Comment Re:"It's the curriculum, stupid" -- 3 years at HTH (Score 1) 146
Well, your understanding is not entirely correct. Having gone through two years of stupidity at HTH-Los Angeles, I can honestly say that the quality of education there is among the lowest of all the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
They have a nice building, nice P.R., lots of money, lots of computers, etc., but the school did a horrible job on the actual learning process. I never took trigonometry, because the school didn't offer it. I was stuck with the rest of my grade, who were all one math level behind me. After some pushing by my parents, the math teacher gave me a 40-year-old trig book for me to work on for the last two weeks of school. Luckily for me, my Calc teacher at the school I transferred to for my senior year did a trig review, and I caught on quickly.
The same teacher also taught my Chem class, which was also a joke; I spent the majority of my time reading slashdot. Yeah, that's right, the school let kids basically loose on the computers during class, I guess because the idea was to integrate technology into the classroom. The problem is, nobody ended up learning everything - the teacher would be talking, and the students would be on the computers goofing off. Those two classes also ended up progressing at the pace of the slowest student, which turned out to be excruciatingly slow.
Oh, and another thing - I was missing a semester of P.E. coming into the school, having sprained my arm in a regular school. LAUSD requires four semesters of P.E. credit, and I was assured that the Tai-Chi exercises we did during homeroom would make up for the semester I missed. Oh, how wrong I was. I ended having to take P.E. as a senior the next year.
At the time I left, 3 teachers had been booted (Including one that actually did a pretty good job teaching Spanish), and about half the kids I had started with in my 10th grade year were now gone. I later found out that the school was bleeding students like crazy - of the 9th graders that had entered the school in my 11th grade year, only about 40% of them returned to the school next year. My class had a graduating size of oh, 25?
As I said before, I ended up transferring to a regular school for my senior year, and I couldn't have had a better year of high school. I mean, I was never that worked up about school (something I continue to regret) but taking 3 AP classes and actually learning stuff never felt so good.
I wouldn't be surprised if I read about HTH-LA's closing within the next few years.
They have a nice building, nice P.R., lots of money, lots of computers, etc., but the school did a horrible job on the actual learning process. I never took trigonometry, because the school didn't offer it. I was stuck with the rest of my grade, who were all one math level behind me. After some pushing by my parents, the math teacher gave me a 40-year-old trig book for me to work on for the last two weeks of school. Luckily for me, my Calc teacher at the school I transferred to for my senior year did a trig review, and I caught on quickly.
The same teacher also taught my Chem class, which was also a joke; I spent the majority of my time reading slashdot. Yeah, that's right, the school let kids basically loose on the computers during class, I guess because the idea was to integrate technology into the classroom. The problem is, nobody ended up learning everything - the teacher would be talking, and the students would be on the computers goofing off. Those two classes also ended up progressing at the pace of the slowest student, which turned out to be excruciatingly slow.
Oh, and another thing - I was missing a semester of P.E. coming into the school, having sprained my arm in a regular school. LAUSD requires four semesters of P.E. credit, and I was assured that the Tai-Chi exercises we did during homeroom would make up for the semester I missed. Oh, how wrong I was. I ended having to take P.E. as a senior the next year.
At the time I left, 3 teachers had been booted (Including one that actually did a pretty good job teaching Spanish), and about half the kids I had started with in my 10th grade year were now gone. I later found out that the school was bleeding students like crazy - of the 9th graders that had entered the school in my 11th grade year, only about 40% of them returned to the school next year. My class had a graduating size of oh, 25?
As I said before, I ended up transferring to a regular school for my senior year, and I couldn't have had a better year of high school. I mean, I was never that worked up about school (something I continue to regret) but taking 3 AP classes and actually learning stuff never felt so good.
I wouldn't be surprised if I read about HTH-LA's closing within the next few years.
