12th Grade Odyssey

The 12^th Grade Odyssey classes consist of Senior English: ERWC, Chemistry, United States Government (1 semester) and Economics(1 semester). The 12th grade Odyssey interdisciplinary projects may include:

• the feasibility of modifying the Long Beach-Los Angeles harbor breakwater in order to bring waves back to Long Beach as well as improve its water quality. 
• Students will take part in a Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific environmental science workshop where they learn about the economic, political, and environmental factors involved in expanding the Long Beach-Los Angeles harbors.
•  Later students travel to the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium and collect water samples from inside and outside of the breakwater in order to determine the differences in water quality. This is followed by researching the economic, political, and environmental factors concerning proposed modifications of the Long Beach Los Angeles harbor breakwater. 
• Students assigned to various special interest groups present their findings and take part in a mock city council meeting to determine which option should be pursued. This provides an opportunity for students to apply concepts learned and acquired skills in their Economics, Government, Multicultural Literature, and Chemistry classes.

Senior English: ERWC

The goal of the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) is to prepare college-bound seniors for the literacy demands of higher education. Through a sequence of fourteen rigorous instructional modules, students in this yearlong, rhetoric-based course develop advanced proficiency in expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing. The cornerstone of the course—the assignment template—presents a process for helping students read, comprehend, and respond to nonfiction and literary texts. Modules also provide instruction in research methods and documentation conventions. Students will be expected to increase their awareness of the rhetorical strategies employed by authors and to apply those strategies in their own writing. They will read closely to examine the relationship between an author’s argument or theme and his or her audience and purpose; to analyze the impact of structural and rhetorical strategies; and to examine the social, political, and philosophical assumptions that underlie the text. By the end of the course, students will be expected to use this process independently when reading unfamiliar texts and writing in response to them. Course texts include contemporary essays, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, reports, biographies, memos, assorted public documents, and other nonfiction texts. The course materials also include modules on two full-length works (one novel and one work of nonfiction). Written assessments and holistic scoring guides conclude each unit. 

Chemistry

The Odyssey Academy uses a unique approach to learning Chemistry. Students are provided with a need-to-know situation that requires the learning of Chemistry concepts in order to solve a societal issue or problem.   Students learn the necessary chemistry in order to better understand the issue as well as develop a solution. This is a fairly radical departure from traditional chemistry, where students often merely memorize answers to questions that are remote from their lives and concerns.