ACADEMICS Spotlight: 20 Time English Projects

L-R: Jacinda Heo, Imbre Johnson (front), Madison Felschow (back),
Kelsey Ballou, Darrell Goodwin, Shelby Carmichael, Bryce Patrick,
Aisha Clay, Marion Brown, Tavaris Sims and Dru Chambers

Mr. McMicken's English III Honors class is doing an interesting project entitled 20 Time. The idea is based on 3M's 15% time, where the company gave their workers 15% of their work time to work on passionate projects, which is how Post-It Notes and masking tape were invented. Google currently has a 20% Time program, which has resulted in many Google Apps and Google Drive features.

Mr. McMicken's class is doing the same each Friday this spring, working on a project of their passion which benefits either themselves, their school, their community, or others. The students went through a proposal process, had to find a community mentor specific to their field, and they have to keep up with weekly blog posts to track their progress. You can check on their progress using this link: http://mrmcmicken20time.blogspot.com/.

These students are doing some truly amazing things ranging from creating new medical equipment for the disabled to learning how to dunk a basketball. This project is exciting passion for learning, and is helping to improve the students' independent research skills, and life skills such as learning how to accept failure, speaking and listening, writing, collaboration, and working across content areas. A final showcase presentation of these 20 Time projects is tentatively schedule for early May and will be open to the public.