About This Series
Our families want to know what’s new in local schools. So we’ve created the Our Students Have Class feature series. We will visit classrooms and ask educators what they are teaching. We will also ask students to reflect on what they’re learning and what it means to them. This is the second installment in the series. We focused on Advanced Placement (AP) classes for our first and second installments because a parent requested that we tell the community about these classes, and we thought it was an excellent idea.
When senior Lucia Tomaselli enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition class this fall, she knew that poetry would be a part of the literature they studied — and Tomaselli has always found poetry dull.
Happily, her teacher helped Tomaselli see the value of poetry. Tomaselli said that’s because the teacher doesn’t just teach how a poem is constructed but what it means. For example, Derek Walcott's poem, “XIV,”may be about when he was a child and heard stories. More importantly, it’s about how childhood is joy.
“It’s been fun to do instead of looking at a poem and getting mad because I don’t understand it,” Tomaselli said.
That’s the idea. Newberg High School Teacher Gail Grobey’s main goal is to not only explain what these authors intended but to also inspire an appreciation for literature (even poetry) in her students. She has many ways of doing that besides offering clear explanations of the material: uniting the right book with the right student, sharing tips to improve grammar, and above all, teaching students to be independent thinkers.
- On books: “Mrs. Grobey is a master book recommender,” senior Fred Sutherland said. “She recommended a book to me called The River Why. I would consider it to be the foremost guide for fishing, and it was a wonderful, wonderful read.”
- On grammar: Last week in class, Grobey was overheard saying this to a student about compound-complex sentences: “The semicolon is your friend.”
- On independent thinking: “It’s most important to me that they think for themselves and they formulate their own responses and ideas in response to the world around them,” Grobey said.
Whether it’s inspiring students to love literature, offering them grammatical tips or book recommendations, or taking the time to dream up their own ideas, Grobey is there to help her students. That’s what she’s about, and that’s what her class is all about.
“I really like Mrs. Grobey,” Tomaselli said. “She’s so good, positive. She keeps us on task, but she’s fun about it.”