What do you need to know in order to narrate a story or talk about important events in history? Spanish II continues the general introduction to Spanish by focusing on the main past tenses. Students practice listening, speaking, writing, and reading Spanish in the context of engaging real world topics and applications of Spanish. This…
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“I hate you, Mr. Doerksen.” When spoken by a student to a teacher, those words can go in a lot of different directions! Not all the possibilities are as bad as they seem. The student’s squinting eyes and sly grin looking past her classmates down the the table to where I sat suggested her meaning…
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In Law & Government, students learn to argue — the productive way. During the first portion of this class we practiced good argumentation and persuasion, then spent some time learning about the U.S. judicial system. All this knowledge and practice prepared these students to become the inaugural Waterloo Mock Trial Team! Although the class is…
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To many people, “rhetoric” is a dirty word, but to the RHE 306 students, it’s a flexible tool for persuasion. In this dual enrollment course created by the University of Texas at Austin, RHE 306 students have learned the fundamentals of argumentation: mapping the stakeholders and positions in a controversy that is important to Texans, taking a position…
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Raise your hand if you enjoy doing things that have no meaning… Now a show of hands if you enjoy showing off something you are proud of? WATERLOO’S 2021 FALL STUDENT SHOWCASE We just wrapped up our first term of classes with a showcase of student learning. Students in each class presented and showed off…
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Whether you’re creating it or using it, data surrounds our everyday lives. How can data be analyzed to tell a story? How can we use data to form a prediction or describe patterns? How can we make sure a data set is valid and does not display bias? Our data science students addressed these essential…
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Facebook is getting a lot of attention these days…for how they keep our attention. While the social and political implications of what platforms do and don’t do is very important, the story also draws attention to… attention. Attention is a finite resource—we can ‘spend’ it or ‘invest’ it—but we do not get more of it. (ADD and ADHD…
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I was in Atlanta recently at an education conference and a colleague who I’d not seen since we had started Waterloo wanted an update on how we were doing. Being an educator he asked an important question, “How do you know what you are doing is working?” So I shared with him one of the…
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The pandemic has disrupted a lot, right? A lot in the workplace, and a lot in schools. And, when things get stirred up, we notice status quo features of life, school, or work we had not seen before. They were always there, but once we see them in the light, we realize—that’s not a feature, that’s a…
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We started off the 2021-2022 school year strong with an ice cream social! Find out from students and teachers all the things they are excited for in a new year at Waterloo School Austin.
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