Main Campus Teens Program
Meets in Talent, Monday -Thursday
Teens Group for ages 13-16
Our Talent campus brings together curious, motivated students in a small, intentional learning community where deep thinking, hands-on making, and genuine collaboration are not just encouraged but expected.
We structure our program around five-week block rotations, immersing students in one subject area at a time while weaving in connections across multiple academic disciplines simultaneously. This focused, interdisciplinary approach allows students to go far beneath the surface of any subject — developing real expertise, asking genuine questions, and producing work they can stand behind. Each block is anchored in a relevant, real-world project that builds practical skills alongside academic ones, and our curriculum are deliberately designed to meet students where they are: fostering critical thinking, creative expression, and the kind of social-emotional growth that helps a young person move toward purpose with confidence.
Subject Rotation for 2026-27
Fall
NATURAL BUILDING: ARCHITECTURE, EARTH & SUSTAINABLE DESIGN
This course is a hands-on, academically rigorous exploration of natural building: cob, adobe, timber frame, straw bale, and living structures. Students study how materials are formed, sourced, and processed by the earth itself, connecting environmental science, structural physics, and ecological design into a single working knowledge. History runs throughout — from ancient Mesopotamian mud brick to Pueblo adobe to West African earthen architecture — revealing that some of the most sophisticated structural knowledge humans ever developed lives inside vernacular building traditions that modernity has largely discarded.
Mathematics enters through load distribution, material ratios, and thermal mass calculations students actually use to design real things. Environmental science grounds the work in the genuine ecological cost of conventional construction and the regenerative alternative natural building offers. The course culminates in a real build on site — a cob bench, a garden wall, a small shelter — moving through the complete process from site assessment through material sourcing, design, and construction. Students leave with a finished object, a set of practical skills, and a fundamentally changed relationship to the built world around them.
LITERARY ARTS: WRITING & PUBLISHING A CHILDREN'S BOOK
Writing well for children is one of the most technically demanding and creatively revealing forms of writing there is. The best children's books never talk down to their readers — they are written with complete respect for a young person's emotional intelligence and capacity for genuine literary experience. In this course students read as writers from day one, studying the architecture of great children's literature through C.S. Lewis, E.B. White, Roald Dahl, Norton Juster, and others — learning how picture books balance image and text, how enduring writers use simplicity as a precision instrument, and how a children's book can hold a truth that takes a lifetime to fully understand. Students then develop their own original story, rooted in a real mythological or cultural tradition and written with full attention to language, structure, and emotional truth.
The interdisciplinary crossovers are built into every stage of the work. History and cultural studies provide the mythological and narrative traditions students draw from. Child development and psychology inform how students think about their reader — what a child at a given age can hold, understand, and feel. Visual art and design shape the illustration, layout, and typography of the finished book. The full publishing process is treated with the same seriousness as the writing: students move from manuscript through illustration, design, and production to a physically printed and bound book, which is donated to a local library or school and presented to a live audience of younger children.
ETHNOSCIENCE: PLANTS, PEOPLE & THE LIVING KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURAL WORLD
Before laboratories, before peer review, before scientific journals — there was observation. Thousands of years of it, conducted by people who depended for their survival on understanding exactly how the living world around them worked. This course explores the intersection of indigenous knowledge systems and Western science across four interconnected fields: ethnobotany, ethnobiology, ethnopharmacology, and ethnoecology. Students discover that the global pharmacopeia of modern medicine owes an enormous and often unacknowledged debt to indigenous plant knowledge — aspirin from willow bark, quinine from cinchona, hundreds of pharmaceuticals derived from plants identified by traditional healers. The chemistry is genuine and rigorous: students study the molecular basis of traditional plant medicines, how preparation methods like fermentation affected bioavailability, and how the land management practices of the Siskiyou region's indigenous peoples — controlled burning, seed saving, watershed stewardship — are now being validated by modern conservation biology.
Chemistry and pharmacology ground the science. History and anthropology provide the context for how this knowledge was developed, transmitted, and in many cases extracted and exploited. Ethics, law, and political science frame the course's central unresolved question: who owns knowledge? When a pharmaceutical company patents a compound derived from a plant an Amazonian community has used for five hundred years, what does justice look like? Students develop their own reasoned positions and produce a final research project tracing one plant, one knowledge system, or one ethnoecological practice from its cultural origins through its chemistry, its scientific status, and the ethical questions that surround it.
Winter
PERSONAL ECONOMICS: FINANCE, SYSTEMS & AGENCY
This course covers the mathematics and mechanics of real financial life: budgeting, compound interest, debt, taxes, investing, and the difference between what things cost and what they are worth. But it doesn't stop at personal finance. Students examine the broader economic systems shaping their choices — how capitalism was built, who it was built for, and why some people have options and others don't. The course treats financial literacy not as a neutral life skill but as a form of power, and gives students the quantitative reasoning and systemic understanding to exercise that power with intention.
Mathematics provides the tools: compound interest calculations, currency conversion, data modeling of long-term savings and spending. History traces the arc of capitalism, labor movements, and economic inequality — connecting today's financial landscape to the decisions made by people with names and agendas. Civics and political science bring the course into the present: taxation, wealth distribution, public policy, and how economic systems reflect and reinforce social structures. The course project asks students to plan a fully costed two-week international trip — real destination, real prices, real tradeoffs — making the math immediate, personal, and genuinely consequential.
INTO THE UNKNOWN: THE HISTORY & LITERATURE OF HUMAN EXPEDITION
Every name on the shortlist for this course — Shackleton, Magellan, Darwin, Humboldt, Cook, Lewis and Clark, Earhart, Mallory — represents a human being who chose to go somewhere nobody had reliably come back from, carrying inadequate equipment, incomplete maps, and the full weight of being mortal. This course studies the great human expeditions not as geographic achievements but as human dramas — asking what drove these individuals, what they sacrificed, what they got catastrophically wrong, and what they added to the sum of human knowledge and story. Literature is woven throughout as both subject and method: the great expeditions produced extraordinary writing — Darwin's Beagle journals, Scott's final diary entries, Shackleton's account of the Endurance, Humboldt's Personal Narrative — and students read primary sources as literature, learning to hear a voice across centuries.
The interdisciplinary crossovers are deep and deliberate. Geography and cartography give students genuine map literacy — reading historical and topographic maps, tracing routes, understanding how terrain shaped decisions. Each student produces an original annotated map of their expedition as part of their final presentation. Ethics and political history provide the course's sharpest edge: exploration and empire are inseparable, and every expedition on the shortlist encountered people who were already there. Students examine the full human cost of these voyages — what was taken, what was destroyed, and what we owe to the peoples whose worlds were changed forever by someone else's voyage of discovery. Students choose their expedition from a curated shortlist and present their reconstruction in a format of their own choosing — a live presentation, a documentary essay, or an immersive first-person account.
LEADERSHIP STUDIES & CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
Leadership is not a personality trait. It is a practice — a set of learnable skills that history's most consequential people developed through study, failure, and sustained commitment to something larger than themselves. This course examines the history and practice of leadership from ancient philosophers to modern community organizers, studying people who changed things without institutional power and asking what made them worth following. Students read primary texts — Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, selections from Machiavelli, Mandela, and others — not as historical documents but as living arguments about power, conscience, and the responsibility of people who see clearly to act accordingly.
History provides the case studies: what conditions produce leadership, what it costs, and what it actually achieves across eras and cultures. Psychology brings the science: group dynamics, social influence, motivation theory, and the research on what makes someone genuinely trustworthy rather than merely persuasive. Political science and civics ground the course in the present: how institutions are built and changed, how community organizing actually works, and what the relationship between individual agency and systemic power looks like in practice. The course project asks students to identify a real gap or need in their community, design an initiative to address it, and take the first concrete steps toward making it happen — because leadership, in the end, is not a concept. It is something you do.
Spring
ALTERNATIVE SYSTEMS: REIMAGINING HOW THE WORLD COULD WORK
This course explores the full landscape of alternative human systems — from intentional communities and ecovillages to complementary currencies and barter economies, from traditional medicine systems to decentralized energy grids, from food sovereignty movements to open-source communication networks. This is not utopian fantasy. It is rigorous systems thinking applied to a genuine question: are the dominant models of organizing human life the only ones that work, or simply the ones that won? Artificial intelligence is examined not as a threat or a salvation but as a tool — asking what it would look like to integrate emerging technology in ways that genuinely expand human potential, creativity, and connection rather than replacing or diminishing them.
Political science and economics provide the analytical frameworks: gift economies, mutual aid, commons-based resource management, and the political philosophy behind decentralization and self-governance. Environmental science and ecology ground the course in living models — how ecovillages, permaculture systems, and regenerative agriculture actually function as ecological systems, and what systems thinking from ecology teaches us about designing resilient human communities. Technology and ethics frame the course's forward-looking dimension: how emerging tools could be integrated into human systems in ways that prioritize flourishing, autonomy, and equity over extraction and control. The course project asks students to design a functioning alternative system for a specific human need — food, energy, medicine, currency, or governance — and defend it as a real proposal to a real audience.
WILDERNESS & THE HUMAN STORY: WRITING FROM THE WILD
Students enter one of the oldest and most demanding literary traditions in the world — wilderness writing — studying writers who went into wild places and came back with something true about being human: Annie Dillard at Tinker Creek, Barry Lopez crossing the Arctic, Aldo Leopold watching a wolf die and understanding something about land and loss, Mary Oliver finding in a single grasshopper a door into the whole question of how to live. Students spend significant time in the field throughout the block, keeping sustained field notebooks that capture not just what they observe but what it feels like to observe it — developing the naturalist's eye and the writer's ear simultaneously. Writing craft is taught rigorously: the sentence as a unit of attention, the essay as a journey that arrives somewhere the writer didn't know they were going.
Ecology and natural science provide the foundation: good wilderness writing requires genuine scientific knowledge of what you're looking at, and students develop real field observation skills alongside their literary ones. History and philosophy provide the intellectual tradition: the course traces the history of wilderness as a human concept — how different cultures and eras have understood wild places, from the biblical desert to the American frontier to contemporary rewilding movements — and what those understandings reveal about human values and fears. Psychology and philosophy of mind bring the course's deepest question into focus: what does direct encounter with the natural world do to human attention, perception, and self-understanding? Students answer that question not in an essay about nature but in a piece of nature writing — original, long-form, submitted to a real publication or competition before the block ends.
ELECTIVES:
MEDIA STUDIES: DIGITAL LITERACY, ETHICS & INFLUENCE
This course pulls back the curtain on the digital world students already inhabit, examining how algorithms work, how misinformation spreads, what your data is actually worth and to whom, and how platforms are deliberately engineered to exploit the cognitive vulnerabilities of the human brain. Students develop genuine media literacy — the ability to read a news feed, a social media platform, or a search result the way a lawyer reads a contract: critically, skeptically, and with full awareness of whose interests are being served. The interdisciplinary crossovers are wide: computer science explains the technical architecture of surveillance and recommendation systems; psychology illuminates the neuroscience of attention and the mechanics of social comparison; political science and ethics frame misinformation as a civic threat and ask what responsibilities come with the power to reach anyone, instantly, at scale. Students build something real as their project — a portfolio, a website, a campaign — that represents who they actually are rather than who an algorithm has decided they should be.
PERSONAL BRANDING & PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
You already have a digital presence. The question is whether you built it intentionally or it built itself by default. This course prepares students to navigate a professional world where algorithms screen resumes before human eyes read them, AI tools evaluate college application essays, and your digital footprint can open or close doors before you ever shake someone's hand. Students examine how AI screening systems actually work — what data they're trained on, what biases they carry, and what they're looking for — and develop the skills to write a resume, personal statement, and professional profile that communicates authentically while meeting the criteria these systems are designed to find. The interdisciplinary crossovers give the course its critical edge: computer science and ethics examine the implications of automated gatekeeping in education and employment; language arts and rhetoric develop the craft of writing about yourself with honesty and precision; sociology and political science ask how these systems reflect and sometimes amplify existing inequalities of race, class, and access. Students leave the course with a complete professional identity package — stress-tested, peer-reviewed, and presented to an outside adult mentor as if the stakes were real, because they are.