Intersession 2008

For the past few years, High Tech High has done something called Intersession -- a two-week session between semesters in which students choose an elective course of interest. Students take only that course all day (8:40-3:40) for two weeks, at the end of which they receive a pass/fail designation on their transcripts. The course I taught for intersession last year was called "(ism)x(ism)," and was a painting class focused on how social issues (human-isms) intersect with art movements (art-isms) throughout history. This year I've taken a similar idea and expanded it out to include more than just painting. The course is called the Art of Social Protest, and its course description is as follows:

"Throughout history, the arts have been a place for expressing social discontent, protest and revolt. In this course we will work in various media (writing, painting, graphic design and music) to create our own expressions of social protest. We will also investigate other examples of protest art and report on their contributions to the course of history. Our studio and academic pursuits will be augmented by a museum visit and possible excursions into public art making."

The class started just yesterday (1/22) and will go until next Friday (2/1). So far, there are a few things of interest which have carried over in my mind since last year's intersession. They are:

Motivation & student choice: One of the components of High Tech High's design that I struggle with is the lack of student choice in the course schedule. Each course in the students' four years at HTH is already mapped out for them, making the term "electives" a bit of a misnomer for our non-core classes. Intersession is the only time in students' time at HTH that they really get to choose a course solely based on interest. As a result, we get students who really want to be in class - making it easier to convince them that hard work and rigorous academic inquiry are worth doing. And if kids realize in the first couple days that a class is not what they expected, it's easy for us to find a new one for them.

Time frame: Doing anything for seven hours a day is exhausting. Having the same class, with the same teacher, in the same room all day for two weeks is enough to drive teachers AND students crazy. However, it also gives teachers the potential to think very differently about what's possible with kids. For me to teach a painting class in 50 minutes a day would be frustrating, because if I subtracted time for set up and clean up, students would get maybe 25-30 minutes a day of painting. But if a student has a block of 3 1/2 hours to paint, then the set up and clean up time is negligable compared to the vast expanse of time available to really get into a piece. Another example would be a critical film study course, which of course works best if one has time to watch a film in one sitting and talk about it immediately after. Or a course that relies mostly on field work, such as community service that involves travel to and from a site plus several hours of work on-location. These differences in the way I perceive my day during intersession are really refreshing, and they help me break out of the box in terms of how to envision the possibilities for the rest of the year.

"Rigor" & creativity: Possibly the most exciting aspect of intersession for me is the sense of freedom I get from designing and executing a course entirely from scratch that may or may not be in my certified subject area. The kinds of courses that teachers choose to do during intersession are often surprisingly different from their "day job" subject areas: a math/chemistry teacher conducting a course on modern folk lore; an engineering teacher doing community service; a multimedia teacher doing a health and fitness class; a humanities teacher conducting a course on fishing. Yet all of these classes are rich with real learning and a kind of "rigor" that the traditional curriculum doesn't leave room for. For myself, the opportunity to teach art for two weeks is a great way to recharge my enthusiasm about the possibilities for exploring serious academic content through creative media, and a lot of the energy I'm feeling in intersession is going to spill right over into our second semester.

Once intersession has passed, I'll come back to this topic and post about the results of the course, as well as some student work samples. In the meantime, this is my syllabus for the course: Download the Word document