Welcome

Last year's trip to Costa Rica showed us that education can, and should, be a life-altering experience. This year, a largely new group of students, have decided to learn about and travel to Puerto Rico. With this new topic and destination in mind, we have developed a year-long interdisciplinary class that is based on the same three core principles:

1) Travel to expand students' horizons
2) An explicit connection between the classroom and real world
3) The use of sweat equity for students to see that their efforts can make a difference

During the early fall, the curriculum was largely focused on developing the 21st Century Skills of problem solving, critical thinking, decision-making, and collaboration. This was initially done using group challenges in the classroom, but then became vitally important once we started raking lawns. In addition to being our major fundraiser, this hard work put students in positions that required group problem solving, as well as perseverance and responsibility – traits that we all know are central to changing the trajectory of their lives.

During the winter and spring, each student will be developing an independent research project on a chosen aspect of Puerto Rico.
We hope that you will keep checking back as we share our learning, growth and adventures.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Tonight!

I can't believe that we are going to Puerto Rico tonight. It feels like the last time I looked at our count down calendar we were 50 days away. I'm so excited and the rest of the class feels the same, though I am not too excited about the time (We leave for Boston at 2am.) It will be such a wonderful experience to be able to travel with the entire class, and get to go through all we will do with my classmates. I graduate on June 1st, so this is pretty much my last hoorah for my highschool career. I couldn't think of a better way to end my year.

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