Class Trip and Projects
Upper school students have a keen awareness of their identity, and are seeking to understand their roles in society. By developing compelling and authentic connections between Tesseract School and the larger community, our program helps students connect their learning and individual interests to the world around them.
National and international grade-level trips, the fall retreat, advisory projects, environmental monitoring and interim projects are all important elements of the school’s larger goals. These events help students recognize real-world uses for study and learning to encourage them to develop an ethical connection to the local and international communities — including a sense of environmental responsibility — and to prepare them for success in an increasingly globalized world.
Class Trips
In ninth-grade, students continue their humanities studies in the Mediterranean for two weeks. While there, students engage in educator-led activities and projects that involve research, data acquisition and journaling, uniting what they have been learning in class with what they are seeing and experiencing firsthand through visits to historic sites, such as the Sistine Chapel, the excavations of Pompeii and the Roman Colosseum.
For sophomores, the class trip focuses on the application of math and science principles. Students experience real-world applications of concepts they are studying in class as they spend time at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Catalina Island and Six Flags Great America. At UCSB, students study nanotechnology and its applications to computer science. From there students travel to Catalina Island to study ocean chemistry, and then on to Six Flags Great America to study the mathematical applications of amusement park physics.
The junior-year trip* supports Tesseract’s foreign language curriculum. Students studying Mandarin will visit China; students studying Spanish will visit South America. In addition to learning about the cultures and values of these countries, these trips give students the opportunity to be fully immersed in the language, and to meet the students that they have been speaking with online throughout the academic year.
During students’ senior year*, there is a special emphasis on individual internal development and professional exploration. Each senior proposes, designs and executes a three-week supervised off-campus project. This project allows students to explore a specific area of interest in preparation for college—such as what each student might choose for a major—and provides them with a taste of life outside of college for a chosen career path. Throughout this project, students work closely with a mentor, and receive considerable support in planning and executing their projects.
*Tesseract School’s first junior class will start fall 2010; the first senior class will start fall 2011.
Fall Retreat
This all-high school retreat takes place the first three days of school. This trip sets the tone for the school year and gives students an opportunity to begin to form friendships with students and educators in a non-academic setting. The fall retreat is designed to build community, develop trust and establish common goals for the academic year. Tesseract’s high school fall retreat takes place in a wilderness setting, emphasizing our program’s commitment to greater sustainability and challenging our students to develop self-reliance and self-confidence.
Advisory Projects
Freshmen and sophomores work closely with their advisors to design and implement a long-term service project. This project helps fulfill our expectation that ninth and tenth-grade students volunteer sixteen hours of their time to helping others. Our schedule is designed so advisories can travel off campus and work in the community.
Environmental Monitoring
Students apply their science and mathematics coursework in an ongoing campus monitoring project. By monitoring the school’s energy consumption and waste production, students work to incorporate real-time data into the school’s ongoing efforts to increase our level of sustainability.
Interim
Interim is a week-long elective course. During interim students participate in a project of their choice designed to merge the academic study of a specific topic with hands-on interactive experiences. This unique course gives students and educators an opportunity to work side-by-side to achieve a distinct educational outcome by the week’s end. These opportunities may be on or off campus, and may involve traveling to another country.
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