Below we answer the top 5 questions that we've heard at open house events this fall.
STUDENT LIFE
How does Bay help with the transition to 9th grade from middle school?
We are very enthusiastic about helping new students find their way and find their people. In addition to all of the community-building activities and “nuts-and-bolts” lessons during the multi-day 9th-grade orientation, here are just a few other supports we have in place:
- Summer Sports & Theater Workshops: Over the summer, there are optional workouts for different sports teams, and anyone can join in. There’s also a pre-audition theater workshop in August for students interested in the fall musical, where you get to meet others and learn about the show.
- 9th Grade Seminar: Yes, this is a class designed to help 9th graders adjust to Bay life. In the first semester, you’ll learn about Bay’s values and get to know the community. In the second semester, the focus is more on social-emotional learning and identity. We also cover tutorial and time management. The class happens once a week during flex block.
- Advisory: You’ll be in a group with 8-9 other students and a staffulty advisor, and you’ll stay with them all four years. In 9th grade, advisory is all about getting to know each other and building a solid support system. Your advisor is your go-to person to get your questions answered.
- Clubs & Affinity Groups: Clubs meet weekly, and there's a club fair early in the year where you can sign up for whatever interests you. You can even start your own club if you want! This year, we have 9 affinity groups and 49 clubs. See them here.
- Tutorial (Office Hours): This is time set aside for you to meet with teachers for extra help or just to check in. It's on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and it’s a great way to build relationships with teachers and get support when you need it.
Overall, Bay is all about connections—juniors and seniors here talk to 9th graders, people say hi to each other in the hallways, staffulty are always willing to help a student, and we all get to just sit together in Bay’s common area (a.k.a. the Great Room) three mornings a week for Morning Meeting.
What community events happen/do students look forward to? Are there dances or prom?
Morning Meeting is a special time, when we gather as a community to share stories and learn from one another. This is where our community building really starts. Schoolwide events include Field Day and Bay Olympics, and they are both a blast! Theater shows are always sold out, and students look forward to the Winter Formal dance and prom (for juniors and seniors).
Seasonal sporting events like Breaker Bash, Winter Classic, and Spring Showcase are super popular, featuring double-headers with both boys’ and girls’ teams. Our mascot, Blue the Breaker, always makes an appearance and the whole school gets into it with their Bay gear on. Go, Breakers! 🌊
What makes Bay unique?
In addition to the experiences described above, Bay is student-centered and student-driven. In both academic and extracurricular life, we encourage students to shape fulfilling experiences for themselves that help them grow as learners and as people. And we give them the resources to help them do so, from opportunities to start clubs to supportive staffulty to the practice of mindfulness as a lifelong tool for emotional regulation. We give our students agency and are always impressed by how they grow into not only academically capable young adults but people with ethical frameworks.
ACADEMICS
What are the big shifts in academics from middle school? What is the homework like and how do we balance everything for 9th graders?
The biggest shift for some new Bay students is our focus on collaboration across all parts of the Bay academic program. It is one of our core transferable skills, and gets students engaging with their teachers and their peers to really unlock a new way of learning. We also ask our students to begin to think more about the process of learning and encourage them to lean into their own agency to build an intrinsic ownership of their learning.
One of the places you will see that demonstrated is in the 9th grade October conferences, when students work in 9th Grade Seminar, with their advisor, and with each of their teachers to create a presentation of learning (POL) of the first part of the year. In this presentation, students show examples of their work and how that work connects to Bay’s six transferable skills. Students reflect on their own engagement in their courses and set goals with each of their teachers for the remainder of the term. This is a milestone for Bay 9th graders as they start building their capacity to realize their academic potential.
Homework: Each of a 9th grader’s five courses can assign up to 1.5 hours per week (30 minutes per course meeting), except Humanities, which may assign up to 2 hours per week (40 minutes per course meeting). We strongly encourage students to use their flex-block time to complete homework to keep their at-home work to a reasonable amount.
Tell us more about Immersives!
As you may have heard at Open House, Immersives are where Bay is most Bay! In these hands-on, experiential courses, students spend 3 weeks earning a University of California-approved academic credit while diving deep into a topic of interest. In a course like Biotechnology, students conduct experiments cloning and analyzing a gene. Or, they might conduct original scientific research as part of our Astronomy Observatory course, spending multiple days at the Tuolumne Skies Observatory. Or, they might be traveling to Atlanta, Georgia, and Montgomery, Alabama, for Civil Rights in the American South and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Or, closer to home, students in Stories of San Francisco could be found learning about the history, culture, and literature of a specific San Francisco neighborhood like North Beach, the Mission, or the Castro. No matter the course, students get the opportunity to deeply engage in their learning as a scientist, as an artist, as a writer, as a thinker. Click the button below to see more student experiences from Immersives.
#BaySchoolSF #BaySchoolImmersives #BaySchoolCommunity
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