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Required courses for four years at Bronx High are impressive: three years of math (most students take more); five years of the sciences; four years of English, four of social studies, and at least three years of Latin, Spanish, French, German or Hebrew. For students who are superior even at Bronx High, there are sterner courses in English, math and physics, biology and chemistry, leading to college admission with advanced standing. So far the students have taken everything thrown at them; last fall a tenth-grade biology class was fed a hard, one-year biology course in one semester, and at the end, most of the experimental group rated above 95 on a New York State Regents exam. This semester, class members are doing independent research, prowling into such arcane matters as an attempt to find whether frog blood can be grouped in types, as human blood can.
Calculus for Kicks. Bronx High's 2,600 students—a third of them girls—are unashamedly unaverage; some take sly amusement in explaining to visitors that they read advanced calculus for kicks, in their spare time, and many of them are precociously sure where they are heading, e.g., "Harvard for a doctorate, then teach math." Marriage waylays most girls heading for graduate school, but a survey of both sexes a few years ago showed that 13% of the school's alumni had taken two or more years of graduate study. Not all Bronx High students go into science; Principal Taffel maintains that those who do not are better grounded in what he pointedly calls "the other humanities" than graduates of most comprehensive high schools.
Not all is calculus and calorimeters at Taffel's school; he recalls that he has attended four school dances since he took over in February, and last week tryouts began on a student-written play. There is no football team at Science (too expensive), but last year the school won the city tennis championship, in 1956 won the city mile relay and handball titles. Another sporting championship it picked off last year: the Interscholastic Mathematics Contest title.
Next year Bronx High will leave its dirty yellow brick pile (Former Principal Meister will move in with his newly founded Bronx Community College) and take over a lavish, $8,000,000 brain trainery, equipped with special labs for independent student research. Last week the joyous grind for next year's scholarships continued; Math Department Chairman Irving Dodes dismissed a class studying symbolic logic, said wearily and wonderingly: "I can't sit down without kids coming in, pestering me for advanced math books or trying to prove the impossible. It's a continual effort to keep up. Every day I go home tired—but happy."
*The others, and this year's records: Brooklyn Technical High School, one Merit Scholarship winner; the High School of Music and Art, one winner; Stuyvesant High School, six winners—tied for second place nationally with Evanston (Ill.) Township High School.