Seminar!

So today we met with our seminar teams.  Let me first describe exactly how our curriculum works.  As I said before seminar takes the place of an English class, and it is co-taught by teachers of any subject, meaning all teachers teach it.  So because there are an odd number of teachers, I am working with two teachers instead of simply being paired with another teacher.  I am with a Humanities and a Music teacher, and all of our students in seminar are music majors.  They group them by arts discipline in 11th and 12th grade.  So basically, each grade has a different curriculum (obviously).  But for 11th and 12th grades, they have worked out a cyclical curriculum, so that teachers are either in an 11/12 block or a 12/11 block.  For instance, I am in the 12/11 block, so I am with 12th graders first semester and 11th graders second semester.  Since I really only know the curriculum of my block, I'll only be able to explain that.  We teach college admissions, SAT prep, and senior projects, whereas I gather that the 11/12 block has an arts history curriculum.  The reason for the cyclical block is because theoretically if a teacher is there for more than one year (unlike myself), they will have the same 11th grade group in the spring which them becomes their 12th grade group in the fall.  This way they have the opportunity to provide SAT prep, college admissions, and senior projects stuff all in the correct timeline.  It really actually makes a lot of sense, so I'm gonna go with it.  :)

So I guess it's most important for me to explain the senior projects, because I'm sure you can assume what we do to help with SAT prep and college admissions (college essays and resumes, choosing schools, and doing well on the SAT).  The senior project is unique to this high school.  The mission statement of our school clearly outlines that we try to help students become artists, scholars, and citizens of our world.  So the senior project is the ultimate combination of these roles.  Each senior must write a grant proposal and must achieve at least a grade of 3 on a scale of 4 in order to graduate, though they can revise it as many times as they need.  So the students have to find a community organization they would like to become artistically involved with and write a proposal for a grant that would help fund them so they could in return help the organization.  So they are using their artistic skills but also their scholarly skills in order to write a clear and effective proposal and also their citizenship skills because it is a community service-oriented idea.  It's really the capstone of their high school years.  It sounds like a fabulous project, and I cannot wait to see what the students come up with.  Then they bring in outside judges to select some of them to actually receive the grants.  They get $500 to do their project, and those that complete the project fully graduate with honors.  It is the only way to graduate with honors, although they do have a separate program to get the honors designation on their transcripts for a particular course.  There is no exam to test into honors, it's open honors, so any student who wishes to can choose to.  They are not in separate classes, they simply do more work (read more books and write more papers).  I think it's such an important lesson for students - to give them the opportunity to elect whether or not they want to do extra work to learn more.  

Also, the teachers discussed that this 12th grade class in particular is a very high needs class, meaning I will be working with a lot of special education students (they call them learning center students at this school).  I am curious to see how that will play out, because they do work towards inclusion as much as possible, so I will definitely have high needs students mixed with all kinds of other students.  It will be an interesting environment, and I am excited to see how that will play out.  They told me that some students will have completed the summer reading assignment fully and others will not have even started, so I guess I'll learn how to deal with that.  They also told me that I would be working with students from the very beginning.  This class particularly is very individualized for each student, so I'd probably get a group of three students and follow them specifically throughout the semester.  I still don't exactly know what that means, but I am excited and nervous to see how it all works!  I even managed to speak up and make suggestions in our meeting today.  My classes start on Tuesday, and the high school starts Thursday, so things will be in full swing soon - oy!