As per tradition as Mass Academy, Walden by Henry David Thoreau was our Humanities summer reading assignment. For a bit of background, Henry David Thoreau was a renown transcendentalist who emphasized living life simply and returning to nature. Because of this, he moved into a small shack next to Walden pond and lived there for two years while documenting his experiences in his book. After starting school, we were put into groups and tasked with coming up with an original skit about anything from the book, whether it be about Thoreau himself, the pond, or any of his adventures. I was grouped with Anyee, Suhruth, and Nihitha. For our skit, we decided to make an exposé, following a junior detective after he was transported back to Thoreau’s time. Since we discovered that much of Walden is exaggerated and Thoreau left a lot of stuff out, our skit was a comical exploration of his experiences he withheld from his audience. Below, you will find the script.
For our unit on satires, we ended by creating a satire of our own. Put simply, a satire is a work in which humor, irony, and other devices are used to criticize a certain issue. Prior to this, we studied other satires such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. After studying the strategies employed in a variety of different satires, we were tasked to create our own. I worked in a group with Anne and Emily, and we decided to create a satire criticizing the use of AI art generators and those who seek to profit from them. We chose this topic since all three of us are artists. Because of this, AI art was a topic we felt strongly about, but also a topic we knew we would be able to have fun with. We had a lot of fun with this since we were able to incorporate AI art and other art references into our skit. Below is our skit, along with the script that has all the techniques and devices highlighted.