I signed up for SEAL in my sophomore year. I went to the class, and I didn’t like it. I asked my guidance counselor if I could switch out of the class and I was told no. I was stuck. I decided to not have a fixed mindset, and I started attending the class everyday. I started liking the class.
Later on, we started going to the freshmen classes to start doing activities with them. At first, I was nervous but all of those feelings went away when I stepped foot in the class. The students weren’t intimidating and everything went smoothly. I really liked this because I was in charge and younger students can look up to me.
One activity I really enjoyed was “Group Juggling”. Group Juggling is an activity we do in the beginning of the school year. We get to know the freshmen based off their names. For this activity we would get in a circle, have everyone say their names, confirm that everyone knows each others names, then we would involve balls. We would throw the balls to someone across from us in the circle and say their names. After a while, we would involve more balls and it would slowly become organized chaos. I really enjoyed this activity because it’s something simple to learn in a matter of seconds and it also doesn’t require many materials. The underclassmen don’t really have a problem learning the rules. We go through this in a breeze.
Sophomore Jasurjon Shuhratov was one of the students who I used to do an activity with every Friday, along with the rest of his class. Imagine my surprise when this September, I found out that Jasurjon became my peer in SEAL! Speaking on what made him want to join the class, Shuhratov said “I would see [SEAL Leaders] coming to the class and doing activities with us every Friday, and I wanted to have a hand in that.” He continued, saying “During the [SEAL] activities, I would have a smile on my face because everyone is so genuine.”
John Dewey High School has this class they have to offer. It was once called PGC but now it’s called SEAL. SEAL stands for Social Emotional Advisory and Leadership. This class is offered to juniors and the seniors. These people come together to help the lower classes get comfortable with the school. They help with anything you need, anything from needing advice and questions about the school. The upper class mates go to the Freshmen class to do activities with them, they go to their class every Thursday to do these activities. These activities help the Freshmen get comfortable with us and help us connect with them.
