Schools

Senior HS Projects Inspire Patch Editor

For Patch's Give 5 Day, the South San Francisco Patch editor volunteered as a panelist for the El Camino High School senior projects.

As part of our Give 5 program, each Patch editor spends five days a year volunteering in their local community. Here’s what I did this week.

On Wednesday afternoon, I sat at a desk in a high school classroom, trying to figure how to factor a difficult algebraic equation.

Though I think of myself as good at numbers, I was having some trouble with this one. I looked to my right and to my left; my fellow classmates didn’t seem to be having much better luck.

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No, I hadn’t been transported back to the eleventh grade; rather, I was watching (and participating in) an interactive presentation about teaching by an El Camino High School senior. Every year, El Camino seniors present their senior projects to volunteer panels of community members and show what they’ve learned about their chosen fields.

The students picked occupations they might be interested in eventually doing professionally, like policing, nursing or teaching. They had to find a mentor and do field work and a community service project related to their topic. They also wrote a persuasive essay on a subject related to their field.

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Throughout the afternoon, students told us about conversations they’d had during police ride-alongs, on-the-job skills they’d learned in the carpentry trade and songs they’d sung to inspire people fighting to overcome cancer. Though many of the students are still deciding where they’ll end up in life, I could tell just sitting there that they were excited about the possibilities before them.

Thanks, El Camino seniors, for inspiring me.


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