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Software Gets North Adams Tweens Thinking About Careers

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — What do you want to be when you grow up?

It's a question children often hear as early as preschool, as they don plastic doctor's equipment or pretend to race cars or fly to the moon, but it's not a serious question often until the second half of high school.

In North Adams, though, a push is being made to introduce students as young as sixth grade to the idea that there is a multitude of careers they can choose to explore based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Molly Meczywor, Drury High School's College and Career facilitator, recently purchased a curriculum for younger students on the district's college/career planning platform, called Naviance. Over the course of this school year, she and a couple Drury student ambassadors have taken this program out to Brayton and Colgrove sixth- and seventh-graders to help get the wheels turning in the heads of these tweens.

"It's a program that anyone in Grades 6 through 12 can use," Meczywor said on a recent school day when she worked with students in the Brayton Elementary School computer lab. "We don't just wait until they're a junior or senior to start talking about college."

For the sixth-graders, the program allows the students to go through a checklist of possible strengths and interests before narrowing the results down to three "career clusters," or series of jobs that have something in common with each other that might match a student's interests. The seventh-grade curriculum delves more deeply into those careers.

"It's cool because the kids will talk to each other," Meczywor said. "They will start to identify their strengths."

Amphibious Toads Procreate in Perplexing Amplexus

By Tor HanseniBerkshires columnist
08:09PM / Sunday, May 05, 2024

 

Toads lay their eggs in the spring along the edges of waterways. Photos by Tor Hansen.

My first impressions of toads came about when my father Len Hansen rented a seaside house high on a sand dune in North Truro, Cape Cod back in 1954. 

 

With Cape Cod Bay stretching out to the west, and Twinefield so abundant in wildflowers to the east, North Truro became a naturalist's dream, where I could search for sea shells at the seashore, or chase beetles and butterflies with my trusty green butterfly net. 

 

Twinefield was a treasure trove for wildlife — a vast glacial rolling sandplain shaped by successive glaciers, its sandy soil rich in silicon, thus able to stimulate growth for a diverse biota. A place where in successive years I would expand my insect collection to fill cigar boxes with every order of insects abounding in beach plum, ox-eye daisy and milkweed. During our brief summer vacation there, we boys would exclaim in our excitement, "Oh here is another hoppy toad," one of many Fowler's toads (Bufo woodhousei fowleri ) that inhabited the moist surroundings, at home in the Ammophyla beach grass, thickets of beach plum, bayberry, and black cherry bushes. 

 

They sparkled in rich colors of green amber on beige and reddish tinted warts. Most anurans have those glistening eyes, gold on black irises so beguiling around the dark pupils. Today I reflect on a favorite analogy, the riveting eye suggests a solar eclipse in pictorial aura.

 

In the distinct toad majority in the Outer Cape, Fowler's toads turned up in the most unusual of places. When we Hansens first moved in to rent Riding Lights, we would wash the sand and salt from our feet in the outdoor shower where toads would be drinking and basking in the moisture near my feet. As dusk fades into darkness, the happy surprise would gather under the night lights where moths were fluttering about the front door and the toads would snatch bugs with outstretched tongue.

 

In later years, mother Eleanor added much needed color and variety to Grace's original garden. Our smallest and perhaps most acrobatic butterflies are the skippers, flitting and somersaulting to alight and drink heartily the nectar abounding at yellow sickle-leaved coreopsis and succulent pink live forever sedums of autumn. These hearty late bloomers signaled oases for many fall migrants including painted ladies, red admirals and of course monarchs on there odyssey to over-winter in Mexico. 

 

Our newly found next-door neighbors, the Bergmarks, added a lot to share our zeal for this undiscovered country, and while still in our teens, Billy Atwood, who today is a nuclear physicist in California, suggested we should include the Baltimore checkerspot in our survey, as he too had a keen interest in insects. Still unfamiliar to me then, in later years I would come across a thriving colony in Twinefield, that yielded a rare phenotype checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton p. superba) that I wrote about featured in The Cape Naturalist ( Museum of Natural History, Brewster Cape Cod 1991).