Seeing Ourselves/Seeing the City
An Expedition into 9th Grade 

August 22rd – August 24th - 9:00 am – 12:00 noon - bring a lunch

At the Science Leadership Academy, we understand that the transition into High School can be a difficult one. We are pleased to offer a three-day Summer Institute this August, to ease that transition and allow our students and faculty to begin forging bonds together as a learning community – before the “hard work” of the classroom begins.

Led by faculty and upper-class students, this three-day orientation will have two goals, the first is to begin the process of bringing them into the unique, diverse SLA community. To that end, students will spend part of the time in their Advisory Groups, getting to know the students and teachers that will be a part of their community from their first day at SLA through graduation and beyond.

Second, the week will be built around our philosophy of student-driven, hands-on, project-based learning. We want to introduce our students to SLA’s core values of Inquiry, Research, Collaboration, Presentation, and Reflection from the start, and get them acclimated to the high expectations we have for their high school careers. Using The Franklin Institute and other Philadelphia sites as their “classroom,” students will begin working to explore a variety of questions and problems relating to their surroundings and their place within it. Our students will practice the art of “seeing in new ways” as it relates to the process of observation, analysis, and interpretation.

During Summer Institute, students will work to ultimately create a collaborative project to present to their classmates, while, at the same time, establishing positive relationships and a sense of themselves as first-year SLA students. It will be an exciting, enriching, and energizing way to gear up for the year.

See you in August!

For the past three years SLA (SLA refers to both campuses of Science Leadership Academy, SLA Center City and SLA Beeber) has been running a summer program called SLA's Summer Technology Program. This program is in partnership with the Ellis Trust, The Charles E. Ellis Trust for Girls (The Ellis Trust) helps eligible young women in Philadelphia excel in high school and be prepared for postsecondary success.

This program not only empowers our students to be technicians that can fix all parts physical and software related to our one to one laptop program; they are also empowered as ambassadors of our school and the "SLA way". The girls participate in and help manage the events that take place at the center city location all summer long.

The program starts the weekend after the fourth of July and lasts until the last day of August. During this time SLA hosts a Summer Teacher Institute and a student Summer Institute.  The summer also holds tours for perspective students, interviews for perspective transfer and new ninth grade students and phone conferences with principals from both campuses.

The tradition, for the Ellis Trust, back when they had a brick and mortar school was to graduate each girl with a sewing machine. From the onset of the Summer Technology Program SLA's tradition has been to reward each girl with a laptop and printer for her service to the school. This tradition started with Diana Laufenberg for a graduate in 2013.

The SLA Summer Technology Program was started by Rafaela Torres, Chris Lehmann and Marcie Hull. The program has continued with the help of Mary Beth Hertz, Adrienne Williams, Jeremy Spry and Chris Johnson.

In the next weeks I plan to showcase all of the girls currently working for the SLA Summer Technology Probram. If the internet has any questions for them, I will be happy to include them in my interview. I plan to ask them about their experience and have them reflect on personal gains of having an experience like this one.

Current Members:

Marcie Hull - Technology Coordinator

Stephen Jones - Computer Support Specialist

Amir Davis - Digital Service Fellow

Leyitha Achoute, Student - SLA Beeber

Jaidah Murray, Student - SLA Beeber

Corinthia Bell, Student - SLA Center City

Tamira Bell, , Student - SLA Center City

Tiarra Bell, Student - SLA Center City

Past Members:

Abdur Saaba - Computer Support Specialist

Alisha Rothwell, Student - SLA Center City

Bailey Collins, Student - SLA Center City

Aateeyah Sharrieff, Student - SLA Center City

Dejanhia Johnson, Student - SLA Center City

Imani Rothwell, Student - SLA Center City

Korah Lovelace, Student - SLA Center City

Katherine Hunt, Student - SLA Center City

1. 3 paragraphs, 5 sentences each
2. 1 picture
3. 3 sources

D: 8:15-9:10

E: 9:15-10:10

A: 10:15-11:10

B: 11:15-12:10

Advisory: 12:15-12:45 (read narratives)

12:50 lunch

1:30-3:30pm ILPs and TFI

3:30pm - 8pm conferences

Thursday Dec. 4th schedule for conferences

• 8:15-10:10 Advisory

• 10:15-11:00 A Band

• 11:05-11:50 X Band

• 11:50-12:35 Y Band

• 12:40-1:25 B Band

• 1:30-2:15 C Band

• 2:20-3:05 D Band

• 8:15-9:00 E Band

• 9:05-9:45 Advisory

• 9:50-10:50 A Band

• 10:55-11:55 Y Band

• 11:55-12:55 X Band

• 1:00-2:00 B Band

• 2:05-3:05 C Band

6/16 - Monday:

Meet your advisory at SLA or off-site for Advisory Day between 9am and 10am.  Dismiss at 2pm.

6/17 - Tuesday:

Laptop turn-in, locker clean-out, return materials

9th: 8:30am-12pm

10th: 9:30am - 12pm

11th: 8:45am - after 11am (when done with rostering)

6/18 - Wednesday:

Field Day

8:15am - 12:30pm

Wear comfy athletic clothing

We will be inside if it is raining.

6/19 - Thursday:

Report card pick-up

9th grade - 9am-10am

10th grade - 10am- 11am

11th grade - 11am- 12pm

• YEARBOOK DISTRIBUTION will be held tomorrow in Mr. Reddy's room during both lunches. If you ordered a book, stop by to pick it up! If you want to buy a book, bring $60 with you (limited supply of extra books available).

• LOCKER CLEAN-OUT will be held on Tuesday. Please make sure your locker is empty, free of lock, and CLEAN! You MUST check-out of the locker you were assigned in the fall. Advisors have access to those locker numbers (online and hardcopy available in office mailboxes as of today).

• FIELD DAY is on Wednesday! Have you coordinated with your stream yet to show your pride on that day? (Orange Nation is already repping their spirit with wearing their shirts early). Good luck to all teams!

Student please check your email to see if you are on the list for testing. 

Students to be in testing rooms by 8:15 - Breakfast will be served in your exam room

Students: All testing is taking place on the 5th floor. There will be no access to lockers or classrooms on the 5th floor. See the table below for room changes or look in the hallways for the posted room changes. 

Laptop Imaged 

- Follow these steps

• Login - turn on the computer

• User Name -  Student Account 13-14

• Pass code - it is blank, press the return key without typing anything in the password field

Laptop not in the cart 

- Follow there steps

This means your name is on the list below and you did not hand in materials or pay laptop insurance for last school year. You must hand in your material or pay the laptop insurance. Laptop insurance is $75.00 and a check can be made out to Science Leadership Academy or cash can both be given to your advisor. You will not receive your laptop until you have completed these steps.

1. pay or hand back materials
2. have your advisor email Ms. Hull stating that you have completed the steps
3. Ms. Hull will contact you about picking up your laptop

Name on the list below and you had your laptop over the summer - Follow these steps

1. Bring your laptop to Ms. Hull immediately, in room 301

Everyone who handed in a charger will get it back the first day regardless if they owe for materials or insurance. 

Thurs:

There is a new art supply policy

1.  Supplies are only available to students who sign out the materials HERE

2.  Supplies my only be retrieved during X band and from 8-8:15am

I will keep replenishing the roll paper outside my room and students are welcome to pick that up at any time during the day. 

from the New York Times

December 29, 2011

The Joy of Quiet

By PICO IYER

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

ADJUSTED SCHEDULE

ALL CLASSES ARE 'DAY 1s'

Wed. Nov. 30 -

8:15-9:20 = A
9:25-10:30 = B
10:35-11:40 = Advisory
11:45-12:50 = X

Thurs. Dec. 1 -

8:15-9:20 = C
9:25-10:30 = D
10:35-11:40 = E
11:45-12:50 = Y

This MUST be on your SLA blog:
1. Photos of all your work
no fingers or people in the photo
no photos that are sideways
no improperly lit art work
clear clean background that compliments the art piece

2. Photos of progress and sketches

3. Photos of finished artwork (or an explanation of why it is not finished)

4. Completed artist statement proof read and no grammatical errors.
      Here is the link to help write an artist statement - Artist Statement
Remember this is public


THE FOLLOWING GOES IN THE MOODLE JOURNAL
1. make a list of the projects you completed
2. put in the link to your blog to show your work
3. make a list of the projects you didn’t complete (if there are any)
If you only missed one list it, but it does not count against your grade
4. write AT LEAST 5 sentences that describe your work and work ethic for this quarter
5. look at the assignments for next quarter, and state 2 goals you have for yourself in the up coming quarter

School District of Philadelphia AUP

Science Leadership Academy AUP

TFI AUP

Work with your group to find the following things....

Name three major differences between the SLA AUP,  SDP AUP & the TFI AUP

What is the most unfair rule from all three AUPs

With your group come up with three changes for all three AUPs to make the policies better.

Now imagine you have children write an AUP for your home network with your group.

Upload your answers to Moodle - every student must upload their groups reactions. The assignent link is below

Tuesday, October 12 Art Students went to the SkyBox gallery to see an artist install a site specific sculpture. The artist is Arurora Robson and the opening is Friday, October 15. Ms. Robson described her work being inspired by childhood nightmares and she combines her inspiration with the nightmare we all share in harnessing the amount of plastic produced and its effects on the environment.

Students were thanked for their efforts in collecting caps and they even received a shout out on the gallery wall, picture below. All the art students were asked to create a sign for the school walls that demonstrated their knowledge of the elements of design. There was a slide show of all the posters presented to Ms. Robson. She enjoyed them very much.

Finally upon our departure Ralen Robinson thanked Ms. Robson and gave to her our traditional lab coat. Ralen explained that it is an SLA tradition to give a lab coat to adults and experts who give their time to meet and speak with SLA students and teachers.