John Taylor Babbitt '07 Memorial Field | alumni ... - Pingry School

[ School News ]
With Summer Fellowships, Faculty
Members Enhance What They Teach
Every summer since 1989, Pingry has awarded up to five faculty
summer fellowships of $5,000 each, based on applications that
are judged by a committee including the Headmaster and Chair
of the Board of Trustees. The proposal does not have to be
directly related to a teacher’s discipline, but it should contribute
to making the faculty member a better teacher. Each applicant
must have taught at Pingry for at least five years before the
year of the award’s announcement. These are the fellowships
that took place during the summer of 2008.
Language Learning
Aided by New
Technology
There are two aspects of this distance
learning which Mr. Vazquez
used his fellowship to initiate. The
first is an online virtual classroom
developed by the Cervantes Institute,
an international non-profit organization
responsible for promoting the
study and teaching of Spanish language
and culture; Pingry is the first
school in the United States to use
the program because it is designed
more for the European market.
During the summer, Mr. Vazquez
completed 30 hours of training so
that he could be approved as a tutor,
enabling his students to use the
course. It replaces a workbook and
all of the activities are connected
to the textbook.
The second aspect is Podcasts to
help students practice speaking in
Spanish. Using the computer program
Audacity in Pingry’s library, students
use a personal topic, such as describing
their best friend, to record an
audio file. “If they can use the vocabulary
in a personal way, they will
remember that vocabulary longer
than by learning a list or making artificial
sentences,” Mr. Vazquez says.
After the students record their files,
they email them to Mr. Vazquez,
who sends them back with any corrections
that need to be made and
the students re-record the assignment.
This enables the students to
access the files at anytime and learn
at their own pace.
Time in the Lab
Advances the
Curriculum
Science faculty member Tommie
Hata usually spends his summers
conducting research in laboratories
at The Rockefeller University, which
A Spanish student, wearing a headset with
earphones and a microphone, uses Audacity to
record a sound file, visible at the top of the screen
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the pingry review
Learning a second language is a big
task for anyone, and Spanish faculty
member Gerardo Vazquez believes
that a daily 40-minute class is not
sufficient. Instead, he is trying to
help his students become more independent
learners by providing them
with distance learning—technological
capabilities outside the classroom
to supplement their work with textbooks
inside the classroom. “The
idea is to use their time not just to
fill in the blanks in the workbook,
but to have a really meaningful
learning experience,” he says.
With help from scientists at university laboratories where Tommie Hata has done research, he has
developed a method for students in the Science Research course to isolate bacteriophage (a virus that
infects bacteria) from soil collected around Pingry. Senior Brooke Conti and Mr. Hata are screening
the bacteriophage cultures against potential bacterial hosts as they look for lysis (bacterial death)