by Elizabeth Darling
Students at Palo Alto High School are doing a documentary on life as a teenager in Palo Alto. At Gunn, students are examining the impact of humans on black-tailed deer living in local parks. Other students are doing senior projects on topics such as the United Nations peacekeeping missions. All of these high school students are enrolled in pilot classes that started this year as part of a new district strategy to offer more enriching or specialized classes.
At Paly, the new subjects being taught this year are video production, computer programming in the C++ language, Introduction to Chemistry and Physics, and literacy.
The goal of the video production class, said fine arts teacher Ron Williamson, is to help students gain a deeper understanding of the media. "They are out there with video cameras," he said, filming themselves and the community.
He teaches students about camera angles, digital editing and other technical skills. But, he said, "the technical expertise for me is secondary to really understanding the media, to deconstruct it, to analyze it, to be able to interpret what messages are being sent to them."
Paly is also host to a new reading and literacy course to help freshmen catch up to their peers. An Introduction to Chemistry and Physics class was the brainchild of science teacher Laurie Addleman, who saw a need for a "bridge" class for sophomores who might not want to go straight from ninth-grade biology to chemistry.
The course teaches basic science skills and is aimed at students who aren't interested in the rigor of other science classes. "Some of the kids are finding more success than they have in the past," Addleman said. "I just want to make sure they're going to get something out of the day's lesson."
On the other end of the spectrum, students at Gunn can take Applied Biology, a course designed for students who want to explore science in greater depth. This semester, students study ecology and conservation through group research projects.
One group studied sea otter behavior at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, comparing those in captivity with those in the wild. Another group studied the human impact of black-tailed deer living in local parks. The course, said teacher Heidi Ballard, "allows students to rediscover the curiosity of how the world works."
Students do hands-on research, community service projects that involve planting oak trees and building trails, and even read scientific journals. "They're experiencing a little bit of what science is like in the real world," she said.
Gunn is also offering an ongoing engineering technology course, a joint Theater/English course and a math class emphasizing the use of the graphing calculator.
Ten seniors are also taking a pilot senior project course, which started at Paly last year, that will be open to 40 more students next semester. Three teachers--Ballard, English teacher Paul Dunlap and social studies teacher Sybil Frankenburg--have teamed up to provide an interdisciplinary approach to the students' final year projects.
The school board has indicated that it may decide to make such projects a graduation requirement. For now, students voluntarily sign up for the course, choosing their own project topics, and getting a community mentor. One student is comparing home births with hospital births and has a mentor who is a midwife. Another is studying quantum physics with the eye of a poet, writing poems about each of five physicists and their theories.
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