Middle school students met with clients (many of whom were international and based in China), scheduled their own meetings, and consulted with clients to build their dream sustainable homes. Students then executed these plans by designing and building models of these dream homes - all while learning more about sustainable housing design. This project exemplifies how students learn through authentic interdisciplinary bilingual projects.
Dr. Keisha Siriboe, a consultant who we have closely worked with since 2020, recently came to visit us on campus - for the first time! Over the past two years, she has worked closely with our faculty and staff, addressing critical topics such as diversity, representation, and social justice, and has formed a Social Justice Cohort among faculty and staff…
As we read this story, we had one burning question - how can we replace our collective imagination of Native Americans with authentic experiences that increase our understanding? As students realized from the story above, good intentions are not enough. If we allow ourselves to remain ignorant, we can end up causing embarrassment at best, and trauma at worst.
As many of you know, I have a P3 student here at PKS, and a 2 year old son whom I hope will join us when he is old enough. Both kids were in the car with me on Thursday morning as I tuned in to the Judiciary Committee hearings in which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford courageously told her story. I found myself feeling confused, and a bit helpless, as I tried to balance my civic impulses and my fatherly impulses.
On Saturday, March 4, we came together as a community to express our values of caring and resilience at our first-ever PKS Red Cross Blood Drive. In honor of our former Head of School Lee Drolet’s daughter, children talked about the importance of giving blood, encouraged adults to donate, and even signed up to volunteer at the blood drive themselves!
Families may know me as the jovial, coffee-drinking, salad-eating English teacher (and I am absolutely all of those wonderful things!) but I am also a deeply concerned human being who worries for the future of our students, given the divisions in our society, events around the world, and even challenges here in the Bay Area.
The two PKS second grade classes kicked off the year with an exciting dive into their own habitat: San Francisco. The 我的城市 (“My City”) unit of exploration encouraged them to ask and answer big questions: What is a city? What does it take for people to live together and get along? What infrastructure is critical to keeping a community peaceful? What are the biggest problems in San Francisco?
Without a doubt a school can be a progressive school and a language immersion school. There’s nothing about language immersion that limits our ability to implement progressive or vice versa. One specific example: repetition and daily practice of characters is an important part of learning Chinese. A progressive approach would be to consider: what is the appropriate amount of time for a 3rd grader to engage in this practice, and how do we make it as engaging and enjoyable as possible? There is no one strategy that is cancelled out by progressive – it’s about weighing kids’ developmental needs to create a well-rounded approach.
