SELF

SELF is a period that meets every other Friday from 1:00-1:50, alternating with Study Hall.

It first started happening in the 2017-2018 school year on Thursdays for freshmen only, and replaced Titan Connect. Each year, one more grade higher up would start doing SELF, meaning that class starting in 2017 (class of 2021) and anybody graduating later would be doing SELF for all 4 years, while the rest of the school would have Flex periods on Thursdays for the rest of their time at Gunn. It was originally meant to begin with freshmen and sophomores, but a lot of criticism from Gunn students at the time made Dr. Herrmann decide to open it with only freshmen instead. Freshman cohorts are led by Titan Ambassadors.

According to Gunn's school profile,

SELF is a non-graded 4-year comprehensive weekly program for every Gunn student participates in weekly. As students develop the core SEL competencies – social awareness, self-management, self-efficacy, selfawareness, social management, and social engagement – students build community and share stories with a trusted adult mentor and each other, guided by specific themes each semester like equity and empathy, self identity, and building relationships.

In practice, this means that students receive lectures on the aforementioned topics and are invited to comment on or discuss what they've learned. There are also occasional free choice classes in which the SELF teacher brings in some food and students are allowed to do more-or-less whatever they want (though there is usually some restriction, like no doing homework).

Controversy

Students generally do not like SELF, viewing the lessons as force-fed and a waste of time. In a show-of-hands survey of a single U.S. Government class in 2024 conducted following a student suicide, all students (25 or so) said that SELF was a waste of time and had no personal benefit.

In Gunn Student Simulator, SELF is an afterschool program that takes away time from homework, a reference to how anyone who was not part of SELF instead had a Flex period, which gave them time to do homework, but people are specifically told not to do homework in SELF.