A new year of classes begins with new faculty in several departments at Harvard Middle School and the Bromfield School. The most numerous changes are in world languages, where three teachers are arriving in the district. Sabiha Madraswalla and Michael Poe will teach Spanish. Lisa Terrio will teach French with a section of Spanish. Julie Burton will teach physics. And Craig Robbins will teach music and be the band director.
Madraswalla has traveled widely in Latin America
Sabiha Madraswalla. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Madraswalla has brightened her classroom with the flags of Argentina and Chile, both countries where she studied abroad while majoring in Spanish at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. During her semester in Argentina, she enrolled with local students at university, so she was fully immersed in Spanish for classes and daily life. In Chile, she was part of a group of U.S. students studying abroad in a program that focused on language, culture, and social issues. She also took part in a community service project in Panama between ninth and 10th grades, after she had studied Spanish for just one year.
The European Spanish that most American students learn in school, Madraswalla pointed out, is just one form of the language and is actually the farthest removed from what they are likely to encounter in this hemisphere. Argentina has its own particular dialect, while Chile has a very different one with a distinctive vocabulary, she noted.
Growing up in Storrs, Connecticut, Madraswalla attended a high school with about 2,400 students. Her year of student teaching in central Pennsylvania was also at a school with more than 2,000 students. For the past year, she has taken part in the AmeriCorps City Year program in Boston. She described her role in a fifth-grade classroom as “tutor, mentor, and role model” for her students.
Madraswalla emphasizes spoken Spanish in her classroom because, she said, “You can go somewhere and use it.” Conversational groups and even charades help students master vocabulary, she said.
Poe is researching
Spanish cinema
Spanish teacher Mike Poe sets up his new classroom.
Numerous flags also bedeck the walls of Mike Poe’s classroom at Bromfield. In this case, the flags represent all the countries where Spanish is widely spoken, including the United States. In the classroom, wrote Poe in a letter with his resume, he wants to help students “use the Spanish language to engage the world around them.”
Poe, who majored in drama as an undergraduate at Ithaca College, is pursuing a master’s degree in Spanish language and culture at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He plans to complete that degree next summer with further course work and a thesis on Spanish cinema in a historical context.
Poe began his study of Spanish as a sixth-grader in the Bedford schools, continuing with the language throughout high school. He returned to Bedford to teach Spanish in 2014. (While in college, he also studied Italian and American Sign Language.)
Poe said his whole approach to teaching language is “communication-based.” He uses dialogues, group work, and in-class skits to help students become Spanish speakers. Referring to traditional homework with worksheets, he said, “That does not create a language user.”
Terrio has studied
many languages
Lisa Terrio will teach French and Spanish.
Lisa Terrio earned her bachelor’s degree at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, where she completed a quadruple major in French, German, religion, and comparative languages and literature. The multiple majors were possible, she explained in an interview, because she had a lot of advanced placement credits from her high school in Westford along with additional credits from a post–high school year as a student in Germany.
Terrio later spent her junior year abroad in Germany as well. She then earned her master’s in teaching French at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, with one academic year spent at NYU Paris. She has also studied Latin, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian, and she said she has picked up a little Mandarin.
For the past three years, Terrio has taught in a French-English dual-language program at the Carroll School, a public school in New York. About half the students in the program were native English speakers, while the other half were French speakers from France, Switzerland, or Francophone Africa. At each grade, students spent half the day using French and the other half using English.
Terrio explained that she wanted to move from the dual-language program to teaching French as a second language. She said using real-world tasks as activities for learning a language helps students improve comprehension and become confident speakers in their new language. “Overcoming that barrier to speaking is the most important part,” she said.
One of her goals at Bromfield is to start an international language club, perhaps focused on movies or food. She said that a club is a way for students to share language-related information and interests that might otherwise never come up in the classroom.
Burton encourages
hands-on physics
Julie Burton is passionate about physics.
Teaching was a career change for Julie Burton, who majored in electrical engineering at Loyola Marymount University in California. After college she spent nearly a decade as a systems analyst and a management consultant. But Burton was quick to point out that those jobs, too, involved a lot of teaching—training people to install and use complex new software products.
After having children, Burton and her husband switched to jobs that required less travel, she said, which brought them from California to the East Coast. She began substitute teaching in elementary school and discovered she loved it.
The biggest decision, Burton said, was whether she wanted to teach at the elementary or high school level. “Physics was my favorite subject in high school,” she said, and that was what she decided to teach.
Physics allows for a lot of hands-on learning, she explained. Among her favorite teaching tools, she said, is the Vernier probe, which lets students connect their physics experiment—for example, a model car rolling down an incline—to a computer that records and graphs all the data from the event. But then, she said, “Students have to be able to say what it [the data] means, to interpret it. …I don’t like to answer questions. I like to make them think more.”
Throughout the past 15 years, Burton has taught physics, biology, earth science, and physical science at the middle and high school levels in three New Hampshire school systems: Salem, Pelham, and Hudson. She also taught physics and physical science in online classes through VLACS (Virtual Learning Academy Charter School).
Robbins wants to link student musicians with community
Craig Robbins’ first instrument was trombone, but the Berklee-educated musician plays many.
Craig Robbins has a long background in music, even though it is less than a year since he graduated magna cum laude from Berklee College of Music. His first experience with music, he said in an interview, came when he signed up for fifth-grade band and began playing the trombone. He got his current trombone as a Christmas present in seventh grade. He was playing professionally by the time he was 14, he said, and has continued to play with area musical groups at a variety of events.
Robbins grew up in Uxbridge but attended Holy Name Central Catholic High School in Worcester for its music program. While there, he was president of the 100-piece concert band and also president of his class, as well as playing in an all-state jazz band. Robbins still plays in ensembles with his high school music director, whom he described as “always the best.”
While taking part in the John Philip Sousa National Honor Bands in New England, Robbins met and worked with Bromfield’s longtime band director, Tom Reynolds, who retired in June. Robbins also traveled to Europe twice on musical programs with the Sousa Foundation.
Robbins knew he wanted to be a teacher and studied music education at Berklee, where he received the Most Promising Future Music Educator Award in 2016. He did his student teaching in Framingham and Shrewsbury, where he later also worked as a substitute teacher.
Robbins also earned certification as an official in baseball and basketball. He recently went with a 12-and-under baseball team from Hudson to Cooperstown, New York, home of baseball’s Hall of Fame, where he umpired at the youth summer program at Cooperstown Dreams Park.
Robbins said he would like to link Bromfield’s music program to other events in town. “I’d like to get the kids playing in the community,” he said, “at the senior center or at local events.”
