Tag Archives: high school

very random thoughts, writing

Student writing

I have been reading and responding to so many personal statements, I’ve lost count. Mercifully, many have been through email, so I can always do a search and count them up. Which I have to do so I can track them all for work, but that is future me’s problem…

The thing about personal statements is that they are draining. Well, actually, everything with high school students is draining, but that’s just because everything in high school is the very first ever in the history of life, because 13-18 is the age range where you start to experience others in a more concrete way, but you’re still too young to really pay attention to what you’re learning in class to realize that everyone on the planet has gone through something similar, so it’s not really the first time in the history of humanity; it’s the first time in the history of your life.

And then, just as everything is on the very edge of beginning to come together, you have to write a personal statement (or 5) to get into college and fund your next round of education. And so all of the life experience ends up on the page for other people to read. Continue reading Student writing →

books, review

Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really loved the story. I remember seeing the novel on the bookstore shelves not long after its publication, and I wanted to read it. Being a quite, not shy, watching person myself, any book that dealt with the people at ease on the edges of the crowd felt immediately comfortable.

But I put off reading the novel until earlier this October, more than a decade after I first held the book in my hands. And I’m glad I waited until I had grown up a little more. If I had read the story so close to my experience in high school, I would’ve completely missed all of the references to the numerous groups of like-minded lovers of all that life has to offer, like the Algonquin, and my enjoyment would’ve have been less.

And the space gave me some perspective on my own high school experience, which allowed me to connect with these complex characters. Charlie and Patrick and Sam come with a tremendous amount of baggage that, like real life, we only get to see parts of. As much as we learn about all of them through the course of the novel, we never get the complete story for any of them. We get the most important pieces of them, and no one gets to be completely good or bad or friend or enemy or pigeonholed into any one category. Even secondary characters do not get to be any one thing.

I cried through whole sections of this book because I recognized the pain of these characters in my own experience. They are damaged without being broken, and their efforts to keep from falling to pieces demonstrate ways to accept the entirety of their lives, from the great to the horrifying to the mundane to the sorrowful. Because life is all of these and more and becomes complete with the acceptance of its multifaceted nature.

I loved this story, but realize it is not for everyone, as it deals with very major topics. But for those who’ve always felt like they are alone on the edges, Charlie can be a friend to walk the path to connecting with others. And sometimes when you live on the edge, you need to see a way to live with others, and this novel can be that.

View all my reviews

 

made of win

Sharing Knowledge

Amateur wireless station (LOC)Today, I had the privilege of introducing one of the students who started a blog to HTML. She knew about computer languages, to the extent that she knew you needed a language to get computers what you want them to, but she hadn’t thought about how you would need to have a language to make websites do what you want as well.

And now she not only knows that HTML paves the path to controlling what her site looks like, she’s already started learning the basics. I won’t lie; it was really fun watching her excitement at discovering how to create buttons and links. I felt bad reminding her about her homework.

But she did walk out with more information, and a broader field of passion, because she learned something new today. And she found the practical aspects, along with most of the information, by taking the initiative to search for what she didn’t know.

That’s what happens when we share the information that we have with those who don’t know about it. Will HTML change her life entirely? I don’t know. Some of the most poignant lessons in my life come from my Year 11 experiences. But with most of her life, and all of college, ahead of her, I may have only shown her the tools she can use to continue creating in yet another medium.

Watching her joy at playing with the basics for any website inspired me to really get back into increasing my coding knowledge. It will probably take me awhile, I do have a thing or two to do, but I’m excited to expand my collection of information. Because that’s what sharing knowledge does.

books, conversations

Discussing Special Topics in Calamity Physics with teenagers 3

It’s been a couple of weeks because the students had mid-terms, scholarship applications, and then there was Spring Break. So this is a recap for around 3 weeks worth of discussion, which works out to be about an hour’s worth of actual conversation.

The students, for the most part, really enjoy the novel. The action has picked up (I mean there was a dead body in a swimming pool at the party they crashed), and the students are in.

What I’ve noticed most through the discussions are the numerous elements that need explaining. Not because the story is necessarily complicated, but because the story takes place predominantly on the East Coast and most of the students haven’t even made it to Northern California. The element that stood out this time around was the father/daughter relationship. Most of the students find Blue’s relationship with her dad a little creepy, but they understand why Blue would be so connected. It’s interesting seeing the father/daughter relationship through the eyes of students who either don’t know their father or don’t have a good relationship with him. It’s yet another aspect of the novel that they tend to react to as though the concept comes from Mars.

This week, hopefully, we’ll get to have more of a conversation. I’m trying to come up with more interesting questions that can be answered regardless of the number of chapters the students have read. We’ll see what the week holds.

books, conversations

Discussing Special Topics in Calamity Physics with teenagers 2

Well week two could have had a better discussion, but it wasn’t terrible considering the sophomores had just completed the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) and the seniors were all caught up in scholarship deadlines. So the number of students who had not completed the reading outnumbered those who had.

But we started with some predictions. For those that had completed the reading, they had a chance to predict some of what Blue will face. Most of them suspect that life for Blue will take another turn for the worse, but they still don’t have specific predictions.

For those who hadn’t completed the reading, I had them write their predictions for the chapters based on the paragraph synopses of the books the chapters pull their names from. Some of them were able to predict fairly well, but others did not draw a solid connection between the title and what could happen.

What I learned this time was that foreshadowing is more difficult if you haven’t read much. Most of the students in the reading group aren’t readers (yet), and I am learning that what seems obvious to me and jumps off the page as contrived or trite appears new to them. I have some suspicions as to why they are in high school and yet lack the skills to point to examples of foreshadowing.

Next week we will meet more of the characters who will play a larger role in the remainder of the story. We will also hit some of the longest and slowest parts of the novel, but I’m hopeful that the students trust my judgment enough to stick it out. I’d forgotten, until I reread it, that Pessl does a great job laying a solid foundation for the rest of the story to stand on. Why this fantastic world building may trip up several of the students is that so few authors do it anymore. And since many of the students prefer stories that keep up the action (and yet don’t like fantastical elements in their stories), the initially slow pacing may get the better of some of them. But I have faith in the students.

made of win, school

UCI features Ervin Meneses

Domestic science laboratory in Hartford Public High School, Hartford, CT. No date given, but ...

You probably don’t know who Ervin Meneses is. He’s a high school student that comes to my work constantly. He’s dedicated and working hard to make it to college.

He has spent this summer working at University of California, Irvine, for Dr. Reginald Penner, one of the chemistry professors. And UCI interviewed him and wrote a good, though occasionally slightly sensationalist, piece on him. It’s a featured article on their website! From the article:

Each weekday, after donning purple gloves, a white lab coat and goggles, Ervin starts to work. His mission: to grow gold-coated filaments 1,000th the width of a human hair. Creating nanowires is a tough, tedious task that stumps even veteran researchers, says his mentor, Jung Yun Kim, a third-year graduate student. But Ervin never gives up.

“He’s really something else,” says Kim. “I feel more motivated to work every day he’s here. He is so full of life.”

This kid is brilliant, and I’m so happy that he took the opportunity to work at UCI. And it was really fun to read about him here. I hope you get to have moments like this. It makes the day brighter.

*the photo is from Cornell University’s Flickr stream.

reading

Reading with High Schoolers

2 Comments

I have a new job tutoring high school students in English at an after-school, non-profit academic center.

Today is my third day and I’m enjoying it already.

The center is trying to create some sort of fun program to encourage the students to read more on their own.

My current suggestions extend as far as have books that are fun to read and not school work. I’m also thinking of how to make some of the amazing podcast novels easier for the students to access.

What I am really needing are brilliant ideas on how to get the students reading in a way that actually makes them want to read.

So how would you get high school students to read? What sort of program would you create? Please leave your suggestions in the comments, and feel free to throw in suggestions for what to have on the shelves!

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