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DURHAM -- Older students at the Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill will get the opportunity this week to return to campus without resuming their usual classes.
Instead of studying history or math, they'll be boning up on swing-dancing techniques, eating their way down Franklin Street, painting murals in stairwells, volunteering at local nonprofits, writing a one-act play, shooting and developing black-and-white photographs, playing and inventing games, getting tips on money management, and decorating cakes.
The school is about to hold its fourth annual "Winterim," a nine-day period between the fall and spring semesters. It lets students "find something that you love and learn a lot about it in a short period of time," said Lori Easterlin, the school's dean of student life and its Winterim coordinator.
Winterim runs from Tuesday through Jan. 13; classes are held 9 to 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 to 3 p.m.
"There's no credit, no grades, but it is a very important part of who we are at Trinity, and yes, it's a requirement," Easterlin said.
Becca Griffin, a Trinity sophomore, signed up for a morning class on "Saturday Night Live" and the role of political humor in American culture and an afternoon class on sports journalism.
"It's fun because we get to ... spend time with our friends and we get to build relationships with our teachers that we don't usually build in normal subjects," she said. "We kind of get the chance to sit around and discuss what's happening in other parts of the world than the specific stuff that we've been studying in our classes."
Friends at other schools grow jealous when she discusses Winterim. "It's a very original idea, and it's a lot of fun," Griffin said.
A number of colleges and private schools around the country offer Winterim or some equivalent, although Easterlin is not aware of any other local institutions that do so.
The 15-year-old school's younger students attend classes as normal during Winterim, noted the dean, meaning they stick to their regular, earlier start time. "And they are quite envious, particularly [in] the middle school, because they have classes in the same building that we do," Easterlin said.
Winterim's offerings have expanded greatly from the first go-around in 2007, when Trinity had about two dozen high schoolers. It now has 87 students in grades nine through 12, which comprise its upper school.
Two of this year's 15 courses are being taught by volunteers: a professional photographer and a professional cake maker.
Past Winterims featured classes on baseball history and civil rights from 1960 to 1979 and workshops on ballroom dancing, print-making and encaustic art, which is made of melted wax.
Between Christmas break and Winterim, high schoolers at Trinity end up taking a monthlong break from traditional classes. "But once the parents and the students have their first Winterim experience, they will just repeatedly say that it's the best thing that happens all year at Trinity," Easterlin said.
Margaret Griffin, Becca's mother, is a big Winterim fan. "It just helps ease back into that high school craziness," she said.
She added: "We've always been excited about it just because we love learning for the sake of learning and giving the kids the opportunity to explore ideas that they wouldn't necessarily get to explore in a regular classroom."
