Exploring Skills for the Future

Career-Based English

Amanda Walsh’s twelfth-grade career-based English class takes the fundamentals of a standard English class and applies it to how a student can work on achieving their goals for their future careers. Walsh, a first year English teacher at Polson High School, was given the opportunity to pilot the class as it was something that the former teacher was interested in. She kept hearing from her colleagues that there needed to be more classes at PHS that are geared towards students who don’t want to go straight to college, so she thought it was a great idea. Walsh said, “Students might want to do more trade- or business-oriented work, and if we’re preparing them all strictly for college, it’s not helping them. It’s not a one size fits all education. There are ways we can serve our students better.” 

Like a typical English class, the students in the class read the novel Brave New World, which Walsh said had a lot of fictional and dystopian elements that can apply to a career. She said the primary reason for reading this is that “The novel’s focus is to make sure that we’re understanding what we’re reading and then we’re also trying to look at ideas that we can extrapolate from the novel and look at in the world and in real life. It gets them to think about things on a deeper level to try to help them find a career that will make them feel happy and fulfilled.” 

Walsh describes the class as similar to an independent study where students are given the chance during class to work on their culminating project, which is a research project on a career of their choice. She is asking the students to do a variety of different research methods and to look at multiple sources. They also must contact a business and find someone they can shadow. To help them, Walsh has set up guest speakers for many different career paths such as people from law enforcement and job service.  She bases speakers off of the feedback that her students have given her for what they’re interested in. The class also took formative assessments with a program called YouScience, where they discovered what they’re interested in along with their attributes. She has them build in time on a weekly basis, usually Friday, where the students can be working on their independent research. Her reason for having her students do a project like this is to “build confidence and help give the students more ideas and information they might be able to use in a career.”

While most students in her class had a general idea of a career they wanted to pursue, some students had no idea. She had one student who wasn’t really sure about what he wanted to do but thought that the class would help him figure it out since it covers so many different careers and it would give him ideas about potential career pathways. Senior Zander Benson originally joined the class because counselor Chris McElwee persuaded him to; however, since he already knew he wanted to know more about cowboying, the class helped him learn more about the different ways of doing it and the different areas where one can do it. He said that he has enjoyed the guest speakers such as when a fire pilot came in and talked about dropping fire retardant out of airplanes. Walsh admires how dynamic her class is and how they have great energy and ideas. She said, “I would love to teach this class again next year. I really like the fact that it gives me a chance to try to meet my students where they are a little bit more and also be able to do things you can’t do in a standard English class.” 

Culinary

From proper knife cutting to healthy food preparation, culinary is one of the few classes at Polson High School that offers students the chance to build their skills across four levels. In the class, students learn kitchen etiquette, cooking techniques, and how to make a variety of dishes. Each class is a semester-long, starting with standard Culinary One, and ending with technical Culinary Four. The culinary teacher Stephanie Anderson said if a student takes them back to back, the spring session will differ from the fall session. To advance to Culinary Two, Three, or Four, a student must start out in culinary one learning basic cooking skills and proper sanitation procedures that would be appropriate in the culinary industry. 

Culinary Two is an extension of Culinary One, but has an additional unit about nutrition and how it relates to cooking. However, Culinary Three and Four are industry-level classes that prepare students for jobs in the culinary industry. The students have cooking opportunities outside of the classroom. They catered for a fair last spring and for the PHS library advisory group. 

Each class’s projects vary: in the fall, Culinary One participates in a gingerbread house competition and in the spring cupcake wars. In Culinary Two, students participate in cake week, where they make a two layer, fully decorated cake. 

For the first time, Culinary Three and Four students did a project with the third graders. They had stations to teach the Linderman students cooking skills. Shay Morin, who just completed Culinary Three, said working with the third graders has been challenging but in a rewarding way. Although the elementary students have struggled with keeping their attention on what’s going on, she said it allows the culinary students to step out of their comfort zones to become more patient and learn how to assess and teach kids an array of different skills and activities. During the stations, they kept track of the third graders so they wouldn’t burn themselves on hot oven or touch their faces after they had washed their hands. Morin’s group cut little shapes out of cheese and honey ham and put them on skewers, which they got to take with them. Another group made little brownie bites with fresh whipped cream on them, while a different group made a homemade ranch with carrot sticks. 

Anderson thought the project was a good way for students at all levels to work together. She said, “I think it’s really important to learn basic cooking and cleaning skills to keep yourself healthy.” Morin has learned how to properly cut fruits and vegetables, how to cook meat, and has learned how to make dishes such as patatas bravas and Mexican meatballs, but her favorite thing that they made was homemade fajitas. She said, “The fun part was getting to use a tortilla press and then another fun thing was cooking the chicken and adding fun seasoning to make it absolutely perfect.” Morin says that culinary is a class students can learn a lot from and added, “If someone was wanting to learn how to cook different foods from all around the world, if they were wanting to learn how to cook in general, it is definitely one of those classes that help you learn the basic skills you need. I recommend it to people who want to learn more cooking skills or have a passion for it.”

Forensics

You might have seen an eerie true-crime documentary or binged a fictional true-crime series, but have you ever considered or been curious about what it would be like to solve a mystery for yourself? Science teacher Kyle Dunn’s forensics class teaches students how to apply science techniques to solving mysteries and focuses not on what a problem is but more importantly the process of solving it. 

When Dunn first started teaching at Polson High School in 2014, the teacher he replaced had taught a forensic science class that was well-developed and had the equipment to go along with it. Being brand new to the school, he didn’t want to teach another class. But after three years, Dunn finally gave in. He said, “The forensic stuff kept staring me in the face, and I thought that there were so many good things and I should revive it.” 

Prior to teaching in Polson, Dunn had taught a forensics class in Idaho. He said he learned forensics as he taught it. He was a big reader as a kid and would always tend to pick up mystery novels. His approach was,“I love mysteries, right? Science makes sense to me and so I thought it would be fun to solve mysteries as part of class,” he said.

Since there aren’t enough teachers to teach forensics every year, it alternates with wildlife biology. When it is offered, many people sign up. The class is only a semester long so students can either take it in the first or second semester. 

The curriculum focuses on solving mysteries. For example, if they have evidence that is hair, Dunn will teach the forensics of how to identify hair. If there is blood, they focus on how to figure out the blood type from a splatter or DNA from the blood. There isn’t an obvious sequence, Dunn said, “It would be to do what the case demanded.” He has his students do many labs, probably more so than his other classes. One of these labs was DNA fingerprinting using short tandem repeats that would be used in a crime lab. Although they didn’t have the expensive equipment to run it, the paper version represented the general idea. They use 13 different loci, which are regions of DNA that they look at. The students graph it and make “fingerprints” that they can compare as if they were comparing human fingerprints. They overlay these prints on top of one another and students can look for exact matches. Senior Seth Stanley, who took the class first semester, said the students get to do their own research on a document or evidence before Dunn instructs them how to do it. It allows them to work on their problem-solving skills with little to no help.

Stanley joined the class because growing up he watched the show Forensic Files and thought it would be fun to work through the forensic process to uncover mysteries. He said his favorite part of the class was, “Definitely the teacher. He makes it really fun and evolving and one of the other parts is seeing the gory parts of the world and what forensic scientists have to do to find the evidence.” When he joined the class he didn’t know what to expect. He thought it would be mild, but by the end of the semester he thoroughly enjoyed it. He said Dunn’s teaching is engaging and interesting. His favorite unit of the class was the skeleton one, where he learned about the different parts of a skeleton and even how to identify a skeleton based on its race or sex. Stanley encourages students to take this class and said, “I generally think it would be fun and it is definitely involving and easy. You’re just consuming the ideas of what scientists do and you get to see some gruesome things. If you want to pursue a career in forensics, definitely take this class.”