As an alpha nerd, Harper Robertson naturally thinks her high school is kickwump -- a word her class coined. She wouldn't be prouder if it had the top-ranked football team on planet Earth, which it most decidedly doesn't and never will.
"I knew I was going to a nerdy high school when I realized that the only elective was Java programming," she said.
If you could set foot on Harper's campus -- you can't -- you'd see what she loves about it. It's a school for teens who never fit into the traditional classroom because they were too high-achieving, too driven, too intellectually curious or all of the above; youths who were lumped under the general heading of "gifted," although the gift didn't always come with instructions for assembly.
Now students say they have a school where they belong: the EPGY Online High School, part of what may be the oldest online learning program in the world, Stanford University's Education Program for Gifted Youth.
The Stanford program intertwines two uneven threads in modern education: online learning and differentiated instruction for the gifted. As it turns out, it's a natural marriage, and one that underscores the potential for computers to help break down the one-size-fits-all paradigm of many U.S. schools.
Ray Ravaglia, a co-founder of Online High, calls traditional pedagogy the "Panama Canal theory of education," which holds that all students must rise with their class until it reaches the top of the lock, at which point they float forward in unison. There, those on top stay high and dry -- and bored. Those at the bottom drown, educationally speaking.
"We feel that all kids need to learn at their own rate," said Janet Keating, the head of Online High. With the technology now available, "I finally understand that we can do this."
Online High began last September with 30 students, and officials hope to expand it to around 100 in the fall. Admission is based on a variety of factors, including grades, test scores, samples of student work and interviews. Next year's tuition for full-time students is $12,000.
Harper logs on from her home in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. Jake Scheps goes to class in his bedroom in Van Nuys, emerging periodically for food, exercise and music. Matthew Bunday taps in from Minnetonka, Minn. Their classmates, with whom they gather by video conference most days, live in such cities as London, Hong Kong and Seoul.
