My name is Ramzi Habib. I'm a senior at South Eugene High School. As a young man who loves the outdoors, I chose a unique type of English class, one that's exclusive to South Eugene High School. My class is called The Integrated Outdoor Program, or IOP for short. It is only available to junior and senior students as to keep the maturity level tolerable.
The class in composed of students dedicated to the outdoors. We're rock climbers, snowy peaked mountain climbers, white water rafters, artists, and athletes. The class is split into two groups. My teacher, Peter Hoffmeister, is the head of the English department at South and outdoors man extraordinaire, and Jeff Hess, an English teacher and athletic director at South, are the evil geniuses behind IOP.
Each day Hoffmeister’s students meet in their classroom, or the rock wall gym, depending on what day it is. IOP is a block period, so it takes up the last two periods at the end of our day, 6th and 7th period. We have English class every other day, and PE between those days. For example, Monday we will have English, and Tuesday we will have PE. When Hoffmeister’s class has their English day, Hess’ class will have their PE day.
In our English class we read books about the outdoors, such as Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, and Desert Notes by Barry Lopez. Throughout the year we go on amazing trips to different places in Oregon. The first trip was to Boyd Cave in mid-October, it was just outside of Bend. We drove activity buses for four hours until our butts grew numb before finally making it.
After setting up camp, our teachers drove us about 10 miles out before dropping off groups of students at random points in the middle of the forest, not telling us where we were, and only giving us a compass and map to find our way back. “Good luck!” they said, and then drove off. Using previous training from past PE days, we used our orienteering skills to make our way back to camp, climbing over and through rough Eastern Oregon desert and forest. It took each group between six and eight hours to make it back to camp. Our group was the first one back might I add.
We made breakfast lunch and dinner each day, with a different group assigned to food duty for every meal. Throughout the trip we hiked, learned to build shelters capable of living in for extended periods of time, learned survival techniques and spelunked, or cave dived.
The next trip was to Fuji Mountain. After making it there, it was a surprisingly hot four and a half mile, five or six-hour climb to the Fuji shelter. Students built their snow shelters, using previous techniques learned on the days we had snow in Eugene. The next day several groups attempted another four and a half mile hike to the summit. On the third day the students had to break down their shelters to avoid animals falling into them, which was “heart breaking” several students said. The decent took only an hour from camp. The first weekend in June, we’re going on a kayaking trip. We’re currently training for it at the YMCA with kayaks being lent to us. It hasn’t been decided where we will raft yet.
IOP offers an exciting and original lesson plan, with which students can learn about the natural world while exploring novels about survival and bearded-wood-chopping-mountain-men.
The class was created less than five years ago, and word about it hasn’t reach students more than them knowing it’s an English and PE class all in one.
I think the IOP class offers an enormous amount of interesting and relevant story ideas to be featured in your newspaper. It may inspire other schools to create an IOP all their own. At the very least it will get the word out to your large number of loyal readers about the class and what it offers. Who knows, it may even get us more funding!
I extremely appreciate the time you took to read this over.