APES Calendar
 | Greetings students and parents,
I am delighted to be teaching at AHS again this year. I have been at Arcadia High School since 2000 and I have been with Arcadia Unified since 1999. I have a B.A. degree from Occidental College with a double major in Psychology and Anthropology and an M.S. in Biology is from Cal State University Fullerton. My thesis research looked at local medicinal plants used by native people of the Los Angeles area. I find botany to be useful everyday. I know how to identify many plants and can find information about them easily. I am a naturalist at heart and love hiking and exploring local trails. I struggle to learn the names and calls of the birds of Southern California. Audio learning is a challenge for me (evidenced by my difficulty in learning how to play the guitar!) but I am very willing to try if the goal (knowing the names of the birds by call) is appealing. I've recently taken up barefoot running and running in general and am currently training to run the Malibu marathon in November. One of my greatest accomplishments at AHS is the garden and pond outside E-2. It is a life learning laboratory and a work in progress. Each year students in my AP class and summer school biology class work on weeding, planting, mulching, design, and a variety of other practical garden based skills. Last year we got trees and shrubs in the ground. This will probably be the first year we get fruit! Last year I was also the proud advisor of the first ever Solar Cup Challenge team here at AHS. Our students built a 16 ft. power boat run on solar energy and raced it in the annual MWD Solar Cup. It was an amazing experience and we are looking for more team members to help us this year. If you ever look at the high school from google earth you might also see some solar panels on top of the J-building. Those are the result of a grant I was awarded from BP A+ for Energy program. Hopefully there will be more grant funding to come and I will continue to do my part to green our campus! To facilitate class projects (we do some unconventional and resource intensive projects) I am always looking for parents and community members to serve as mentors for environmental projects, architecture and design, garden projects, etc. In addition, this year I would like my students to make podcasts and videos. To facilitate this we will need video cameras (upgrade to the newer model and donate your old camera to our class!) and microphones (run around $30 for a fully functional model that will serve our needs well). If you are feeling generous please browse our Adopt a Classroom page. I look forward to an exciting and rewarding school year and am delighted to get to know you and your familes. |
