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Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Katrina Venters ~ December 3, 2024
PHS juniors took advantage of an unusual opportunity on Friday November 22: they travelled to Salish and Kootenai College to listen to nationally acclaimed author Robin Wall Kimmerer deliver her keynote address at SKC’s climate symposium. All students in English 11 have started reading the youth adaptation of Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which they will continue to explore throughout the year. Lilian Bisson, Misha Evans, Abagail Lei, and Alexia Wilson reached for deeper understanding by attending this event. During the keynote, students listened carefully to Wall Kimmerer’s words, taking pages of notes. Evans gifted Wall Kimmerer medicines she and others in PHS’s indigenous immersion program made. Bisson noted, “Robin Wall Kimmerer was very inspiring and wise. She told us that everyone needs a wise grandmother in their lives, and that’s what she felt like to me.” After the speech concluded, the PHS group got to meet the author, who autographed their notes. Teachers Amanda Walsh, Robyn Bishop, Katrina Venters, and Amy Williams enjoyed dinner with these students to wrap up the event. Walsh concluded, “Making personal connections with living authors adds a layer of authenticity and deeper meaning to any literature we are learning in school. Events like this help us make other connections with human beings from other classes so we feel like more of a community.”
Bringing Shakesepare to Life ~ December 3, 2024
Bringing Shakesepare to Life
Katrina Venters ~ December 3, 2024
Junior Cody Haggard ducks the imaginary splats fired between Dominic Venters and David DiGiallonardo on November 13 when actors from MT Shakespeare in the Schools offered workshops for students after their performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which over two hundred students attended. Freshman Maylee Clairmont observed, “I liked how all the actors had a connection, a friendship, almost an emotional connection to each other. You could tell that everyone put time into the performance and cared about it.” Following the performance, students in Katrina Venters’s AP Literature class enjoyed learning more about the connection between form and meaning in poetry. Violet Stunden, a junior, noted, “I liked learning about a new way that Shakespeare wrote his characters’ dialogue and I really liked the opportunity to meet new people.” Over ninety students participated in the afternoon’s six workshops, which covered topics ranging from set design to storytelling in drama. The English department sponsors this event every year, and this year English teacher Melissa Bahr applied for and received a grant from the Polson Scholarship & Education Foundation to pay for the performance and workshops. Bahr sums up the value of this experience: “Living in rural Montana we have very little opportunity to be exposed to live theater. The interaction between the actors and the students is what I love most.”