A Day in the Life...

8:30 a.m.

Happy Tuesday! We’re starting the day with a double period of Social Studies with Richard. We’ve been studying immigration as part of our unit about social movements and change, and this morning we are watching an episode of a documentary TV show called “30 Days.” The episode is about a volunteer border patrol guard named Frank who spends 30 days living with a family of mixed immigration status in Los Angeles. We spent the remainder of class on a related activity where we listened to a podcast on deported veterans and reflected on the different ways people are—or are not—able to “earn” their place as American citizens. Our near-unanimous conclusion: those who risk their life for this country should be allowed to stay after they’ve completed their service.

10:00 a.m.

Snack time!

10:15 a.m.

In my Math class, we’re learning how to graph parabolas, which is the shape of a quadratic function. We’re exploring how factoring can help find the roots, roots help find the line of symmetry, and the line of symmetry helps find other points that lie on the graph.

11:00 a.m.

Another double period, this time for English. We’re reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and we started class by reading the discussion questions we developed and quotes we pulled from the chapter we read for homework. Later, we talked about what it means for a story to be an allegory, and what/who the animals in the book are really meant to represent. Our teacher, Nick, assigned a fun but challenging new assignment: to write our own allegorical short stories.