John Wesley North High School - Aurora Yearbook (Riverside, CA)

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204 academics

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Preparing for her essay on the Civil War, Liz Scoville organizes her ideas in chronologi- Blowing a bubble in her first class of the day, cal order. Essays were common assignments Adrianne Keltner relaxes as AP history teacher Mrs. in AP history. Mooney begins her lecture. Hard at work, Jeanette Godoy hurries to complete her AP history assignment. Answering textbook and essay questions were the mainstay of the AP history in-class assignments. As election year ' 84 rolls around, Uma Rao and Tom Elders find themselves being tested on re-election procedures, a topic covered in Mrs. McCaskill ' s US government class. liberal arts-english, social science 203

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- Motivation Inspires Motivation: the act or process of furnishing with an incentive to take action. Three sources of moti- vation drove the students to enroll in the math science program: require- ments, interest, or challenge pro- vided the impetus for students to carry on. It was the driving force in boosting the academic quality of the math and science programs. North students displayed a real interest m challenging these two difficult subjects. In 1984, North ex- panded its academic cur- riculum. AP physics and calculus classes were ad- ded to comply with stu- dents ' demands. Derivatives, differentials, and inte- gration were just a few of the con- cepts covered in Mr. Adams ' calcu- lus class. I want to major in electro- engineering and calculus is one of the classes you ' re required to take, said Becky Blann. The AP physics class spent its time studying kinemat- ics, forms of energy, simple ma- chines, and waves. We didn ' t have I MATH I SCIENCE I a calculus class before because there wasn ' t much of a demand for it. This year there were so many stu- dents interested in taking calculus that we decided to offer it here, rath- er than sending them all to UCR, said Mr. Adams. For students who didn ' t take AP classes, motivation was still a factor in deciding what classes to take. Some even forfeited vacations, caught up in the desire for self-improvement. I took biology in the sum- mer because I didn ' t get a chance to take it as a class at North, said Da- vid Hasegawa. Why would students slave through at least three years of math and two of sci- ence? One reason was that taking math and science was part of the new college requirements. Another reason was, as Jeff Stay stated, I enjoy a challenge and physics is a challenging class. All in all, no mat- ter what the incentive, self-motiva- tion drove students to excel aca- demically. ••• Paying close attention, John VanDenburgh lis- tens attentively to his AP physics lecture. Students depended on the daily lectures to do well on tests. Taking out a piece of paper, Margaret Farmer prepares for an intensive note-taking session m AP physics. Meanwhile, Bob Blackman looks over a re- turned assignment. science-life, physical 205