Upper School Teacher Returns Where Passion to Teach Ignited

Peel banana, peel peel banana. Mmmmmmm. Wake up thinking that and you`d think the years of Chiquita jingles had gotten to you. But if you`re Upper School Humanities teacher Julia Griffin and you awake with banana chants ringing in your head (as she recently did) you`d have a smile across your face, recalling fond memories. When she was a senior at Harvard in 2002, Griffin taught literature at Summerbridge Cambridge, an afterschool program for low-income middle school students. It was an experience that quickened her long-held aspirations to teach. \"It`s a really great program in the layers of support that it provides for...teachers, who are starting out,\" she said. Summerbridge Cambridge is one of a number of Summerbridge programs throughout the country and globe that are sponsored by The Breakthrough Collaborative, an San Francisco-based organization that seeks to improve education opportunties of underserved middle school students and encourage and inspire young people to enter the field of education. The average age of a teacher is 19 and average experience is little to none. But the program`s model of using mentor teachers to walk high school and college-age teachers through creating engaging lesson plans and keeping order in rooms of raging hormones is among what Griffin values most--that and, of course, the incredible time she had with the students. \"It`s a really fun, high energy program,\" Griffin said. Case in point: the banana song, the milk song and a series of other chants and dances during daily sessions called Community Meeting that bring home the spirit, excitement and student-teacher camaraderie that fuel the program`s success. This summer Griffin returned to Cambridge to mentor seven social studies teachers for the summer component of the program, where she said she got to see an even better sense of the spirit behind the program. \"It was really, really delightful and a great learning experience for me...in forcing me to, helping me to articulate what works with teaching and why,\" Griffin said. \"...It was about what was going on in front of me [helping the new teachers], but it was also--in the back of my mind--about my own practice and the way I teach.\" Click to here to read more about the program in a Harvard Gazette article that features Griffin.