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Welcome to the first issue of DCI's high school student newspaper!
Logo by Christopher Dunlop, Class of 2026
Meet DCI’s Interim Executive Director, Michael Rosskamm!
Meet DCI’s Interim Executive Director, Michael Rosskamm!
What impact does Mr. Rosskamm hope to have on the DCI community? What is he excited about at DCI? What exactly does an executive director do? What kitchen utensil would Mr. Rosskamm describe himself as? Find out the answers and more in this article!
By Naama Brown, Class of 2023
November 21st, 2022
I recently had the chance to chat with DCI’s interim Executive Director, Michael Rosskamm. Mr. Rosskamm grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, as one of four brothers. His grandparents immigrated from Europe to escape the Holocaust, giving his family an “immigrant mentality” that stuck with him. When he was a student, math and science came quickly to him, but writing was a struggle. He says, "I can connect with students who felt that they were good in school and I can also connect with students who felt like they were overwhelmed in school.” Mr. Rosskamm is a graduate of Princeton University and Northwestern University and has come to DCI after most recently working at a charter school in Brooklyn, New York for eleven years.
I asked Mr. Rosskamm about what makes him passionate about education. He told me that the fact that the path to education is not equitably available, along with his love of working with kids, has “set me on a path to be an educator to try to address the systemic inequality and inequity in our society.” His experiences in education, both positive and negative, have shown him that “our actions really matter as educators. Even though sometimes students don’t love it, it’s our obligation to push and to make sure that we’re doing right by students not just right now, but for their futures as well.” Mr. Rosskamm is very excited to be at DCI and recognizes it as a school with an “aspiration of inclusion.” He values the unique opportunity that DCI has to “show how [conversation across difference] can be done both in the way our community interacts and in how we can be successful in setting students and staff up to thrive.”
Many DCI students don’t know what an executive director does, and it can sometimes seem like a scary title, although Mr. Rosskamm disagrees. He explained to me some of the things that he does on a day-to-day basis, including collaborating with principals, making sure that the building is set up correctly, paying the bills, and most importantly, making sure that students and staff are set up for success. He said that “there are a lot of different pieces to make sure that the organization is running well, both the things that you see in a classroom, but also the behind-the-scenes things to make sure that everything is in order for school to happen.”
This year at DCI, there have been some policy changes that many students have taken note of. Mr. Rosskamm said that he appreciates that “there is a recognition that this organization is trying to set students up for success, and while students might not always 100% agree with all of the rules or policies, there is this understanding of ‘we’re in this community together and we’re trying to figure it out collectively’ and I just really appreciate that vibe.”
Lastly, I asked Mr. Rosskamm what kitchen utensil he would be and why. His response was: “I’m a spoon because I’m very practical. I’m not always the perfect utensil for the job, but I can usually get it done.”
Mr. Rosskamm wants you to know that “I have a lot of gratitude for the students of DCI. I feel that the last two years have been really hard for a lot of different people, and the energy from the students this year has been really positive, productive and supportive.” If you pass Mr. Rosskamm in the DCI halls, make sure to say hello and get to know our interim Executive Director!
A look into DCI’s Baking Club - Leading Youth Towards Autonomy and Independence
A look into DCI’s Baking Club - Leading Youth Towards Autonomy and Independence
By Melanie Delfosse, Class of 2024
Photographs by Grace Gavin, Class of 2024
Edited by Naama Brown, Class of 2023
December 6th, 2022
DCI's Baking Club is a weekly middle school club where students bake different desserts each week. Besides the basic benefit of getting a dessert each week, Baking Club encourages autonomy, independence, and leadership in a small, safe group setting. Dish washing, measuring ingredients, basic fractions - usually taught in a Home Ec class, students learn these skills here and can bring them home and use them in their everyday life. The club “sells out” quickly, with the parents reserving all the spots around thirty minutes after registration opens.
Students in the Baking Club were interviewed while they waited for their desserts to bake- of course, after they cleaned their workspace and dishes. They were asked questions about why they joined the baking club, what they enjoyed about it, what their favorite dessert they’ve made has been *spoiler alert: most people liked the drop strawberry shortcake, which we’ve included a recipe to*, and more!
So, just how was the Baking Club started? Well, Baking Club was actually started by a current administrator, Señor Long, in the old DCI building. According to him, “When DCI first started, teachers were required to do one ACE activity every quarter. I started Baking Club when we got access to an oven. A lot of ACE activities are driven by what teachers are good at and love to do, and because I bake a lot, I thought it would be fun to do with students”.
Furthermore, the club has evolved since starting in 2014: at first, they were in a small kitchenette in the old building - then, in the new building, they had an oven! Problem was it would malfunction from time to time. Now, the food lab has three functioning ovens, allowing all the student groups to make their own desserts. What’s more, the club has grown: going from ten students to now twenty. The club also meets multiple times a week, with different teachers and students on each day. Currently, Ms. Wright leads on Tuesdays while Señor Long leads on Thursdays. The different teachers try different teaching styles: Ms. Luisa, our director of operation and a former Baking Club leader, had all the students work together to make a dessert. Currently, Señor Long has the students split into different groups and lead themselves into making desserts. The recipes are easily separated, and high school students also help the students learn some of the basic skills of measuring and melting ingredients.
For baking club students, their two biggest difficulties are cleaning dishes and working with others. One student says “We also need to make sure that people are washing dishes correctly because some people will only clean their dishes partially”. Another says that splitting up food as a group can: “cause arguments and conflict”. Being able to compromise and “take turns on doing the bad jobs” is also a difficulty during baking club. All these different challenges help the students learn the basic skills of collaboration and compromise, not to mention basic dish cleaning skills.
Students also say they enjoy "baking with [their] friends", "[learning] how to bake and see[ing] what I can do right and wrong", and "learning about the different recipes" - and of course, they all enjoy the freshly baked food or dessert at the end. A few skills students have learned are: separating an egg white from the yolk, learning how to clean bowls and other baking supplies, and learning how to measure ingredients properly.
All in all, the baking club has changed a lot since it started 8 years ago. Even through the different changes and continuing the years, baking club continues to be popular and fun for all its members - and it helps students learn new baking and life skills and give them a sense of independence. For a sweet treat, Baking Club members shared one dessert that is considered the "best": Drop Strawberry Shortcakes. So, we’ve included the recipe below so you can try baking for yourself:
Drop Strawberry Shortcakes 🍰
Drop Strawberry Shortcakes 🍰
By Deb Perelman
Ingredients:
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon fine sea or table salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, cut into chunks
2 large egg yolks
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy cream
3 tablespoons raw or turbinado sugar
1 pound strawberries or mixed berries, hulled and halved if large
2 tablespoons granulated sugar, or more to taste
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice (optional)
1 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon powdered sugar
1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, granulated sugar, and salt until thoroughly combined.
3. Add butter and using your fingertips, break it into small bits, the largest should be no bigger than a small pea.
4. In a small bowl, whisk yolks with a splash of cream, then pour rest of cream in and whisk to combine.
5. Pour yolks and cream into butter-flour mixture and use a rubber spatula to mix and mash it together into one cohesive dough.
6. Divide dough into 6 (for large, 3 1/2 to 3 3/4-inch wide and up to 2-inch tall) shortcakes or 8 smaller ones. I do this by pressing the dough somewhat flat into the bottom of the bowl (to form a circle) and using a knife to divide it into pie-like wedges.
7. Place raw or turbinado sugar in a small bowl. Roll each wedge of shortcake into a ball in your hands and roll it through the raw/turbinado sugar, coating it in all but a small area that you should leave bare. (I found that the sugar underneath the shortcakes would burn, so better to leave it off.)
8. Place it, bare spot down, on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat with remaining wedges of dough. Bake for 15 minutes, until lightly golden all over. Let cool completely on tray or on a cooling rack.
9. Meanwhile, prepare fruit and cream: Mix berries, 2 tablespoons sugar (more or less to taste), and lemon juice, if desired, in a bowl and let macerate so that the juices run out.
10. In a larger bowl, beat cream until soft peaks form. Add sugar to taste, or leave unsweetened, if that’s your preference.
11. Carefully split each cooled shortcake with a serrated knife. Spoon berries and their juices over bottom half. Heap generously with whipped cream. Place shortcake “lid” on top. Eat immediately and don’t forget to share.
Thank you to the fall session Baking Club students (photographed and interviewed), Señor Long and Ms. Luisa (interviewed), and Deb Perelman for her strawberry shortcake recipe.
Labor-Based Grading and the Controversies Surrounding It
The labor-based grading system, which was introduced at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year in DP English classes, intends to reduce the impact of classroom inequalities on students’ grades. Despite these intentions, the implementation of the system has been controversial among students.
By Alexander Harris, Class of 2023 and Alyssa Toussaint, Class of 2023
December 6th, 2022
This year, the Diploma/Career Programme (DP/CP) English department redesigned the traditional achievement-based grading system with a labor-based grading system. Labor-based grading is a new phenomenon created by Asao B. Inoue, a professor at Arizona State University, as a way to prevent students being negatively affected by early educational disparities that are otherwise out of their control. For example, two students may attend the same university but one may have come from a private school and the other from a poorly funded public school with less resources and opportunities. Although they may work just as hard in class, one has an obvious head start. Nevertheless, the new system has been incredibly controversial among 11th and 12th grade students, so we interviewed faculty and students to learn more.
The labor-based grading system was implemented to combat the effect of bias on students’ grades and to make the grading system more objective. One of the main purposes of labor-based grading is to combat classroom inequalities; mastering standard academic English, which Mr. Miller, the DP coordinator at DCI and a former English and TOK teacher, describes as “the language of opportunity,” depends on factors like wealth and privilege. “The unfortunate reality is that mastery-based grading in an English classroom creates racist inequalities when the subjective standard of ‘good’ writing is rooted in a culture of white supremacy.” By reducing the importance of high-quality writing for students’ grades, “labor-based grading puts all students on a level playing field.”
Labor-based grading prioritizes the amount of effort or “labor” that students put into their work, rather than the quality of their writing. The intent behind this is to allow students from different backgrounds “to earn high marks when their grades are determined by the objective, quantifiable amount of labor they complete for the class rather than the subjective ‘quality’ of the work they produce”, according to Mr. Miller. Theoretically, by grading students based on the objective amount of work they complete, labor-based grading significantly reduces the impact that teachers’ biases and a variation of academic backgrounds can have on students’ grades.
In addition, labor-based grading can encourage students to take risks in their writing. With achievement-based grading, students could get lower grades for trying something new in their writing, whereas now, students have the opportunity to develop their writing skills without risking their grades.
Despite these intentions, many students oppose the new system. Keith Hipp, a junior, started an informal student petition against the implementation of labor-based grading. He collected 97 signatures in less than 24 hours. The primary controversy that the petition focused on was the requirement to complete “extra labor” assignments in order to move beyond a four on the IB scale. Many students find that choosing and managing extra labor assignments on top of their other responsibilities is much more challenging than managing the work that was assigned last year when the grading system was still achievement-based.
By openly prioritizing quantity over quality, many students lack a real incentive to continue producing high-quality work. Ultimately, no matter the quality of students’ writing, as long as they complete the assigned labor, they still receive the same grades. To improve their grades, students just have to complete the assigned work and a certain number of extra labor assignments, but their writing skills don’t need to develop over the course of the year. “[We] recognize it is a good system and many students benefit from it,” Keith explains, but “The only thing I’m looking for now is a real incentive to write high quality work.” No grading system will be able to motivate every student to improve, but labor-based grading provides no real incentive to improve their writing skills, whereas achievement-based grading encourages students to focus on the quality of their writing in order to improve their grades. Many students argue that ultimately, labor-based grading encourages students to value completing a certain quantity of work, rather than focusing on the quality of their writing.
Another argument against labor-based grading is that it should have been implemented earlier in the English curriculum. Throughout high school, the DCI English curriculum strives towards inclusivity. For example, we use a very diverse list of texts instead of teaching in accordance with the English literary canon (reading classics like The Great Gatsby or Moby Dick). The addition of labor-based grading is meant to contribute to that same purpose. By making grading labor-based instead of merit-based, it does not penalize students who have had less advanced educational backgrounds and allows them to continue to grow in the subject without that pressure. However, if the goal is to motivate students and prepare them for advanced writing, shouldn’t this process start much earlier in the Middle Years Programme and transition back to merit-based grading in preparation for the expectations of a rigorous tertiary education? Does changing the system so late into high school prevent students from preparing for such a future?
What do YOU think about labor based grading?
Reading is Not Studying: Here’s Why and How To Study Effectively
Reading classwork material has been a popular study strategy for generations. However, studies have indicated that this method of learning is not as effective as it is assumed to be.
By Lehana Daniel, Class of 2024
Nov 25th, 2022
Put simply: reading is not studying. You can read something for class, read it again, and look at your notes, but none of these will be effective in teaching you something. And neither is cramming for a test! Many psychologists and researchers have looked at students and studying methods, and compared them with examination marks, information retention, and learning. They’ve all come to the same conclusion: reading is not studying.
First and foremost, the question that needs to be answered is why isn’t taking and reading notes enough? The short answer is that it isn’t engaging. Simply reading or re-reading is not engaging enough for students to fully remember classroom material. Two psychologists at Washington University at St. Louis, named Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, who have been studying learning and memory for a combination of over 80 years, have come to the conclusion that re-reading a text gives you no more information than reading it the first time. After reading something the first time, they have observed that students often reread the material with a sense of “I know this, I know this” and skim through it without actually processing any of the information (Stromberg, p.7). In fact, when experimenting with the students at the university, the psychologists found that those who read a text twice showed “absolutely no improvement in learning over those who just read it once” (Stromberg, p.6).
Instead of using reading as a study strategy, try something you find more interesting. You could create questions and find answers to them, say the information out loud in your own words as if teaching someone, find examples of the material in your own life, or create concept maps or diagrams to explain what you learned. No matter what you choose, how long you spend studying and on what is equally important. Researchers suggest that you create a schedule and try to spend time on each subject every day. It sounds like a lot— but don’t freak out, it isn’t as bad as it seems. Time spent on a subject each day can vary depending on the subject. Maybe it’s solving five math problems for ten minutes, or spending fifteen to twenty minutes creating flashcards for what you learned in history. Either way, it’s important to do what fits well in your schedule without needing to sacrifice time for something important, like sleep.
It’s been said time and again that teenagers need sleep and yet are chronically sleep deprived. To understate, this is not a good thing. Sleep deprivation can result in a myriad of issues and is caused by many different things. For the purpose of this article, the main issue of sleep deprivation is that it causes people to have difficulty focusing. Difficulty focusing, especially in class, can cause some students to feel the need to study more in order to catch up. In the worst cases, students who are too sleepy in class to concentrate fully on the lesson sacrifice their sleep in order to catch up. All this does is send them into an endless cycle of wishing they’d gotten more sleep and refusing to get more sleep in pursuit of better grades which, as a result of sleeplessness, may never come. This is why it is important that students create study plans or at least have an idea of how to spend their time more wisely.
Many people suggest creating a study plan, and they don’t just say that because it’s the responsible thing to do. In 2009, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles found that spaced out learning was 90% more effective than cramming. Reviewing a topic one day, then the next, and once again two days later is far more effective than trying to memorise all the information a night before the test. Not only is cramming highly stressful and often comes at the price of good sleep, it only allows you to remember that information for a short amount of time. It may be good enough for a test, but it will not be good enough for a week later, or an entire class course the next year where that knowledge is standard.
Don’t sweat if organisation and timekeeping aren’t your friends —they aren’t everyone’s. Try to spend a bit of your time every day at least thinking about what you learned, what it means and/or how much you conceptually understand it. The important part of studying is considering and processing the material, not creating pretty diagrams or flash cards. The goal of studying is to have an understanding, not a product, even if the product is aesthetically pleasing.
So try spacing out your studying. As suggested before, spend fifteen to thirty minutes on a subject every now and again over the course of the week. Choose something engaging to help you better understand the material. Talk to your friends about it, make up a song, create flashcards to review, teach a sibling or a parent, even draw a picture about it. All of these things are excellent study strategies that have been proven time and again to be more effective than just reading.
Dr Danielle. 2020. “Effects Of Overstudying On Students.” Scholars Education. https://www.scholarsed.com/effects-of-overstudying/.
Stafford, Tom. 2014. “Memory: Why cramming for tests often fails.” BBC. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140917-the-worst-way-to-learn.
Stromberg, Joseph. 2015. “Re-reading is inefficient. Here are 8 tips for studying smarter.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/2014/6/24/5824192/study-smarter-learn-better-8-tips-from-memory-researchers.
University of Carolina at North Chapel Hill. n.d. “Studying 101: Study Smarter Not Harder – Learning Center.” UNC Learning Center. Accessed November 15, 2022. https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/studying-101-study-smarter-not-harder/.
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