This is a story about the lessons White boys learn in school. Or at least it’s about what I learned in school- about race and class and gender and what we do or don’t owe each other.
“Paagalon ka school” (“School for lunatics”), “The Motley Crew’, “The Rag-Tag Army” were the not-so-flattering epithets the community used to describe our school —one would have thought we had started a rock band, not a tiny little school with nine children and grand ambitions.
Adelric McCain (Network for College Success) and Xiomara Padamsee (Promise 54) explore the intersections of equity and improvement while sharing stories, wisdom and wobbles from their own journeys to integrate the two.
To address the youth mental health crisis, 11th grade Humanities teacher Andres Perez and his students at High Tech High Chula Vista sewed tote bags for patients at Rady Children’s Hospital Psychiatric Outward. Along the way they learned about the systematic issues in society that could lead to troubling mental health issues, and how to take action toward them. They also learned the importance of iterating a product and a process, and giving grace to oneself through it all.
15-year veteran math teacher, Sarah Strong, and her high school student, Gigi Butterfield, get into why kids hate math (at least some of them), and what to do about it.
During our seven years as High Tech High students—and eventually, student leaders in the Student Ambassador program—we worked alongside our teachers and school leaders to plan and make decisions both in and out of the classroom.
