I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year. This jarring start to a new phase of life set a pace that marked high school milestones strangely.

Now, with graduation approaching, I look back on those milestones—the ups and downs of four pivotal years—and reflect. What can I remember? What should I remember? What will I forget?

This is where the yearbook comes into play.

Yearbooks allow us to slow down and take a look back at the previous year. It goes by so fast when you’re in it: a blur of classes, finals, presentations, clubs. But with a yearbook in my hands, I can see the last of everything with my friends. Yearbooks capture the random science lessons we didn’t know we would miss, the teacher who taught us one year and was forgotten about the next, the friends known only as hallway acquaintances, the people we never thought we would connect with but will definitely keep in touch with beyond this phase of life. Even now, I page through my middle and elementary school yearbooks, and I’m instantly transported back to my day-to-day life.

There is beauty in the curation of a yearbook, too.

For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had the ability to take a picture and save it digitally—which means our pockets are filled with disorganized fragments of memories dating back years and years. There is something special about having a designated space for specific photos that come together to tell a story, captured in a tangible book that forces us to flip the page and feel the weight of the memories.

Besides, when have we ever been able to hold time in our hands?

When I was younger, I was afraid of the idea that memories were happening all around me—and that forgetting them would feel like losing a piece of myself. That’s when I discovered the power of journaling to hold my memories. Writing would ensure that I could look back on the different versions of myself, and what I experienced: from the mundane things, like what I ate for breakfast on Thursday before school (toast and scrambled eggs with cheese), to my first crush in elementary school (and the red collared shirt he wore on the first day we talked).

Yearbooks, too, help capture how we change—which is why they are especially important for teenagers, who are too young to play with the kids but not old enough to fraternize with the adults.

They are how we remember this transitory phase, and the passage into adulthood—our “coming of age.”

During my freshman year, I joined the yearbook staff. We were forced to figure out how to bring people together digitally in a sea of blacked-out, camera-off Zoom screens. Which also meant we got to know our classmates differently. We saw pictures of their pets, got selfies taken in their rooms, and discovered who’s most likely to fall asleep with their camera on. Our small but mighty yearbook team did it all. We often had to get creative. Instead of prom, we spotlighted pets, instead of field trips, we showcased sidewalk chalk art, and instead of homecoming, we featured our actual homes.

So, while we didn’t have the usual options that marked the high school experience, we got to learn more about each other—like a shared love for the same band through posters hanging on our bedroom walls, meeting classmates’ siblings, and finding out that your dog and a classmate’s cat have the same name.

Yearbooks are a shared experience. Although we experience the same year, the same classes, and the same people, a yearbook is not catered to one person’s version of a story; it’s made up of pieces of everyone’s journey. That’s one reason why that COVID year’s book felt particularly special. The pandemic put the value of people and shared moments into perspective for me. And it’s the people I’ll remember the most from my time in high school.

My favorite part of the yearbook process is exchanging signatures, and as a graduating senior there’s more weight to it this time around. I know I’m leaving a lasting message or a last message, a final impression of the past year with my peers. I like to read the personalized versions of what people remember about our shared experiences. What did they remember about me? What memories did we share that didn’t cross my mind? As much as we walk together through high school, every day is different for each person.

Looking back is bittersweet. When it’s time to receive my yearbook this year and the smudged ink signatures are in place, I will be able to turn the pages and hold on to the memories I was lucky enough to have. To look back on the past, not think about the future, and extend the present.

The post A Yearbook to Remember appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The stakes of the presidential election are also peculiar and personal, especially for me. The results may determine which of two old friends—my fellow editors on our high school newspaper—ends up being the next Californian on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mine is a strange circumstance. I spent my high school years, 1988 through 1991, at Polytechnic, a small (my graduating class had just 85 students) and academically rigorous private school in Pasadena. Late in my freshman year, I joined a group of students and a popular history teacher, Greg Feldmeth, in starting a school newspaper. We called it The Paw Print.

I became the paper’s first editor-in-chief, a job I shared with a classmate named Jim Ho, a doctor’s son from San Marino. Jim grew up to become, in 2017, a judge on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month, President Trump added Jim’s name to the short list of judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court.

One of our smartest Paw Print reporters, and one of our successors as editor-in-chief, was Leondra Kruger, a doctor’s daughter from South Pasadena. Leondra grew up to become, in 2015, a justice on the California Supreme Court. Multiple press reports now identify Leondra as one of the top contenders to be Joe Biden’s first appointee to the Supreme Court.

Over the years, I’ve kept in touch with both Jim and Leondra, rooting them on as they rose through the legal ranks (while never missing a chance to tease them for wasting their journalistic chops on careers as legal functionaries). Since they became judges, I’ve read their opinions and marveled at what has changed, and what hasn’t, since I edited their raw copy.

But now that they’re real contenders for the highest court in the land, I’ve developed mixed feelings at the prospect of the ascent of either, especially in this frightening moment in American history.

When I turn on the news and see the toxic stew of American politics and the ugliness of a court confirmation hearing, I’m filled with fear for any friend of mine who might be thrust into such awfulness. And while I’m proud to know two people as great as Jim and Leondra, I also recognize that having two of the top two dozen high court prospects come from the same elite San Gabriel Valley school is not exactly an advertisement for American equality.

But my biggest fears are selfish. I’ve read of how the bitter political battles over the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh ruined old friendships and divided the alumni community at the private school they both attended, Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown Prep. Their classmates were deluged with media inquiries, and I’m writing this column defensively, as a public statement to which I can point as I turn down the interview requests I’ve started to get about Jim and Leondra.

I’m also offering this as a prayer that our nation’s political and legal civil wars won’t eclipse my memories of high school days and divide my high school friends.

Those memories are mostly sweet. Poly mixed old-line Pasadena families with hyper-ambitious kids who had either fled (as I did) or avoided Pasadena’s struggling public schools. Immigrant families produced many of the best students, including Jim (born in Taiwan) and Leondra (whose mother is Jamaican). My AP chemistry teacher once dubbed me and the three other white kids in his class “the Caucasian Corner.”

Teachers were tough, and writing was emphasized; my fellow students included not only these two future judges but the screenwriters of Ocean’s 11 and School of Rock. Poly also had a softer side: It allowed you to try just about anything you could imagine. Jim and I were among those who imagined a school paper.

In that pursuit, we became fast friends. We ran the paper by rough consensus, with about a dozen editors deciding what to publish, often with Mr. Feldmeth’s counsel. Jim and I enjoyed stirring the pot, from arguing that the school tolerated too much underage drinking to investigating the ethics of water balloon attacks on freshmen. Jim made trouble by compiling a feature called “Paws and Claws”—a list of one-paragraph blasts of student praise and complaints.

Jim Ho’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1991.

Jim was super-intense; he walked fast, laid out pages fast, and drove too fast, in a Ford Probe with so many extra options that The Paw Print’s car critic, whom I assigned to review student and teacher vehicles, called it the “Fordari Probarossa.” Jim loved arguing with our classmates and wrote with a passionate, sometimes over-the-top style. As his editor, I tried, and mostly failed, to tone him down as he campaigned to strip graduating seniors of the right to vote on the following year’s student government (since they wouldn’t live with the consequences of their choice).

I didn’t anticipate his judicial career, but I should have. He never missed an episode of NBC’s L.A. Law (he had a major crush on Susan Dey’s litigator). He had a strong sense of justice and helped crusade against what we saw as an unfair regime of student discipline. “Tardiness is treated as a more serious crime than cheating on exams,” the future Judge Ho wrote in his final Paw Print editorial. “Punishments must fit the crime, not the criminal.”

Leondra, a sophomore when we were seniors, was as cool and calm as Jim was hot and polarizing. One of the youngest people in her class, she could be funny and gossipy with friends, but she chose her words with great care, which made you listen more closely.

Leondra was deeply interested in the world outside Poly’s cloistered gates. She wrote for us about a Poly student who had left to go to public school and interviewed local teachers about California’s problems with education. As editor-in-chief, she published smart pieces about the school’s library, diversity, drugs, and even student sex. She also gracefully handled all the stories about the most traumatic event in our school’s life: the shooting death of a beloved student, Ochari D’Aiello, during summer break.

The Paw Print became smarter and more serious, with sharper editing and shorter stories, once Leondra took over. She ruled by consensus, in The Paw Print tradition, but had a strong backbone—she didn’t back down when people complained about coverage. When one student-contributor complained about his piece being cut, she replied: “When it comes to writers, sometimes people think their articles will only reflect on them, but in The Paw Print articles reflect on the newspaper as a whole.”

Leondra and I both went to Harvard, and we worked together again on the student newspaper, The Crimson. There she mostly resisted the urge to tell embarrassing stories about me to my girlfriend, another Crimson editor, now my wife. Leondra wasn’t the only future Supreme Court contender at the college paper; we became friends with Steve Engel, now a top Justice Department official who, like Jim, was recently added to President Trump’s Supreme Court list.

Leondra Kruger’s Polytechnic yearbook page from 1993.

After graduation, I became a newspaper reporter, which would rob me of most respect for the law (I’ve seen too much legislation written by the people and interests with money). But I kept tabs on the legal careers of Leondra and Jim with grudging envy. I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the haphazard ways that careers advanced in the disintegrating media business, and the systematic ways my high school friends touched the different stations of the cross for would-be justices.

Leondra found her way to Yale Law (applying her Paw Print skills to serving as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal), clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens, and worked in the U.S. solicitor general’s office, eventually arguing cases before the Supreme Court. She married a distinguished lawyer, and I’d thought California lost her to D.C. for good—until Gov. Jerry Brown unexpectedly called her home to take a seat on the state supreme court. Back in California, she has displayed her quiet intelligence and sense of duty—the L.A. Times reported that, just a few weeks after giving birth to her second child, she traveled to L.A. to hear cases.

Jim went to Stanford and worked briefly for state Sen. Quentin Kopp, a rare elected independent, before enrolling at the University of Chicago Law School, where his conservatism forcefully emerged. We kept in touch, and served as groomsmen in each other’s weddings. He worked in all three branches of the federal government—for Congress under Texas Sen. John Cornyn, in the Bush Justice Department, and as clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas. (I dutifully reported his high school driving to the FBI when interviewed for his background checks.)

Despite political differences, we stayed friends; he even got me into a Federalist Society event, where, despite aggressive reporting, I failed to spot anyone eating children or selling Supreme Court seats. Jim married a distinguished Texas lawyer—a dead-ringer for Dey—and followed her home to the Lone Star State, where he served as the state’s solicitor general, argued cases before the Supreme Court, and, to your columnist’s dismay, dropped his Southern California roots from official bios. The support of Sen. Ted Cruz, who had been Jim’s predecessor as Texas solicitor general, was crucial to Jim’s appointment to the federal bench three years ago.

If appointed to the Supreme Court, each of my high school newspaper buddies would be celebrated as a history-maker—Leondra as the first Black woman justice, Jim as the first Asian American justice. But, of course, they come from the same place, and I can’t help but see the familiar in their stories.

Profiles of Leondra sometimes include progressive activists and legal scholars complaining that she’s cautious, moderate, too grounded in the facts—just like the student journalist she was at The Paw Print. Jim, meanwhile, has gotten national attention for writing provocative, argumentative, and accessible judicial opinions, just like the pieces he authored as a student journalist. Critics say he writes too much like a columnist, offering opinions about policy and politics and morality, rather than just deciding cases. I confess that some of his rulings—like an opinion suggesting that giving police more leeway to use force would somehow stop mass shootings—make me wish I still had the power to edit him.

The overwhelmingly liberal majority of our old schoolmates would prefer to see Leondra on the court. I’ve watched her on the bench, and she is certainly the kind of judge I’d want with my fate in a court’s hands—smart, kind, and carefully even-handed.

On group texts, classmates sometimes grow angry at decisions made by Jim. (“Jimmy Crow Ho” was the theme of one bitter thread after he joined a decision making it harder to vote in Texas.) But our country, and the politicians who choose judges, seem to prefer jurists like Jim—attention-getting and forthrightly ideological figures who, like Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, can infuriate or inspire political bases.

We also prefer our judges young, which is why both my high school contemporaries are on short lists simultaneously. This is not because younger judges are better. It’s because these are lifetime appointments, and because those in power today want to lock their preferred judges onto the bench for as long as possible. Leondra and Jim are hot prospects since they’re in their mid-40s; in another 10 years, they might be considered too old for serious consideration.

This is a rotten state of affairs, both for the judges and the judged. I can’t imagine a more stressful time in life to ascend to a huge, high-profile job than in these sandwich years, when you’re both raising young children and taking care of older relatives. And for the country, giving such power to younger, less experienced judges is sub-optimal. Judges are supposed to consider long-term impacts and timeless principles, the sort of thinking that is better informed by age and experience. Ideally, America would have wise old judges who can check the excesses of young and energetic elected officials. Instead, America has things upside down. Our judges are younger and precious, while our most powerful politicians are tired, geriatric cases.

My biggest worry, though, is not about the ages of new justices, but about the court that Jim or Leondra might join. The sheer power of the U.S. Supreme Court is frightening, and growing. As our faltering republic finds it harder to resolve disputes and make progress, just five justices will have the power to make major decisions to cancel the democratic and life choices that we Americans make.

I have the deepest affection for these two judges I’ve known for more than half my life. There is no doubting their intelligence and their integrity. I would trust Leondra and Jim with that most precious of things, my children’s lives. And if I could reform the Supreme Court, I’d require its justices to operate more like The Paw Print editors of our day, with all nine required to reach a consensus before they publish any decision.

But, alas, our high court is not my high school newspaper. And I find it impossible to fully trust Leondra or Jim or any other living soul with the vast and unaccountable powers of a U.S. Supreme Court justice seat.

The post Two Would-Be Supreme Court Justices and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Who knew that those words would be the last I would ever say to my students in a classroom?

After that final class on Friday, March 13, my high school in Glendale, like other schools, would close and never reopen. We would finish out the Spring, 11 weeks of it, via distance learning.

That meant no graduation ceremonies for seniors. And for me—another type of senior, 55 work days shy of retiring from teaching—that meant no retirement parties, and no celebratory moments of saying final goodbyes to colleagues and students. All of it deleted before it could materialize. A black hole.

I had no time for self-pity in March because I quickly had to re-learn how to teach, now in a virtual classroom environment. I had been teaching English and journalism at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale since 1989 in a traditional classroom setting, and now I was about to embark on a journey I didn’t know I was going to take.

And neither did school officials who were unprepared for such a moment. They were scrambling to train teachers on online platforms, while distributing laptops and Wi-Fi hot spots to students who needed them—all in a week’s time.

I found it terrifying yet thrilling and after viewing a few webinars that the district provided, I got excited. Not so much about the tools themselves, but the fact that the district allowed teachers to choose how to teach and which tools to use.

It was something I had never experienced before in my 31 years of teaching—the district entrusting teachers with selecting the best way to teach, not mandating one method for all.

During the school year I taught five classes: four advanced 10th grade English and one journalism. Using Google Classroom, I consolidated the four English classes into one for easier workflow management. Why upload the same lesson four times in four different “classrooms”?

Knowing that the very first day of distance learning would feel foreign, I wanted to soothe my students’ nerves with a video of me talking directly to them, reprising a song I sang to them on the very first day of the school year back in August.

My inspiration was Fred Rogers. Instead of rules, we discuss expectations. Instead of penalties, we discuss rewards. Instead of a classroom, we have a neighborhood.

I sang “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with altered lyrics such as “it’s a beautiful day in this classroom now.”

With Mr. Crosby’s Neighborhood premiering on March 30, I would sing it again on video, for this would be the second First Day of the school year.

Once students viewed the video, dozens emailed me about how much they liked it, that it gave them comfort at a time when they were troubled with what was going on in the world.

The reaction motivated me to create more videos, and I couldn’t wait to pursue this new form of teaching which allowed my creativity to flourish.

And then reality settled in.

Distance learning was exactly like its name: distant.

While most of my English students submitted work and responded to my emails, one-third of my journalism staff disappeared. No submissions, no responses, no pulse, as if they were suddenly in a witness protection program. Struggling students no longer fall through the cracks; they have found an online hiding place, never to resurface.

What’s more, Google Meet and Zoom are not substitutes for in-person teaching. Classroom discussions, literature tests, and group projects could not be replicated online. There was no way for a teacher to know with certainty if the work done by the student was original, performed without the assistance of any person or source.

How could I give students a test? I couldn’t. Students could share responses.

How could I assign students an essay? I couldn’t. Most of the papers students write for me are done in class to ensure their veracity. Not now.

Courtesy of Brian Crosby.

Even ordinary lessons normally completed neatly within one class period drag on for a whole week; it’s like working in slow-motion.

For example, here is how a lesson from my Holocaust unit would play out in a regular classroom. Usually I show students a video of Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon returning to the concentration camp. For 47 painful minutes, she describes in excruciating detail the horror of what she experienced.

Before I show the video, I share her biography so they have familiarity with her background. Then I pass out a viewing guide that focuses on significant moments of the video.

I project the video onto a large screen with Bose speakers, an immersive moviegoing experience that all 34 students share collectively.

Midway through I pause the video and have them pair up with a partner and discuss answers to the questions. We then have a whole class discussion. After that, we review the next set of questions and resume the video.

By the end of day two, the lesson concludes with a short piece of writing in which students reflect on the video and make connections to Elie Wiesel’s Night, the memoir they just finished reading.

Compare this to the virtual classroom version of the same lesson.

On Monday, I post the notes, video and questions all at once, giving them two days to complete the assignment. Students are on their own to read the materials and watch the video.

There is no way for me to know if students are reading the material or watching the video. A teacher in the online environment has to proceed with an abundance of faith.

I cannot control when they do this or the speed at which they do this. Viewing the film on a laptop or cell phone in the comfort of a student’s home diminishes the impact, with the students starting and stopping the video as they please. It is no longer the emotional experience they would have had in my classroom.

Wednesday, I review all 112 student answers to the 16 questions. In person, we would have spent 10 minutes for students to share with a partner, then 10 minutes of sharing with the whole class, thus completing the task. Now, I have to actually read 112 written responses and select parts of them to share with students so they can broaden their perspective by hearing from their peers. The result: the whole thing takes too long and is lifeless.

Thursday, I post those select responses and ask students to comment on them to emulate conversation.

Again, in a classroom, this give-and-take would have energy, excitement, emotions running high, maybe erupt into an informal debate—a lesson impossible to orchestrate online.

Friday, I finally post their comments on what their peers had to say.

Online, the lesson dissolves into a lackluster exercise.

Within two weeks of teaching this way, I realized that the main ingredient missing was live performance. When students and teachers congregate in a classroom, together they give life to a lesson. Without sharing the physical space, that energy is unplugged. An electric group learning experience disintegrates into a dim “do your own thing” keyboard task. We all end up working alone in the dark.

Teaching in isolation from a laptop via distance learning was not the job that I had grown to love over three decades.

If I had any urge to change my mind and come back to work another year, distance learning confirmed that I had made the right choice. Schools will not be normal come August, most likely returning with a hybrid of in-class and virtual time.

That’s not for me.

I’m lucky in a way that this happened to me now when I was already on my way out. I feel for my colleagues who remain. It’s not going to be fun.

The post After 11 Weeks of ‘Distance Learning,’ This Teacher Is Glad to Be Retiring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When schools here in Fresno County and across California closed to protect students from COVID-19, I was a senior at Coalinga High School. It has about 1,200 students, and I know many of them, because I tried to make use of every single minute of my high school career. I’ve had some special challenges in life, so I’ve been careful to make academic plans a year in advance and follow those plans carefully. School is incredibly important for my life, my future, and my family’s future.

When I was younger, my brothers, sisters, and I were taken out of our family by Child Protective Services. We grew up in the court system. I was fascinated by the attorney who handled our case in court. She listened to us and then decided how to represent our interests. The experience made me want to educate myself so I can become a lawyer and a voice for the unrepresented.

That’s why I’ve involved myself in more than a dozen extracurricular activities including the Associated Student Body, School Site Council, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the California Scholarship Federation, and perhaps most important of all, Mock Trial, a competition where I handled a fake court case in front of a judge and real lawyers. I’ve taken college classes, visited UCLA, and attended camps to develop my skills in arguing and advocacy. I’ve found I have a talent for trials.

I also made a point of enrolling in six Advanced Placement classes to prepare me for college, boost my GPA, and provide college credits, which will save me money when I head off to university. In my senior year, I decided to take AP classes in English, and Government and Politics, and also enroll and study for the AP Spanish test on my own, because the actual class didn’t fit my schedule.

Taking AP classes helps you develop self-discipline and challenge yourself to see things from a broader perspective. It also means you’re surrounded with teachers and students who support you and are ecstatic about learning. Teachers and staff at Coalinga High have fostered a safe environment and gone above and beyond to help students succeed, at school, at home, and in life. That support makes you want to work harder. My fellow students and I never missed class; if one was sick, we’d FaceTime in. We also embraced other challenges; starting in the summer of 2016, I took classes at my local community college. That means I’ve already completed my “transferables”—the courses you need to transfer from a community college to a UC campus or another four-year school.

As the spring semester began, my plan was on course. I was accepted to my dream school, UCLA. Then we heard about a pandemic.

School ended mid-semester in March, and there was no time for a proper goodbye to teachers and students. We all went home, unaware of what was to come. We also left school empty-handed, with no work plan. School just ended in the middle of the sentence.

In the meantime, our teachers suggested that we review our own materials or visit educational websites, such as Khan Academy.

At first, I responded like a teenager, treating this as a vacation from schoolwork and an excuse to stay up late. But as the weeks went by, and the virus spread, I recognized I needed to keep studying. AP tests would still be given online, and I still had to go to college in the fall.

Bringing a structure into our home has been the most difficult task. I live with my mother and my stepfather, but they both have to work long days. So I had to create a schedule, and a place to study and work, for myself and for my four siblings, ages 15, 10, 9, and 8.

After a few weeks of experimenting, I arrived at this arrangement. I sat at the kitchen table and set up my laptop so I could study. I got my brother and three sisters all beside me, on their iPads, and had them reading as much as possible, working on math games, and watching science videos.

Alizé in her Class of 2020 jacket. Courtesy of Alizé Basulto Ibarra.

My biggest concern as an older sister as this went on was that they’d return to school and be one of the kids who fell behind their classmates. My sister, 15 and a freshman in high school, found it hard to study math at home, without a teacher, so I made it a point to spend extra time with her. My younger siblings soak up information like sponges; so as long as they had the information at their fingertips and were doing their work, they would learn well. This arrangement went on for six weeks.

The school only started its official distance learning in May, two months after the break started. Its arrival created new frustrations for me. The platforms for distance learning are very difficult to navigate; they are closed systems. Each sibling attends a different school, and there was no easy or direct way of entering each school’s website. It was a long process just to sign in to each site, and then navigate through four or four or five different tabs just to find my siblings’ work.

It took me a ton of time, energy, and stress to help my siblings navigate their schoolwork. Often it was hard to understand what the teachers were looking for, and what it meant to do an assignment well. The schools did provide computers and other electronics, but those devices came with restrictions that made it hard to access all the websites that my siblings needed to complete their work.

I encountered some issues in my own schooling as well. Certain classes were on distance learning while others were on Google Classroom. Still, at Coalinga High, I was fortunate to have counselors who did everything they could to resolve these problems, while putting up videos that showed us how to navigate the online lessons. Teachers started up AP classes over Zoom, and I took my three AP exams on May 11, 13, and 22, without much trouble.

But it was much easier for me—a senior who knew all the classes and teachers—than it was for my freshman sister, who had a harder time figuring out how to get what she needed. And while I was nearly done with high school, she was just getting started.

None of us will get to make up the time or the lessons of this spring, or experience the milestones and make the memories that we missed out on. I fear that my siblings will be behind not only on work, but on skills we need. This time may make it hard for kids of our generation to build a strong foundation and thrive. Will some lose out on the opportunity to go to college as a result?

As I write this, I’m readying for graduation. All major events were canceled. The school community is looking into having some kind of modified prom or graduation.

Usually in the summer I take classes at UC Berkeley, Fresno State, or UCLA, but this year those have been canceled. So I intend to keep the job that I have working in fast food. And I hope that in the fall, I’ll be able to go to UCLA, in person, and not at a distance.

The post When COVID Came to Coalinga High, ‘School Just Ended in the Middle of the Sentence’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There’s a new answer to this question: 13. That’s how many state football champions California will crown this weekend during five state bowl games at Sacramento State’s Hornet Stadium and eight other games around the state. And that’s a big increase from the five state champions we had in 2014—and 13 more than California had before the state’s governing body for high school sports, CIF (the California Interscholastic Federation), started holding state bowl games a decade ago.

Even in the largest football-crazy state of this football-crazy country, that’s an awful lot of football. Indeed, California’s ever-expanding high school football season now starts the last week of August and extends into the winter holiday break. And it’s worth noting that some of the teams seeking state titles this weekend will be playing their 16th games of the season—the same number of games that the pros in the National Football League play each year.

You may be surprised to read this, especially if you’ve listened to recent news stories and medical studies about the need to protect young bodies and brains from concussions and other injuries. Last year, the California legislature and Gov. Brown made a great show of pushing through legislation with the goal of making our state the safest place in the country to play high school football. The law, AB 2127, imposed new limits on physical contact in practices for school football teams; they cannot have full-contact practices during the off-season, and can hold only two full-contact practices a week during the season, and those practices cannot go more than 90 minutes.

But those rules didn’t cover games. And so California’s high school football industry—with its coaches and players and even cable TV sports networks—continues to grow even more rapidly than the state’s pension obligations.

To be fair, it isn’t merely the will to win and the grab for glory that’s leading this expansion. It’s also about the well-intentioned desire to include everyone. This latest expansion was fueled by complaints that the state bowl games of previous years selected only a fraction of the state’s 50 sectional champions. And that left dozens of teams feeling left out.

So this year, the CIF voted to include all 50 champs in bowl games. The top two teams in the state, as determined by CIF, advance to an “Open Division” final. The remaining teams are divided into groups of four that are considered to be on the same competitive level, with each group including two teams from the north of the state and two from the south. In last week’s semifinal round, the southern teams in each group squared off against each other, as did the northern teams. This weekend brings 13 Northern vs. Southern California contests (featuring winners from last weekend) for the championship.

For football fans, that may sound like an exciting weekend full of possibilities. But California high school football is among the most predictable of sports. Most of the same high schools dominate year after year, in part because thousands of students routinely use liberal transfer rules to move to the schools with the best football programs.

In this way, high school football has been decoupled from local communities, with elite teams dominated by ringers from other places. Private schools often have a big advantage in this high school free agent market, and many of them are national powers that play games against teams from out of state. These days, it is big news when a public high school led by players from its own community ends up competing for a championship.

Tellingly, this weekend’s signature game—the Open Division bowl game between the De La Salle High School Spartans, a Catholic school in Concord, in the East Bay, and the Centennial High Huskies of Corona, in Riverside County—is a rematch of last year’s title game. Indeed, De La Salle may be America’s greatest football factory, having won five of the last six Open Division championships.

This year’s state playoff expansion comes at an interesting time. A new film on football concussions, starring Will Smith, whose son Trey was recently a star player at an elite football high school in Southern California, hits theaters on Christmas. The film dramatizes the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who made discoveries about the impact of contact sports on the brain.

Omalu, now the chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County and a professor at UC Davis, recently questioned whether kids should play at all, given the evidence that football and other contact sports cause brain damage. In The New York Times, he also suggested that the law establish an age of consent for playing football: “We have a legal age for drinking alcohol, for joining the military, for voting, for smoking, for driving, and for consenting to have sex. We must have the same when it comes to protecting the organ that defines who we are as a human being.”

In the context of that sober warning, 13 state championship bowl games sounds like an unlucky number. The 50 schools in the state playoffs are already champions, of their sections. Is it really necessary to expose them to more risk in the name of more championships?

Would California really be diminished if it had no state football champions? Yes, there are contracts and schedules in place to hold this huge round of state bowl games through 2017. But if Californians let these unnecessary games go on for even another year, we all ought to have our heads examined.

The post California’s Ever-Expanding High School Football Season Is Risky appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I see this all the time teaching English at Coachella Valley High School in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Most of my students come from low-income households, have had to learn English as a second language, and hope to be the first in their families to go to college. They’ve been told since they were in elementary school that higher education is their ticket to a better life, and many have come to believe this.

But high school is a big place, full of distractions. For many, school becomes about socializing, partying, and striving to fit in. Other students are stressed by balancing school with a relationship, by responsibilities at home, or by a part-time job. Added to these pressures is the anxiety caused by the daunting cost of higher education. As a result of all these pressures—and low expectations—too few students are truly prepared for college by the time they graduate.

One way to keep our students focused on college is to make them aware of Advanced Placement courses as early as possible. Currently, we offer 14 AP courses at Coachella Valley High, from calculus to Spanish literature. While I know that our very highest achievers are going to take these courses and succeed, I believe that for the majority of students, the cultural mindset of their classmates is just as important as the educator in the front of the classroom. The sooner students with college ambitions take such courses, the better they’ll be prepared for the rigors of college. And the more we can grow the AP program at our school, the more students will share goals and values—and this high-achieving mindset.

So this last November we formed the Coachella Valley High School Advanced Placement Club to support AP and future AP students and encourage more people to take these classes. How we would do this, I wasn’t quite sure at first, but I agreed to be the advisor anyway. Maybe we could use my room as a study hall after school. Maybe club members would want to raise money for college field trips. Maybe we could all get T-shirts.

Mostly seniors and juniors—along with a few sophomores—packed into my classroom after school for our first meeting. We elected officers, approved our constitution, and formed our first committees: fundraising, T-shirts, and freshman awareness. We decided to meet on a weekly basis and then adjourned so that the committees could meet separately to discuss ideas and plans.

And then this wonderful thing happened. About 20 of the students who’d stayed for the freshman awareness committee gathered in a rough circle of chairs. Itcelia, a senior in my AP English literature class and our newly elected vice president, asked, “What do you know now that you wish someone had told you as a freshman?”

And then they all started sharing. I sat at my desk in the back of the room and just listened. They discussed the benefits of honors and AP classes, the importance of homework and time management, and the need to balance academics with activities, clubs, sports, community service, and so on. It was amazing. Here was a cross section of our school’s highest achievers made up of a diversity of personality types and interests—not just the “nerd herd” but the drama kids, the artists, the athletes, the cheerleaders, the class officers, and students from career academies—building a master plan for high school success.

They decided to bring that plan to the freshmen themselves. By the next meeting, Itcelia had contacted an administrator and gotten freshman teachers’ permission to give presentations in their classrooms. She and the other freshman awareness committee members created a PowerPoint slideshow. Club members volunteered to present based on which of their own classes they could afford to miss.

A Coachella Valley High School AP Club welcome event for next year’s freshmen

After the presentations, the students gathered to debrief. Some of them had spoken to the freshmen about resisting the pressure to dumb down in order to stay popular, or to get someone to like you. Itcelia was thrilled that during one of her presentations a freshman girl had shared that she liked a boy until she found out he didn’t know the difference between your and you’re. “Smart is the new sexy,” someone in the group said, defining the moment and themselves.

Surprisingly, one of the groups met resistance from a teacher who thought they were being unrealistic in encouraging students to take as many AP classes as possible. But Itcelia, presently enrolled in four AP classes, active in several clubs and community service projects, and in rehearsals for the school’s production of Grease, passionately disagreed. She remembered that when she was a freshman, some upperclassmen tried to discourage her from taking AP classes, saying they were too demanding and wouldn’t leave room for anything else. “But that just isn’t true,” she said. “It’s all about setting priorities and managing your time.”

The success of the presentations inspired me to create a club website with links to information on AP courses, colleges, careers, admission tests, financial aid, and scholarships.

The site also includes a weekly blog featuring essays from teachers, counselors, alumni, community professionals, and fellow students. Many wrote about their own paths to college and the fears and obstacles they had to overcome, and others about the importance of reading or the value of stories in the community. One student wrote about the need for academic rivalries and another published a poem on immigration. We gave away T-shirts that display our blog address alongside inspirational quotes from authors and civil rights leaders or witty slogans like, “You had me at your proper use of you’re.” We got more freshmen to join the club, and at meetings we had great discussions that often began with questions for seniors from underclassmen, particularly juniors looking ahead at their last year of high school.

A recent Coachella Valley High School AP Club meeting

This next year, with new seniors and a clearer sense of direction, we will build on these successes. We want to increase membership, raise money for college field trips, and encourage more students to interact with and write for our blog.

High school peer pressure can work in positive as well as negative ways, and individual success is often the result of a community of support. With the help of student leaders like Itcelia, who, by the way, graduated as class salutatorian and will attend UC Berkeley in the fall, I believe we can continue to tip the scales of academic motivation in the right direction.

The post When Peer Pressure Is a Good Thing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

San Mateo looked pretty much the same. But I found I wasn’t recapturing the simpler days of my youth. When I started reconnecting with favorite spots like my old high school, I encountered complexities and advances I had not expected, particularly after the many headlines about California in decline.

The little house where I grew up on Voelker Drive still has no garbage disposal, no dishwasher, and no air-conditioning. But my brother Jim, the computer teacher at Baywood Elementary School, set up a Wi-Fi system and satellite TV. I felt up-to-date until I visited my alma mater, Hillsdale High School, a sprawling campus two blocks away on Alameda de las Pulgas.

I write about education for The Washington Post and its web site. High schools are my specialty. Suburban schools like Hillsdale rarely if ever change, except in their ethnic mix. Hillsdale was about 95 percent white when I graduated in 1963. Today the 1,343-member student body is 45 percent white, 30 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian, 4 percent Filipino, and 2 percent black. About 20 percent are low income, roughly what it was when I was there.

That is a typical demographic shift for a California suburban school, and not what makes it so startling to visit Hillsdale now. Through many twists and turns, while I wasn’t paying attention, it has become one of America’s first 21st century schools.

I often make fun of that label. Attempts to describe what 21st century schools look like often make them seem like 20th century schools with better equipment and fancier mission statements. Hillsdale, by contrast, has changed significantly the way students are taught, and raised the level of instruction for both kids going to college and kids not sure what they want to do.

Getting there wasn’t easy. A team of educators who were part of the transformation helped put together a manuscript, written by social studies teacher Greg Jouriles, that explains the process. The changes happened in the same unpredictable way that the computer and Internet revolution swept San Mateo and much of the rest of the Peninsula.

The term “Silicon Valley” did not exist when I graduated from Hillsdale. I still find it hard to believe that the ratty shops of El Camino Real and the nondescript warehouses along U.S. Highway 101 are backdrops for a now famous international center of commerce and innovation. That public schools, among our most change-resistant institutions, might be similarly altered is even more surprising.

At Hillsdale students are organized into small advisory groups that meet daily with a staff member trained to help them with any problems–a system pioneered by private schools. The ninth and tenth grades are divided into three houses that focus on interdisciplinary lessons and ambitious projects such as a recreation of a World War I battle and a trial of Lord of the Flies author William Golding. Students of all achievement levels are mixed in the same classes, sharing in discussions but doing different homework based on their needs and wishes. All seniors must define an essential question, write a thesis of at least eight pages, and defend it before a panel of graders including outside experts. More changes are planned. The idea is to do much more than prepare students for the annual state tests, but the changes have helped raise the school’s Academic Performance Index on California’s 1000-point scale from 662 in 2002 to 797 this year.

Mixing students of different achievement levels in the same classes and giving them different homework is extraordinarily rare in American public schools. Defending research work before a panel of experts is what happens in graduate school, not high school.

True, the football team is not doing as well as it did when it was led by my 25-year-old gym teacher, future Super Bowl coach Dick Vermeil. The Knights this year are 2-4. Like with everything else at the school, the faculty is looking for solutions, while enjoying the fact that the Friday night games, as in my day, have stands full of students and parents, a loud and boisterous band, and tasty hot dogs.

There is something else that connects the new era with the old. When I first moved into our San Mateo house in 1952 and enrolled in third grade, one of my classmates was a big kid named Don Leydig. He was kind, smart, and the best all-around athlete I had ever met. We became friendly rivals for good grades. He made places for me in baseball, basketball, and flag football games where I would not embarrass myself. At Hillsdale, he became the shining light of our 1961 championship football season, Vermeil’s best player as a halfback, and the league’s most valuable player.

Leydig played freshman football at Stanford under another future Super Bowl coach, Bill Walsh, but realized he wasn’t fast enough for the varsity and focused on his studies. He was in the Peace Corps in Libya, then returned to the Peninsula and built a splendid reputation as a high school history teacher, coach, and administrator. In 1989 he became Hillsdale’s principal.

Many coaches and teachers remembered him. They were happy to have as a boss one of the most talented and respectful kids they had ever taught. Don told me, “They would have done anything for me.”

He understood the importance of the American high school. It defines our national character as the last educational experience we share before some of us go to college and others to work. Leydig knew our high schools were in a slump. American 17-year-olds have shown no significant gains in reading and math achievement in the last three decades. Challenging courses are rare. Nationally, the average teenager does less than an hour of homework a night.

According to Jouriles’ written account of Hillsdale’s transformation, Leydig did not charge into the school waving a banner of reform and knocking down the opposition. Instead he renewed old relationships and got to know new people, using the modesty and thoughtfulness that made him so popular when we were students. He hired teachers with ideas for reform and let them make changes. He worked with the teacher’s union. He forged ties with the Stanford University education school, particularly its nationally renowned reform expert Linda Darling Hammond. He cut shop classes and secretarial slots to have more resources for the reforms. He let new ideas start small to iron out flaws. He got grants and finessed district budget rules. At crucial moments he forged consensus with surveys of teacher opinion that did not ask simply if they were for or against a change, but instead gave a range of choices. Were they for it with qualifications? Could they live with it? Were they against it but wouldn’t quit over it?

The change at Hillsdale came in spurts, with some backsliding. It was a team effort, like our class’s football wins. It was hard for everyone, including Leydig. Jouriles describes the afternoon an assistant principal and a teacher called faculty leaders to a secret meeting at a pub on 25th Avenue in hopes of getting the principal fired.

It didn’t work. Leydig’s recruiting helped produce a new generation of school leaders, including innovative teacher Jeff Gilbert who now leads the school. Leydig retired in 2005 and heads the Hillsdale Foundation, raising money to keep the changes alive. He often travels to coach administrators and advise on school redesign. There are a few other thriving California efforts to remake schools such as the New Tech Highs and High Tech Highs. But Hillsdale is the most advanced homegrown project I know of.

Leydig and I sometimes sit together at football games. Still trim, he avoids the hot dogs and cupcakes while I gorge myself. We enjoy the noisy, colorful stream of young people passing by. They seem like our classmates from 1963–from all levels of the income scale, happy to be together on a warm night. They no longer know the words to the fight song, but they have something better: lively, accessible teachers and a widening knowledge and appreciation of the challenge and excitement of the world outside.

Don and I loved the old Hillsdale. But if you ask us where we would like to send our grandchildren, the new Hillsdale gets our vote.

Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education columnist and the father of Zócalo’s California editor, is the author of eight books, including Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.

*Photos courtesy of Jay Mathews.

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