Humanities is a class in which we study a combination of history, culture, English skills (including grammar), and writing. In this class we also perfect our essay writing skills (in conjunction with Technical Science Writing class) with essays. One of my essays was comparing and contrasting Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Although we did not read all of these texts in their entirety, we read a section of all of them that relate to the underworld. One most certainly can see that the concept of what happens after death increased in complexity over time. Another large essay we worked on described Native American accounts of the Biblical Flood. We could have worked on any aspect of the Biblical flood, but I decided to focus on Native American stories. There may or may not have been a so called "great flood," but it is interesting that nearly all cultures have some type of story involving a massive flood. In addition, we also give presentations through either a Powerpoint presentation or through speech. Here are my notes for our Fall of Rome Presentation. This is a far more interesting way of exploring wide topics and it greatly saves class time from being used to lecture. The students get to interact with each other and the class (class discussions are very open). The only problem I found with this presentation was that I had too much information to present in a very short amount of time, thus I forced myself to skip some important parts.
five paragraph essay) about the topic. Later on in the year, we also began to examin the work of the great American poet Walt Whitman. Although his poems are very famous, many of them are extremely hard to understand. After much discussion, We also wrote another five paragraph essay