(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Jade, I'm 14, and I'm from Kerikeri.
So I go to Kerikeri High School and,
I'm a part time student at CGA.
Outside of school, I like doing my own personal studies
of random things.
Going out with friends, playing video games,
ballet, yeah dance, that's pretty much all I do.
- Hi, my name is Caleb. I am 14 years old.
I go to CGA and outside of school
do a lot of extracurriculars.
I love playing sports, in particular basketball,
and I spend a lot of my spare time
mucking around with different instruments
and recording and doing some fun things with friends.
- Well, last year I did Crimson and that helped me a lot
but I just thought I could do with more structure
and seeing, I knew eventually I'd have to do a ton of exams,
I thought CGA would just give a good transition to that
and it would make it more,
it would give me the structure I need
and the resources and a good community to go with it.
- I always had the dream
of going somewhere to an Ivy league uni
and that was just always a personal goal.
And I heard about Crimson first
and I started doing some extracurricular things
with Crimson.
And then Jamie told us about
how there was, also they were gonna launch a high school.
And we thought it would be really cool
for me to be part of the high school.
And it would definitely help mature me
and I can get closer to my goal.
- I expected it would be a bit more
like the Crimson I did last year where you kind of,
I knew there would be set lesson times
but I wasn't quite expecting the,
all the cool people and just having such a nice community
around it, because online,
but yeah, they really did a good job with that.
- I had very positive views of what it was gonna be like.
I never thought there was gonna be major problems.
And so I think it turned out
a lot better than I even would have expected.
And so, it's, I got a lot more engagement
and I know my peers much more
than I would have expected before.
I thought that I wouldn't get as much connection
but I've made lots of friends in my class.
- Everyone's really driven.
And everyone has clear goals.
They're so hard working and everyone's super smart
but they're also really nice and supportive.
Everyone wants everyone else to do really well.
And we all love learning.
So, it was nice talking to them.
You can have really interesting conversations
and make really good friends.
- I feel like I can make friends really easily
and we welcome others into the class
and everyone really gets to know each other.
And we do things like games to get know,
get to know each other, what our habits are,
what our hobbies are,
some strange things about each other.
So we can get to know people in depth.
And we also are encouraged to message each other
through the Zoom app.
Or recently we've got a Slack workspace,
which is really helping with knowing about music,
some of our hobbies, all the sort of things
that you would normally on a day to day basis
converse about and talk about.
- The teachers I've noticed they are like ninjas,
they really observe how you work and learn,
so they can kind of cater it
to know what will work for you.
They really do check in on how you're doing
because of the quite fast pace it can be quite stressful
and they are really good teachers
but they also want to make sure mentally,
and you're doing well.
So you can be your best.
- The teachers are always trying to help the students.
We all are helping each other.
We're talking, discussing in class.
If someone gets something wrong, it's all good.
We say like, cool, that's a cool view of it.
And then we discuss things and we can actually work together
and figure out what the correct solution is.
- I think it will make me really competitive
when I'm applying to universities, but also,
the learning and the attitudes they teach you,
how to look after yourself, how to love what you do.
I think those will help me.
Yeah, it really makes you want to be better.
And kind of makes me feel guilty
whenever I slack off and play video games.
But everyone does so much.
And it really, you want, everyone's so inspirational.
You want to be like them.
So you just want to be the best person you can
like everyone else is.
- Definitely a school where it's online
is going to mature you so much.
And instead of having your own individual
learning experience where you have to
kind of strive yourself,
you now have the added ability of talking with your peers
outside of class.
Even though you might think that
now I'm not in the same country as them,
I can't do that, but you really can.
You can organize your own Zoom calls.
And I know that some people
from the same country have been meeting up
and that's something that's really cool.
So it's not just for people that
think that they don't have any sort of leadership skills
or any sort of self discipline,
because that can really be developed and learnt,
something that's a skill
that you would rather learn earlier than later.
- I think if you're considering CGA,
you should definitely go for it.
It opens up a lot of opportunities
and you can meet some really cool people.
It will give you a whole new kind of schooling
and in a really good way, you'll learn so much.
- So far, I'm really enjoying my new experience
as a pioneer for the online learning environment.
And I feel that it's suitable for all people of all places.
And, it is very crucial to be able to develop
many, many skills that are sitting dormant
in a traditional school.