Venturing into the World

Next week at Millennium School we have our spring intersession, the week between terms when we dive into an intensive, short-term project to refresh ourselves and explore some new territory before the next term begins. We're particularly excited about this intersession, as we have an action-packed week of visiting workplaces all over the Bay Area. Each day we'll divide into student teams, research a given profession to generate questions, and then jump into vans or onto public transit and head to real-life workplaces where hosts are waiting to introduce us to the field and to their own path through it. 

This is part of our developmental theme of connecting school to the real world, exploring how people find ways to act purposefully and authentically in their professional lives. It's also a lead-up to our apprenticeship program, launching in the 7th grade, during which each student will have the chance to become an apprentice in a workplace and further explore these connections. 

Thanks to many Millennium community members who have volunteered their time and their workplaces, we have an exciting lineup of visits. Students will visit professions ranging from metalsmiths to tech company founders, architects to software engineers, accountants to museum curators, nonprofit leaders to chefs. The aim is to gain exposure, to explore what makes these people tick and how they find and apply their passions, and to peek into the world that adults inhabit while kids are in school. We don't want any students to feel like they have to 'choose' a professional path; the aim is rather to lift the veil on what adults do all day, a topic of great interest to many if not all students at this age!

We'll share more after the week, but here's to making school less of an 'island' and more of an integrated part of this amazing city we inhabit.