About me
I'm Lorraine Theroux, the Manning's Science Specialist (a Boston Public School in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood). I'm in my 16th year at the Manning and my entire teaching life has been right here. I treasure teaching each and every one of the students during each year ~ I am fortunate to be doing work that is tremendously personally rewarding.
I mostly teach children but I also teach adults. I have degrees from UMASS/Amherst (College of Engineering) (Go UMASS!!) and Harvard (School of Education). You can email me: ltheroux at gmail .
My professional life began as an engineer (and engineering still informs my work to a great extent) and has followed widely different pathways. I worked in environmental engineering on projects with a focus on wastewater ("Love That Dirty Water") in a few places around the States as well as in Massachusetts, including storm water disposal in Boston Harbor. This work also took me to the Middle East where I spent several months in Egypt and Lebanon, in the early 80s. A common thread through all of this is using engineering and science and writing to help folks live safely within their world.
With the encouragement of some science-teacher colleagues and with the phenomenal support of the Manning's fifth grade teaching team in particular, I successfully pursued National Board Certification in Science in the spring of 2007. This status was achieved by a rigorous review of my portfolio which included over 80 pages of text, supported by videos of me and the fifth grade students working together, plus other documentation. I needed to describe analyze my work and student work. There was also a full day of rigorous essay writing responding to never-seen-before questions on science and also how to best support students in learning challenging ideas.
Working with Boston Public Schools has offered many opportunities to learn. One very dramatic one was a trip to the far North a couple of summers ago to participate on an EarthWatch expedition just below the Arctic Circle, in Churchill, Manitoba. The trip was funded by our branch of The Fund for Teachers. Churchill is on the west Coast of Hudson Bay - and on the tundra just north of the tree line. It is place where polar bears come off the ice for the summer, with a major denning area located nearby. I worked with research scientists who were collecting data. Collecting the data was fascinating while also becoming greatly routine after the second day. We cored trees and were very fortunate to find one of the few trees up there older than 150 years. In fact we cored the oldest tree found in the region (and teams had been looking for old trees for a few years). (We did follow proscribed methods so the tree should be still living, although it is overdue to experience a fire, the usual cause of demise in the region.)
The purpose of the trip was to work with professional scientists. I needed to be certain that the approach I developed for my program was authentic (one of my tenets is that the demand for hypotheses is way over-rated in most pre-college programs).
Thank You - to so many teachers. My work on implementing notebooks and on other "best practices" in education has been
improved and enriched by countless others who have inspired and supported and pushed me.
Most of these folks are either educators working in and around Boston
Public Schools OR are those who have presented at NSTA conventions.
Any and all mistakes/errors/omissions are mine - please email me to let me
know about them.
The corner photo: shows the sunset reflected in a pool of water (from a rain shower) and an old ship (a bit of technology). The exposed bedrock along Hudson Bay up there may be the oldest found on Earth - the rock in this photo is in the neighborhood of 3 (& possibly 4) billion years old. The polar bears are now suffering greatly since the ice season is shortening dramatically. The rate of change is increasing, as open water leads to even greater warming. I found that summer (in 2006) the Canadians have known and accepted the existence of global warming for over 20 years. My country (mostly) came to that acceptance just last year (2007). So, that corner photo has great meaning for me.