Recently, my PLP class went on our trip to California.
After a couple days of enjoying the sun, seeing some beautiful beaches, and going to the safari park, it was back to school. But not our high school Seycove an Americain charter school, High Tech High.
A charter school is a school that is independently operated but receives funding from the government. Charter schools provide educational approaches that are different from regular schools. HTH has a community of elementary, middle, and high schools. The school that we spent our time in was High Tech High Media Arts.
HTH media arts focuses on having a college-going culture supported through a strong liberal arts and sciences foundation.
Now that we learned about charter schools and HTH we get to have a inside look by experiencing two days following a student throughout there classes.
The first thing we did was go on a tour of the campus with our high tech high buddies. I was super lucky to get two awesome gals Mui and Blanca.
When you walk around high tech high you can tell it’s not a normal high school. There are amazing student creations displayed all over the school and very open classroom.
We attended our buddies math class, media arts class, and socials class.
In socials we learned about how education should be the great equalizer and how American and Canadian schools are different.
In the media arts class we debated on current events today. Unlike how I have done current events in school before this was completely student lead and you didn’t have to prepare an essay before. I thought this was great because we talked about a variety of things from school shootings to Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy.
Finally in math we did a interesting riddle. The riddle is called the Locker riddle and independently in groups of three we tried to figure it out. After lots of redrawing the problem out and using what we know we surprisingly solved the riddle.
At HTH we also got to interview our buddies. First we prepared questions to ask them.
I thought this interview went really well I enjoyed talking to Miu and Blanca because they had a lot of cool things to say like how high tech high has given them great opportunities that there parents could have benefited from, and what they like and dislike about San Diego.
What didn’t go well for this interview was the sound quality because we did the interview outside. Because there was an airport nearby HTH and the elementary school was walking around, a lot of the good information I got you weren’t able to hear.
Reflection
HTH believes that education should be the great equalizer. The school is devoted to giving everyone an equal chance for a great education by taking in students from different parts of San Diego no matter there skill level . This creates disruption because many students that wouldn’t normally get a great education like hth provides now are more likely to going on to college. These students have a chance to become intelligent future leaders and have a powerful impact on society. Another way HTH causes this same disruption is by encouraging and preparing the students to go to college. They have after school programs and praise every student that gets into college. The two main things I would love to bring back to Seycove is debates on current events. I think this would be great to bring back because sometimes we are so focused on our projects that we don’t take time to discuss the major issues happening right now. I also think that we could focus more on helping students with thinking about college and preparing for it. My oldest brother found that the grade 12 grad trans did not help him in any way moving on to college as it should have. Finally I also loved how HTH created this amazing environment by letting there students paint the walls, and furnish and decorate areas however they wanted. I thought this was very cool because it connects to how we saw technology companies like twitter and google create a place that people want to be. Just like Scott said at dinner, if you are exited about a problem it makes it seem like less work. I believe if employees and students want to be working at their job or school, it will radiate positive energy and reflect on the work that is produced.