Teachers Return to their Roots

by Alyson Haley

As the year comes to a close, students say “see you later” to two of our teachers as they return to their roots. Math teacher Mallory Masciarelli and history teacher Ken High will be taking leave for the 2015-2016 school year to pursue opportunities connected to their disciplines. Both are set to return for the 2016-2017 year.

Masciarelli will be spending the year in Kwajalein, a place in the Marshall Islands where she grew up. She will continue to teach high school math on the island, taking over for the teacher who used to be her elementary level technology teacher.

High, on the other hand, will not be teaching this coming year. He will be dividing his time between the Minuteman National Historic Park, Ascentria Care Alliance, and independent research to help further his teaching abilities. As a teenager High worked as a park ranger at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco. He worked there for a summer during high school and continued after he completed college.

When Masciarelli first began her teaching career, she applied to the school in Kwajalein, but she was turned down because of her lack of experience. “I’ve only been teaching for five years, but I thought ‘Why wait? Why not now?’, and that if I were to go anywhere to do any teaching like this, that would be the only place I’d want to go. I know it there; it is my home. It’s easier to go there instead of somewhere new,” she says.

Although her parents have told her they still have connections to people there, she remembers very few people because she was so young. “My teachers aren’t there anymore, which is weird compared to here. I still have eleven or twelve of my teachers that still work here, so that will be different, not knowing anybody there,” she said.

As for High, his work will keep him much closer to home. The Lexington and Concord historic park is in Concord and Ascentria is based in Worcester. At the park, High will be acting as park ranger, giving tours and historic details of the battle. The care alliance is one of three in the state that deals with international refugees looking to stay in Massachusetts.

High is excited about the change. “I’ve been in Hudson for ten years, and before here I taught five years elsewhere, and I guess I thought I needed to do something different. To get a change, some new experiences,” he says. High incorporates his life experiences from being a travel agent and traveling that he has done into his lesson plans. He has not done anything different from teaching in fifteen years, and he felt his memories were beginning to get a little stale.

At the care alliance High will be able to fulfill his desire to address social injustice in the world. In his lessons High is always telling his students to be involved, but he never has the chance to help out himself. Ascentria will give High the opportunity to reach out to those who need help instead of only talking about helping.

For Masciarelli, distance will be the toughest. “It’s awfully far away,” she says, but quickly outweighs that thought, “but besides that, I’m going to be on an island! I am going to be doing what I love to do, where I love to do it.”

Not becoming too attached to one area of work will be High’s biggest worry.  Although he is not a huge worrier, and takes challenges head on, he feels he may overextend himself. “These are all things I am passionate about. I fear I won’t be able to do enough for each of them. I could do full time with any one of those three things, so I could end up feeling frustrated with not being able to do more with each,” he says.

Both High and Masciarelli are excited for what the year holds for them, and they are hoping to learn a lot from their experiences. Masciarelli is excited to go back to where she grew up and just enjoy all the island has to offer. “Really I am hoping that I’ll get a different perspective, just from the different teachers I am going to be working with and even the students,” she says. “The way they’ve learned in the past could change the way I will come back and teach here. I mean I’ve only done the same thing, so going into a new environment will help me think about it differently and see what works and doesn’t work for some students.”

High is hoping to come back with lots of ideas and experiences to share with students to give them a more enthusiastic education. His research and volunteer jobs will allow him to develop better lesson plans, activities, and assessments. He wants to be able to bring more life to his classroom and his students’ learning.

“I love change. I think that’s what I am most excited for. The fact that every day is going to be something different, and I don’t know what’s coming, but whatever it is will be kind of exciting,” says High. “I’ll be trying new things, doing new things, challenging myself, taking risks, crashing and burning in some cases, but then picking myself up, and making it work. This will boost change and challenge myself. I love learning.”