Building on what they had learned from the Electric Vehicle Project, we developed the Industries Program for 1993-1994. We used many of the daily team meetings to design the Industries course, which was built around the idea of running a series of microenterprises with students rotating through four technical areas, one each quarter. Students selected three technical areas in September, visiting one each quarter, and at the end of the third quarter they could select a fourth area or return to their favorite. Technical areas included electronics, culinary, carpentry, electrical, drafting, video, computers, graphics, and transportation. In the computer area, for instance, students could use desktop publishing software to create and produce greeting cards, calendars, or other products.
Drawing from a jointly developed curriculum, all of the technical areas would be work toward common goals. Students rotating through would apply the same skills--planning, management, finance, and so on--in a different context each quarter, reinforcing the portability and transferability of these skills, while improving on them. With each rotation, students would create an enterprise or a community service endeavor. The teacher had the option of allowing students to create their own or proceed with a predetermined one. This allowed teachers to operate comfortably. Each enterprise had to meet four criteria: (1) use of the materials, tools, and equipment in the technical area; (2) use of the skills and strengths of all members of the group; (3) the meeting of a need of all or part of the community (the high school and surrounding neighborhood); and (4) the process of breaking even or making a profit. The enterprises would provide a fun, experiential setting. This was the general plan--now all that had to be done was to work backwards and fill in the blanks.
Humanities
The tenth-grade language arts and social studies course at Rindge is called Humanities. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the ninth-grade year generally includes a course in World History and the tenth-grade year includes a course in American History. To some degree, then, the most general content of the tenth-grade Humanities course was predetermined.
The Humanities teachers had decided to take an integrated, American studies approach to teaching American History. From the beginning, they designed the course around thematic units on such subjects as Native American history and the Civil Rights Movement, which included both traditional social studies content and associated activities and materials ranging from novels and poetry to film and vocabulary words. A unit on Civil Rights, for example, included reflective writing, reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," critical viewing of both documentary and dramatic films about the period, studying how constitutional law affected the Civil Rights struggle, reading oral histories, and even listening to the music that Malcolm X had enjoyed during his "hipster" period.
Industries and Humanities constituted the core tenth-grade Rindge program. At that time (1993-1994) and in the following year, as well, Rindge students still took mathematics and science (as well as physical education and nonvocational electives) in other "houses" of the high school.