Mr. Massaro is from New York, United States. He has over 10 years of experience in teaching. He has taught in the U.S., South Korea, and China before he came to Vietnam. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the Nazareth College of Rochester. He also earned a Master of Education in Educational Leadership, with a concentration in Curriculum Design, from Sam Houston State University. Mr. Massaro likes traveling, sports, music, reading, and writing. He’s excited about exploring, sharing, and discussing different genres of texts with students.
I think what makes the middle school experience here special is how much all the teachers care about the students and how much we care about the program itself. Each year collectively we try to improve on the program and the curriculum, the options for students and the extracurriculars for students as well and really try to give them the experience that they want and that they need….
…Kids learn more from their peers than they actually do from the teachers themselves. And so that collaboration with their peers is really important. So we always try to pair a lower student with a higher student and then we all support and work together to build that up.
Presentation skills are hard for anyone. You have students who start their first presentation and they’re shaking, they’re nervous, and then you see them months later, they’re up there, they’re confident. It’s a beautiful thing to watch that growth.
Students grow a lot in terms of their confidence and their executive function skills, in terms of time management, their ability to initiate tasks and to take ownership of their task. And I think that’s that’s our big goal in middle school. And so they come in, they’re they’re a little lost. And teachers will coach them through the whole process and help them grow to be more confident and independent towards the end.
Advice I’d give a new student starting middle school is do the work, don’t hesitate. I always tell my students to be brave or have the courage to ask questions because the more questions you ask, the better you’ll do.
Every teacher has to adopt lessons, right? To accommodate learning styles. Every teacher around the world needs to do that. It’s especially important when a majority of your students are English language learners. We’re privileged enough to have the SPELL (St. Paul English Language Learners) program here and I work along with my SPELL teacher. She and I work together to differentiate for students to adapt lessons for students who are at a lower tier in terms of proficiency and trying to build them up. And so she and I work together to try to make these lessons more accessible for them and just try to get them more comfortable with English.
We have students from Spain, Bellar Russian descent, students from Mosmbique and for these kids to be all in the same class together and sharing their culture and their history. I think that’s one of the most unique and powerful things about international school education. There’s a lot of opportunity for these students to have an experience that they wouldn’t have anywhere else.