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Introduction of Interviewers
Hi, my name is Karen, and I'm Kathy, I'm Rene, I'm Mark. I'm Erin and we're interviewing Alison Ganem on July 30th at the Urban School in San Francisco, 2007.
Hi Alison. First, can you just introduce yourself and tell us where you're from and how you came to Urban School?
Sure. My name is Alison Ganem and I'm eighteen, and I just graduated from Urban. I went to elementary and middle school right up the street at the French immersion School called Lycee Francais. That was sort of a very kind of rigid "my way or no way" kind of system. History class was sort of you walked in and you sat in your desk and you completed fill-in-the-blank worksheets for an hour, and that was pretty much the extent of it.
Then I came to Urban and it was a lot more creative, a lot more innovative, a lot more hands on, and that was really good for me. I don't know if you know this about Urban but it's one of these places where you get grades but you don't see them until you apply to college your senior year. It's kind of a really different evaluation and assessment system where we have twelve week trimesters, and about six weeks into the trimester you sit down with your teacher one-on-one and talk about your strengths, your areas for improvement, and strategies you can sort of use to make that improvement real. And then after twelve weeks you get a full course report. So, there's a rubric and then there's about a paragraph of critical and narrative feedback. That's kind of how it works.
That's real interesting. Here at Urban are there a lot of different choices of history classes you can take?
Totally, yes. As a prospective eighth grader, I was just flipping through the Urban course catalog and it was kind of like I was flipping through a college course catalog. It's pretty ridiculous. And junior and senior year I took a lot of courses that were focused on the Middle East and on Southeast Asia because I was really interested in that, and then I decided to do this in the spring of my senior year just because it's something I knew that Urban offered and that I hadn't explored and that had been really fascinating to me since when I'd heard of it so I just kind of dove in and it was really worth it.
Alison, as you were coming in, did anything change about the way you saw technology at work in the classroom? Was it more or less intimidating? Did it disappear into the background?
It definitely became less daunting as I experienced it in the classroom. You come to Urban and you are just immersed in it so completely and totally that you have to adapt after awhile. People will have their laptops out during class all the time and they will be taking notes. You get the occasional abuse of the laptop where they are checking their email during class or playing games during class, but for the most part it's really constructive use. I had to kind of get adjusted to that piece of Urban.
You mentioned earlier that you don't see your grades until, did you say your senior year?
Yes, kind of junior and senior year. It's a little bit of a complicated system.
Because looking at a primary resource, so many of my students will hunt and peck for what they perceive as the "right answer." How do think the freedom to kind of come in a create something without their necessarily being a "right or wrong" has been useful or helpful or not to you?
I think it's been really helpful to me personally because at my middle school it was this thing where you got grades up to the second decimal point and no feedback. So I came to Urban and it was really helpful for me. There are definitely students who try to get around the system a little bit and try and gauge like, "Oh, from this feedback that I got on this essay I must have gotten a B." But I think it works differently for different students.
How about making mistakes, did you feel like you could?
At the beginning I definitely didn't just because that's kind of what was my ingrained mind set from my previous school, but the teachers at Urban really encourage you to take risks and step out of your comfort zone and be playful with your learning, and I think that I did that a lot, especially in history classes.
Was there a particular mistake or obstacle that you had that you feel like without you wouldn't have learned as much?
Can I think about that for a second?
We can come back to that.
Yes, maybe come back to that. I'd have to think about it.
You talked about "play" in the classroom. If you could give two newish teachers any advice about how important play has been to your success going to Stanford - what would you say?
Super important. I know that freshman and sophomore year a lot of times what I would do—the Urban system is very discussion based, so we'll read a book then we'll come into class the next day and discuss it. My first couple of years I would annotate so thoroughly that I knew I was going to have something to say when I came into class. While the other students were speaking I'd be thinking about what I was going to say, so that when it came out it was perfectly formulated. And I had to really let go of that junior and senior year. I think that was super helpful for me, to be able to be a more kind of "on your feet" thinker and not necessarily have to have everything prepared and planned out 100% of the time.
You gained confidence in yourself?
Yes, definitely. You should have seen me freshman year, I was like this timid introspective kid who never said anything. There were no other kids coming to Urban from my middle school so it was kind of hard for me to make friends at first. I feel like I also had a really tough transition because I was speaking French in all my class at Lycee and then I had to speak English in all my classes here. I've really grown here and owe a lot to this school.
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