4/8/13
On Monday I met with Mr. Jewitt during C Block to go over
what I will be doing in general for the immediate future and what the end all
goal of my project will be. We decided that the direction my project would take
would be very flexible and up to how things go as I continue with my efforts
and the idea is that I will try to get as much information about the history of
Manchester Essex Regional High School. I spent a great deal of time going over
the old year books and determining what information in these books was relevant
to what I was trying to do. Most of what I saw was actually not that important
and focused mostly on the students in their senior year (as it should) and not
on the school or faculty. I did, however, manage to determine what the last
principles were for the last 50 years as well as the last superintendents for
the last 50 years. I also discovered that the oldest documented school was
called “Story” the recent old school was called “Anchor” and I wonder if our
school has a legitimate name besides Manchester Essex Regional High School. While
I found some of the pictures amusing, I found this task to be for the most part
extremely dry and boring and almost lost hope in my SCORE project so I decided
to move on to the next phase of the project which is the interviewing of
different people in the school
4/10/13
I have now moved past the phase of simply researching old
“manuscripts” that discuss the history of Manchester Essex Regional High School
and moved on to the more interesting and perhaps more useful phase of my
project which is the interviewing of faculty and students about organizations
and their history. In order to get these interviews I had to e- mail the
faculty members I wanted to talk to before actually interviewing them as they
all have busy schedules and I only have one free block to talk to them so
finding a time to do this is sort of difficult. I did e-mail Mr. Murphy about
describing the history of Manchester Essex Regional High School since he is the oldest member of the
faculty here and would be able to give insight into what this school was like
decades ago. Our meeting is scheduled for the Monday that he gets back from
vacation. I then e-mailed Dr. Burgess in order to meet about National Honors
Society and ASR in order to get the history and achievements of these
organizations. Our meeting is scheduled for Thursday during c block. Finally I
talked to Mr. Martino, the head of the DECA team, about meeting to discuss the
history and achievements of that organization as well knowing that we have been
very successful in this field. Our meeting was scheduled for April 29th
after the tournament since he expects many of his students to do very well and
wants to have all of the potential rewards they will earn recorded.
4/11/13
Today I experienced a severe disappointment and obstacle
that made any meaningful and real progress on my project impossible, the
Internet was down. I am quite upset by this as all of the work I am trying to
do right now (planning meetings with faculty) requires the wi-fi to be working
and I am at a clear disadvantage when I have no ability to communicate with the
people I need to talk to or to access the website I need to access. Instead of
giving up though I decided to make the best of a bad situation and took some
old manchester history books, namely Jeffrey’s Creek and a History of
Manchester from 1660 -1890, and attempted to gain any information pertinent to
my project of obtaining a history and record of Manchester Essex Regional High
School. While the majority of the information I saw was concerning the local
economy and the real estate of the town I was able to glean 4 pages of
information from the History of Manchester book, which told me about the
establishment of the first school in manchester and its evolution over time up
until 1890. I also was able to obtain important names of people who were
heavily involved in the process of establishing a high school in Manchester.
Overall Jeffrey’s Creek was interesting and did have some good information but
not much that wasn’t already taken by Mr. Jewitt in his first sweep of the book
as the section on our school in the book is only about 3 pages long.
4/23/13
Despite the Internet connection still being down (which I
believe is unacceptable and quite frankly should be an issue that is solved by
now) I was able to go through the yearbooks and make a to do list of different
clubs that need to be represented on the Wikipedia page. Some clubs such as
green team and journalism already have a very sizable chunk on the website so
it was unnecessary to get a background report on them but others such as DECA
and drama which both have long and impressive histories that have little to no
information on their accomplishments. I feel as though this will probably be the
largest portion of my SCORE project, holding interviews with the 15 or so
leaders of these organizations and then editing what they say and integrating
it onto the Wikipedia page. I have begun a schedule for the people who I have
already contacted about interviews although it has been rather difficult to get
a strong commitment from most of them as I have very little time to hold the
interview (only F or C block) yet they have classes often during these. I was
able to manage setting up a meeting with Mr. Magers concerning the Green
Scholars program which is a unique part of our school that allows for students
to have independent projects aimed at increasing sustainability and awareness
of environmental issues, which actually is similar to SCORE in the aspect of
independent work regulated by weekly updates. I also had to reschedule my
interview with Mr. Murphy as he went to Washington D.C. with the middle
schoolers this week so now we will be meeting next Monday.
