Every October we celebrate Spirit Week with dress-up days, competitions among the classes, and general goofiness. Witness the two videos below. The first one is a slideshow of all the zany outfits during Spirit week, from dead people, to toga-wearing Romans, to plants, dinosaurs, and more. The second one features a handful of sophomores showing that the Class of 2014 is not to be messed with on the dance floor!

The Class of 2011 is truly remarkable, and here is where they will be attending college:

• Stanford (7 students)
• UC Berkeley (6 students)
• Carleton  (4 students)
• Columbia  (4)
• Penn (4)
• Harvard (3 students)
• Pomona (3)
• UC Santa Cruz (3)
• Washington U. – St. Louis (3)
• Wesleyan (3)
• Brown (2 students)
• University of Chicago (2)
• Cornell (2)
• Dartmouth (2)
• Emory (2)
• Occidental (2)
• Reed (2)
• Swarthmore (2)
• Tufts (2)
• UC Davis (2)
• UCLA (2)
• Williams (2)
• Bates (1 student)
• Bennington (1)
• Bowdoin (1)
• Carnegie Mellon (1)
• Chapman (1)
• Colgate (1)
• Colorado-Boulder (1)
• Duke (1)
• Goucher (1)
• Loyola – New Orleans (1)
• Macalester (1)
• MIT (1)
• Mount Holyoke (1)
• New York University (1)
• Oberlin (1)
• Pitzer (1)
• Sarah Lawrence (1)
• Smith (1)
• St. Andrews – UK (1)
• UC Riverside (1)
• UC San Diego (1)
• Whitman (1)
• Yale (1)

Intraterm consists of special courses, field studies, internships, community service, and trips, offered to students during one week of the school year. The catalog changes every year, but here is sampling of this year’s choices. Trips include Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Santa Cruz, Belize, the Grand Canyon, the Yucatan, and Iceland! The more than 35 classes include Game Theory, Geology and Field Mapping, Hiking Bay Area History, Screenwriting, Animation, Tutoring Little Guys, Basic Cooking, Introduction to Aerial Dance, Kindergarten Revisited, and Yoga and Art Journaling.

As I walked around campus this week, it seemed something amazing was happening behind every door. Peeking in the auditorium revealed the “What’s All the Hoopla?!” class, in which students made their own hoops (as in hula) and practiced a variety of moves. Further down campus about fifteen students were practicing Parkour. How fun!

As a school, we enjoy this recognition with some reticence. The article’s author refers to the top schools collectively as a “pipeline to elite higher education” and a professor of education is quoted, “Prep schools are organized to ensure elite college placement–that’s the whole idea.” We bristle at the notion that College Prep is nothing more than a means to that end.

In the aftermath of this latest publicity, among varied reactions, two stood out to me.

In an email to all faculty, Head of School Murray Cohen writes, “As several of you have noted, late last week, Forbes.com came out with a ranked list of the twenty ‘best prep schools’ in the country, and College Prep was included in some very eminent national company. Eighteen of the twenty schools are ‘spread’ from New York all the way to Boston (!), leaving just two ‘left coast’ schools.  The main takeaway, given the criteria Forbes used, is that College Prep among all these much older and much wealthier schools has done the most educationally with the most modest resources.  It has always been the case here that we concentrate, not disperse, our resources, and the focus is always on teachers and students.  Thanks to you and your predecessors, Prep has kept pace with the talents, passions, and spirited inquiry of generations of students.”

Finally, who better to contextualize this honor than a current College Prep student? Junior Daniel E. had this to say via the school’s intranet message board:

“Some interesting facts:

• College Prep is the youngest school on the list by more than 40 years
• College Prep is one of only two schools on the list from the west coast
• College Prep has the fourth highest percentage of faculty holding advanced degrees
• College Prep has the smallest endowment of all the schools on the list by a measurable amount

These facts aren’t meant to cast aspersions on other schools on the list, schools that didn’t make the list, or those who don’t hold advanced degrees.  I simply included these facts to save time for the many students that would have surely looked for such information.

A side note: Although I’m thrilled we made this prestigious list, I am not any more or less proud to be a part of this special place (for lack of a better description) than I was before I discovered this.  Sure, the school’s facts and figures place us #17 in the country, but, in my opinion, there are far more important things about this place then how many students go to Harvard, Yale or MIT. I am so grateful for having the opportunity to be a part of this community, and, to me, no label or number can truly express how important it is for everyone who is a part of it.”

As an aside, one of Sarah’s former teachers at College Prep, the legendary and retiring English teacher John Faggi (more on him in an upcoming post), spent time in Sarah’s classroom earlier this year. After the visit, he made an impassioned speech at assembly about the experience of visiting Sarah and another former student who is now an artist. His theme was that not all Prep students go on the become (in the words of Malvina Reynolds) “doctors and lawyers, and business executives.” College Prep students are so often outwardly focused and go on to do great things in their communities. Sarah, after graduating from College Prep and Brown University, became a public school teacher in her hometown of Oakland.

On the day of delivery, the College Prep students who built the playhouse disassembled it and loaded it in pieces on Charles’ truck. It took almost two hours to reassemble the playhouse when they arrived at Monarch Academy. During this time, junior Edgar C. visited with Sarah’s students and talked with them about the process of building the playhouse from scratch. The students cut the wood, learned how to use power tools, and even painted the playhouse in Monarch’s school colors.  More and more Monarch students came out to the courtyard to watch the assembly, and when it was all done, they started playing in it immediately!

Enjoy the video below, which details some of the process.

The new program will vigorously reaffirm and extend to all students the core College Prep values of educational effectiveness and equity. Every freshman next year will be outfitted with a standardized computer, including a prescribed set of software programs.  At home and in school, each student will be able to rely on a supported, functioning machine to do the increasing amounts and varieties of schoolwork that require the use of a computer.  Building on ten years of experience with the faculty laptop program, we will enable next year’s freshmen to use the same software and Apple hardware that teachers have been incorporating throughout the curriculum in effective and imaginative ways.

The school will take advantage of bulk-purchase contracts to procure hardware, software, protective cases, extended warranties, and back-up equipment for all incoming freshmen.  The costs of the program will be spread over four years, and families will pay an annual technology fee (estimated now at up to $500/year).  Of course, financial aid for this fee will apply to all families that qualify.  When the student graduates, the computer belongs to the student.

Families may opt out of the school-purchase plan if they have other ways of acquiring essentially the same equipment.  For those families, the annual technology fee will be approximately $100, to cover an equal share of the program infrastructure, start-up, administration, and participation in the loaner pool.

Obviously, there are many other pertinent details, some of which have yet to be finally settled.  We will update everyone through the school website.  For now, we want you to understand the basics and to join us in our excitement for this significant educational development at College Prep.  If you have questions, please contact Preston Tucker, History Teacher and Technology Strategist, at preston@college-prep.org.

That is the mission of Project Jatropha, a remarkable collaboration between two College Prep students. Along with his sister Apoorva (’12), Adarsha S. (’11) created the ambitious Project Jatropha not just to protect the physical environment in rural south India, but also to boost the local economy.

The Brower Youth Awards honor young, emerging environmental leaders in North America, raising their profiles and furthering their work. Since 2000, 55 young people have received the Brower Award, and this year Adarsha S. was honored for his work with Project Jatropha.

As you can see from the video, Adarsha’s project is about so much more than the individual communities he is affecting. This is global citizenship in action and will hopefully inspire other young people to go out and change the world for the better.

Project Jatropha has a fantastic website where you can learn in great detail about this amazing work and get involved yourself!