“I want to go back to Simon’s point.” Emma has been waiting patiently for several minutes.  She’s been leaning forward, eyes following the conversation, as these seventh grade students have kept their exchange going for much longer than we had expected, and with the intensity of thought that we do expect. “I want to go back to Simon’s point because I’ve changed my mind.” The 7th grade Utah Studies students are discussing an issue that at first impression might not seem...

That’s what a passer-by asks me as my seventh grade students worked at a site on State Street. Yes, it looks to that passer-by as if the students are looking at and taking notes about nothing:  an empty space, a hole in the ground for construction.  Yet these students are engaged in learning that is so distinctive of City Academy.  They were doing field work for their investigation into whether Liberty Sky, a proposed 300’ tower of luxury apartments, is...

Leaves are falling, and Monday at City Academy, so were pumpkins. Dennis Pedersen’s 11th-grade physics class put what they had learned about gravity, acceleration, velocity and force to the test Monday afternoon as they dropped pumpkins from the school’s roof onto five different catchers. All the pumpkins survived the fall, which surprised Pedersen — in the four years he has done the experiment with his students about 1/3 of the pumpkins have been smashed. Physics students at the City Academy...