science

Yorktown High School Develops New Courses


YORKTOWN, N.Y. – Reading, writing, arithmetic—and Tweeting?

Yorktown High School is experimenting with three new classes this year, one of which involves being a good digital citizen and using social media, particularly Twitter, to spread positivity.

The class, called Husker Discovery, is a semester-long course for freshman students and strives to improve their mindfulness and to integrate them into the Yorktown High School community. Teacher Jaime Ciliberto said she begins each class with a mindfulness activity.

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“A lot of people get caught up in the word ‘mindfulness’ and they think it means stress relief,” Ciliberto said at the Oct. 22 Board of Education meeting. “That is not exactly what mindfulness is. What mindfulness teaches them is to focus on one thing at a time.”

Ciliberto said Twitter is also being used prominently in her classroom to teach students about digital citizenship. In addition to requiring each Tweet to have proper grammar and spelling, Ciliberto said, she insists on bringing positivity into the digital world.

“They have to find something positive that’s happening in the United States and they have to Tweet about it,” Ciliberto said. “So, it’s one of the things that I’m really enjoying in the class that I really do feel is bringing positivity to their lives. I hear them talking about their current-event articles and some of these really cool things that are happening around our country.”

The class, Ciliberto said, gives students the tools they need for academic and emotional success in Yorktown High School, such as how to write essays without plagiarizing by properly paraphrasing and citing their sources. She also gives her students long-range homework assignments, including attending two school events and participating in one school club.

“I want them, in their freshman year, to really get involved and hopefully stay involved in the things that they’re doing,” Ciliberto said.

AP Psychology

Though the district has historically offered a psychology elective, that course only scratched the surface, said teacher Amanda Guszack.

“[Myself] and the kids all wanted a deeper and more challenging course,” she said. “That’s finally what we have with AP Psych.”

Psychology, in its most basic form, is the study of the human mind and behavior. Guszack has enlisted the help of science and math teachers at Yorktown High School to break down the biology of the brain and analyze some statistics.

“It’s not just theory,” Guszack said. “There’s a lot more to it, a lot more science to it.”

The class was offered only to seniors who have previously taken a psychology elective. Even with two classes at 27 kids each, Guszack said, she had to wait-list students because of the high demand. Some, however, have already dropped the course because of its difficulty.

ESTEAM Discovery

Keeping in line with the district’s guiding philosophy of ESTEAM—an empathy-based approach to science, technology, engineering, arts and math—Yorktown High School has introduced ESTEAM Discovery. Open to students in ninth and 10th grade, the class is a modified version of the science research class, teacher Mike Salmore said. He is teaching three classes: two this semester and one next semester.

“Our students basically research science advancements,” Salmore said. “They go through publications, through the internet, and they do a lot of research and hopefully they move on to our science research class, if they choose. They don’t have to. They’re welcome to take the class and walk away.”

The class, Salmore said, teaches “real-world solutions to real-world problems.” After researching worldwide issues, they design solutions and present them.

“We then pare it down to community problems,” he said. “We want them to look at their own classroom, their own families, their own problems.”

Essentially, he said, it’s “research and design with a slant toward empathy.”

“Empathy is innate. You’re born with it. It’s something like a muscle,” Salmore said. “Like a muscle, you have to simulate it, you have to exercise it. Otherwise, it won’t grow.”

If that muscle is not exercised, he said, “it could be stifled. If you don’t work on it, it could wither away.”

“We try to sort of bend the needle. We try to sort of make them go toward the Mother Teresa side of empathy, and that’s sort of our goal,” Salmore said. “Ultimately, we want to take it to the next level. Where empathy is feeling people’s suffering, the next step is maybe to pass it on to compassion and actually relieving people’s suffering.”





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