Jessica Eber: As a high school parent, I’m most interested in hearing you talk about your vision for BHS. I’d like to start by asking you to describe it.
Andrew Bott: The Education Plan for the high school spelled out a vision for BHS through a couple of different lenses. First we identified the things that are working really well at the high school, and looked at how we could maintain that level of success as the school continues to grow. Then we asked: What are areas in the high school that are not working really well for everyone? Who are the students who aren’t connected with the school? Where do we have outcomes for students that are not equitable — students taking AP classes, for example — and how do we grow in a way that increases both access and successful outcomes, and do that as the high school is growing?
One way is by making sure that, as the school grows from an enrollment of 2000 to one of 2700, we create a small-school feel, so that students are connected. We’re looking for opportunities to create what Anthony [Meyer] calls “havens” — like SWS, for example. We’re looking for other ways to create the kind of community that SWS creates. Is there perhaps a Global Leadership pathway? This is actually a perfect example of the impact of the 21st Century Fund, since Global Leadership started as a 21st Century Fund course and is very much on a trajectory to become a pathway within the high school, where a cohort of students with a shared interest can become connected with that particular area of interest.
Another really important piece of the Education Plan concerns providing more opportunities for interdisciplinary, project-based learning. And again, I don’t bring this up just because we’re here talking about the 21st Century Fund, but there have been some really incredible examples of interdisciplinary courses launched by the Fund that have become part of the curriculum. And so you start thinking about how to create these interdisciplinary, cross-curricular connections and opportunities for students, and then you need to figure out: what do we need, physically — what spaces do we need — to support teacher preparation, student work, etc. The Educational Plan really ties all of it together. It’s about identifying the traditional silos. Where is it that we need to head in math, in science, in social studies, world languages, the arts? And what are the ways that they’re interconnected? What’s the matrix? Think of the DNA double helix, where it’s all coming together in that interconnected way. And how do we support that as a high school?
I will say one last thing. I think that the courses for next year that have been vetted and are now in the course catalog are a great example of a first step in implementing our vision before the building project is even decided upon. Because this is what we believe is good for the high school. We need to start doing that work now. So we’re adding new coding classes and starting to think about how to integrate the skills and learning connected to coding within the math disciplines. We’ve also added a new history class (Human Geography, a fascinating AP class) and the new engineering and design class [Engineering Innovation and Design]. They’re a real first step in moving toward that vision. And what’s really amazing about the new engineering class is that the department has designed it sort of like an AP course in terms of class time and planning time, but there are multiple pathways into the course. Students may come from an engineering class, or it may be an art class as a prerequisite, or a math class … I think that’s a really important way to think about our course offerings, so each course doesn’t just have one way in.
Think about Global Studies. It may be that a student is really interested in taking a course and learning more about Global Studies. Well, there are a lot of courses already offered at the high school that are a part of Global Studies. As so, if we start identifying those courses for students, we can create a pathway within the existing structure. We want to be identifying those havens — those spheres of interest. Of course students need to be able to move among the spheres. We certainly never expect a ninth-grader to know exactly what he or she wants to do.
I think the Education Plan is fantastic. For folks who want to learn more about it, I would say that the Executive Summary — the first five or six pages, really captures the vision very powerfully.
JE: I was planning to ask you about the role of innovation in education, but it seems like a lot of it is described pretty clearly in the Executive Summary, where it talks about the goal of engaging students more and encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration. Can you talk about what some of the challenges are in introducing innovation into the public schools? I imagine budget is one very big constraint. I was particularly interested in your recent email regarding the fact that more hiring needs to happen to keep up with growth, and that cuts need to be made to counterbalance that increased spending.
AB: You know, it’s budget and space challenges. You can’t continually add courses, so we assumed, for example, in adding Human Geography, which is an AP class, that fewer students are going to take one of the other AP history classes. So we are assuming that we will see a shift of students, and sometimes you have to take that risk in adding a course and trying something that is innovative. Then there’s the cost. We have to think about how are we’re adding courses and what are the budget implications. And the other challenge that’s very real for Brookline is space. When you’re talking about cross-disciplinary classes: Where do they meet? How do they meet? Our classrooms all work, but they’re small by today’s standards, certainly for cross-curricular work. If you are engaged in a design project, how do you leave all of your design work out until the next day? Where’s the space for that? Part of the design process is, you can’t clean it up. The messiness needs to stay as your team is problem-solving. And there’s a similar challenge in elementary schools, as we think about how to create makerspaces and interdisciplinary learning spaces in schools that have huge facilities constraints. It’s hard. That’s the most challenging thing. The will to innovate is huge in Brookline. The educators here have been incredible in their drive to innovate, their creativity and passion to try new things. It’s not the desire; it’s how to support it, financially and physically.
JE: And so how does the 21st Century Fund fit into the overall plan?
AB: Well, it’s a way to vet ideas. At my first meeting with the Fund I saw the large number of classes and initiatives over the years that have been funded. Some of them have become institutionalized and have been transformative in the high school, and some of them didn’t. But even when a class doesn’t become part of the curriculum, the learning that results from having tried it informs something else. The Fund provides that additional bit of flex through the funds, the dollars, that are available in support of innovation. It allows BHS to try things. And as they are being tried, the Fund helps us understand the impact so that we can decide whether this is something that should continue for the long-term or something that discontinues, but has helped us understand XY and Z. It’s an incredibly powerful and important partnership.
JE: I wonder if you can speak to the question of how what we’re doing here in Brookline to support innovation compares to what’s happening in other towns?
AB: I think that there’s a real tradition in Brookline of innovation coming out of individual schools. What Brookline has, which is in place in some but not all communities, is a very strong team of curriculum coordinators. Our elementary history coordinator, for example, works incredibly closely with educators throughout the system so that there’s an understanding of and common expectation for what students are learning in Brookline at a given time. So for example second graders throughout Brookline have a unit on Ghana. But there’s some flexibility, so within that a teacher can say, “Well, could we try this?” There’s a school that does an artist study as a part of the nonfiction reading and writing component of the Ghana unit. They started it many years ago, and it has become ingrained in the faculty of the school. So I think that’s one way in Brookline that we support innovation. And the 21st Century Fund is a great example of that at the high school. People can have an idea and get support for it. That kind of thing is not necessarily embraced in every community.
JE: I know there has been some controversy about the idea of raising private funds for public schools, which is of course exactly what the 21st Century Fund does. What do you think about it?
AB: It’s a balance. You want to make sure that the money has an equitable impact within the schools. That’s where the School Committee weighs in. I think that private funding can be very supportive. There are many examples of how it has effectively, and in important ways, impacted BHS over the years. Private funding from the 21st Century Fund has impacted educators, students and families in very positive ways. So yes, there is a really important place for private fundraising, but the key is to make sure that it has an equitable impact.
JE: How exactly does a course get approved for funding by the 21st Century Fund? Does the School Committee review teacher proposals?
AB: Ultimately, yes. Nothing goes into the course catalog until the School Committee says it’s OK. It’s really the fiduciary responsibility of the School Committee to say whether a particular course is going to be funded.
Elizabeth Zachos, 21st Century Fund Board Chair, explains the funding process:
The proposal goes from the teacher to the curriculum coordinator to Anthony [Meyer, BHS Headmaster] and the Fund at the same time. Simultaneously, but not talking about it with each other, Anthony and his administration figure out if they think it will work. If the Fund’s Program Committee also thinks it will work, it goes to the Curriculum Subcommittee of the School Committee.
Click here to read more about how the 21st Century Fund supports innovation at BHS.
The Racial Awareness Seminar is a year-long sophomore elective that was seeded by the 21st Century Fund in 2016-2017. This seminar-style class is designed to foster students’ capacity to reflect on and speak effectively about racial identity, and to create a learning community that embraces and is empowered by the rich diversity of identities and perspectives at BHS.
The following is an update submitted by teachers Malcolm Cawthorne and Kate Leslie in February 2017:
The Racial Awareness Seminar has been working toward the goal of understanding the complexities of race in the 21st century. Recently, our focus has been on students’ own racial identities. To think more deeply about this, we have been examining groups historically and currently viewed as “races” within the United States.
We have used the past to focus on the present. Students grappled with the idea that the only Asian identity box that could be filled in on the U.S. Census was “Chinese” until the 1900s. We saw how the growth of Chinatowns in American cities created a “one-size-fits-all” approach to immigrants from Eastern Asia, and we discussed the complexity ignored by this approach. For example, we recognized that the Middle East is also in Asia, and racial identities are sometimes connected to religious faith. These observations fueled exhilarating discussions.
A student explained the seminar’s effect in a reflection: “In the past quarter my thinking about race has changed so much! In Racial Awareness the way that we learn is so impactful. . . . Instead of being able to pinpoint certain things we learn every day, like parabolas and ionization, I can feel how I’ve changed as a person over time. In this class I’ve learned things like how to have a discussion about race. I’ve learned what racism really is and how to see it. I’ve learned how to have a voice in my head that goes against the one that makes assumptions. And most importantly I’ve been able to learn about other people’s experiences and what we have to change.”
In addition, this year’s students feel it is important to become leaders and share their knowledge. Five of our students joined the Anti-Defamation League in its work with Brookline High after the recent incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism. Two students have created an organization to examine Institutional Racism at BHS. Many students were involved with BHS’s “Asking for Courage” day in December.
This activism is organic. Many of our students have been inspired by the class to do “personal work,” outside of school. Students have attended meetings, movie showings and programs to gain a greater understanding of the issues. Some have worked to reach into communities they feel have been mis- or under-represented. Some have begun to read more for broader understanding. To bring it to the present, the kids are “woke.”
— Malcolm Cawthorne and Kate Leslie
A conversation with Aubrey Love (Physics) and Andrew Maglathlin (Art) about Engineering Innovation and Design, the class they are currently developing with support from the 21st Century Fund
21CF: Let’s start with a description of the new class.
Andrew Maglathlin: Sure, well it’s still in process. The course is going to be co-taught by myself and Aubrey, so we’ll be combining my art background with his science/engineering background. The exact plan is a bit of a moving target at this point, but we know that project-based learning and collaboration will definitely be key elements of the course.
Aubrey Love: We want to bring together that STEAM side of things; we want students to experience engineering and problem solving, and also design and aesthetics — both at the same time. Nailing down exactly what we’ll be able to do is a little tough. There’s a huge scope, and we’re still trying to figure out what we can reasonably accomplish in one course.
21CF: How will this new class differ from the other Engineering classes at BHS?
AL: Currently we have Engineering the Future — that’s a freshman course that is run just in Career & Tech Ed. And then there’s Engineering By Design, which I teach. The name refers to an engineering design process — it’s a step-by-step method for how you go through an engineering problem-solving process. It feels like a misnomer a little bit since there’s no artistic design aspect of that class. So now I’m really trying to take that course to the next level. Kids in my course collaborate, they problem-solve, it’s very project-based. Every challenge that I put them through requires them to work their way through research, prototyping, designing, and developing a solution, but never do they spend the time and energy needed to worry about the aesthetic side of design. And that’s where Andrew comes in. His expertise will help students think about the user end. They’ll have to think about what people say, feel, experience — not just the functionality of the thing.
AM: Function and aesthetics will definitely be a huge part of the curriculum. Also it’s really important to us that students will actually be creating things, executing their designs. They’ll need to see their projects through from start to finish. That’s going to include presenting their work to other people, so they’ll need to learn how to do some drafting and present their ideas visually.
AL: Presenting to different types of groups is key. Some of it’s going to be as if they’re creating proposals. For example, maybe they’d show their design proposal to a craftsperson, like maybe a woodworker, and ask if that person would be interested in building their designs. Or say there’s something they want to provide the community — they’d need to be able to present their idea to the people who’d be in a position to implement it. Or even just presenting something to peers — how do you present in each case? They’ll need to understand how people perceive their ideas so they’ll know how to best communicate those ideas.
AM: They’ll need to understand how the user will benefit from whatever solution they’re proposing for a particular problem, so they’re also going to be gathering feedback. They’re going to be researching things for the projects themselves, but we also want them to research the market. Like if you came up with an idea for a cell phone case, how would you go about moving from creating it on your 3D printer to getting it produced? For each project we’ll be looking to introduce different ideas and tools that will help them learn about involving the community, and working in different kinds of teams.
21CF: Do you already have some specific projects in mind?
AM: We do. The goal is to give them a broad question so that they can approach it in whatever way interests them the most. The parameters and guidelines that we’re planning to give them will probably be a little more open than what they’re used to.
AL: The example we started this whole course with was an idea for a bridge project. We asked the question: How can a bridge be more than just a mode of transportation, more than just a way of getting from point A to point B? We sort of went through the project a little bit ourselves. We were interested in the community aspect, and we thought about the Braga Bridge.
AM: Yes, the Braga Bridge down in Fall River. Fall River is an old mill town, and we wanted to somehow offer something to that community. Our idea was to create a park that comes off of the bridge, so that people could stop and enjoy the view. People could go up to a green-space over the Taunton River, and maybe there’d be a place to get coffee, or a performance venue or something like that. We thought it could make a good tourist attraction to bring people to that community. Another idea was based on something we heard about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I’m not 100% sure this is true, but apparently there’s a team of painters that are always painting the bridge. And so maybe if you’re a student who’s more interested in robotics than green-spaces, you could design a bridge that has robots that can move around it and scan it, and also paint it, so it would be a self-maintaining bridge. Or maybe you’re thinking about materials. Maybe your idea is to build a bridge out of easily found materials, which could connect two places where the people don’t have a lot of resources. The idea is to have a big question that students can pursue in a variety of ways. Hopefully every student, every group of students, is coming up with something different.
21CF: What kinds of students do you expect will be drawn to this course? I imagine there will be plenty of engineering students, but do you think there will be any art students who may want to dip their toe in the engineering pool?
AM: You know I think so, and we’re thinking hard about exactly how we want to write up the course description because we want to have a very balanced class, with students that have different skills and interests. I believe if the students understand it correctly then there will be plenty of art students interested in taking the class. They would have the opportunity to use all kinds of tools to create — we have 3D printers, computerized routing machines, laser cutters, and things like that. I’ve done a little unofficial research and presented the possibility to my students in Ceramics and Sculpture. A lot of them seem very interested.
21CF: Are there any other programs, local or national, that inspired you to design this course?
AL: The first one that really caught our attention was NuVu. They do a lot with project-based learning, and also, I think, with art and design. Learning about that school made us realize that there is an entity out there that caters to kids in ways that we don’t. It’s an indication of what we’re missing, and we wanted to provide this element of education here at BHS. We also have a lot of kids that go on to another level of education, and we don’t feel like we’re necessarily setting them up in a perfect way, because they don’t know how to use their hands. They go into a mechanical engineering degree or something like that and they don’t have the right skill-set. They have an incredible background in AP sciences and AP math, but something’s missing. I think all of those things proved to be the stimulus for this. We’re hoping to provide a better general high school experience for a lot of kids.
21CF: And how about the “makerspace”? Do you think that might be available for use outside of class?
AL: The space issue is going to be its own monster. Next year there will be 60-80 kids in the space for five or six blocks during the day. We want it to be open for kids to come and do work outside of class — independent project work. We would also love to make it available for teachers to bring their classes in for small projects. It’s already kind of happening with our Woodworking classes and Engineering the Future classes. Manning the space is going to be a huge issue, but yes, we’d love the space to be available to kids as much as possible.
AM: We would love it if kids could come in outside of class, and even outside of school, because so many students are bogged down during the school day with all their courses. The dream would be that it is open for a period of time outside of school, giving the students that are in the course, and hopefully other students too, the opportunity to come in and further their projects. There’s only so much they can do on their own without the 3D printers, laser cutters and other specialty tools.
21CF: Other than the high-end machines, what kinds of tools do you expect to have in the space?
AL: We want kids to be able to realize their ideas in a variety of ways. That’s going to include things from glue guns to hammers to drills to sandpaper. We have the luxury of having inherited a lot of hand tools from the automotive shop, which used to be in this space. The nice thing about having space in the UA building is that we have amazing resources above us and next to us.
AM: The technologically advanced equipment is really important, but it’s not everything. One of the really amazing things about creating this course and creating the makerspace is that there’s no set way of doing it. We’ve visited some different spaces, and the more we see the more we realize that everyone is doing it a little bit differently. Over at Newton North they have “greengineering.” That happened because there were certain conditions, and certain people over there that made it right for them. Here at Brookline we’re really tailoring it to our expertise and what we think the students should learn, and what they want to learn. And I think the course will constantly be changing and evolving, because if you’re not innovating it’s pretty much over. It’s done.
21CF: This seems like a really huge undertaking. Do you think you’re on track to actually have something ready for the fall?
AL: The course will evolve based on the kids that show up. And so our job really is to set them up with the right questions and then support them as we move forward. So we’ll be ready as long as we get to a place where we feel comfortable figuring out how to assess kids and support them in a real way. Project-based learning takes some doing, and some practice for the teachers. We don’t want to give them the answers or be too supportive, because we want kids to go through the experience of trial and error. And so that’s what we’ll be focusing on in the next couple of months. We need to figure out how much freedom we can give kids and still have them walk away with something. We don’t want everything be theoretical.
AM: Not at all. We want them to be creating things. If it’s too open-ended we’re worried that they won’t get to that point, so we’re trying to figure out how to be supportive enough in defining the project so they end up with a finished product, not just something made out of string and cardboard.
21CF: Before I let you go, I’m curious about what you each, personally — as teachers and as individuals — hope to get out of this experience.
AL: Coming from a science background, and even just my natural tendencies, I’m all about problem-solving in terms of functionality. And how that translates in my classroom is, my kids end up with a lot of ugly stuff. They’re constantly asking me to help them with the aesthetic side of things, but I feel unable to support them in a way that’s beyond my own personal taste. And that’s frustrating, because I feel like I’m only giving them a partial experience. They really should be thinking about both the structural and aesthetic aspects of developing a project. So that’s something I hope to learn from Andrew. I’d like him to help me understand how to ask the right questions and help kids make the right decisions beyond the physical structure. I look forward to being able to watch Andrew do what he does; see what he says and what he doesn’t say. The hardest part with project-based learning as a teacher is you have to know what not to say and what not to teach — what things to tell the kids and what things to let them experience on their own. And I think that nuance is what I’ll be learning the most from Andrew.
AM: A couple of years ago the two of us worked together on the STEAM project, and we really clicked because we’re both constantly trying to figure out how to make things more efficient, how to get them to work, and we were thinking a lot about our projects and our courses. But we think about things differently, and Aubrey’s coming from the physics side and the science side, which is something I’m not terribly familiar with. So I think the two of us coming together is a great match for teaching engineering and innovation. Aubrey understands materials in a particular way — he understands things like force. I understand materials more from hands-on experience. Aubrey’s really a lot more technologically advanced than I am, so when it comes to the computer modeling programs I’m definitely going to be learning a lot from him. But also his character is a huge influence. He’s a really grounded person, he’s very thoughtful, and that grounding and that methodical approach really helps me to get a grasp on what we’re doing.
AL: And that’s an added benefit to co-teaching in general: regardless of the skill sets within our content areas that we bring, we’re different teachers. You learn from watching other people teach regardless of who’s bringing what knowledge base. I think our different backgrounds naturally lead us to being different types of teachers. What we demand every day of our kids is different. Our interactions with kids on a one-on-one basis is different, so I think we’ll learn a lot just about teaching from this experience. It’s a really great opportunity.
Social studies teacher Stephanie Hunt has taken on the additional role of teaching in the African American Latino Scholars Program. Hunt carries an enthusiasm about the program as she prompts her students to think about their own identity as scholars.
What is your position?
I am part time in the social studies department and part time working with the scholars program. I am currently teaching the sophomore scholars seminar.
What was the process of getting selected for that role?
I had applied for the scholars coordinator position and it worked out where Dr. Lemel was hired and there was money in the budget to bring on another teacher in a part time fashion so my love for scholars was alive and it is still present so it made sense for me to take this opportunity and even though it wasn’t the opportunity that I had initially sought, it was a great opportunity to still be connect with the program.
What do you do in a day to day class?
The sophomores get PSAT help twice a week and then the other two meetings they are with me in seminar. Currently we are looking at the identity of a scholar and my goal is to provide them with a more comprehensive view on what a scholar looks like and to provide them with examples of scholars that look like them and that have similar experience, obstacles, and successes that they do. So right now it’s all about exposure and defining or even redefining what it means to be a scholar and what it means to be a pioneer in your community
Do you think teaching scholars classes has affected how you teach your other classes?
I think what has had an effect on me is last year Dean Poon and Ms. Ramos came up with this idea of the identity curriculum. It’s about getting the students more connected with what they are learning whether it be in history, english, math and science. The goal is for students to feel like they are connected and represented in what they learn in the classroom and I think that has definitely impacted my view of curriculum. With scholars I have more flexibility to play with things, but even with my modern world history classes I feel like when I am looking at my curriculum I am thinking “Okay, in what way can we bridge the past and the present. In what way can we bridge these subjects with who our students are”.
What are you hopes for the future of scholars?
My hope is that more students know what the scholars program is. I fear that the broader community only knows it by name and does not know enough about what they do, who they are, and what their accomplishments are. My hope is more visibility. I would love scholars to get involved in other programs as well. I want the program to grow. If the program grows, that means that more and more students are hitting the requirements. Our expectations aren’t lowering, but students are meeting them and that’s a testament to the support staff that work with scholars and a testament to the students that continuously are bringing each other up and helping each other succeed.
Lauren Mahoney, Sports Writing Editor
Teachers help students with their math homework in Math Center on March 16. Math Center is held prior to school every morning in multiple rooms, one of them being room 144.
It’s 6:30 a.m. and your alarm is ringing. A half an hour later, you’re out the door and on your way to one of the many help centers the high school has to offer.
For sophomore Claudia Marza, waking up early can be the deciding factor of whether or not to go to Math Center.
“I would much rather go in the afternoon for 15 minutes or half an hour than go in the morning,” Marza said. “Teenagers already get too little sleep as it is, so I think that having it in the afternoon would be better.”
Sophomore Jackie Mundis said that she doesn’t get the help that she needs when she goes to Math Center due to the distraction of other students.
“I like the idea of getting extra help,” Mundis said. “I’ve been a couple of times but, when I went, I found that I didn’t really end up getting the help that I needed. I think that it was a good idea to meet with my teacher, but I don’t think that I got enough help because I was pretty easily distracted by some of the other students who were there.”
According to Mundis, one of the biggest problems with Math Center, in addition to distracted students, is that there simply are not enough teachers to help all of the students who come.
“I think the main problem is that there is only one teacher in the room,” Mundis said. “Since there are a lot of students, you can’t really get one-on-one help.”
Marza also said that the lack of teachers present is a problem.
“I think that there should be more teachers there,” Marza said. “It’s like six kids to one teacher, which can make it really hard to get help.”
Math teacher and Math Center Supervisor Lisa Rodriguez said that she understands why students would not want to come to Math Center due to its timing, but feels that the program is run well.
“People don’t like how early it is, and certain kids don’t want to get up so early, even if they need help,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t think there are problems with how Math Center is organized, but I do think that, even if kids don’t want to wake up, they should try to come to Math Center for help if they need it.”
Rodriguez said it can be hard to have so many students and not very many teachers.
“In the upperclassman Center, there are a lot of kids who come in, but only three teachers,” Rodriguez said. “Some kids don’t like to work together and talk to each other, which makes it so that I often have to answer the same question like 10 different times, which makes it hard for me to get to all the kids. I can totally see that being a reason why some people don’t want to go to Math Center.”
Rodriguez said that she wants to get the word out to more students about Math Center so that more kids, especially those in standard level classes, can come and get help.
“It needs to be advertised more so that more students can take advantage of it,” Rodriguez said. “Not a lot of standard kids end up coming to Math Center. Usually, the room gets really packed with honors and advanced students, but I wish we could get more standard students to come.”
Senior and founder of the Science Center Aria Wong also said that not enough students know about the help centers.
“I think the reason that some kids don’t come is because they don’t know about it,” Wong said. “We haven’t done enough outreach and marketing.”
Wong said that she wants to spread the word about science center by making announcements, talking to teachers and putting up posters around the school.
Students work at the Writing Center prior to the school day. Senior Ben Groustra, who works at the Writing Center, said that there aren’t a sufficient amount of students who know about the program.
Petra Huang for the Sagamore
Students work at the Writing Center prior to the school day. Senior Ben Groustra, who works at the Writing Center, said that there aren’t a sufficient amount of students who know about the program.
Senior and Writing Center worker Ben Groustra was recommended for his place in the Writing Center by his history teacher and the teacher supervisor to the Writing Center Michael Normant. Groustra said that there are not enough students who know about the Writing Center.
“It can get very quiet in the Writing Center, and I feel like it is very under-utilized,” Groustra said. “A lot of teachers don’t have time to look over papers as much as they would like to or as much as some students need, and writing center is a great place for people who need someone to edit their paper when their teacher can’t.”
However, Andrew Kimball, who runs the Language Center, which meets Mondays and Tuesdays before school, during X-block and Thursdays and Fridays after school in room 206, where kids go to retake quizzes, get practice and ask for clarification, said that X-block is the most popular time for students to visit the Language Center.
“Attendance is equal before and after school,” Kimball said. “X-Block is easily the most popular time. We try to balance the hours before school and after school because lots of students have commitments after school.”
Groustra said that he understands it can be early to wake up, but feels that the mornings are the best time to get help and that it is well worth it.
“I don’t think there’s really a better time to do it,” Groustra said. “You need a time where everyone would have a free block, which wouldn’t really work, and people have stuff to do after school. Coming in before school for 10 minutes isn’t too bad, and that’s when everyone has free time.”
Petra Huang for the Sagamore
Infographic by Ben Mandl
The high school’s help center vary in time, room number and aid provided. This infographic relays this information.
Advisory is the only class at the high school which every student participates in. In response to feedback from advisers, mentors and students, history teacher and Advisory Curriculum Coordinator Jennifer Martin decided that it was time to change major parts of advisory.
According to Martin, she and a team of teachers spent part of the summer working on revising parts of advisory. The changes they made included installing a wellness program.
“We’ve trained about a dozen teachers and they are coming into junior advisories,” Martin said. “They’ll do six T-blocks in a row of mindfulness, so learning how to destress and become less anxious before tests, and it’s going to be really cool that that’s going to be now part of advisory.”
According to Martin, the program will be unveiled for the juniors this year, and will roll out into every grade as the years progress.
Spanish teacher and Mindfulness Program co-creator Elizabeth Gorman helped write the grant that brought the Mindfulness Program into being. Gorman believes many students and teachers create unhealthy stress which negatively affects their lives.
“As a teacher you are empowered to replicate this intense culture that is out there in society that says do more and achieve more, or you can create the culture of educating ourselves and students in a proactive way to be able to understand stress and the impact it has on us,” Gorman said.
According to Gorman, the constant stress many students feel led her and others to create the Mindfulness Program. One of the main goals of the program is to empower students to use the techniques they learn to help alleviate stress.
“One of the goals of the curriculum is to educate students about stress and that’s nice, except that everyone sees themselves as chronically stressed and then they’re stuck,” Gorman said. “So there are actually all these tools to teach yourself to not only identify stress, but to recover from it.”
Junior Mentor Jake Sternlicht believes that having a strong wellness program is important at the high school.
“I’ve always thought of wellness as being important, because of many of the things that I have seen at the high school,” Sternlicht said, “So, I think the changes are positive.”
Another major change that will begin this year, according to Martin, is the new way advisories deal with community service requirements.
“We’re no longer doing the one hour community service requirement and that’s going to get replaced with something that is going to happen next year, not this year, because we need some time to do it. It’s going to be morphed into no longer being, ‘You need to do this amount of community service,’ but rather that the advisories will find a community service club in the building to sponsor and help raise awareness around those issues as a group,” Martin said. “So it’s not like you go out and do something for someone else, but more of we as a group do something together to help out a club, and hopefully it will encourage kids to join community service clubs.”
The Ithaka Cup, which is an annual competition for freshmen and sophomore advisories to gain points through events and determine the winning advisory in a grade, will also undergo major changes this year, according to Martin.
“For freshmen, instead of having four tournament events, we want to do something where every freshmen comes, and it’s awesome because you see your friends from other advisories,” Martin said. “Whereas when we used to do it, you’d end up with just two advisories in a room and it’s kind of cramped. It’s not as fun as everybody together in the gym. So as of right now there will be two events for the freshmen, one each semester.”
According to Martin, the process for changing the advisory curriculum began nearly two years ago. She already had a significant amount of data compiled, and worked to get more so she could understand how to best improve the program.
“When you run something for seven years, you hear people say when they don’t like a lesson, so I have this document where I keep notes on all those things,” Martin said. “I surveyed the Junior and Senior Mentors all last year to see which lessons needed go and which ones were still good for the the 9th and 10th grade, and then I used the adviser’s opinions about what was going on in the upperclassmen advisories to figure out what we should do.”
Sternlicht thinks that the changes in the advisory curriculum will be beneficial to the program as a whole. He said that many of the topics covered in the old advisory program were also taught in middle school, and therefore became monotonous.
“I am happy about the changes because it was always hard to get kids integrated and interested in what we’re talking about because it was often repetitive and very boring because we had already done all that stuff before,” Sternlicht said. “The freshmen have seemed relatively interested in what is going on so far.”
Louie Goldsmith, Opinions Editor
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