Tory Bullock (standing) leads a discussion at the Boston Arts Academy. Photo credits: Kayana Szymczak, The Boston Globe

This summer Tory Bullock instructed students at the Boston Arts Academy to participate in the cultural art experiment that has swept the nation over the last few years, PostSecret.

Created by founder Frank Warren, PostSecret is an ongoing community art project/experiment where people around the world mail in secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard and every Sunday Frank uploads a selection of scanned copies of the postcards he receives.

“It was very, very difficult to get kids to really participate in the beginning, though some did open up,” Bullock told the Boston Globe.

Bullock gave her ninth-grade students some blank postcards, some glitter and some glue and asked them to open up about a range of topics including sex, drugs and violence, sharing their most private thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »

High school graduation is a big event and it needs to be celebrated in style. You need the perfect cap, gown, tassels, announcements, and everything else that recognizes you as a high school graduate. That’s where Graduation Source comes in to the picture.

Graduation Source allows you to buy everything you need to walk the graduation stage in style, and to let everyone else know what you have accomplished. Graduation Source sells personalized caps, gowns, tassels, cords, stoles, medals, and so much more!

My high school offered us some very cheap-looking gowns to wear to graduation. As a result, I looked like I was wearing construction paper. Graduation Source is a great resource if you are in a similar, unflattering position, or if your school does not offer gowns to graduates. Read the rest of this entry »

A job is one of those love/hate things about summer break. You love it because it puts some extra spending money in your pocket, but you are supposed to hate it – on principle if nothing else – because it takes away from your time to be lazy and do whatever you want. However, you could actually find a fun summer job. Then maybe the love/hate relationship could become a love/tolerate or even a love/like one. That doesn’t sound too shabby to me!

If you already have a summer job and absolutely hate it, or if you haven’t found one yet, here are some nice alternatives to normal summer jobs.

1. Forget babysitting. Be a house-sitter or pet-sitter. Many families take their annual vacation during summer break. As a result, they are left in a bind: Who will take care of Fido and water the plants? Well, that could be you. The difficulty of the job depends on the house or the pet, but the good news is that even if it is ridiculously hard, you only have to do it for a few weeks, at most. The good news is that most people are willing to pay quite a nice rate for this service because you are taking care of things that are very important to them. Read the rest of this entry »

My least favorite class in high school was biology, which isn’t strange because I like science and I really enjoy learning about the world around me. So, it seems like biology should have been one of my favorite classes right? Well, it was…until we had to dissect a frog.

I don’t know if you have ever dissected a frog, but it was an awful experience for me. First off, they stink. Really, really badly. Secondly, I hate dead things; they just give me the creeps. And the third major problem for me was that a frog had to die so that I could dig around in its intestines. It just was not at all pleasant for me.

If only my biology teacher had had an iPad. Read the rest of this entry »

MTV is such an interesting television channel. This channel has brought us popular hits such as “The Jersey Shore,” “Teen Mom,” and “16 and Pregnant.” If you know anything about these shows, you might think they are all going for the shock factor and are not exactly what I’d call classy or uplifting programs. It’s OK, though, MTV is not ABC Family and can show these types of programs. I just usually choose to steer clearit when I am channel surfing.

However, things appear to be changing over on the ‘ole MTV. A new program premieres on July 20 at 11:00pm EST called “If You Really Knew Me.” This show gives students a chance to break down social barriers in their high school and really get to know their classmates.

“If You Really Knew Me” features a different school during each episode and works by bringing students together through “Challenge Days”. “Challenge Days” are those when the entire school comes together and classmates are encouraged to really open up to each other and face difficult decisions and realities about bullying, prejudice, cliques, racism, and sexism.

Continue reading to learn more and watch the trailer. Read the rest of this entry »

“Can I ask you to recall a time when you really loved something?” Dan Meyer asked an audience at a recent convention. “A movie, an album, a song, or a book. And you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked. You anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back and the person hated it. That is the exact same state that I spent every working day for the past six years.”

What exactly is Dan Meyer’s job? It sounds completely awful to me.

Surprisingly – or maybe not so surprisingly – Dan Meyer is a high school math teacher. Meyer says he is providing a product (math education) that nobody wants to buy, but are required by law to do so. However, Meyer says that the future of math education is actually quite bright. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know the negative side effects of smoking. It makes your breath stink, you get wrinkles earlier, and I won’t even mention all of the types of lung diseases or cancers you can get from smoking.

In the past, there were many anti-smoking campaigns aimed at younger people. However, the hot topic in health care today is obesity. Some public health experts believe these anti-obesity campaigns have taken the focus off of preventing students from using tobacco products. Unfortunately, a recent survey confirms this by showing that 19.5 percent of high school students are smokers.

Why are students using tobacco? Terry Pechacek of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention thinks that “people are getting the image that it’s cool to use nicotine as a drug.” Read the rest of this entry »

Since its opening in 2003, The Urban Assembly New York Harbor School has been cut off from the water in Bushwick, Brooklyn. One of the 22 small, theme-based public schools opened by Public Assembly, a non-profit group, the Harbor School opened its new facility on Governor’s Island. Last month, it opened a new location, more fitting to the schools name, which sits on the harbor in a large building that used to be a Coast Guard hospital.

In addition to providing students with a college-preparatory education, a major part of the school’s mission is to foster a new paradigm of eco-conscience stewardship. Eighty-five percent of the students attending the Harbor School are living below the poverty line, and are in low-performing school districts.

One of the school’s projects is raising oysters in the New York harbor, a species that had previously disappeared from the city’s waterways due to overfishing and pollution. Oysters are key to the hands-on curriculum, and are an indicator species of a water system’s health. Incoming freshman must swallow one, although not any of the oysters raised in the contaminated harbor.

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After students had left North High School in Newton, Mass. for the summer, custodian Ed Reardon was cleaning out lockers. Each year the school district donates the abandoned books to charity. But when he reached into the top of one locker, a three-foot python fell to his feet.

“I just thought it was a change purse or something,” Reardon told a local newspaper with a laugh. “I bent down, because I wasn’t sure if it was real, and I realized it was the real thing,” he said. Identified as a ball python, Reardon used a notebook to keep the snake from escaping and picked it up by the back of the head. “It can’t bite you if you grab it by the back of the neck,” he said, of the technique he had seen on nature shows. Read the rest of this entry »

Flocabulary has made an amazing gift for all of the high school graduates. This gift is a compilation of  “(nearly) all the major headlines of your life.  In rap.” Check out this awesome music video of the most important events that have impacted the past 18 years and shaped the lives of many recent high school graduates, all students, and people around the world.

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