This edition’s teacher spotlight features Dr. Potkalitsky, the current teacher of Senior English.
From managing his own Substack newsletter to watching baseball (his favorite team is the Guardians) and helping redefine how MVS’s grading system works, he is definitely quite a busy person. Dr. Potkalitsky has been teaching at MVS for over 5 years, joining us at the height of COVID-19, which presents its own challenges. However, he has quite an accomplished career before MVS. He got his PhD in English at Ohio State University and he has also taught both Latin and Humanities. However, he gets “bored” easily, and is always searching for something new and challenging as a result. This led him to MVS, which was the perfect fit, allowing him to switch grades often, teaching English from 8th to 12th grade, along with offering other flexibilities unique to MVS. This has the added benefit of allowing him to learn how students process literature and writing at different age levels. He is currently “spearheading the effort to create an AI-enabled curriculum across disciplines and grade levels” at MVS.
What else is Dr. Potkalitsky doing? Well, his grading system is changing rapidly into a “standards” based system, which would require another article to describe in its entirety. In summary, students are assessed on a scale from 1 to 5 on various categories, which are added up at the end of the semester. This system was partly designed by our very own, Nathan Shields. Standards-based grading has been spreading rapidly throughout MVS, currently spanning classes from US History to English. In addition, he is an avid promoter of artificial intelligence, referenced by his Substack newsletter which has over 2 thousand followers. Substack is a platform that lets anyone subscribe to a writer’s (usually) weekly newsletter. Talk about talent! From organizing guest insights in his newsletter to writing articles, all in his free time, it certainly is a lot. He also uses AI in the classroom, but not in the way you would think. According to him, AI is best suited to speed up the mundane tasks that would usually take hours, which gives him the extra time to spend on dedicated student feedback. This boils down to the fact that AI should not give someone more free time but allow redirection of work into more productive tasks. However, he does worry that AI will create “more dependence and less critical thinking.”
That concludes this week’s Teacher Spotlight, leave your suggestions on who we should feature next below!
