While summer vacation is a key time for teachers and students to recharge their batteries, many also chose to build their knowledge through various workshops and volunteer opportunities. language and cultural explorations. Mr. Day completed an online professional development seminar through Washington D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library, entitled “Teaching Shakespeare IS Teaching Race,” considering ways to teach some of Shakespeare’s most problematic and emotionally intense texts. Meanwhile Student Support teacher Ms. Gott facilitated a virtual cultural exchange program that took place in Paraguay and Washington D.C. through Learn Serve International. She helped students in DC connect with students in Paraguay and learn about social entrepreneurship and business ideas. Her students created business plans to change the world through Sustainable United Nations goals on issues related to the environment. 

Many teachers were excited that loosened travel laws in 2021 allowed them to venture abroad this summer. Upper school history teacher Ms. Hamd returned to Lebanon with her husband to work with the preschool he directs, which serves Syrian refugees, migrant domestic workers, and underserved Lebanese children.  The program’s families faced challenges from Covid, gas shortages, lack of formal government, and economic struggles.  Mr. and Mrs. Eleby-El visited the Dominican Republic, where they went to El Limon waterfall on horseback, rode ATVs and visited former colleagues (Read more in last week’s news section below). The summer vacation also allowed teachers to engage in joyful wanderings, both locally and internationally. English teacher Mr. Baum drove 10,000 miles, covering 22 states in two months, from Massachusetts to Michigan and California. Along the way he stopped to hike among the great sequoias, see Crater Lake, and backpack on Wyoming’s Wind River Range. English teacher Mr. Day also took an impressive road trip, visiting relatives in Albany and New England, and later flying to Seattle.

For students who wanted to stay stateside, the addition of various virtual programs helped them build on their passions over the summer.  Junior Audrey Kim took part in an Arabic immersion, and junior Paulina Inglima did a virtual summer program focused on journalism. It is exciting to hear how students have taken the skills they have learned in modern language classes and other academic disciplines and started to translate them into meaningful ways to connect with the world around them.

Many students reflected on the last year and noted they had cabin fever after so much time spent indoors. For the summer, a number of teachers and students made up for this time with exciting travel, once the boundaries of international quarantines were loosened. Senior Luca Campanovo spent a month living in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, doing an internship, practicing his Arabic skills and reconnecting with childhood friends. He worked with Egyptian contractors that formed a collaboration with an Egyptian energy company to take on an infrastructure project. Senior Conor Macaloon also practiced his Arabic in Morocco, and senior Nalla Diallo traveled to Mauritania.

Washington Latin Class of 2013 graduate St. Clair Detrick-Jules was featured in the Washington Post (For a bullied girl, a book about beautiful Black natural hair – The Washington Post) and Washingtonian Magazine (Black Hair Is the Star of a Buzzy New Book | Washingtonian (DC) for her new book  My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories From the Sisterhood. The photo book chronicles the experiences of African American women and their hair, inspired by her younger sister Khloe’s experiences being bullied for her natural hair. Detrick-Jules is a D.C.-based documentarian, who made the 2017 movie DACAmented.