March 2018 Superintendent's Blog Guest Post: Áine Kern, Sage Creek High School

March 2018 Guest Post: Áine Kern, Sage Creek High School

Each month, a student from one of our high schools will write a guest post for the Superintendent Blog. The students will be asked to reflect on one of the characteristics described in our Graduate Profile. This month, Sage Creek High School student Áine Kern reflects on the characteristic of “Critical Thinker.”


Carlsbad Unified Graduate Profile: Critical Thinker

“Graduates are inquisitive. Graduates have the passion and vigor for learning that will fuel them through new opportunities and challenges. They notice; they wonder; they figure things out.”

Critical thinking is a sort of innovative problem-solving. It’s pushing your mind and even your body to find the maximum-benefit solution to any problem, whether it’s in a trigonometry class or a poetry club meeting. It’s striving to achieve more, to make it further in life, to leave your name behind on work you can be proud of.

Most importantly, especially for a student, critical thinking is recognizing that no one is exactly like you; no one is going to agree with all you think, do, and say. You’re a complex individual with a background no one else could exactly mirror; what’s beautiful about school― as well as often frustrating― is that a campus is a Petri dish of hundreds and hundreds of different perspectives, ideas, and insights. They clash sometimes; more often, they work together to create something new and creative.

Critical thinking is arguably the most important skill students must master before leaving their homes, their cities, and, ultimately, their comfort zones. If students are only trained to follow directions without question, then all we would have achieved is a motionless society, never expanding to help more people or better society. Humans are not meant to be at a standstill. We would have died off long ago if people had stopped thinking critically and seeking solutions.

Every day as a student, my peers and I are pushed in biomedical innovations class to find new remedies for medical ailments, inspired in literature class to find new interpretations and meanings for old stories, challenged in government class to justify and defend our ideas within the context of current American politics and society.

In the workforce and in higher education, graduates from Carlsbad are able to problem solve independently; we’ve learned to utilize any resource available and gain expertise through experience. The curriculum at Sage Creek, at least, is very hands-on with working on real-time issues like diabetes, healthcare system problems, analyzing prose and recognizing fallacies in current speeches. My time in high school has been a largely independent strain of learning: fewer lectures and more projects.

Admittedly, the projects can be burdensome. They’re time-consuming, focused on foreign subjects, and challenging. However, even as I struggle through the work, I can see how it’s all preparation for a college thesis, a company innovation, anything in the workforce or the college life that would have more damaging consequences than a bad grade if it went awry.

Even now, before any of my peers have graduated, I can easily envision them becoming successful speechwriters, engineers, architects, and doctors. My classmates never hesitate to ask questions whenever confronted with an intricate problem or confusing concept; they always step up to meet the challenge whenever it arises.

I’ve seen my peers build robots, construct lyres, invent germ-killing light mechanisms, write poetry, create clubs, and strive to be more than just run-of-the-mill students in Carlsbad. They work jobs outside class, they build foundries and melt metals, they direct plays, they write stories, and they intern in hospitals.

As a Carlsbad Unified student, I spend the majority of my time within a community of overachievers, a city of never-settlers, a school of critical thinkers. And I’m definitely the better for it.


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Áine Kern will graduate from Sage Creek High this coming June and plans to major in Classics and Literature in college. She currently edits opinion articles for The Sage.