Eagle Rock Learning Experiences: Can you believe it’s ER - 99?!

Eagle Rock classes stay small, with a maximum of 12 students, mixed in age and ability. That size is a choice, not a constraint. It means the learner is at the center, because there's no way to hide them in the back of the class.

Teachers here build curriculum together, across subjects. A class about running turns out to also be a class about math. A class about clay turns out to also be about identity. The 8+5=10 Expectations underpin all of it, and the offerings shift from trimester to trimester depending on who's here and what assets instructors bring.

Students learn through projects, movement, and collaboration. They show what they know through portfolios, exhibitions, performances, presentations, and hands-on work, built up over time, not captured on a single test day.

AM Learning Block

That Looks Good 

The glaze on a donut. Butter pooling into a short stack. That specific sear on a filet. There's something about well-presented food, the way it makes you stop and look before you eat it. This class takes that impulse and runs with it into ceramics. Students hand-build clay versions of their favorite foods, packaging, and whole meals. The goal is texture and finish so convincing that it almost doesn't matter that you can't eat it. Along the way, students work through the theory and practice behind expressive art-making, learning to make decisions about a project and actually see them through, from the first sketch to the finished glaze.

The Fast and the Curious (About Math)

The whole class is built around one finish line: the Garden of the Gods Trail 10K.

Over five weeks, students train and do math at the same time, and the math is always about running. Why did your pace drop in week three? How do you distribute effort over a climb? What does your split data tell you that you can't feel in the moment? Students collect their own performance numbers, analyze them, and use them not as an assignment but because the answers are actually useful. Physical fitness runs alongside the quantitative work, and so does something harder to name: the experience of setting a goal with a group of people and showing up for it, week after week, until you cross.

So You Think You Can Act 

People have always told stories. Through song, movement, image, and word across every culture and every era. Heroes, villains, truth, collapse, survival. It's one of the few things that hasn't changed.

This class examines where storytelling comes from and how it works, with genuine attention to the global history of the art form. Then it turns the question on the student: Can you actually do it? Diction, emotion, projection, physical presence — the technical skills that make performance land rather than just happen. Students give and take feedback throughout, which is where a lot of the real growth lives. The trimester ends with a showcase, which means by the time it's over, students have chosen something, built it, refined it under feedback, and performed it in front of people.

Elements of Film 

Before any actor says a word, a film has already made dozens of decisions. Color palette. Shot distance. Where to cut. What sounds to layer underneath a scene that the audience will never consciously register. This class gets into the mechanics of all that color theory, cinematography, the work of Foley artists, how dialogue actually gets written, and by whom.

Students bring genuine curiosity to films from across cultures and time periods, learning to read cinema the way you'd learn to read anything else. Conversation is a big part of class, sometimes structured, sometimes not. One question keeps surfacing: what does your favorite film say about you, the person who loves it? By the end, each student writes a Technical Review on a film of their choice. It requires analysis, precision, and a point of view. The watching will have changed by then.

PM Learning Block

Queer Art Exploration

Queer art rarely announces itself plainly. The meaning is often tucked into a color, a gesture, a symbol that reads one way to one audience and entirely differently to another. This class goes looking for that through galleries, performances, social media, historical texts, wherever it lives.

Half of each session is conversation and analysis: the history, the debates that haven't been resolved, the ideas still in motion. Students learn to evaluate sources and read closely, not just absorb. The other half is making and developing skills in sketching, drawing, and painting while working toward original portraits that use visual metaphor and symbolism to say something real about who the student is and how they see the world. Writing is part of it too; students put their analysis into words alongside putting it into images. No prior experience in art is needed. The class is open to anyone. Queerness is the lens here, not the admission requirement. One field trip each week.

Weather (Earth's Changing Skies) 

All ten of the warmest years in the historical record have happened in the last decade. Colorado just had its warmest winter since data collection began, and the least snow. These aren't abstractions. They're the conditions students are already living in.

This course asks why, and takes the question seriously. Students get into meteorology, atmospheric science, and the mechanisms of climate change not through a textbook but through actual investigation. They collect real-time local climate data and use it to make predictions. They choose a topic in weather or climate to study independently and produce an informational poster for the surrounding community. The global picture matters, but so does the practical one: what do these patterns mean for how people live now, and what they'll need to navigate later?

Grad Seminar II 

Planning for life after Eagle Rock isn't something that happens in one conversation. It's a process that involves knowing what you want, being realistic about what you're actually walking into, and having the habits to work through both.

This course picks up from Grad Seminar I and puts students through fifteen real-life scenarios, tackled as a team. The scenarios aren't hypothetical exercises — they're meant to be worked through with care, using research, peer input, and whatever's in the student's adult backpack. Each one builds on the last, asking students to apply what they've learned to their own actual circumstances. Running underneath all of it: time and support to complete the graduate Presentation of Learning and finish every remaining requirement for graduation. Clarity about the future. The writing to show it.

Music Is Poetry

Some lyrics feel written specifically for you. Some poems do too. That's not a coincidence, it's craft.

Music and poetry use a lot of the same tools: meter, metaphor, line breaks placed just right, and a word that does double work. This class studies how those tools function and then hands them to students to use. Over five weeks, students write their own poems and songs, building a portfolio while learning to read lyrics and verse with real attention to technique. The bigger frame is that music and poetry have always traveled across cultures and languages, carrying things that ordinary speech can't quite hold. Exhibitions end with an open mic. Students perform their final piece. The portfolio is what they take with them.

Homespace 

New students learn about what it means to be a student at Eagle Rock and a part of the Eagle Rock community. The idea of Homespace is to create a space where new students can feel comfortable learning, sharing, discussing, and growing. In Homespace, students are introduced to four pillars that serve to ground them in ER practices: Academics, Health & Wellness, Belonging, and Restorative Practices. Throughout the class, new students will explore the way Eagle Rock approaches education holistically through the lens of the four pillars to support them in understanding what it means to be a student at ER.  By the end of the class, new students will understand that they can create a Homespace at ER by reflecting on, building capacity in, and advocating for themself in these four areas: academics, health and wellness, belonging, and restorative practices.

This is the first half of the trimester. Academic Learning Blocks are where students build the skills, the vocabulary, the confidence to walk into something harder. The second half is where they use it. Real World Learning sends Eagle Rock students out into workplaces, communities, and situations that don't have a rubric. What happens there is a different kind of story, and it's coming next.