Virtual Learning

Wave Learning Festival Teaches Kids Globally

/ May S Ruiz / Leave a comment

Originally published on 9 July 2020 in the Pasadena Independent, Arcadia Weekly, and Monrovia Weekly

Karly Hou, shown at Harvard Square, is Wave Learning Festival’s Chair and Founder | Courtesy photo / Wave Learning Festival

When students were sent home during the coronavirus lockdown in March, they were left to their own devices as they studied remotely. Many didn’t have access to resources and teachers for guidance, which made it difficult to keep up with schoolwork. Parents of young children became active partners with the schools in providing learning for their kids. Some of them were also working from home so they had to juggle their time among their many responsibilities.

Karly Hou, who attended Henry M. Gunn High School in Northern California, was a freshman at Harvard University at the time. She had a brainstorm – organize an online platform to help students and parents during the quarantine period.

Fellow first-year Harvard student Kevin Tan, who went to Arcadia High School, along with a handful of other students from Stanford, Cal State San Luis Obispo, Northwestern, Rhode Island School of Design, Williams, and University of Pennsylvania, teamed up with Hou to form Wave Learning Festival. It is now on its third ‘wave’ of summer courses and has attracted middle- and high-schoolers from all over the world.

Via email, Hou and Tan reveal how they know each other, how they created Wave Learning Festival, and what they hope to accomplish.

“Karly and I have the same favorite study spot on campus: Cabot Science Library!” begins Tan. “It’s a truly amazing place for collaboration and seeing familiar friendly faces. There have been many times when those late night study sessions spontaneously broke into TikTok tutorials or just general chatter. Karly just has this amazing energy with her all the time, and we’ve been on the same wavelength since day one.”

It was this energy which Tan enthuses about that led to the creation of Wave Learning Festival.    

Hou says, “In March, we were all sent home from college. While it was a stark transition, we were able to continue some sense of normalcy through online classes and club meetings. But I saw friends at my old high school struggling to maintain their studies, posting about their confusion and lack of communication and support from the school. I thought, if PAUSD (my district), one of the wealthiest school districts in California, was struggling like this, what must students across the country be dealing with?

“Around the same time, I saw notices of summer camps and community programs shutting down without replacements or refunds, and started reading article after article by exasperated working parents on the difficulty of balancing their full-time jobs with the new job of keeping their kids engaged.”

Nick Danby, teaching ‘Great Speeches of History | Courtesy photo / Wave Learning Festival

Those concerns, and how to address them, became an obsession for Hou. She discloses, “I had been thinking this idea over in my mind for around three days straight, and I finally realized I had to get started because I couldn’t think about anything else. I made a document to quickly outline my ideas on the structure of our program, set up a team structure broken into five subgroups, and set up some basic materials – email addresses, a Slack workspace, a shared Google Drive, etc. The name – Wave Learning Festival – came about on a whim. After some deliberation, I decided to just roll with it since a) we could tie it into the idea of our classes running in ‘waves,’ b) the ocean imagery could give us a lot to work with as a theme, and c) nobody on the team had any grievances with it.

“I then reached out to some of my close friends from college and high school, as well as a few passionate friends I’d met through other events and, luckily, almost everyone was really excited about the idea. We got straight to work. Four days later, we had enough logistics set up and a website launched to start working with teachers; a couple weeks later, we introduced our first wave of classes. It’s incredible to me that we were able to organize everything so quickly, and I think that’s because we were all motivated by this shared belief in helping the community.”

For anyone else, working on a passion project would be accomplishment enough. But, by now, you would conjecture that Hou is quite the over-achiever.        

“Balancing Wave with the end of my courses/my summer internship has definitely kept me very busy, but I’ve been more than happy to stay occupied during quarantine,” discloses Hou. “The good thing is that we got started right before finals, when classwork was winding down, but it was definitely hard to force myself to actually study, since working on Wave was so much more fun! Once summer started, I was able to get into a more set schedule of working my internship at Two Sigma in Houston from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., then taking a break before working on Wave through the evening. I spend my weekends working on Wave, so I’d say it comes out to be 20-plus hours a week right now, not counting the time spent thinking about it as I’m falling asleep at night. It definitely feels less tiring than it might seem, since I have so much fun on both projects. Happily, I still have some free time to hang out (virtually) with friends, bake cakes with the family, and do some painting.”  

How she manages to do all that seems like a Herculean undertaking – it’s exhausting just seeing this young lady’s timetable on paper. 

Arcadian Kevin Tan is Wave Learning Festival’s Associate Director of Logistics | Courtesy photo / Wave Learning Festival

Tan isn’t a slacker either – he is the Associate Director of Logistics for Wave Learning Festival. He describes, “I do a lot of the work on the back-end to make sure that we have a palette of phenomenal classes each wave. I work directly with the college and high school students who sign up to teach a course, and I make sure that through Wave, we can translate those ideas into classes that work well in a remote setting. It’s really amazing how such a small group blossomed into something so much bigger. I remember for our inaugural wave, we had 12 courses running, and since then, the logistics team has been working tirelessly to work with the demand and enthusiasm from students and teachers alike. We have over 50 classes planned for our upcoming third wave of classes, and we’re hoping to include even more in the future!”

“I’ve been working to get almost 100 courses live on our site this summer, and I can tell you that is no easy task,” Tan expounds. “Being remote, I can work throughout the day focusing on the logistics – from interviewing our teachers to moderating ongoing classes to make sure they are safe. The team has put in a lot of time to make sure that the classes are of high quality and that student safety is never compromised. I’m really excited to get our content team integrated into the workflow so we can continue to scale this project throughout this summer.

“When I’m not working on Wave, I do research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Lee Lab – their computational biology projects are a perfect transfer to remote – which I started this summer. With my mentor Anna Lappala, we’re finding novel ways to computationally model 4D chromosomal folding. I’m also taking online courses and working with a few of my friends to address social issues highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic or the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Hou and her collaborators designed Wave seminars to vary in duration and format. Most of them are a two- to three-week series with classes that meet three to five times a week and a few are one-time sessions. Any student can sign up at their website, and classes are held live through Zoom. There are no formal assessments or assigned homework – the goal is to help students learn about topics they’re interested in and have fun.

“We leave optional readings, assignments, and projects at our teachers’ discretion to enhance student learning,” explains Hou. “Our educators have been pretty good at measuring students’ progress through interactive discussions, projects, and informal quizzes. Although some of our courses only run once, many of our most popular courses from each wave return for future waves. Each teacher comes in with their own idea of what topics they’d like to teach. Our prompts are completely open-ended, so people can apply to teach whatever they’re passionate about – whether it be astrophysics or poetry, filmmaking or public speaking, hip hop or medical ethics!”

Madison Abbassi, a rising junior at Palo Alto High School, teaching ‘How Cancer Work’ | Courtesy Photo / Wave Learning Festival

Instructors are carefully hand-picked from a pool of applications. Wave team members  interview each applicant and work with them over the course of two weeks to review and refine their curricula. In addition, at least one team member sits in on each class to help with logistics and ensure things run smoothly. Some past instructors have also joined the team to help work with future teachers, passing on some of the experience and insight they’ve gained from going through the same process.

Wave seminars are all held online and are open to anyone who is awake at the time and can speak English. Says Hou, “We originally promoted it only within the US, but news of the program quickly spread around the world. We’ve now registered students from 31 countries: the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Spain, Germany, Macedonia, Russia, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Libya, South Africa, Venezuela, and Brazil. So far, over 2000 students have signed up to learn with us in Wave Three! Registration for Wave Four opens on July 14th  with sessions beginning on the 27th. Wave Five begins on August 17th and each runs for three weeks. Interested families can enter their email address at our website to receive a notification when registration goes live. We think we’ll run over a hundred classes for Wave Four and maybe more for Wave Five to meet student demand.     

“We are hoping to continue Wave into the near future, likely transitioning to a support format during the school year to assist students with their in-school coursework, provide some extracurricular opportunities, and set up career panels and college information sessions to help increase accessibility to this kind of information. We are planning to host our summer programming next summer as well, and now that we’ve set up so much infrastructure already, we anticipate being able to offer even more courses and serve even more students.”

Wave Learning Festival came about to fill a need caused by the coronavirus pandemic. However, from all indications, the Z Generation’s altruism and responsiveness come early on in their life compared to the generations before them. And they do it all in the spirit of having a fun time. Even if the lockdown didn’t happen when it did, Hou would undoubtedly have come up with a fantastic idea to be of service to others at some point. The pandemic only hastened the process.

Temple City Alternative School Offers Different Learning Methods

/ May S Ruiz / Leave a comment

Originally published on 6 October 2016 in the Pasadena Independent, Arcadia Weekly, Monrovia Weekly, and Sierra Madre Weekly

High schools are usually multi-level structures that are populated by two thousand teen-agers hurrying from one classroom to another. While most kids enjoy this daily interaction with classmates and lectures with teachers, there are some to whom this schedule isn’t the right fit for their needs. 

The Temple City Unified School District (TCUSD) is one of the few districts offering students and their families some options for getting a high school education using a different delivery method – the Dr. Doug Sears Learning Center (DDSLC) and the Alternative School.

According to Chris Sewell, principal, “While both are alternative schools, they are two separate institutions, having different accreditations and curricula. The DDSLC is a continuation school serving 10th to 12th graders from TCUSD who might need credit recovery and for those who may not have passed some classes but weren’t able to attend summer school. Students could recoup and maintain credits to be able to transfer back to the high school and graduate on time.”

“Our enrollment fluctuates from one year to the next,” Sewell says. “At one time we had as many as 80 students; we currently have fewer than 50, with four full-time teachers and a counselor. Several things have changed over the years in terms of intervention at the high school so fewer kids are sent to remedial school. The district altered and added services to support students before they reach the point of failing a course.”          

Sewell explains, “DDSLC is also another option for students who feel that a comprehensive high school schedule interferes with other things going on in their lives. Some of our students are 18 years old and are working; they would like to pick up more hours and a traditional school doesn’t allow for that. Still some who come here already know they want to start at Pasadena City College (PCC) so this schedule allows them to take a class or two at PCC.”

“The Temple City Alternative School (TCAS), on the other hand, offers online independent study for 9th to 12th grade students,” adds Sewell. “It has the same academic requirements for graduation as a comprehensive high school – four years of English; three years of history and government; two years of science; three years of math and economics; three years of physical education; four years of electives. Those who are planning on applying to UC/CSU have to complete the A-G requirements.”

“The only difference is the delivery method – we have a digital curriculum using APEX Learning. Students have access to their online course 24 hours day; they study at home at a convenient time to do so. Students are required to come in only for an hour once a week to meet face-to-face with Shannon Findley, the supervising teacher,” Sewell says further.

Findley, who came on board during the 2015-2016 schoolyear, says, “I supervise and approve student coursework designed to meet their individual needs and levels. I meet with them regularly to assess their work, discuss progress on an ongoing basis, and revise individual instruction plans when called for. If necessary, I provide mediation which can mean either teaching or counseling. I also have an open computer lab to serve as additional resource for one-on-one tutoring and technology, and to furnish an absorbing learning environment or workplace.”   

To explain how she combines APEX Learning and teacher instruction, Findley describes, “The digital curriculum keeps students actively engaged and attentive as they are required to read, watch, listen, inquire, write, discuss, and manipulate. Embedded in the program are multimedia tutorials which give students the opportunity to explore and understand new concepts at their own pace. Whenever necessary, I provide direct instruction or I modify material and assignments to help them become proficient with the concepts.”               

With technology a pervasive tool in today’s world, online schools have gained wider acceptance. Sewell points out, “Ten years ago, if someone said he or she was taking a class online, people gave a knowing smile. With more and more prestigious schools offering online courses, the stigma attached to digital study has disappeared. The truth of the matter is that the digital classes can be as rigorous as, if not more rigorous than, coming on campus listening to a lecture and taking notes.”

Kids who attend an alternative school have unique needs that cannot be filled by traditional institutions. Sewell illustrates, “We have students who are serious athletes and their training schedule doesn’t allow them to go to Lemon Avenue (where Temple City High is located) from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm but they want to obtain a high school diploma. The district has given much support – the school is open daily so students can come in and leave any time between 8:00 and 3:00; laptops are available and they can sit in coffee shop-style chairs; the lab is open for them to use. A math teacher comes in from 3:30 to 5:00 twice a week to provide extra help.”

“The 12 students currently attending have direct access to a full-time teacher and a counselor. They can still participate in all the events at Temple City High, like grad night or the homecoming. They can go to the college fair the high school hosts, with the advantage of getting individual and personal attention from the counselor. They are, in fact, better off than the 500 seniors at the traditional high school,” Sewell observes.   

Raul Acevedo, who has been the school counselor since 2004, ensures that he provides a welcoming environment for all newcomers, “Each students enrolls into the independent study program due to a variety of reasons – often, although not always, after some challenging experience. Because students have very few adults to interact with, it is important that each interaction is a positive one. So building that initial rapport is key.”

Pasadena City College Photo taken online

“Within three domain areas – academic, personal/social, and college/career – I give students the support they need towards attaining knowledge, setting goals, and follow-through for individual success. While the majority of our alternative school students are on a college prep track, some may not be. The challenge then is to develop the college and career readiness mindset and behavior within those students,” Acevedo expounds.

“I provide orientation; schedule classes based on students’ transcript review, grade level, and oral interest survey to select elective courses; monitor progress throughout the term; check-in and follow up with students on their goals and plans. I make sure I know if they intend to stay in independent study or transfer back to the high school; if they have post-secondary plans, including attending Pasadena City College (PCC). 

“During our first few interactions, college counseling occurs when I ask students about their goals. But the process begins in earnest in junior year and culminates in senior year. I assist in their school research, relative to the courses they have in mind; I guide them through the college and financial aid (FAFSA) applications, and I help find scholarships.

“Being the counselor for DDSLC, I combine certain activities with our alternative program students, like visiting local community colleges. I usually take students in my car and visit PCC and Citrus College; another teacher drives his own car to take more students, when needed.

“Our students also attend fairs including: PCC Career Technical Education Fair; the annual Citrus College Theatre Performing Arts Open House; and the National Hispanic College Fair, which provides a platform for dozens of colleges and universities nationwide to connect with students (last year’s fair was at Loyola Marymount University).

“During the 2015-2016 school year, three seniors graduated and are now attending community colleges – Brandon Johnson is at Citrus College and plans to major in accounting with the hope of becoming an FBI accountant; Charles Osborne is pursuing a political science degree at PCC on a full tuition scholarship from AJ Wang; and Lu Jiang is currently at PCC but intends to transfer to the Art Center of Pasadena,” Acevedo says.     

Everyone who comes through their doors is expected to do well and succeed, “The onus is on the student to have self-motivation and drive because they have more independence – it’s so easy to be a slacker,” Sewell warns. “But if they can manage this well, it will serve as a skill that helps them transition to college, to a career, and to life.” From that perspective, an alternative school offers some very attractive reasons for students to deviate from traditional learning. But as Sewell enthusiastically proclaims, “In the year 2016, what’s traditional? Technology has changed all that.” Indeed it has!