CABOT – On a chilly early evening in January, the classrooms and snowy sidewalks of Cabot School were busy. As one semester drew to a close students had prepareD exhibitions showcasing their work, and parents, siblings and interested community members had turned out.
Across the campus there was a lot to see, read about and hear.
In the shop space, students in Dan Parrella’s Engineering History course had been challenged to research iconic structures around the world and demonstrate how a small replica of them might serve a valid purpose in Cabot. Included in the project was building a scale model of the structure, pricing out its cost and preparing a presentation pitching the new construction to the select board or school board. The students’ choices were diverse, from a four–foot long Golden Gate Bridge spanning a small brook to a Great Wall encircling the campus, to a Torii (a traditional Japanese gate.) The students who’d researched that gate suggested adding it to the entrance of Cabot’s Elm Street Cemetery to both enhance the area’s beauty and to spur residents’ interest in Japanese culture.
In the science room, students in Thomas Dunbar’s Future Evolutions class created a chronology of mass extinctions across one wall, part of their larger research into genetics, mutations and population changes over time. In the same room students in the Waters of the Winooski class had built a variety of exhibits to showcase their learning about watersheds in general as well the Winooski River watershed in particular. Photos and macroinvertebrate (insect larva) samples documented students’ investigations of the current health of the river’s headwaters in Cabot, while models of septic systems illustrated human efforts to maintain that health. A table-size 3-D model of the watershed helped put the impact of the recent intense rain events in Cabot on downstream cities like Montpelier and Waterbury into context, while smaller displays explained why and how rivers change the course of their channels over time.
Students in Collin Cole’s geometry class had used a digital program to plan and model either their dream house or a narrative character’s living space. For the exhibition students had built intricate 3-D models of these dwellings, complete with an estimated construction cost for each.
In Laura McCaffrey’s classroom, essays written by students in her AP Language and Composition class throughout the semester were on display. Some were rhetorical analysis essays about both fiction and nonfiction, while others were argument essays about issues that interested the students. In the same room, students in her How Things Work class had researched the construction and operation of a specific tool, machine or structure of their choice. On display were models, diagrams and written work they had completed to demonstrate what they’d learned.
At 6:25 p.m., almost all students, teachers and visitors converged for the screening of two student-made films. They were the final product of a semester-long course in film making co-taught by Laura McCaffrey and Jonny Flood. Using their complementary skills in writing and filmmaking, the teachers guided two teams of students through the process of planning, writing, filming, adding music and the editing needed to reach their goal. One a drama, “How to Carry the Light Home,” and the second, an outdoor horror film called “Mourning of Silence.” Following the screenings there was time for the students in each production team to field questions from the audience about the challenges of the process and the particular choices they made along the way.
As the finale to an evening showcasing the wide range of opportunities for students to both learn and demonstrate that learning at Cabot, the high school band performed two numbers, assisted on trumpet by their teacher Jonny Flood and with a guest vocal by science teacher Thomas Dunbar.
