Position
Writer
Graduation
Class of 2024
Sage Feldman is a writer and musician at Berkeley High. They've worked with the Jacket and played in the BHS Jazz Band for their entire high school career. They've won awards for their poetry and academics.
As education science evolves and curricula shift, even Advanced Placement classes and their exams change. Redesigns of AP classes happen on a scale imperceptible to students, but for teachers who have to teach the same thing every year, a development in the College Board’s philosophy can shake up their classroom.
The current iteration of AI chatbot Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, GPT-4, has quickly developed into something difficult to ignore in everyday life.
Gender is a fundamental expression of individual identity, not just a spectrum but a plane that extends in multiple directions. With it comes societal baggage — expectations of behavior, pronouns, and other aspects of identity.
Berkeley High School’s course offerings are constantly and subtly shifting; new classes spring up with much fanfare and older classes are quietly retired.
Berkeley High School and the University of California, Berkeley’s campuses are only two blocks away, each filled with large and changing student populations.
Sarah Cline, leader of Berkeley High School’s jazz program, was one of many teachers who made the move from their temporary holding spaces to the newly refurbished A Building. “It was like one of those home makeover shows, when the family’s coming in two hours and everyone is blitzing to get ready,” Cline said. The
The improvisational group Room for Improvement is reforming at Berkeley High School, a tradition that helps aspiring actors explore themselves as team members. “[Members] are not necessarily the most experienced actors, but [are] the kids comfortable enough to listen…, to fail…, [to] say ‘yes,’” said Jordan Winer, an English teacher at BHS who has
“Live music,” to Berkeley High School senior Ruby Thompson, “is a really incredible way to connect people based on shared interest.” Throughout the Bay Area, these gathering spaces in the form of restaurants, city parks, and traditional concert halls serve music with a side of community, art, and food.
At a recent concert, Jazz band Director Sarah Cline asked for parent support for the upcoming trip to Cuba. She recalled the contrast between the attitudes of host school Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Música, the National School of Arts, and Berkeley High School to woodwind reeds.
“59 percent of our students happy here,” said Yasmin Navarro, a college counselor at the College and Career Center, regarding a survey given to juniors.
In the courtyard attached to room G112, Berkeley High School’s mechatronics, sound design, art, carpentry, and CAD classes have come together in time for Halloween to create an interdisciplinary summative project: a combonation haunted house and escape room envisioned, built, and presented by students and staff alone.
“People of all colors together united to fight for this department in San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, and later in high school,” said Menaka Gentle, Ethnic Studies teacher for Hive 6 of the Universial Ninth Grade.
After three years of pandemic-based hiatus, the Solano Stroll returned to the Bay Area on Sunday, September 11, bringing with it a day of entertainment and business. “The Stroll started off as a sidewalk sale,” said Robert Abrams, a potter and one of the volunteer board members for the Solano Avenue Association.
Twenty years ago, six movie theaters were within easy reach of downtown Berkeley-goers. With the closing of Shattuck Cinemas in late May, Regal UA, on the same street, is the last one remaining, and the 90-year-old Art Deco building is soon to leave as well.
“It kind of felt like a slap in the face,” said Sam Matsumoto, a film photography teacher at Berkeley High School as she shared her opinion on the pending overturning of Roe v.
On Wednesday, May 4, Berkeley Unified School District’s School Board met to discuss growing class sizes, wages among teachers, and the Berkeley Schools Excellence Program’s budget. After acknowledging Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month, the board opened up the microphone for public comment, with nine members of the webinar sharing their thoughts.
“We [at Berkeley Unified School District are] creating a world where anyone can feel that they are important and that they have a space in our society to contribute,” said Shawn Mansager, executive director of special education for BUSD.
Berkeley High School’s Black Student Union hosted a Black History Month event at lunch last Friday, February 25, to celebrate the diverse cultures of the African diaspora.
