Watchung Hills English Department Supervisor Retires

You might say it  was Morris (“Morrie”) Kaye’s destiny to teach English—having come from a “half-English family,” one that had influenced him to study English and love the classics. And now, after 32+ years at Watchung Hills Regional High School,  as a teacher of English, and then as  department supervisor, Kaye has retired mid-year.

A “kid from Brooklyn,” Kaye went north to the State University of New York/Plattsburgh for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and taught  in New York State for five years before coming to Watchung Hills Regional High School in 1974. As a teacher of English, he taught” everything at all grade levels, but specialized in freshman and sophomore levels and in World Literature. In 1990,by now also equipped with a master’s degree in administration from Rutgers University,  he stepped into the post of department supervisor left vacant with the departure of Greg Manka, the department’s previous head.

During his three decades at Watchung Hills, Kaye has   also served as advisor to the senior class, the  Chess  Club and the student literary magazine Folio. From 1980 to 1990,  he coached in a variety of capacities as well: Boys soccer (assistant coach);  girls soccer (head coach), softball (assistant coach);  boys basketball (assistant coach),  and was for ten years head  coach for  girls varsity basketball, whose 1981  team won the Somerset County Tournament. With regret, his increased duties as department supervisor put an end to his coaching activities.                 

Over those decades Kaye also  saw many changes in  his teaching specialty. When he started, Kaye said, the English curriculum was very “predictable, very fundamental.” Although teaching the basics of grammar and good writing—stressed more than ever in the SATs and other exams—are still the foundation of the English curriculum, today’s courses  are  richer, more varied, more timely, in sync with students’  interests. Unfortunately, due to so many other distracting influences—especially in the area of electronic communication—reading does not enjoy the same popularity it once did. Few students will ever pick up one of the acknowledged “classics” on their own, so “classics” are still included in course work, and such reading is also encouraged through the obligatory summer reading lists, a practice which Kaye helped set up.Both as  teacher and coach, Kaye’s goal in preparing students for ultimate success in life was to concentrate on the fundamentals which would enable them to  grow as individuals in a society that’s always changing. He   taught in a   way that he himself would have preferred to learn—and as if “they were my own kids,” he said.

While beginning to savor life in  retirement and the prospect   of some future travels, Kaye is already mulling the possibility of “getting back into education,”  returning to teaching part-time, possibly on the college level.

Hills' Italian Students Inaugurate Exchange Program

In December, when Watchung Hills Regional High School teacher Rosemary Guccia told  her Italian students that she was planning a trip, they immediately thought: New York City; “Little Italy”; an Italian opera, or perhaps an art exhibit of  the Italian masters at the Metropolitan Museum.

They were taken aback when the teacher announced that what she had in mind was far more impressive: the first half of an exchange plan which would take the Hills  students to Italy  from February 16 to  26, and bring their Italian counterparts to Watchung Hills from April 20 to 28.

The home-to-home, school-to-school exchange is not a new one. In the past, Hills German students and Hills French students have participated in the two-way  overseas  programs which are so much more than the travel and sight-seeing trips schools may sponsor. In the very near future, before the end of the school year, Spanish students, too, will be hosted at Hills in the same kind of international exchange. For Italian students, however, this would be the inaugural experience.

Unlike most first attempts at such an undertaking, this trip, thanks  to the group leader’s expertise,  went off  without a hitch. In 1999, in her former teaching position (in the Washington, D.C. area), Guccia was contacted by the Italian Embassy. The embassy was looking for someone who would help them find an American school that would be amenable to forming a school-to-school relationship. The school was the Instituto F. Angelone in Terni, Italy. The connection clicked, and the teacher subsequently made two visits herself, became well acquainted with the principal and faculty,  and even taught a class there.

Terni, said Guccia, not to be confused with  the recent Olympic site Turino, is positioned well, situated in the region of Umbria, an hour northeast of Rome,  within traveling distance of many  important and scenic Italian sites. Under the sponsorship of the Italian Embassy, contacts with  the principal, Dr. Ermanno Scaramuzza, were renewed and an exchange coordinator in Terni, Mrs. Rossella Mastodonti-Scalise was appointed.

Students on the exchange trip were: Caitlin Bartolotta, Kristin Chapman, Chris De Cosimo, Kevin De Guilo, Laura Di Nardo-Smith, Anthony Di Nuzzo, Annie Ferreri, Luke Freel, Daniella Fusari, Jackie Gaeta, Stephanie Howard, Stephanie Jedra, Dana Nalven, Melody Safarzadeh, Marina Samarina, Gretta Spengler, Heather Viebrock, and Marielle Hartman.

Accompanied by Guccia and Vice- principal Michael Waluk, the eighteen students left JFK Airport on February 16, not without qualms and questions: How would they fare without parental presence or the usual group of friends? a different cuisine? language  barriers? and, most of all, living in the homes of students they’d only  just come to know via e-mail? These fears were “scary enough to hold back many from trying out this  first exchange,” said one of the group members.

In their ten-day stay, the Hills students attended school with their Italian counterparts, and, as a group visited many of the sites on the must-do list of any overseas visitor: In Rome, the Vatican Museums, St. Peter’s, the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain,  Spanish Steps; in Florence, the Galleria with its Michelangelo masterpiece, “David,” the  Duomo, the Baptistry Doors; in Pisa, the Leaning Tower and Cathedral.

But, most memorable, most valuable  was the experience of living abroad with a host family. Daniella Fusari, a grade 11 resident of Warren,  summed it up when she said:  “This exchange program absolutely changed my life and my fellow classmates’ lives. I found a new family, new Italian friends, a new outlook, a new place to travel... Trying to explain  the moments we captured in Italy, the people we saw, the things we learned, the reasons we changed: it’s just impossible to explain.”

 When the eighteen  young people whose families were hosts to the Americans in Terni become, in turn, guests of  the Watchung Hill students in the last  week of April, the inaugural round will be   completed. Obviously, the value  of an exchange program goes beyond practicing language skills, seeing the sights and sites of another country, trying new foods, forming friendships. It is an experience that bears repeating, in many places, for many reasons.     

Dana Nalven and Daniella Fusari throwing coins into the Trevi Fountain.

This is the Watchung Hills Italian class together with their Italian hosts.... photographed in the gym of the Istituto F. Angelone in Terni, Italy.

This is the Watchung Hills Italian Class in front of St. Peter's in Rome.

WHRHS’ Robot #41 Enters Regional Competition

The Sovereign Bank Arena in Trenton, so often the scene of athletic or entertainment events,was filled with cheering spectators on March 3 and 4th. They were not applauding a successful rebound or an especially intricate riff, however. They were acknowledging the ingenuity of high school students as they maneuvered  robots they had designed and programmed in the annual USFIRST Competition.

Twenty-four “Robo- Warriors”  from Watchung Hills Regional High School were among the 63 competing teams that took part in the New Jersey Regional, one of 33 such events held across the United States. Representing  Hills were: Robert Adams, Nathan Butler, Tim Clark, Garrett Dicken, Chris Dionisio, Scott Di Roma, Jon Doherty, Nicole Drasin, Brian Franken, William Hnath, Jon Hogg, Jacob Jaslove, Elie Klein, Deniz Kortan, Elias Landau, Sheila Mellen, William Merrill,  Brian Monetti, Ryan Oksenhorn, Alex Pommer, Reema Sil, Alex Sitt, Chris Thomas and Matt Tyler.

The nationwide regional competitions, which attract students from as far off as Great Britain, Israel, Canada, Brazil and Ecuador, culminate in April, when the top teams from each regional event come together, this year at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, from April 27-29.

Although the task of the robot changes yearly, the essentials of the high tech competition remain the same. USFIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science & Technology), an   organization founded by Dean Kamen, noted physicist,  engineer, inventor and entrepreneur in 1989, continues to be dedicated to increasing the awareness, appreciation and  value of those fields.   The organization draws up a handbook detailing the parameters of the competition, including the robot’s construction, an overview    and definitions  of the  game and its scoring, and emphasizes as well the behavior and demeanor of    participants.

An interesting feature:  teams work as allies rather than individual competitors. The 2006 competition,  Aim High, is played on a field with two alliances (the red and the blue) composed of three teams each. In moves akin to basketball and soccer, the object of the game is to attain a higher score than that of opponents by scoring balls in the center or corner  goals, and/or have the robots on one’s own team  back on one’s own raised platform or ramp at the end of the match.

Each match lasts two minutes and ten seconds and is divided into several segments, the  major portion of which consists of   tele-operated game play. The major participants (all students)  during any one match are the coach , who advises during the match, the “human player” who is the only team member permitted to enter balls on the   field and the  driver, a team member who operates and controls the robot.

The mandated size of the robot is 28” x 38” x 60” (high), and it may contain ten balls at the start of the match. Twenty  other balls are evenly distributed between the alliance corrals. Altogether, there are nine pages of instructions  governing  the play in the Game Overview.

The competition, however, is only the tip of the iceberg, the part visible  to those who come and watch. The real guts of the competition is the building of the robot, which calls for knowledge, expertise, ingenuity, imagination and successful adherence  to the many rules and regulations stipulated by the organizers of the contest.

 The official kickoff date for the contest was Jan. 7, 2006, when teams everywhere first saw the official documents. For six weeks, after school and on weekends,  members worked on their robot.  By Feb. 21,  all completed    robots had to be sealed, signed and delivered to the contest site. This meant a two-week gap in which Watchung Hills’ Robo-Warriors were out of touch with their creation. On March 2, the team’s four  “inspectors,” ( John Hogg,  Bill Hnath, Chris Dionisio, and  Bill Merrill)  those students best acquainted with their creation, Robot 41, traveled to Trenton with their faculty advisors Brian Brown, Andy Furlong and  Michael Kutch, to check out their creation, looking for possible damage incurred in shipping, and to briefly put it through its paces.

On March 4 and 5th, the entire team (see photo below) went to Trenton for the Round Robin Events and the finals—in which the  Hills team did not take part. Playing in 16 different alliances, the team’s score was five wins and three losses, not the best record in Hills nine-year history of competition, but not unsatisfactory, either.

Seven of the    team are seniors who have been involved in previous contests. John Hogg of Warren, team captain, said “It was a  great comeback; we made many improvements over last year, and our  (as yet unofficial) standing of 22 out of 63 participants   is an OK score.”

Bill Hnath of Warren agreed: “We really came together as a team this time.”

Chris Dionisio of Long Hill said, “ For me, it was a totally positive experience; teamwork was the best and most important thing. That will stay with me in the ‘real’ world as a professional engineer.”

Bill Merrill, a junior from Long Hill, said “Many of the competitors  were using robots that had been built largely by  professional engineers of their sponsors—which   is OK by the rule book.  However, they had more time to practice with their machine than we did; building our robot, with the help of  our advisors, cut down on the amount of time in which we could polish our  moves.”

The robot builders’ efforts were supported by funding from Anadigics, a  Warren-based electonics   firm, and by gifts of materials from  Knotts of Berkeley Heights and Jaeger Lumber of Stirling. Gifts of food and cookies supplied by various parents were also welcomed during the crews’  long after-hours sessions.

Although they will not go on to the Atlanta finals, the Hills Robo-Warriors felt rewarded for their efforts; each, in fact, will receive a medal. But some of the intangibles are rewards also: how to meet challenges; how to win graciously, lose gracefully; how to deal with disappointments; how to  make instant decisions; how to cooperate with new-found allies. All these factors, in fact, are built into the contest by its founders.

In early April, WHRHS Latin students participated in the National Latin Exam. Out of 53 students eligible to receive a medal, 29 received a gold medal and 12 a silver medal.  12 of the gold medal and 6 of the silver medals were at the upper level (3/4 prose) which is very difficult.  There were 4 perfect scores at levels 1 and 2.  8 seniors who received gold medals were offered a $1,000 scholarship to continue their studies and earn 6 credits in Latin or Greek at the institution of their choice.

Our students were joined by over 134,000 other students from all 50 states and 13 foreign countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, England, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Bulgaria.

Out of the 68 students who participated 56 received an award.

Contact us! We want to hear your stories!

This newsletter is published by Dr. Frances C. Stromsland, Superintendent of Schools, Watchung Hills Regional High School.

Remember if you have an article or interesting story or photographs about WHRHS to share please Contact Irene Mitta at imitta@whrhs.org or Karen Brenner at kbrenner@whrhs.org