School on Saturday?

Saturday Academy satisfies the hunger of students eager to learn

By Sara Bednark and Amee Pacheco
The Portland Upside
September 2009

For kids that need more challenging education than traditional schools can provide, Saturday Academy offers programs and classes to stretch their minds.

The catalogue comes in the mail and immediately my 9-year-old son grabs it from my hands. He devours it while eating his morning breakfast. Legos! He wants Lego Physics II: Motors and Movement. No, it’s not a Christmas catalogue come early. It’s the Fall course listing for Saturday Academy.

For my math and science lover, third grade got a little, shall we say, boring. He’d come home from school and when asked what he did that day, “Not much,” was his usual reply. Adding and subtracting was his thing in first grade but he wants more of a challenge than the math curriculum can provide. When our school counselor sends home Saturday Academy’s course listings, we check it out.

Saturday Academy (SA), the brainchild of Portland teachers Gail Whitney and Jackie Jackson, began in the early 1980s. Their talented and gifted students, hungry for hands-on projects and eager to learn, weren’t being engaged at the appropriate level by the public school curriculum.
They watched one gifted boy become bored, decide school wasn’t for him and drop out. Gail and Jackie feared losing their brightest kids and they vowed to do something about it.

The creative duo also noticed much cutting-edge technology—computers at that time—sitting around unused during the weekends. By recruiting community experts as instructors, they were able to use the computers to provide young people with hands-on, in-depth classes in an environment that was relaxed, stress-free and anything but boring. The program has grown from those early ideas.

Today Saturday Academy provides three distinct programs to assist eager students who need more than the regular school day to quench their thirst for learning: classes and workshops, SA in the schools, and Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE).

Classes and workshops

Saturday Academy offers hundreds of classes and workshops at various locations throughout the Portland metro area and welcomes all students from grades 2 through 12. Although math and science remain a focus, SA subjects also explore the humanities, arts and writing.

My 3rd-grader ruminates over more than twenty choices from the school counselor’s catalogue, including Acting for Young People: Fractured Fairy Tales; Computer Art & Animation; and Rocket Science: Blast Off. He decides on Math Gems and it’s just what he needs.

In the first hour and a half session, students create and solve codes, and we can’t get him to leave the Portland State University (PSU) classroom. The day they study Fibonacci numbers, he rushes home to catch rabbits and count flower petals. In one class they fashion abacuses out of paper, metal nuts and string, and he learns to use his for addition and subtraction. On the final day, 3/14, they celebrate pi. These Saturday Academy people are his kind of people, and for my 3rd grade math wizard, learning has become fun again. This story repeats itself year-in and year-out in SA classrooms all over town, with curious students pursuing their quests for hands-on learning.

Saturday Academy in the schools

By stepping directly into the schools with an advancement program called Learning Enrichment and Accelerated Pace (LEAP), as well as SA:AfterSchool, Saturday Academy strives to ignite an excitement for learning in public schools throughout the Portland metro area, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.

Middle school students are in their own school after their regular day has ended. Despite the beautiful sunny weather outside, these children are all indoors, hard at work designing houses. While chances are good no one will ever live in their designs, instructor Anthony May has created a real-life work environment for these budding architects.

“I try to engage the students to work as if in a professional environment,” says Anthony.

His teaching style is decidedly different from the middle school instructors many of us remember. The children are encouraged to speak up and interact with one another, giving the classroom a laid-back feeling despite all the concentrated mental activity. He spends a good deal of the class time observing rather than teaching. First providing basic instructions, Anthony then allows the students to lead their own projects, intervening only to answer questions and offer encouragement.

“There are a lot of happy accidents in here,” he says.

The curriculum is based on Anthony’s personal experience as both a student and an instructor.

“My initial approach is to incorporate past college experiences, projects, lessons, and concepts into their lessons,” he says. “[This] makes the students strive a bit above and beyond what they might get from their respective age-level education.”

Anthony’s lesson plans are heavily influenced by his students’ level of interest and productivity. His willingness to adapt his methods fosters an all-inclusive environment where everyone feels successful. Students explore and build at their own pace, creating a learning environment with plenty of “aha” moments.

As one student puts it, “I finally got my ceiling up. I’m so proud!”

Apprenticeships in science and engineering

Once the ceiling is up where does one go from there?
Saturday Academy addresses the age-old question of how to bridge the gap between education and the real world with their Apprenticeships in Science and Engineering (ASE) program.

To quote the SA website, “The ASE program matches high school freshman, sophomores, and juniors with scientists and engineers in an 8-week summer internship in a professional, scientific or engineering environment.”

Dr. David Jay, PSU professor and ASE instructor, exemplifies the professionalism of the program. His experience points to the important contributions one mentored young person can make through participation in ASE.

In 2003 David was training SA intern Andrew Krause to run a tidal analysis program. When Andrew’s results found that the tidal amplitude (the differential between high tide and low tide) near Astoria was increasing, David asked him to check his work again, and to analyze data from a San Francisco site. Andrew found tides increasing there, too.

Thus began David’s five-year project culminating in the discovery that tidal amplitude has been rising from Alaska to Mexico, all along the west coast. Until his work, the scientific community considered tidal amplitude to be stable. While reasons for the change are still unknown, global warming is a prime suspect.

Clearly science has benefited from Saturday Academy’s ASE program and Andrew’s hard work. How do the interns benefit?

SA mentor and board member Meenakshi Rao explains that doing real work—to which researchers in the field refer and on which they base future research—“is very empowering to a student. These high school students have amazing talent and potential. And mostly, we as a society ignore it. ASE empowers the students while enriching society with their new ideas and hard work!”

Andrew Krause went on to Cal Tech and received his engineering degree this past spring. When he heard about his part in David Jay’s research he responded:

“Wow, that’s great that the research paid off! I definitely remember the excitement of finding out that the long hours in front of the computer seemed to be leading to discovering something no one had noticed before.”

Early this summer my son takes his second Saturday Academy class, Lego Physics Level 1: Gears and Cams. He builds a bridge that spans the classroom and constructs a tower taller than his reach. Luckily SA instructor Scott Isler is there with support to lift my son higher as his construction project soars. Likewise, after twenty-five years, Saturday Academy has built a strong organization, educating thousands of Portland metro area students and lifting them higher toward their dreams.

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To view Saturday Academy’s fall catalogue, register for classes or find out more about their in-school and apprenticeship programs go to www.saturdayacademy.org

Sara Bednark has written two children’s books, publishes The Portland Upside and believes that everyone has a story to tell.

Amee Pacheco has a bachelor’s in journalism and a graduate certificate in nonprofit management from the University of Oregon. She happily spends her time writing grants for Saturday Academy and knitting.