From Columbia High School Principal Frank Sanchez, January 29:
Columbia High School will be starting the course selection process for next year this month. We hope the monthly updates highlighted some of the cool courses we offer here at Columbia High School. Here are some additional classes that stood out this month.
Photography. It is always neat during your travels throughout the campus to find students doing school work on their own. One example of that is what these students are doing for Mr. Jon Fisher’s photography class.
What you are seeing is students captured images through trial and error. They can’t see through the camera so they approximate their view and the exposure times, which can be anywhere between 5 seconds and several minutes depending on the lighting. This also enables them to make “ghost” like images if they photograph a person who is only in the photo for half the exposure time and leaves! Then they develop the photographic paper negative in the darkroom, shoot again, and make any adjustments in exposure time or composition if necessary. Then they make a positive image from the negative image and can implement some cool effects in the darkroom to enhance their images if they like! So fun!
Band. During the aforementioned concert performance, Mr. Bauer discussed how the percussion students have their own class every day. That sounded so neat that I popped in the other day, and I just loved watching an impromptu concert (which I think was sponsored by Home Depot — just saying.) Watch it here on YouTube!
Physical Education. With the weather as cold as it is, students still have great choices for PE classes that are indoors. For example, in Ms. Molly Maggiore’s fitness class, students were enjoying some yoga stretching. What is especially cool is that Ms. Maggiore had the students using our Polar GoFit technology. This is a live heart rate monitoring system that allows the instructor to safely guide each student towards an individual fitness goal.
World History 2. In Mr. Matthew Borkowski’s class, his Freshmen held mini-salons in which students adopted the role of a 17th or 18th-century philosophe or scientist and then acted out scripts of a conversation for their classmates to guess who they were. The session I watched below was awesome in which Locke, Voltaire, Hobbes, and Descartes debated the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate!
World Languages. In the Program of Studies, you will see we offer the following languages at CHS: Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese. It is just great to see that the World Language curriculum models our community values as well. The French bulletin board below in the D-Wing highlights how our underclassmen believe in anti-hate activism.
Math Classes. Our students were busing reviewing for midterms this week. In math and science, the students take quarterlies. The first and second quarterlies average together as the midterm score while the 3rd and 4th marking periods make up the grade for the final. Our CHS instructors who teach the same sections work together in creating the quarterlies, ensuring a consistent assessment for all Algebra 2 students, for example.
Co-teachers Ms. Esther Han & Mr. William Keegan work together to ensure their students are ready for their Geometry midterm. They make up one of the great co-teaching pairs at Columbia.
