If you’ve been catching up with my blog you would know that we went on a trip to California, if not click here to catch up! On this trip we went to a charter school called High Tech High (HTH).

Charter schools are basically schools that receive government funding but abides by rules that are created and approved by an independent group of people or a person. Throughout Canada, the only province with these schools is Alberta but in America they have them everywhere!

This specific charter school is very well known throughout California and even the world! HTH is made up of a cluster of schools one of them is High Tech High Media Arts (HTHMA, is the school we visited). High Tech Highs current CEO is Larry Rosenstock, one of his many beliefs is that “HTH is founded on respect, if you treat kids like adults they will act like them”.

Many kids all over California and even other states dream to go to this school, unfortunately its really difficult to get into HTH. The school accepts applicants from everywhere, then depending on your zip code they use a lottery system to choose students. Usually if you live closer to the school its more difficult to get in, the school does this because they really want to give kids with not many opportunitys a chance to improve their education. The teachers even mentioned they had a student from Taiwan crossing the border everyday!

While we were at HTH we were partnered with either one or two other students! To pair up with other students we created an intro video to match our personality’s. We used iMovie and many other apps to mash together basically a definition of who we are! Here’s mine…

I got partnered originally with two people (Arlet + Loren) but by the end of the trip a student called Natalia tagged along! I was super nervous when I first met them but as the day went along we all started to get to know each other and by the end we couldn’t stop talking!

Our first day was tons of fun! HTH’s day looks a little different then Seycove’s though. We started with a grand tour of the whole HTH “village”, including HTH media arts, HTH international and all the middle and elementary HTH’s! Afterwards we shadowed our partners around for the day! We started of with going to a Media arts class, which i really enjoyed. We started the class with current event (talking about events in the world) the class ended up having a very heated discussion about gun laws which was very interesting to listen to. I think that media arts class was really helpful because it was a way for everybody to express their opinions on todays current events, I definitely want to see this class at our school in the future. We then headed off to math class and were separated into groups to try to solve a math problem. Afterwards we all went down to the mall to get lunch at five guys!

At around 1:50 we went to humanities to finish off the day. We started to talk about rights and the unfairness of education. We also went outside to record our HTH interviews for a podcast we were going to put together! The criteria was really open, so there wasn’t anything specific we had to talk about which I really liked! We just sat outside on the grass and had a conversation about our daily routine and things we wanted to change in the world, and how we could do this. By the time we got back into class it was time to go home!

The next morning we went to media arts and created some mini books with drawings of our trip on them. Then we went to their flex block, this was a block that the students could sign up for whatever interested them. My partners and I went to yearbook which was really fun to partake in for a day. After we went out for lunch again, this time I went to trader joes!

After lunch we went to our last block together! In humanities we continued to talk abut the unequal education rights among different schools. We did this by listening to a podcast about this super smart student at a poor school that didn’t have enough opportunities to get the education she deserved, and how this impacted her. I thought this was a very powerful story, and something that shows how messed up the school system can sometimes be in the world. After this we played a mini game where the teacher would say a phrase, and if you agreed with it you would stand in a certain area and if you didn’t you would stand in the opposite area.

Once the game was done it was time to say goodbye. I had so much fun with them and met so many great new people that I was super sad to leave. I really hope that one day I can meet my partners again!

Once we got back to Canada it was time to start editing! The raw clip was around 20 minutes long so my focus was to cut down the parts I didn’t need. My first step was listening to the whole thing, once I had a good idea of what I wanted to do I started editing! I decided in the end to use the part where we talked about the future and what we want to change in America and how we can do this. As per usual I used ferrite to record and edit, and YouTube to post. For my second draft I added in some music in the beginning to set the tone. I also rearranged some clips and cut some others out, to create more flow. I ended up creating the music in garage band like I usually do. For the final draft I listened to it a few times and decided to rearrange some clips again in Ferrite. I also retouched some audio and tried to balance out the volume even more! Here’s the final draft…

Overall it was a really fun experience that I’ll never forget! I felt like I also improved my editing skills, I think compared to other podcasts this was really strong because it was really focused. The whole trip was super fun but I feel like this was the highlight because of all the great people we met, I just really hope that we can see them again!