Upper School News

Take a look at some of the intellectually stimulating, rich experiential sessions offered by facilitators for Intersession 2023!

One of the ways Nueva faculty members help students meet their potential is through assessments. Just as our approach to learning keeps our gifted students at the center, so too does the process for how teachers assess—and then communicate—how students are meeting the learning objectives and where they have opportunities for growth. This week we highlight upper school. 

When they learned that the environment would be the focus of the assembly, a trio of environmentally focused upper school students reached out to two San Mateo City Council candidates—Sarah Fields (running in District 3) and Adam Loraine (running in District 5)—to invite them to Nueva to talk about about environmental initiatives in the city of San Mateo.

For seniors, English class is a smorgasbord—a panoply of teacher obsessions and expertise. This fall, two of the newest advanced English seminars being offered are the 1980s and 1990s classes taught by Allen Frost. In these literature and cultural studies courses, students spend the semester reading, viewing, and listening to texts of all kinds (novels, poems, short stories, television shows, films, and popular music) from that respective decade.

On a typical Thursday morning, a cacophony of student and teacher voices could be heard in the hallways of the San Mateo campus. We invite you to learn more about a variety of Block 1 classes.  

Last spring, Director of Internships Katie Saylor met with biology teachers Paul Hauser and Jehnna Ronan to explore ways to offer students hands-on internships for those interested in lab-based sciences here at Nueva. Out of their conversations came a new biology internship offered this summer, where students helped to design new lab experiments and to refine existing experiments in the 10th grade biology curriculum.

What does it mean to build the courage to imagine and craft solutions to challenges? How can design thinking, systems thinking, data science, computer science, and design engineering be used to address societal issues around social justice and equity? In Design with Impact (DWI), a core course in ninth grade, students engage in projects that help them bridge the skills in these five key areas and design for others. 

It’s a rare occurrence for it to be sunnier in San Francisco than in San Mateo, but upper school students in Chelsea Denlow’s Postcolonial Latin America history class experienced sunshine and blue skies, which made the vibrant colors of the Mission District pop as they visited the neighborhood last week.

On the final day of the fall semester you could hear the sounds of a waltz, smell freshly-baked crumpets, and see a top hat—or three!—in room 1109 of the San Mateo campus.