Students in Social Justice Leadership took a field trip to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution, a medium security prison alongside Project Youth, a program run by MCI-Norfolk.
From HBO’s “Oz” to Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black ” to Fox’s “Prison Break,” seemingly, cinematic depictions of prison culture are more omnipresent than ever, feeding viewers images of the “typical” inmate: dispassionate, belligerent and remorseless. Yet, several students have sought to redress the narrative, hoping to understand inmates beyond these supposedly hostile facades.
Students from the C and G-block sections of the Social Justice Leadership class visited the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk (MCI-Norfolk), a medium security prison, on Thursday, Jan. 19 and Friday, Jan. 20, respectively. The trip, which takes place annually, was organized in accordance with Project Youth, a program run by MCI-Norfolk that allows inmates to share their experiences in prison with Massachusetts students.
History teacher Kate Leslie, who teaches Social Justice Leadership, said a strength of Project Youth’s is its ability to humanize inmates rather than exploit their stories to inhibit others from committing similar crimes.
“What makes Project Youth special is that it is not a ‘scared straight’ program in which the goal is to freak kids out and ensure that they never do drugs or drink and drive,” Leslie said. “[The program] is about helping students understand the humanity of incarcerated people, their decisions and the underlying factors, whether they be poverty or drug addiction or a history of sexual assault, that contributed to them breaking the law.”
Leslie said many of the stories told by the inmates correspond to the history and concepts explored in the Social Justice Leadership class.
“I teach my students about mass-incarceration and the ways in which the prison population has ballooned since the 1980s, especially due to the “Tough on Crime” movement and the policing of drug use. All of that tends to come up in the inmates’ stories,” Leslie said. “When they discuss why they are in prison, some of them talk about drug addiction, some talk about dealing [drugs] and others talk about receiving sentences that they felt were longer than they deserved.”
Following their visit to the prison, students were taken to the Brookline Teen Center, where they formed groups and reflected on the stories they heard. Senior Alex Levy said one story in particular felt powerfully resonant. It was told by an inmate named Ian, who recounted a night during which he operated a vehicle while heavily under the influence and killed a man.
“Ian grew up middle class and spent his summers vacationing in Cape Cod, like many students in Brookline,” Levy said. “He revealed his alcoholic tendencies but explained that he never thought of himself as an ‘alcoholic,’ as he drank beers every day, not hard liquor. He said something that especially stood out to me: ‘I thought of myself as a good drunk driver.’ Although this is counterintuitive to me, I hear many of my peers saying things like this quite frequently.”
Junior Malcolm Urena said the trip changed his perspective concerning inmates and their decisions.
“When I learned about the trip, I thought that the people in the prisons were there because they deserved it,” Urena said. “But after hearing their stories, it was hard to say that these people deserved to be in prison. They seemed to be normal people who had made a mistake that ruined their lives.”
Levy said the inmates she met were dissimilar from the stereotypical traits assigned to them in popular media.
“Hollywood tends to depict inmates as tattooed people in orange jumpsuits and shackles. It also portrays incarcerated people as cold and thick-skinned. These men, however, showed a great amount of remorse and were very vulnerable while telling their story,” Levy said. “One man even started tearing up as he recalled seeing his niece, whose life he hasn’t been able to be a part of while in prison.”
Leslie said hearing inmates’ stories highlighted the often overlooked structural flaws of the country’s criminal justice system.
“I’ve seen, in the past, that students have a sense that this country is failing to create a [criminal justice] system that rehabilitates. Sometimes, we say that the prison system is meant not only to punish people, but also to help them reform their lives and learn from their mistakes,” Leslie said. “However, when students hear these inmates talk about what prison is like, they don’t hear about that rehabilitative aspect. Instead, they might hear about how inmates cannot get time with a social worker or that they have not been able to address an underlying addiction.”
Junior Eli Traub said the trip’s immersive nature gave him knowledge and opportunities that he would not have otherwise achieved.
“I think this trip is so important because of the experience-based learning. I learned more in this trip than I did over my class’s entire prison unit, not from a lack of information during the unit, but from the value of experiencing things for myself,” Traub said. “No fact or statistic about the prison system can truly give you a grasp of what it’s actually like, and by listening to men who have spent years there, I was able to learn firsthand about the injustices and systemic issues in the prison system. Only through knowing this through experience will anyone be able to make meaningful change.”
The School Curriculum Subcommittee met to discuss the implementation of future classes for the 2022-3 school year.
The Brookline School Curriculum Subcommittee Meeting convened virtually via Zoom on Jan. 18 at 4 p.m. to discuss the introduction of new courses and adaptation of current courses for the 2022-23 school year to improve diversity and access at the high school.
Mathematics Curriculum Coordinator Joshua Paris presented a proposal for a new course at the high school: Data Science and Social Justice, which would focus on social justice issues and introduce students to gathering related data, making models and presenting.
Paris said the aim of the course is to tie math into real-world application, something that students have expressed an interest in.
“A number of teachers have incorporated social justice lessons into their curriculums this year, and the feedback we are getting from students is really positive,” Paris said.
Paris said the course will be open to all students and taught using complex instruction, a type of teaching that focuses on group work and collaboration.
“Complex instruction is a way to make sure that all students have a social standing in a class. It’s a belief that all students have something to bring to a group,” Paris said.
Visual Arts Curriculum Coordinator Donna Sartanowicz presented a new visual arts course called Artists’ Books and Visual Journals. Sartanowicz said the course focuses on expression through creating visual journals which can provide students with an outlet for expression.
“A visual journal is a place where you can practice, you can collect images and think about things. You can experiment with your ideas, and it’s a very open way to work,” Sartanowicz said.
Sartanowicz said she found low enrollment numbers and course success from underprivileged communities after looking at data from other visual arts courses.
“We need to do some work on building the diversity of our classes. We want to make sure we are teaching all students; we are making a variety of moves to bring that diversity and equity about, and [the course] is just one of those moves,” Sartanowicz said.
Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator Gary Shiffman presented the concept of a pilot Social Studies class, Global Studies, for the 2022-23 school year as a 10th grade world history course.
Currently, all students in 9th grade take the unleveled World History: Identity, Status, and Power (WHISP) course and choose from either standard or honors World History II for 10th grade. Like WHISP, Global Studies would have students taking both standard and honors credits.
Global Studies would revolve around themes, and Shiffman said that although this can lead to confusion around the timeline of events, it allows for students to form personal connections with class content and understand impacts on the present day.
“In a thematic-based course, you can get to the present and teach the past as a precursor in a way that is illuminating that past for students,” Shiffman said.
According to Shiffman, the Global Studies course would allow differentiation within a class to be based on performance instead of pre-determined labels.
“Traditionally, students sign up for an honors or standard class and there is no way to make it not feel like identification. The fact is you’re buying a ticket, and you buy the premium ticket or the not premium ticket” Shiffman said.
Science Curriculum Coordinator Ed Wiser updated the subcommittee on the process of making AP Physics courses more accessible to students by merging two AP Physics: AP Physics I & II and AP Physics C. Wiser said additional planning is required for the start of the merged AP Physics course next fall.
“We’re trying to figure out how we can restructure those first few units of AP Physics so that we can make the onboarding a little more intentional,” Wiser said.
Students and teachers benefit from consolidating courses with multiple levels in the high school, Wiser said.
“Every single time that we’ve taken courses with many levels, as soon as we’ve collapsed those, scores were the same or even better, and access was increased,” Wiser said. “Every single time we’ve reduced the number of levels, we’ve always seen success, and the other interesting part of this is that you get teachers who are able to collaborate more.”
The subcommittee plans on voting on the proposed courses at their next meeting on Feb. 3.
Anisa Sharma and Nate Parry Luff | January 20, 2022
The Data Science and Social Justice class works to apply mathematical ideas to social justice issues students are passionate about.
As an algebra class discusses taking the standard deviation of a data set, just down the hall, the Data Science and Social Justice class is using a data set to find the intersection between math and global issues.
Taught by math teachers Danielle Thiessen, Danielle Rabina and Christopher Monschauer, the Data Science and Social Justice class was created after the teachers sent a grant proposal to the Innovation Fund. Theissen, Rabina and Monschauer hoped that this course would allow for students to apply mathematical theories to topics they are passionate about.
Thiessen said the idea was derived partly because most math courses offered are more theoretical.
“Because data science ties into the world around us so much, we thought this would be the perfect opportunity for the math department to cover a course on social justice. Every other course has a class on social justice and we didn’t, and it was really hard to tie social justice into the algebra curriculum,” Theissen said.
Senior Dylan Krakowski said they were drawn to the class after learning it intertwines two topics they are passionate about.
“I didn’t want to take just a ‘normal’ math class. I really like using math in real world scenarios, and I also pursue social justice in the real world—I try to live my life in a way that benefits humanity. So I was like, ‘kill two birds with one stone,’ and take the class,” Krakowski said.
Rabina said class is spent working on various projects that will eventually teach students how to complete the data science cycle. According to Rabina, the last step of the cycle is for the researcher to share their work- the backbone of the course,
“The data science cycle encompasses what a data scientist would need to do to complete a project. You start with asking the questions, then you gather data and then you might go back and fix your questions based on the data you see. Once you have your data, you have to learn how to take this huge amount of data and analyze it,” Rabina said. “Then, you create some way to communicate what you found to the world around you.”
The class’s first unit will culminate in a project that centers around gun violence during the summer months in Boston. The idea for this project was born after Thiessen, who lives in Boston, noticed an uptick in violence this past summer. At the end of the project, students in the class will analyze the patterns established through the data, and ultimately will make recommendations to the Police Commissioner of Boston based on these patterns.
Rabina said the data science cycle is helpful to analyze local events.
“We were talking about what happened, and thinking about how we could involve it in the curriculum and what factors may have led to this increase in gun violence. This is actually part of the data science cycle: noticing things in your world and asking a question about it, then gathering data, then drilling it down to a clear idea. We thought this could be our first project, and that’s how it was born,” Rabina said.
Prior to this major project, students are completing smaller projects in which they learn different skills pertaining to data science. Krakowski said one of the highlights of these projects has been that it is up to the students to decide which direction they want to take them.
“Students have a really big voice in the class, which is one of the ways in which they’re intertwining social justice into their curriculum. They’re allowing a lot of student power and student decisions to choose to work on something which we are passionate about,” Krakowski said.
Thiessen said one of the key qualities of the course is that there are no prerequisites; the class is open to all students.
“I recommend this class to any student who is coming out of standard, honors or advanced,” Thiessen said. “Any student who wants to learn more about statistics and data science from a more hands-on experience and is eager to learn about social justice. We built this class wanting it to be for everyone.”
Ava Varrell, Sports Managing Editor|October 21, 2022
Displays of students’ art made in the Engineering Innovation and Design class are scattered around the school, like this one, which can be found on the first floor of the STEM wing.
Creativity and team building are at the heart of a unique class split between a robotics classroom in the STEM wing and a workshop in the Unified Arts building.
In the Engineering Innovation & Design class, students learn about engineering and problem solving through interactive processes with the help of constructive peer feedback to adapt their ideas.
Engineering teacher Aubrey Love said when he was first creating the class alongside ceramics teacher Andrew Maglathlin, they hoped the class would be able to complement other engineering classes by incorporating the nuances of art and collaboration.
“We wanted to incorporate critique, the idea that you are working with other people and their ideas are relevant and valuable,” Love said. “Then, we wanted to maintain function; we wanted to solve problems in a functional way as engineers should, so the final projects that we created for the class meshed function and form.”
Love said the collaborative environment that the students work in prompts much of the success and creative ideas found in the class.
“A student’s foundational knowledge is important, but it’s not just about what brilliance you have in your head but what pieces of knowledge you can pull together. Being able to talk to other people and come up with ideas as a group is huge,” Love said. “Collaboration is being able to listen to other people’s ideas and find value in them and not saying ‘let’s agree to disagree because I like my idea.’”
A unique quality of the class is the environment. Senior Maxwell Hatchett said he enjoys that the class generally feels less like a technical engineering course and more like a problem-solving class. He said the laid-back but extremely productive environment is one of his favorite parts of the class.
One of the class’ major projects is the cardboard chair project. The challenge is to create a full-size functional chair that could be used by anyone, employing only 10 pieces of cardboard.
“We brainstormed a bunch of different ideas and designs and finalized them before working on bringing the chair to life using the tools and materials available to us,” Hatchett said.
Senior Joshua Heinstein said the cardboard chair project requires an iterative design and construction process considering the difficulty of scaling a 2D material, cardboard, into a 3D design. The class teaches students to accept given constraints and adapt to them.
“We couldn’t just design the chair in the 3D modeling software, push a button, and have it printed. We had to brainstorm and design cardboard that could be cut and then assembled into the final product which is a much more involved process,” Heinstein said.
Working within the boundaries set by the project, Love hopes that students who go through his classes are able to embrace new concepts and better observe the world around them through the lens of an engineer.
“I’m hoping people understand humility in their design ideas. High school teaches you often that what’s in your head determines your worth, and I’m trying to move kids past that,” Love said. “There are great ideas that exist all around us; we just have to go out and find them, and then try to bring them all together to form a solution.”
Engineering Innovation & Design fuses art and STEM
Connor Quigley, Staff Writer|June 15, 2022
Last summer, the BHS Innovation Fund provided a grant to enable coding to become integrated into the 9th grade math and science curriculum. Josh Paris (JP) is the Math Department Chair who, along with Ed Wiser, Chair of the Science Department, and Britt Stevens, Chair of Career and Technology, supervised the initiative. Mr. Paris discusses what excites him about the Coding initiative and its impact on students:
Q: How did the Innovation Fund enable you to integrate Coding into the 9th grade curriculum?
JP: We have had two coding elective courses called Python and SNAP at BHS for several years but this is the first time it is being integrated into the 9th grade curriculum. The grant began last summer (2020) and it was a collaboration between the math, science, career and tech education departments. Teachers usually teach four courses but the grant gave course releases to Adam Fried and Christine Shen (both from the math department) and Tyler Brown (from the science department) to instead teach three classes. This – and the hiring of another teacher – enabled them to spend time collaborating and modifying the curriculum so that they could implement coding into the 9th grade math and science curriculum.
Q: Are you intending to integrate coding into the curriculum of the upper grades at some point?
JP: Yes, we started with 9th grade and then will move to the older grades in the following years, one year at a time.
Q: Why is it important to have coding as part of the curriculum?
JP: It is very important to have coding be accessible to everyone for so many reasons; not only is it the way of the future and opens a lot of career doors but it also helps enhance math deduction and reasoning skills. For instance, the same logic is applied in both coding and formal proof in geometry. Furthermore, giving all students access to coding is important for equity reasons since it has historically been a profession dominated by white males. By having equal access to coding beginning in 9th grade we are hoping that will change.
Q: Since coding is integrated into the math and science curriculum does it mean you need to be strong in those subjects to be good at coding?
JP: Motivation and hard work – like many things in life – are the keys to success with coding. Coding is something that draws upon and enhances many life skills and cuts through many disciplines, for that reason, students often find something about coding that “speaks” and appeals to them!
For members of the Turkish and Syrian diaspora, Feb. 6 will mark a day of mass destruction and devastation. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake along the Turkey-Syria border left millions displaced, thousands dead and put reconstruction costs in the billions.
Within a week of the disaster, students in Global Leadership, an elective course designed to educate students about modern-day challenges across the world, shifted their efforts to aiding the crisis. The class organized fundraisers, set up donation centers and spread awareness around the community.
Sophomore Sasha Harwin, a student in Global Leadership, said that despite the project being teacher facilitated, students took initiative and led the fundraising process.
“When we learned about the earthquake, we dropped everything else and immediately started to brainstorm ways we could help Turkey and Syria. Going in, we already knew there were going to be donation aspects, but we also wanted to put a big emphasis on spreading awareness around the school,” Harwin said.
Due to the urgency of the issue, the class had minimal time to prepare and organize logistics. They ultimately broke up into four separate groups to cover all bases: awareness, publicity, in-kind donations and monetary donations. Harwin said that each student was able to choose their own group, and everybody remained passionate about their work.
“The whole thing came together so fast and everybody stayed accountable,” Harwin said. “It’s a real and dire issue, so everyone was willing to help out in their free time.”
Harwin was a member of the awareness team, and gave presentations to World Language classes to generate more attention on the issue. Harwin and her team also reached out to all Brookline Public Schools to set up more donation centers. Despite only successfully connecting with Baker and Florida Ruffin Ridley school, she said that the team still managed to amass nearly twenty large bags of clothes, tents and blankets.
The class initially planned to send the in-kind donations to the Turkish embassy; however, their recently updated donation requirements forced the group to look elsewhere to donate. Harwin said that although she is disappointed with the unexpected change, she is still happy to know that they are able to donate everything to Cradles-to-Crayons and On-the-Rise, two local and dedicated organizations.
“It still feels so empowering because for most projects we do, we just talk and learn about big disasters in the world, but this felt so real because we’re actually going to make a difference for the first time,” Harwin said.
For junior Yoni Tsapira, a member of the monetary donations team, fundraising was also a new experience that he said will stick with him. His group managed to raise over $9,000 dollars through a GoFundMe page in two weeks and was only a few hundred dollars short of their ten-thousand dollar goal. He said that the GoFundMe is still active, but the class is planning to deposit their donations to UNICEF soon, a United Nations agency dedicated to providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children.
“It’s really cool to know that we as high school students can have a real impact,” Tsapira said. “If you think that you’re just a teenager and can’t do much, well, you can—because we just did something.”
Global Leadership teacher Roger Grande said that overall, he considers the fundraising efforts to be a major success for reasons beyond just the money raised.
“It was great that we achieved our goal, but it was so powerful because the students saw what they could do; it was both a real life effort and a classroom effort,” Grande said. “What I wanted them to take away from this project is what I want them to take away from this class in general: that they are insightful, their thoughts are real, and that they are powerful; that they are changemakers.”
