Cool Reaction : Nordhoff High’s Touted ‘ICE’ Program Called Too Hard on Students

An unusual class Nordhoff High School administrators have hailed as being on the cutting edge of educational reform is now being criticized by some students and parents as too difficult.

Eight months into a course that mixes English, Spanish, art and science instruction, educators at the Ojai school acknowledge that many of the class’s 120 students are disenchanted and intend to return to regular classes in the fall.

“We’ve had a lot of complaints from kids that they’re working too hard,” Principal Michael Maez said recently. “But we want to create a climate where working hard is OK.”

Some students complained in interviews that they were confused because all 120 students are sometimes taught simultaneously in one large classroom by four different teachers. Also confusing was the lack of predictability of what they would be taught from day to day, some students said.

“It’s hard,” freshman Amy Fuller said. “You understand more because you can do it from all different perspectives, . . . (but) sometimes it can be really confusing.”

Other students said, however, that the mixing of subjects in a single class made school far more interesting.

“Just yesterday alone, we learned so much,” sophomore Jennifer Kelso said the day after a field trip to UC Santa Barbara. “You learn more in four hours than two weeks in regular classes.”

The novel Interdisciplinary Cross-cultural Educational Experience, or “ICE” class, was created over the last three years by four teachers who volunteered to bring to Nordhoff the type of class being encouraged nationwide--one that connects areas of knowledge that have always been taught separately.

“The way curriculum has been delivered forever on a high school level is a kid is asked to go to six or seven classes and nobody bridges those subjects,” said Rick Mohney, the English teacher in the course. “They’re taught in vacuums.”

What the class does differently is to clearly demonstrate that subjects such as science and art are often linked in real life.

One recent assignment taught students about atomic structure by requiring them to construct papier mache three-dimensional models of an element’s atoms.

For another assignment, students traveled to Lake Casitas, where they dug samples of soil for science, sketched landscapes for art and wrote an essay about their experience with nature.

A handful of schools in Ventura County have experimented with similar interdisciplinary programs, including Oxnard and Oak Park high schools, which both received state grants in 1992 for their programs.

Nordhoff has gone a step further. The school spent $400,000 to construct a special building with movable walls to allow the large class to meet as one or to separate into four smaller units when desirable.

The one enormous open room invites group projects that are the hallmark of the program, teachers said.

Students in the ICE class are predominantly freshmen and sophomores. But Nordhoff also began to offer last fall a cross-curricular course for 11th-graders called the American Experience. It combines U. S. history and American literature in one three-hour class in a regular classroom. About 90 students are enrolled.

“I would say that every school district is experimenting with (interdisciplinary teaching) at this time,” Maez said.

But William McComas, an education professor at USC, said he had never heard of a program as far-reaching as Nordhoff’s.

“That school is beyond the cutting edge,” he said. “Most interdisciplinary schemes that have been put forward so far involve the sciences, or history and science. . . . But rarely do you see schools extending so far.”

That is the right direction, he said: “The world is an interdisciplinary place.”

Maez said cross-curricular programs like Nordhoff’s are changing how students learn.

“There’s an information explosion going on,” he said. “We have to focus on process, on skills, on teaching them how to learn, not necessarily what to learn.”

But that transition has been uncomfortable for some of those who are used to a traditional classroom. Sophomore Jaime Ortiz is one of them.

“I think I’ll learn more out there,” Ortiz said, gesturing to the old classrooms beyond the ICE program’s new facility. “I like it, but I don’t like that the freshmen and sophomores are mixed.”

Amy and fellow freshman Stephanie Warner said the mixture of subjects makes learning difficult. Both intend to leave the program.

Mohney said youths in the ICE program are not honors students--many are average students who will not go to college.

“They think somewhere along the line it’s going to be easier,” the teacher said.

Art teacher Linda Taylor is among those who is convinced that the new program works.

“I never want to go back to a traditional classroom,” she said at a recent school board meeting. “I think this is how schools should really be.”

But after nearly a full school year in the new program, some students and parents are frustrated.

Kenneth Fay, a parent who worked on a district panel that evaluates new classes, has voiced concern.

“My question is, when all the smoke clears away, how will it work out?” he asked the school board recently. “Will the ICE program help out in college preparation?”

Amy’s mother, Lisa Fuller, said she’s seen a change for the worse in her daughter since going into the class.

“I see a lack of enthusiasm. I think she would have been better off in a normal class because they focus on a single subject,” Fuller said.

“We did not want to be in this (program),” she said. “We did not sign up for it. When school started, we decided we’d try it because no one knows about it and it’s brand new.”

Maez acknowledged that some students were enrolled in the course by school counselors because other elective courses were full.

But Mohney says students and parents are balking mostly because the program challenges students in ways that they have not been challenged before.

“The biggest complaint we have had is, ‘My child cannot function in your open environment,’ ” he said. “Our response was, ‘That’s why your kid needs to be in this program.’ ”