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August 26, 2004
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August 26, 2004 |
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New school year brings new staff
This year four new staff members are joining McKinney Middle School and Yellow Springs High School: English teacher Desiree Nickell, special education teacher David Johnston, chemistry teacher Fred Kingrey and administrative assistant Amy Gravel. Desiree Nickell For Desiree Nickell, teaching is much more than a job. It’s her passion, what she most enjoys thinking about, talking about and reading about. “Education is my hobby as well as my work,” she said. “It’s where I find my joy.” Yellow Springs High School’s new English teacher, she replaces teacher Mary McDonald, who retired last year. Nickell will teach English to freshmen and juniors, while Elizabeth Lutz will teach sophomores and seniors, plus A.P. classes. Nickell said she’s delighted to be joining a team that includes Aurelia Blake, the McKinney language arts teacher, and Lutz, both of whom, along with Nickell, received teaching certificates through Antioch University McGregor and thus share a “philosophical foundation” for their work. “All three of us are equally enthused about education,” Nickell said. “They’re both dynamic teachers and I’m happy to be in the mix.” For the past seven years, Nickell has taught English, including A.P. and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses, at Meadowdale High School in Dayton. Previously, she worked as the executive director of the Miami Valley Literacy Council in Dayton and the supervisor of the Writing Center at Wright State. She also has taught at the college level. While Nickell enjoyed her work and her students at Meadowdale, she said the long commute from her Yellow Springs home grew wearing, and she’s grateful for the chance to work in the village. Although teaching an African-American student body at an urban high school might seem considerably different from teaching a diverse student body at a small-town school, Nickell said she expects the similarities between the jobs to outweigh the differences. “I had caring parents there and I will have them here,” she said. “The kids at Meadowdale were creative and ambitious, and Yellow Springs kids are as well.” This summer Nickell has kept busy reading and rereading the literature she’ll assign to her students, including, for freshmen, To Kill A Mockingbird, Antigone, Romeo and Juliet and Kindred and, for juniors, Siddhartha, Nectar in a Sieve, Like Water for Chocolate, Macbeth and Metamorphosis. Nickell plans to use a workshop format in most classes, during which students will work independently or in small groups two days a week on reading and two days a week on writing, and as a large group one day a week. Each reading class will begin with a “mini-lesson” on assigned material, and writing classes will begin with a writing prompt. Nickell plans to use a “multi-genre approach” to writing, she said, so that students may choose from a variety of creative and analytical writing genres. Her goal, Nickell said, is to meet students’ needs and to spark their enthusiasm for reading and writing. “I’ll be trying to find the books they like and the writing assignments that get them excited,” she said. Nickell will likely keep her classroom open to students during lunchtime, as she did at Meadowdale. She wants to offer students a place to hang out and, most of all, she enjoys their company. Nickell and her husband, Ellis Jacobs, who works as an attorney in Dayton, have a son, Sam Jacobs, a sophomore at Ohio University. “In Yellow Springs, kids can put teachers through the test” in their first year, she said. “But I’m ready. I’m not going anywhere.”
David Johnston What interests David Johnston the most about his new position as an intervention specialist at YSHS and McKinney is the challenge of finding his students’ strengths and constructing a bridge between those strengths and the curriculum they are studying. Johnston started working as a special education aide at Mills Lawn four years ago while he finished graduate degrees in sports medicine and massage therapy. But he was so impressed with the school’s staff and found teaching so rewarding that he switched gears and got a master’s degree in special education from Antioch McGregor. Though this is his first assignment teaching middle school and high school students, the hallways and classrooms of the buildings are familiar stomping grounds for Johnston, who graduated from YSHS in 1992. After serving as an assistant track coach at YSHS and McKinney since 1997 and teaching at Mills Lawn, he already knows many of the students he will be working with this year. Trained as a special education teacher in grades K–12, Johnston will spend this school year as a mild to moderate intervention specialist helping students with different types of learning disabilities and medical impairments. He said he anticipates that he will spend most of his time with students who have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, a general diagnosis for people needing various kinds of educational support. There are 50 students in the Independent Education Program at YSHS and McKinney, to which a team of four teachers are assigned. Johnston will work with Linda Sikes, Carlos Norman and Pam Conine, who is also Johnston’s mentor for the year. Though Johnston, 30, now lives in Dayton, he said he wanted to stay in the Yellow Springs school district because of the freedom afforded to teachers to fashion a curriculum that fits each student. Rather than handing his students a book designed generically for any student no matter their strengths and affinities, he hopes to design course work that plays to his students’ strengths and interests. “Here I’m able to do things the way you see is going to work best for the student. It’s using different means to get from point A to point B,” he said. Johnston said he enjoys trying to figure out ways to help students who don’t learn through traditional channels. “It’s a big puzzle to focus on an individual student and learn how that child works, then take what they need to be learning and meet the child where they are,” he said.
Fred Kingrey Retirement or no retirement, what chemistry teacher Fred Kingrey wants to do is teach. Kingrey has had a long career in education. Since 1963 he has spent a year teaching physics and geology at Stebbins Junior High, four years at Fairborn High School and 35 at Kettering Fairmont High School, during which he also taught at Sinclair Community College and Wright State. He has had so much success convincing students of all ages that science is fun that he convinced himself that all he wants to do is keep on teaching. After 40 years of life in the field, Kingrey has answers about teaching. “I subscribe to Aristotle’s philosophy that you can’t teach students anything, you can only help them to find the information within themselves,” he said. “You lay out the fundamentals, and they apply it and internally make the unique discoveries we’re trying to teach them.” Kingrey likes watching that process of discovery in others and thinks YSHS students will be receptive and ready to grow. Though certified to teach chemistry, Kingrey has never taught the subject. He spent his time at Fairmont teaching physics, A.P. physics and geology and kept to those fields as an adjunct professor in higher education. But general principles of physics and math, such as the gas laws and kinetic molecular theory, can be applied to chemistry, he said. And after spending the summer reading chemistry textbooks, he said he is excited by the new challenge of teaching different material. Kingrey has four courses this year: a freshman triad course split equally between chemistry, physics and general science; general chemistry for sophomores and juniors; A.P. chemistry; and chemistry in the community, or chem com. In all of his courses, he hopes to be able to generate excitement through demonstrations and labs that show the application of the material students are learning, he said. He wants the chem com course to be centered on a fictitious town on the Snake River in which students will use chemical principles to investigate what is causing the fish to die and decide whether the town would be better off with an aluminum factory or a phosphate plant. “The mind has to be receptive, and generating curiosity is the way to do it,” he said. “A picture is worth a thousand words, and a lab is worth a thousand pictures.” Kingrey also hopes to start a ski club or a chess club, such as the one he advised at Fairmont that won a national championship over a decade ago. He would also consider leading summer field trips to far-off places, perhaps like the trips he led to Alaska, Newfoundland, Hawaii and the Bahamas. Kingrey recognizes his strength in teaching and is consummately devoted to his students, perhaps one reason he has been so successful in the classroom, he said. “Kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” he said. “We’re going to get these kids stirred up in chemistry.”
Amy Gravel Amy Gravel has 19 years of secretarial experience, and her favorite work environment is not the business world, but education. That’s why after spending the previous five years at home with her daughter, she wanted to work again in a school system. It’s also why she’s excited to be the new administrative assistant at McKinney and YSHS. “I get a lot of pride working in education, having a hand in it some way,” she said in an interview last week at YSHS. “You feel — it sounds like a cliché — you feel like you’re making a difference in kids’ lives,” Gravel said. “It’s an investment in their lives rather than an organization,” she added. Gravel, whose name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, is working in the main office at YSHS and McKinney along side Sue Smart, who oversees attendance, among other responsibilities. Gravel’s duties include assisting Principal John Gudgel, purchasing and managing the schools’ 53 budgets for teachers and myriad activities. Gravel will also coordinate the creation of a new school directory for grades 7 through 12. The directory is being sponsored by the YSHS PTO. The purchasing process, which Gravel said will take up most of her time, includes seven steps. Though Gravel is not responsible for allocating funds (that falls on Gudgel or the school board office), she must turn requests into purchase orders, make the orders, check in items as they arrive at school and release the purchase order so it can be paid. During her professional career, Gravel said, she has held various secretarial positions, including at several businesses. She worked for three and a half years as a secretary in the Xenia Board of Education office, assisting three departments, buildings and grounds, cafeteria and student services. Secretaries are the “ones who keep a place running,” she said. They also set the tone in the workplace, Gravel said, noting that she will bring a “positive attitude” to McKinney and YSHS. People who don’t have good attitudes about their jobs bring everyone at work down, she said. Gravel and her husband, Neil Gravel, a carpenter who is studying nursing at Sinclair Community College, have been married for 10 years and live in Xenia. They have three children, Joel, 14, Aaron, 8, and Joanna, 5. So far, Gravel, whose first day on the job was Aug. 2, is enjoying working in Yellow Springs. She noted, for instance, that when she has to go to the school board office she will walk downtown to get lunch. “I like the businesses of downtown, everybody walking around and being friendly,” she said. “It seems like so many downtowns, regardless of the size of the city, they die. That has not happened to Yellow Springs.” |
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