Mrs. Small does not teach your standard English class. Here we don't just read a book, reflect on it's hidden meanings, and write an essay. Instead, we analyze society as a whole. We look at institutions such as the education system, find their problems through written work, Then, we create our own essays, allowing them to seem very personalized. We also work with forms of persuasion such as satire, rhetoric, comedy, and more. We look at societal fantasies and debate why we as humans made them exist. This class is incredibly interesting and a very free way to better our skills as writers.
This was the very first essay we wrote this year for our first unit. Before this, we had spent weeks reading papers about the United States Education System, how it came to be, and the problems it has had in the past, and problems it still has today. We were then instructed to find an issue we were passionate about and find more articles, specifically op-eds, to write a convincing piece, showing the problem and our proposed solution. The problem I saw in the system was the fear of the use of new technology, the latest example, AI. Thus I wrote about all the ways AI could be used in classrooms to nurture our knowledge and respect for technology. Please feel free to read!
The summer before coming to MAMS, all students are required to read the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. This is a highly disliked book throughout the MAMS community and very quickly gave us something to bond over. Taking a small detour, this year, the junior class went to a camp called Bournedale for a week where we bonded as a class, participated in many fun activities, and did a little bit of schoolwork. For hum, Mrs. Small required that we each get on stage as a small group and perform a play based on Walden. These skits were intended to be loosely based on the story and send a larger message about Thoreau. My group recreated the ant battle scene from the book as a gladiator fight with Thoreau as the evil emperor. We used this skit to show Thoreau's arrogance and hypocrisy, ending his reign of terror with a small rebellion.