formula Ford not very successfully in the United States and Canada back in the 1970's. She remains a fan of F1 racing and sometimes teaches her class a vector-based game called Graph Paper Racing.
- She's a desultory gardener who wishes that she could convince herself that weeds are just a dynamic form of mulch. Students at Miquon all have individual gardens, and Lynn teaches her students that weeding is very important.
- She is a virtual "collector" of bridges and other interesting structures. Students in Lynn's class often build toothpick constructions as part of their study of triangles, making bridges and other weight-bearing structures.
- She enjoys computers as a source of recreational frustration and loves spending the weekend beating a new piece of software into submission.
- Before she came to work at Miquon, she was a systems analyst for an insurance company, working with IBM 7080 mainframes. An amazing storage device called a "disk drive" was just coming into use as she left the company.
- She put together the original web site for the school (now replaced by this much more professional site) and enjoys keeping her classroom website current, useful, and interesting.
- She's an avid reader of history, science, and fiction. One of the joys of her recent sabbatical (2007-08) was being able to sit with a cup of tea and a book until mid-morning . . . or midnight. That's a pleasure which is hard to sustain during the school year, as any teacher can affirm.
__________________
Jeri Bond Whatley is a highly experienced and long-time member of the Miquon teaching staff who enjoyed a well-earned sabbatical last year. She is working with both of the 5th/6th groups this year. We are delighted to have her spending part of her time with our class. Here's what she has to say about herself:
Jeri has taught at Miquon since 1995 in many age groups from 1st grade up and has prior experience in Special Education with both children and adults. Previously she worked in various administrative capacities for software, insurance, and law firms. She has served on the Miquon Board and brings her strong concern with equity and multicultural education to the classroom and to the Diversity Committee as one of its long time members. Her son Drew graduated from Miquon in the Class of 1999. Jeri enjoys spending her spare time singing and listening to music, reading, exploring the art of stained glass, and tackling Sudoku and jigsaw puzzles.
|
