From Chicken Coop to Chromebook
Contributors: Karl Pulkkinen, founding faculty member and current Elementary•Middle School Public School Liaison Kyle Clark, current High School faculty member and coach
1971 (Karl Pulkkinen)
Drake. Other faculty members meet to share daily news and updates on the routine and students.
6:30 a.m. We wake up our boarding students in Norrie House (now Alexander Academic Center), make sure they wash up, brush teeth, make beds, tidy up rooms, and get ready for breakfast.
12 p.m. We all make our way back to the dining room for lunch, clear our dishes, and then head to our afternoon classes.
7:15 a.m. A family-style breakfast is served to teachers and students in the small, elegant dining room on the first floor. 8:00 a.m. Students disburse across what is now the High School campus to begin classes in any manner of buildings, from the stately Norrie House to trailers and even a converted chicken coop. I head off to teach two 1:1 tutorials, providing reading instruction using a linguistic approach where my students practice decoding specific patterns in a controlled reading series called Let’s Read. I reinforce the decoding of these patterns with spelling dictations and we practice students’ application with non-controlled reading material. As it still is today, the approach is completely individualized based on each student’s strengths and weaknesses. 9:40 a.m. Milkbreak is a welcome daily reprieve for teachers and students who work hard in small classes, tutorial, and a new method of teaching based on the same Six Teaching Principlestm that today provide the architecture for Landmark’s proven approach. Students take a break, grab a snack, and stretch their legs while some faculty meet with founding Headmaster Dr. Charles FALL 2020/WINTER 2021
A donated chicken coop gets retrofitted to serve as a classroom space.
1:00 p.m. My social studies class is held in an office trailer that provides additional classroom space. I use accessible social studies texts that allow the six students to apply their decoding skills. They are learning how to approach the text to glean the main ideas and details and then commit these to two-column notes for future reference. 2:00 p.m. Faculty and staff wear several hats here, and I also teach physical education, which is often held outside or in the “chicken coop” (now the site of Collins Field) in inclement weather. Our new gymnasium (now the Black Box Theater) and classroom building (now the Dudley Classroom Building) are under construction for most of this first school year. 3:00 p.m. I am on duty every other day and every other weekend. If it’s my shift, I am responsible, along with other teachers, for after-school activities until 5:30 p.m. These can range from taking a group to a local laundromat, leading an outdoor activity, or supervising free time. The Lantern
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