College in High School 

I’m a little more than halfway through Bard Early College, Queens, a high school that is also a college. Four years of high school are crammed into freshman and sophomore year; junior and senior years (referred to as Year One and Year Two) we take college classes. Most of the teachers in our school have either master’s degrees or PhDs.

If you pass all your classes, you graduate high school with an associate degree. Most colleges accept at least some of the credits, so when you enroll in college you can graduate earlier. Bard Early College credits are accepted by New York’s SUNYs and CUNYs and many out-of-state universities—and of course, by Bard College, the private college north of New York City that anchors Bard’s array of programs. 

I started Bard Early College as a freshman soon after immigrating here from Ukraine, and now I’m in Year One. Last September my class had a matriculation ceremony, and we were officially enrolled into the college’s database. 

I buzzed with anxiety over the transition. The whole culture of the school revolves around college. The walls are adorned with posters talking about different career paths and internships. “Get ready for Year One,” said my advisor last year. “It will be nothing like high school.” 

The college classes are held in our high school building, so what makes them college classes? For one, every grade I get now goes on my college transcript. Another change is more responsibility. At the end of sophomore year, we were sent a form to choose our own classes and teachers. 

It’s on us to keep up. If we missed assignments freshman and sophomore year, the teachers reminded us and gave us second chances. No more. Also, we “college kids” are allowed to leave for lunch and free periods. That means access to our phones, which are banned inside all NYC high schools. 

The workload is much heavier now. All my classes feel more intellectually challenging. There is definitely more reading, more creative projects, and more research papers. We are encouraged to produce more thoughtful work that will help us in whatever college we transfer to, instead of just preparing for the Regents.

Classes are also longer, though there are fewer of them. Lab for science classes are three periods long now instead of two, which is just 45 minutes more but sometimes feels like decades. First semester I took theater and I do not have to take another art elective for the rest of my Bard career. You can also stop taking science classes after two semesters of them if you wish.  

My experiences in 10th and 11th grade literature class with the same teacher, Ms. Woronzoff (we can also call her Dr. Woronzoff or Marina), illustrate some of the differences. In her 10th grade World Literature class, we read three books. We spent four months studying Gilgamesh (290 pages) and took three months to analyze 50 pages from Genesis from the Torah. The 104-page play Medea, which I liked enough to write an article about, took three months. We also did state exam prep and analyzed a few poems.

Now, I have Ms. Woronzoff again, for seminar in 11th grade. 

Though 10th grade felt like we were overanalyzing every single word over and over, now I realize that the laborious process helped. I got comfortable with deep reading and interested in what it yielded, and that prepared me for all the pages we have to analyze now in class. 

More Pages, Deeper Discussions

During the first semester of junior year in Ms. Woronzoff’s Year One Seminar, we read Genesis (yes, again, 30 pages); Sweat, a short story by Zora Neale Hurston; the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone; The Darker Face of the Earth by Rita Dove (102 pages); and a few short articles. 

The increased reading is the biggest difference between Ms. Woronzoff’s two classes, and because of her teaching, I now pay way more attention to things such as characterization, imagery, references, and patterns. Sweat is about a black woman, Delia, in 1920s Florida who works as a laundress and has an abusive husband, Sykes, who torments her with snakes. This terrifies Delia, but it also is a catalyst to her finding her strength, making her “like a god” when she chooses not to help the man who has been hurting her. All our reading of the Bible as literature also helped me appreciate the layers of symbolism around serpents. I am better able to write about a work of art in depth now. 

We no longer wait for the teacher to tell us what is important; instead we come to class with our own takes on the texts. 

Another difference between the 10th and 11th grade classes Ms. Woronzoff taught is that Seminar has more wide-ranging discussion. Students give their opinions and share what they know about the readings, discussing anything. We no longer wait for the teacher to tell us what is important; instead we come to class with our own takes on the texts.

The goal of the course is to talk about canonical works and how they relate to big questions like “How should one live?” or “What is right and wrong?” or “Does god exist?” We expand out from the canon to thematically connected recent books, which are sometimes easier to relate to.  

For example, we connect Oedipus Rex, written in 5th century BCE, with The Darker Face of the Earth from 1979, which takes place on a plantation in South Carolina before the Civil War. Both  works feature a child who is given away by his parents and cursed at birth. In each tale, the child finds his way back to his parents and ends up slaughtering one of them.

Our discussion explored the questions, If everything is predetermined, is there free will? Can you change fate? In the case of Oedipus, there was a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Jacosta, which later happened, even though Oedipus had moved to another country. Jacosta committed suicide when they discovered their relationship. 

One student said, “Oedipus’s self-blinding after Jocasta’s death can be interpreted as free will.” That was a unique point, because there was nothing in the prophecy about him blinding himself in the end: Was it really his fate to do that, or was Oedipus looking for a way to control something? To make his suffering his own after everything else was foretold? Some agreed, some didn’t that Oedipus would rather be violent and overly emotional (and blind) than be controlled by fate. 

We also discussed what literature gets to be read and studied over time. “What defines a canonical text?” Woronzoff  asked early in the semester as she surveyed the students with her gaze. “Who decides it?”

Students gave their thoughts as the professor wrote on the board. “The topics in them are always talked about,” said the girl to the left of me at the round table. Someone else said, “They talk about things normally not spoken about, especially in the times they were written.” Woronzoff wrote the words universal and taboo on the board.

Another student said that “the privileged writers control the narrative.” We discussed why the canon is mostly old, dead, White men and why haven’t we put someone else up there who is deserving? Woronzoff said that’s partly why she assigns Rita Dove, Zora Neale Hurston, and Malcolm X. 

Stepping Up to Lead

When I started Seminar, I worried that it would be impossible to read hundreds of pages at the same depth as we had done in 10th grade World Lit. But I managed and adapted. I no longer wait until the night before to do my assignments. Before class, I skim through my homework notes to find a discussion topic. 

Another example of a college class is Introduction to Anthropology, where we had to do an ethnographic research paper of a community we’re part of. I picked aikido, a martial art that I’ve been doing with my dad since I was 4. We have an aikido dojo in Queens where we have been training since we immigrated. I had to do participant observation, and that helped me see things I hadn’t noticed before, such as how much adults do aikido for mindfulness. 

“Researching” something I already do made me see it afresh. Originally it was something I did to spend time with my dad. Taking a step back, I saw how it had turned into a passion that gives me adrenaline, and even into a philosophical practice that helps me heal, ground myself, and focus on the training instead of what stresses me out. Thus the project led me to greater self-knowledge.

Ms. Woronzoff and the other teachers talk with us instead of policing us to do homework. They expect that the work that needs to be done will be done. They trust us more than I was trusted as a student in the past, and see us as reliable. As a result, I want to stay on top of my classes. The belief in us, in me, also makes me more confident speaking in class. I like being treated as an adult. 

A few months ago Ms. Woronzoff asked if I would teach a class on Ukrainian poetry. I got really excited and wrote up a homework assignment, including biographies of the poets and a lesson plan. I will be talking about Lina Kostenko’s “Wings” (Kryla/Крила) and Taras Shevchenko’s “The days go past, the nights go past” (Минають дні, минають ночі). 

I’ll be leading a class discussion for two hours, asking students if they can see how the writers’ lives show up in the poems as well as looking for literary devices like imagery, motifs, or metaphors in the English translations. I’ll also read the poems out loud in Ukrainian and ask if they hear anything like repetition or rhyme. 

Being a college student in high school is stressful but rewarding. Discussions where students express themselves, and opportunities to do inspiring things like teach a class, make schoolwork more meaningful. I feel more agency as a Year One student; even with the increased reading, it is less like drowning in a flood of pointless homework and more like swimming with a purpose.