While Shalhevet students were on a much-awaited weeklong vacation, Dr. Katya Gudis was busy setting up Biology and Physiology lessons after Miss Rosales’ unexpected departure Jan. 1.
Dr. Gudis, a researcher and teacher who has worked in Los Angeles and Japan, wants her students to connect more personally with what they study, and plans on doing this by including multiple projects and experiments in her classes.
“Today education is done with the mind only,” Dr. Gudis said. “I believe it should be done with the heart and mind. This allows the students to enjoy what they learn by connecting it to other things.” .
Projects allow students to understand and apply things, she said. Dr. Gudis also plans to have the year culminate in a school-wide science fair.
“These projects will be done in groups, so everyone can do what they are good at,” she said.
Dr. Gudis has at least two websites. One, a Linked-in profile, includes a list of scientific papers to which she has contributed with titles like “Clinical significance of prostaglandin E synthase expression in gastric cancer tissue,” published in Human Pathology. The page also highlights some of her interests, which range from Italian wines to Shotokan karate.
The second, titled “Shalhevet Biology,” opens with a eulogy for Robert Kennedy and contains everything from class rules – some apparently left over from her previous job at Matrix High School – to videos of jaguars in the wild.
Her personal background is equally wide ranging, something she said accounts for her unusual accent, which is hard to place. Dr. Gudis said she was born in El Salvador and lived there during her early childhood. Eventually her family moved to the U.S. and settled in the state of Vermont. Once she started high school her family moved to Los Angeles, California, where she would attend several different high schools.
“As I moved around I learned the language with the people’s accents,” she said. “My English is a mix of them.”
She started teaching science in the Los Angeles Unified School District. After some years of teaching, Mrs. Gudis decided to take up an offer to live in Tokyo where she could teach Biology to college students while pursuing her doctorate and academic career. There she earned a Ph.D. from Japan’s Nippon Medical School, published numerous articles about her biomedical research and founded a dojo — a karate school.
Tokyo, she said, is a city that “is quite split up…in one day different parts of the city were all celebrating different holidays,” and she thinks that will help acclimate her to yet another unique place: Shalhevet. She also said she wants students to understand how she views them.
“This is a whole person, not just a brain, in my class,” said Dr. Gudis. “In Japan, they worked with the whole person.”
Dr Gudis also plans on highlighting a connection between science and religion.
“Science and religion used to be one,” said Dr. Gudis, whose father was Jewish but was not raised in his faith. “What has happened is that we can’t see each other well because we are looking at each other in a broken mirror.”
Dr. Gudis expects that this semester will be hard one foe the students. But in the end, she hopes to have an impact on the Shalhevet’s Just Community by stressing the importance of ethics.
“Science is very strongly based on ethics, and scientists do not do anything unless it is cleared by an ethics committee,” said Dr. Gudis, “Ethics cannot be separated from anything.”
In a letter to parents announcing her appointment, Acting General Studies Principal Mr. Roy Danovitch praised her experience in both teaching and research.
“We were impressed by her commitment to project-based learning, and the unique and collaborative lessons she uses to bring Science to life for young students,” Mr. Danovitch wrote Jan. 23.
