{"id":3816,"date":"2016-05-02T00:27:10","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T00:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2016-09-21T16:51:08","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T16:51:08","slug":"faculty-highlight-mrs-slaff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/2016\/05\/02\/faculty-highlight-mrs-slaff\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Highlight: Mrs. Slaff"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ryan Jackloski ’16<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are five facts about you?<\/strong>
\nI love to entertain.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t supposed to live past the age of two because I had a severe heart condition and had open-heart surgery when I was eighteen.\u00a0 I\u2019m a great sports spectator but I was never allowed to play.\u00a0 I\u2019m Southern and have deep Southern roots.\u00a0 My guilty pleasure is country music when I\u2019m cooking or working.\u00a0 My mother was a church organist but also a recording artist and arranger for the pipe organ so I appreciate classical and religious music as well, but you can clean a house pretty well to a country song.\u00a0 I love helping students.\u00a0 It keeps me young, but I get so much back from trying to help students figure out things or relieve stress.\u00a0 I\u00a0love<\/em>\u00a0my job.\u00a0 I really enjoy being a grandmother; I have four grandchildren: twenty, seven, four, and four.
\n 
\nHow long have you worked at Sem?<\/strong>
\nThirty years.
\n 
\nWhat positions have you held while here?<\/strong>
\nI\u2019ve been a French teacher, Spanish teacher, English teacher, and ESL teacher.\u00a0 I ran the ESL Summer program for eighteen years.\u00a0 I served as chair of global language department.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked in college guidance for over twenty years and directed it for four.\u00a0 I\u2019m also a mentor of new faculty, and I sit on a bunch of committees.
\n 
\nWhat is your favorite class you\u2019ve taught?<\/strong>
\nAs far as content, I\u2019ve always loved French Honors.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always held onto it because you\u2019re introducing literature and history through the target language.\u00a0 When College Board stopped AP French Literature, I had a few years when I got to develop a capstone course after AP French Language, and we did sub-Saharan and Caribbean literature of negritude, which is black literature.\u00a0 It was literature that I had never studied, so I was learning it with this small group of students, and that was\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0cool.
\n 
\nThis year you oversaw the submission of over 1,100 college applications and just the other day you had nine appointments to attend.\u00a0 How do you stay so calm and organized?<\/strong>
\nThat\u2019s a lesson I have learned through being a grandmother.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t know that I stay calm, but I am able to be present.\u00a0 When I\u2019m in a meeting, I\u2019m just in that meeting, or when I\u2019m talking to a student, I try to really just focus and listen to the student.\u00a0 I have learned that when you\u2019re with three and four year olds, you have to be in the moment, so I try to remember that lesson and I give my full attention to whatever I\u2019m doing, and then I move onto the next thing.\u00a0 I plan my day.\u00a0 I keep a list of what needs to be done, but then I try to focus on just one task at a time.\u00a0 I do think that sometimes we spend too much time worrying about what has happened that we can\u2019t change and what we still have to get done.\u00a0 I just start plugging away.\u00a0 You have to know when to draw the line and just say, \u201cThat\u2019s the best I can do right now,\u201d and you move onto something else.\u00a0 It\u2019s okay to fall short, to accept yourself as not perfect.
\n 
\nWhat college did you go to?<\/strong>
\nI went to Tulane University in New Orleans.\u00a0 I went as an informational engineer and math major when computers were a whole big room, and I fell in love with French literature because Tulane required language.\u00a0 I changed my major, graduated, and went on to do graduate work in medieval French.
\n 
\nWhat would you like to say to the overly eager freshman or sophomore with plans on applying to every Ivy, MIT, and Stanford?<\/strong>
\nThe difference between having a dream and a goal is a plan.\u00a0 Having a plan is important as long as you understand that plans change.\u00a0 I think we get so wrapped up in\u00a0where<\/em>\u00a0we go to school that we really don\u2019t focus on\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0we go to school.\u00a0 There are so many ways to get a great education and get launched into a career that will make you feel fulfilled and happy.\u00a0 There are so many jobs that a seventeen year old doesn\u2019t even know exist that could be marvelous careers.\u00a0 I really hope that high school kids keep an open mind of what\u2019s out there.\u00a0 You can make so many college experiences great.\u00a0 I would rather students focus on the\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0why<\/em>\u00a0than on the\u00a0where<\/em>.
\n 
\nA lot of colleges have recently become test optional.\u00a0 Do you think with time the SAT and ACT will become totally obsolete?<\/strong>
\nNo.\u00a0 Test optional is really a luxury of small to midsize schools.\u00a0 Really large institutions oftentimes use computers to at least go through the first round of selecting their classes. They need something to compare apples to apples because the grading scales and curricula at different schools are so varied.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think standardized tests are going to go away unless we go to some type of national exam for graduation like the Baccalaureate in France.\u00a0 I think test optional and test flexible admission programs are important because we can\u2019t quantify a student.\u00a0 They\u2019ve proven that students who do not report their scores to test optional schools perform just as well during college as the students who chose to report their scores.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of data that says those tests do not necessarily provide any sort of measure of success.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to go away because some kids are good at tests so they want to report their scores.\u00a0 Admission officers just want to know what your skills are entering college.\u00a0 I hope there will be options for students.
\n 
\nA lot of people know you as Snapple Cap because you know a ton of random facts.\u00a0 Can you give us one?<\/strong>
\n\u201cAre you worth your salt\u201d is an expression we use.\u00a0 Some say Roman soldiers were often paid in salt (which is\u00a0sal\u00a0<\/em>in Latin)<\/em>, so your salary is your allotment of salt.\u00a0 So if you\u2019re worth your salt, you\u2019re worth your salary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ryan Jackloski ’16 What are five facts about you? I love to entertain.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t supposed to live past the age of two because I had a severe heart Continue Reading \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3817,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/slaff.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3820,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theopinator.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}