Zoe - Class of 2013
January 20, 2012
The school year, in its essence, can be broken down into a series of cycles, a unique calendar of collective activity that encompasses sports seasons, AP exams, winter and summer, and the occasional three-day weekend. Most notable, perhaps, are the last few weeks of the semester. Together, we refocus our school magnifying glass toward the year’s culmination: final exams.
Under the pressure-cooker of encroaching assessment, the connections that bind our school together grow tighter: classmates grow closer, and students rely upon their teachers much more than usual. Their lessons become essential, their words precious.
The classrooms buzz with activity. In Mr. White’s room, calculus students line the whiteboard-covered walls. We scribble problems, ask for help, consult each other. There is an unbridled urgency to our questions, the challenge ahead lending intensity to our interactions.
The unnecessary is swiftly dropped from our schedules: club meetings cancel, sports practices are postponed. Instead, students fill every chair in the library, its round tables covered in a hodgepodge of textbooks and notes. Study groups convene in the grassy shade of the Norfolk pines that line the soccer fields. A few runners and swimmers take advantage of their study breaks to fit in a workout. In the weight room, one student rides a stationary bike, flicking through flash cards as he pedals.
When exams finally come, we pile into the gym, which is filled from wall to wall with neat rows of chairs and desks. We are a whirl of nervousness and sharpened pencils. The exam begins, and 350 heads bend over 350 papers. A few Santa hats shine amidst the sea of hair. We are ready for Christmas, ready for a break, for beach and sun, friends and family. But we also know, know even before the test results come back, even before we take the exams, that our goals are already accomplished. We are working together, and we are learning, and it is good.
Three weeks later, HPA’s quiet upper campus begins to fill again with students’ voices. We re-emerge from winter break well-rested, tanned, and ready for school again. My AP English class read Dave Eggers’ memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, over the break. After three weeks of Eggers’ beautiful, convoluted writing slowly wrapping its slippery tendrils around my brain, it is a relief to finally discuss the book together and to hear my classmates’ thoughts. My small biology class goes on a field trip to examine the moss of Kalopa. These days are the perfect counterpart to final exam week: the pressure of our tests is over, but the connections and learning we forged remain. Of course, this is just the next phase of the repeating cycle: soon there will be essays and tests and in just a few months there will be finals again…but we try not to think about that.
A catalyst for learning - 10/10/2011
“I cook with reckless abandon,” Mrs. McDowell admits. “And, actually, that’s how I do labs, too.”
Glancing around the room, “reckless abandon” seems pretty accurate. The small AP Biology class has managed to spread beakers, graduated cylinders, pipettes, and syringes across the majority of the lab’s table space. The crowning glory of the day is a blender-full of pungent brown liquid, emitting an odor I would place somewhere between dead fish and long-expired leftover meatloaf. The eight of us students (proud biology geeks all) crowd around the blender in intrigue and revulsion.
In fairness, there is order – plenty of it – to the lab’s chaos. We are experimenting with the rate of hydrogen peroxide decomposition over time – its breakdown catalyzed by the enzyme catalase, which is extracted from pureed liver, the aromatic brown substance in the blender. We carefully measure the enzyme into our beakers of hydrogen peroxide and watch as it bubbles and fizzes (as we later learn, from the release of oxygen gas).
Our experiment doesn’t work out in that our results are vastly different from those agreed upon by probably about 99% of the scientific community. It turns out that our pureed liver was too concentrated, causing the hydrogen peroxide to decompose at a rate too fast for us to measure. But, like all labs, it was also a success. We learned about enzymes and toxins and decomposition and how to measure all these things. We got to experience first-hand the smell of homogenized frozen liver. And we embraced the spirit of scientific inquiry: curiosity and reckless abandon
Namaste - 10/10/2011
At the end of a hard workout with the HPA Girls Cross Country team, there are few things as satisfying as a soft patch of grass.
It is a remarkable phenomenon: the ground that seems so uninviting when practice first starts is converted, over the course of two brutal, wonderful hours, into what surely must be the most comfortable bed in the world.
Our Friday workout complete, the team sprawls out upon the grass and embraces a few moments of supine exhaustion. Then, one by one, we roll or crawl ourselves into a circle, and Coach Hayslip – runner, English teacher, and team yogi master – leads us through a pre-race yoga routine.
Team yoga is a more recent cross-country tradition, one that embraces the calming of mind and body alike. Somewhere between “trikonasana” (“triangle pose”) and “downward dog,” we release some of the tension (and lactic acid) accumulated in a week of hard workouts. Slowly, we relax into the rhythms of our bodies, trace the paths of the clouds in the blazing blue sky, and learn to listen to the sound of the wind in the Norfolk Pines above our heads.
We bring our hands to “heart center” in a prayer posture and breathe deeply of the crisp, late afternoon air.
Namaste.
