By Dylan Howlett
One Monday in September, beneath cloudless skies and amid seasonal fall temperatures, the Durham Academy Middle School came to life. It was, by every indication on the calendar, an unremarkable start to the week. There were no special events, noteworthy occasions or distinguished guests. But none of the classrooms across the sprawling, bustling campus bothered to abide by the constraints of uneventful Mondays.
In six hours, stretching from early morning to early afternoon, the teachers and students of the Middle School carried out a daily routine of dynamic learning in dynamic spaces, all of which reverberated with near-incessant laughter. That is, literally, by design: The look of The Gateway Center was always meant to reflect the fun and humor of the middle school experience. This day brought about a special kind of joy in learning: an international game of Simon Says, a raucous simulation of democracy, enthusiastic presentations about common elements, and mathematical fly swatting.
Welcome to the first installment of our Day in the Life series, a behind-the-scenes peek into an average day at each of DA’s four divisions. We begin with Middle School, where you’ll find the ordinary is inseparable from the extraordinary.
8:10 a.m. — Novice French
Martha Goodge, Arts & World Languages Center (AWL)
A standard piece of upright printer paper sits atop a standing desk in Martha Goodge’s French classroom. It faces every student desk with a friendly edict: Parlez Francais! From the moment these seven fifth-graders enter the classroom, they are required to do exactly that: They can get out of it only by asking, Anglais? But it serves as an infrequent reprieve, even for students who are only in their fifth week of learning the language. That dampens their enthusiasm little for a game of Simon Says — or, in French, Simon Dit — to practice simple classroom commands, such as “stand up” or “open your book.” During a partnered activity, as snippets of English drift across the room, Madame Goodge pauses them for their cardinal reminder. She gets two words out before a student raises his hand, knowingly, and points toward the edict: Parlez Francais!
8:40 a.m. — STEAM by Design
Karl Schaefer, Gateway Center
It’s a three-minute walk from the front doors of the AWL to the east end of The Gateway Center, where Karl Schaefer’s STEAM class has spilled through a retractable shop door and onto the sidewalk. Three students crouch over a drop cloth as they clutch spray cans and paint brushes. It’s not art class: They’re in the early stages of robotic design. “We’re trying to bring life,” Ari Patel ’28 says, ”to the painting.” Students have selected celebrated works of art — Liam Pickens ’29, for instance, has chosen Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” — and will eventually use robotics to create motion and visual effects within two-dimensional pieces.
8:45 a.m. — Sixth-Grade Social Studies
Mike Harris, Academy Road parking lot
Some sixth-graders recoil, and others gasp, when history teacher Mike Harris plucks a strand of hair from atop his head. His class has walked almost 4.6 billion years — the lifespan of Earth — in almost 100 yards along a sidewalk marked with cones and pieces of masking tape. It is a striking visual meant to answer a most counterintuitive question: For all that we’ve contributed to Earth, how long have we actually been on it? Students learn as part of Harris’s annual “Big Time Walk” that it takes nearly 50 yards to arrive at the first plant, let alone the first mammal or human. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth for the equivalent of several paces, a discovery that elicits surprise (“Wow!” “That’s crazy!”) from the sixth-graders.
The class has clustered around the “present day” marker on the timeline, on which every inch represents 1.3 million years in our planet’s history. Harris has already laid down a blade of grass to show that all of recorded human history has occurred within the width of that blade. Now, he kneels and places his detached hair on the sidewalk to represent human civilization. As students turn around and gaze upon the now-faraway cone that demarcates the start of the timeline, Harris smiles as he watches students realize that humans are, he says, “brand spanking new.”
“A gray Harris hair and a blade of grass,” he says to the class. “That’s human life on Earth.”
10:35 a.m. — Eighth-Grade Civics
Karen Ruberg, Gateway Center
“It could get messy,” Karen Ruberg says to her class — and, as is often the case with democracy, it does. Ruberg’s eighth-graders present, and eventually vote on, flag designs for the approaching eighth-grade town hall. The town halls, which are specific to eighth grade, were devised by Ruberg and fellow eighth-grade social studies teacher Austin Muraille as a way for students to “do democracy,” Ruberg says. And they don’t delay during the flag presentations: Some students lobby ardently for their designs, while others engage in a line of insistent questioning to discredit rival designs. The initial vote produces a surprising finalist from an emerging artist, and the outcome leads to spirited cries of disbelief. “Sometimes we walk out of elections and say, ‘What just happened?’” Ruberg says to her students. “This is it.”
The class soon transitions into a reading about the Constitution, and Ruberg has her students practice outline-style notes to prepare themselves for Upper School coursework. The reading offers a series of anecdotes, and oddities, about the centuries-old document, which at 4,500 words represents both one of the shortest constitutions in the world and the oldest-written constitution still in use today. Students are surprised to learn that only 33% of Americans can name the three branches of government. “By the end of this year,” Ruberg says, “I hope you can learn more about the Constitution than the average American.”
11 a.m. — Mid-Novice Spanish
Sonia Salas Chaparro, AWL
Salas Chaparro and her students have jumped headlong into celebrations for Hispanic Heritage Month. They’ve found a variety of ways to learn more about Hispanic luminaries, including presenting written reports to their classmates; participating in a classroom scavenger hunt (Busca a alguien que…); and completing an interpretive reading that featured achievements of notable Hispanic figures. On this day, Salas Chaparro’s students put their now-encyclopedic knowledge to the test with a trivia contest replete with a prominently featured buzzer.
12:24 p.m. — Fifth-Grade Language Arts
Avery Goldstein, Literature & Language Arts Building
Vocabulary instruction isn’t rote or dull in Avery Goldstein’s classroom, where her Language Arts students dutifully record the definition of 16 words that end in the suffix “-less.” Her fifth-graders are already starting to internalize learning styles that will suit them best in middle school: Each definition includes a photo or illustration and an example of a word in the sentence, all while Goldstein provides auditory processing in the form of personal stories or anecdotes. She includes pieces of herself throughout the lesson. Her self-described “boyfriend,” NBA star Stephen Curry, makes an appearance in effortless (“Steph Curry practices so much he makes shooting seem effortless”), as does Goldstein’s dog — her “girlfriend,” she says — in peerless (“Nellie, my dog, is peerless”).
The final 20 minutes of class features independent reading in which choice is king. Students sprawl on the floor, across tabletops — and beneath them, too — as Goldstein circulates. She provides individualized feedback in student vocabulary notebooks, and she checks in with students about their reading progress. It is a level of personalized instruction and intentional relationship that could safely be described, by any objective measure, as effortless and peerless.
1:30 p.m. — Seventh-Grade Science
Mike Schollmeyer, Gateway Center
Halfway through his lesson, Mike Schollmeyer has a confession for his class: He could have done things differently. In the spirit of having his seventh-graders learn about the four most common elements in living organisms, Schollmeyer could have delivered a traditional lecture. Instead, he split his class into four teams to learn more about the “CHON” elements — Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen — and instructed them to prepare group presentations. The result is an afternoon of student-driven enthusiasm that delivered essential content — nitrogen, for instance, is the most abundant gas in the atmosphere — and gave students an opportunity to refine their presentation skills.
On Altitude, a new online platform that several DA Middle School teachers are utilizing this year to track progress within Competency-Based Learning classes, students could find a spectrum of feedback, including a specific demonstration of proficiency: I can deliver a rehearsed presentation with a strong voice and consistent eye contact. Students are not merely tasked with knowing science: They are charged with communicating their findings to each other and, when necessary, a potentially skeptical public. And their buy-in is infectious. “If we have an opportunity to research and present again,” Schollmeyer asks his class, “are we all in?” He barely finishes his question before 16 students shout in unison: “YEAH!”
2:18 p.m. — Fifth-Grade Math
Jonnie Moorhead, Gateway Center
With two minutes to spare in the final academic block of the day, Jonnie Moorhead and her fifth-graders would have been forgiven had they decided to call it a day. They had completed a rigorous lesson in which they practiced identifying place value periods within decimals and writing numbers in expanded form. And they took advantage of the intentional learning spaces in every Gateway and AWL classroom: Each desk, the surface of which is outfitted with a dry erase surface, served as the canvas for students to write a seven-digit number of their choice with at least one decimal place and the same number in expanded form. Soon the room was abuzz with students filtering between desks and providing feedback to at least two of their peers.
But the room reaches a fever pitch in these final two minutes, when Moorhead brings the class to a whiteboard in the back corner of the room. She divides the group into two teams and plays several rounds of “Fly Swatter,” a game that requires students to identify the equivalent term for a decimal or fraction by slapping a homemade fly swatter — made, naturally, with a ruler — on the appropriate number displayed on the whiteboard. The contest is so competitive, and ebullient, that most students don’t notice when the game stretches beyond their traditional end time of 2:20 p.m. and into the transition to their next class. Only the sounds of cheers, and swats, can be heard through the room as other students gather outside the door, peering through panes of glass to catch a glimpse of the joy unfolding within.