Five Hard Years, Written Down: Pasadena Students Publish ‘The Learning Curve’

The pandemic scattered Pasadena’s students to their bedrooms and their laptops. What some of them did there was write — and now that writing is a book.

The Learning Curve, known as TLC, is a student-written anthology produced through Pasadena Unified School District’s Student Think Tank. Its first print edition debuted July 17 at 6:00 p.m. at Octavia’s Bookshelf, 1353 North Hill Avenue, gathering into one volume five years of essays, poetry and artwork by students who lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, the presence of immigration enforcement in Pasadena, and the January 2025 Eaton Fire. The project is a collaboration among the district, the Pasadena Educational Foundation and the bookstore.

The project traces back to the earliest weeks of remote school, when Think Tank students began writing personal narratives and then invited peers across the district to submit their own, many of them anonymously. The result is a record of what students carried during years that reshaped their schools and their city.

Nine students and alumni took part in the launch reading, according to the Pasadena Educational Foundation. Among them was Ella Uriu, a 2022 John Muir High School graduate who co-founded the publication with Mya Hernandez, a 2023 Pasadena High School graduate. Uriu organized the reading and described how the anthology grew out of the students’ own hands. “That’s how ‘The Learning Curve’ came about,” Uriu told Pasadena Weekly.

The readings reflected the book’s range. Students read essays about losing their homes in the Eaton Fire and about district protests over immigration raids, alongside a reflection on the district’s dual-language immersion program. “The pandemic really forced a lot of us to look inward,” Hernandez said in the same interview.

Dr. Elizabeth Pomeroy, a Pasadena Educational Foundation board member who has served as president of the PUSD Board of Education, opened the discussion segment by asking the students, “What are you all writing now?”

Sehba Sarwar, the Think Tank’s facilitator, said watching students carry an idea from online conversation to a printed book has been inspiring. “Students can do anything,” Sarwar said. “Just let them loose, let them do it.”

The Think Tank has since grown into a districtwide body whose members helped create PUSD’s Student Assembly, giving elected student delegates a seat at school board discussions. The anthology is already being used in professional-development workshops for teachers and staff. “I think if there’s anything people should take from this book, it’s that we need to listen to students,” Uriu said.

The venue carried its own resonance: Octavia’s Bookshelf, described by Pasadena Now as Pasadena’s first Black-owned bookstore, opened in 2023 and is named for the late science-fiction writer and Pasadena native Octavia E. Butler.

Print copies are available at Octavia’s Bookshelf, and digital copies can be requested from the Pasadena Educational Foundation at pef@pasedfoundation.org or (626) 396-3625. A follow-up public reading is scheduled for December 19 at the Pasadena Public Library.

The founders said the anthology’s endurance is what matters most to them. “The proudest thing about it is the fact that it’s sustained itself after we’re gone,” Uriu and Hernandez said. Students have picked it up and kept writing.