Who are you school 2022 full story
In 2020, when the pandemic made universal standardized testing impossible, Lowell temporarily suspended its admissions standards in favor of a randomized, lottery-like system. “And by ‘that’ I mean the last eighteen months.” “Good morning! Wow, that was weird,” Johnson said. “Lowell students will skip class to study for their next class.”Īs the foot traffic intensified, Johnson pushed through a narrowing in the hallway-the Gates of Hell, she calls it, owing to the hourly bottlenecks it creates-and headed to Room 255, where desks were arranged in a double horseshoe. “They call us nerds, and I can’t refute that,” Catherine Hung, a junior, told me. For decades, Lowell has been one of two public high schools in San Francisco to use selective admissions, with a grade- and test-score cutoff for most applicants. In the front entrance, glass-framed boards display smiling head shots of illustrious alumni: Stephen Breyer, Alexander Calder, Jennifer Egan, Dian Fossey, Rube Goldberg, William Hewlett-the lists go on in every field. A big seal on the building’s façade proclaims its status as a National Blue Ribbon School. Lowell, founded in 1856, is the oldest public high school in the West and a long-admired jewel of public education. “I don’t know where 270 is!” a boy cried, clawing at his hair and sprinting toward oblivion. The school’s campus is a sprawl of irregular buildings, semi-connected sophomores had attended only remotely, so half the student body was a little lost. She is both commanding and approachable, with snowy hair just past her shoulders and a big camp-counsellor voice, and people tend to come to her with their confusions. Upstairs, Johnson stood against the wall to guide the rush.
m., Johnson began walking the lower hallways, then the upper, while a tide of students lapped onto the campus as if from twenty-seven hundred different continents, all keen to see their futures made. Lowell is in western San Francisco, near the ocean, and a thick, low fog was sweeping through the eucalyptus and cypress trees as students arrived for the first time since the start of the pandemic, eighteen months earlier. On arriving, she prepared herself, as usual, a mug of milky tea. “While I am still experiencing much of that excitement, I am also feeling some trepidation, and I am not sure exactly why.” On the first morning of school, she dressed the way she always does: an untucked button-down shirt, this one with flowers gray slacks and extraordinarily sensible black shoes. “I am used to having my plans and procedures mostly ready to go, and I am just excited to meet a new crop of kids,” she explained before the term began. Rebecca Johnson, a teacher for more than twenty years, approached the first day of class at Lowell High School last fall with unusual anxiety. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.