Jennifer B. Esty
I teach all of the science classes at the Polly T. McCabe Center. Our school is a transitional high school in the New Haven public school system, but our enrollment is limited to pregnant students and new mothers. The school was founded in an era before abortion was legal, when pregnant girls tended to disappear from school, frequently never to be seen again. The school's founders did not think that being pregnant ought to be a reason to quit school. Today our mission remains the same as it was then. Our core mission is to help the girls have a healthy pregnancy and childbirth while continuing their education in standard high school subjects.
Our motto at Polly McCabe is "Educated Mothers; Healthy Babies", which is why I would like a significant component of this unit to be teaching the girls about nurturing their children. While nurturing your offspring may seem self-evident, almost instinctual, it can be less instinctive in our population of young mothers. Many of our students did not live in a nurturing environment growing up and, therefore, do not always know what a nurturing environment is. Additionally, all of our young mothers are teenagers which is a difficult time emotionally even without the added complication of a newborn infant. When the occasional post-partum depression is added in, it is easy to see why so many of our students sometimes need help learning to nurture their offspring. So, one of my objectives in this curriculum unit is to teach our students how to interact in a positive way with their children while regaining some of their own natural wonder about the world. A significant number of the activities in this unit will be similar to activities that they can do with their children prior to their child's entry into kindergarten. This will introduce an early childhood component to this unit.
As I stated earlier, our mission at Polly McCabe has two parts. The second is to help our students be good mothers; the first is to help our students be good students. So, about two thirds of this unit will be about the ecology that is part of the standard high school curriculum. Because of the nature of our student population, it is frequently the case that one or more students in a particular class may be legitimately out of school for several weeks; additionally, we continue receiving new students all year, on average one every week and a half. So, it is imperative that the curriculum be written in a way such that students can do large parts of it on their own either catching up or on bed rest. Because of the continual variability of the class population, I find it more efficient to present whole units as one project or lab to be completed in stages. In this way, all of the students know where they are going and can work at a pace which suits their ability and energy level on any given day. Furthermore, because we take all pregnant students, our classes, especially in science, are more fully integrated than many elsewhere. By giving a set of tasks to be completed, I can more easily adjust things like the reading level of texts to challenge each student, while teaching all students the same topic.
Finally, the nature of our student body requires that field trips be planned more carefully than in many other schools. Destinations must be within a short bus ride from school or bathroom breaks will be required. Locations must have bathroom facilities available to our students and must be readily accessible to medical care if necessary. At the same time, though, our student population is a single sex one which leads to a different, less competitive, dynamic than typically found in a coeducational classroom. And, although class sizes change on a frequent basis, the classes are rarely very large, so field trips to sensitive areas can be accommodated more easily.
