Education

As a Bay Area high school student, the pressure to get ready to apply for college bothered me since my freshmen year. I picked extracurriculars with admissions officers in my mind, tailored my course load to my prospective major and spent hours ruminating over...

Various instruments, such as tambourines and maracas, ring out during the Thursday afternoon “Rhythm of Life” drum circle at the College of Adaptive Arts, an educational institution for students with intellectual and developmental challenges. Everyone is attempting to follow the beat, something they work on...

On the 143 acres that make up West Valley College campus, there is a single building that houses the College of Adaptive Arts (CAA). Last week I arranged a tour with Nicole Kim, the executive director at CAA. As she welcomed me in, I...

Letters to Santa are a long-time tradition, with wee little ones usually telling the big guy they’ve been “good boys and girls this year.” Occasionally, a child will admit they’ve been both naughty and nice, which is what 5-year-old Jefferson, Emmett and Blake, and 6-year-old...

Students from Los Gatos and Saratoga High Schools’ Speech and Debate Teams have been quite convincing, making their points successfully against students from other public—and private—schools. These efforts have led to placements in top tournaments and invitations to national competitions. At the California High School...

Last year, only a handful of students got As in my Advanced Placement (AP) Language and Composition class at Prospect High School. I noticed many of my classmates complaining about these results, commenting that they felt like English isn’t supposed to be so tough. But why?...

As I ask Dyuthi Boinepalli, a 15-year old at Saratoga High School, about the uptick in Artificial Intelligence usage on campus and how it affects curriculum. She looks at me and smirks. “I'd answer that, but it’s not loading,” she said, referring to how...

After serving half of his four-year term on the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District’s school board, trustee and former Los Gatos High science teacher Alex Shultz announced his resignation from the position, effective Jan. 24, at the board’s first meeting of the year. During...

With all the hubris of a startup founder, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District, took to the stage in March to launch Ed the chatbot. He told parents and students it had “the potential to personalize the educational journey at a...

By the time the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District held its first meeting since classes returned, Aug. 24, it’d already dealt with two coronavirus cases—a teacher and a student—one in Saratoga, and one in Los Gatos. While demonstrating the publicly-available “dashboard” for trustees, Brian...