As you may have seen in my previous blog posts: “Disturbing Disruptions In San Diego” and “Capitally Cool California” (links below), my class and I have recently taken a trip to California.
On the fourth day of our trip, we went back to school. Not our school, however, we went to High Tech High (HTH).
Before I get to far into my experience at HTH, let me first explain a few things about this school. HTH is a charter school. That means that it’s a publicly funded, independent school. Independent schools are established by teachers, parents, and community groups. This means that these groups have a larger say in how students are taught compared to a public school. It also means that the school’s approach to teaching and the methods it uses might be different or more progressive than those in public schools, Public schools might not have implemented new ways of doing things as quickly as HTH.
There are currently four schools within the HTH campus that we visited. This includes High Tech High Elementary Explorer, High Tech High Middle, High Tech High Media Arts (high school), and High Tech High International (also a high school). During our visit, we spent the majority of our time at HTH Media Arts.
While we were at HTH, we had the opportunity to better understand the HTH experience by following a student, or students, to their classes over the two days of our visit.
Our first experience was a tour of the HTH campus. My tour was really fun. We had happy, talkative tour guides, which was good because our group had three of the loudest and most talkative people from Seycove in it; me, Adam, and Kate.
It’s easy to tell that HTH is not your average scholarly institute. The first thing you notice about the school is the architecture. It doesn’t look like most high schools. It’s really open with glass walls everywhere. The ceilings are super high so you don’t feel cramped and the layout of the school is really simple, which would make it really hard to get lost. And there is student work displayed everywhere, all over the school. I think this is great and really important because it shows the students that they should be proud of their work and show it off.
Two of the classes we attended where Social Studies and Math. In the Social Studies class we talked about serious issues going on in America. One of these issues was about gun laws in America. More specifically, how to minimize youth access to guns. I found it a really interesting discussion.
In one of our other classes (math) we where posed a mathematical riddle. It is known as the Locker Riddle. We worked on it in groups and individually. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure the answer out. Can you?
While at HTH we also had the opportunity to record our HTH buddies. I enjoyed talking to my buddies, Max and David, about HTH and how it was helping them achieve their dream futures. We also talked a bit about San Diego, what it was like to live there and what they liked best about it They both clearly liked being at HTH and knew they were lucky to be there.
High Tech High was a really interesting and exiting place to be. If I lived in San Diego I would love to go there for school.