Humanities is taught by Mrs. Small. In humanities, the class centers around the question of what it means to be human, and we try and figure this out through doing readings, discussing the readings, and writing. We also have bi-weekly to weekly journals where we reflect about the world around us. In the class a lot of different topics come up, and it can be very interesting to see how other people think about the world. (Also, the quote on the front page is from our summer reading book, Walden :D)
One of our units this year focused on satire, and as a part of that unit we worked in partners over a few class periods to develop our own satire. A satire is a form of comedy, where one looks at the issues present within the world, and essentially finds a way of making fun of them, with the intention of provoking a change. Me and my partner, Megan, chose to center our satire on the imbalance between economic classes, and the tendencies of people who are extremely privileged to oversimplify the difficulties people with a lower socioeconomic status must overcome to succeed. We chose to make a “choose your own adventure” style satire, which you can find HERE and to your right, with the goal of showing people that no matter what decisions you make, if you do not start out privileged, you are not going to (or at least, very unlikely to) become more economically successful.
As humanities has a focus on conveying our thoughts and opinions through writing, we often need to write more formal documents like essays. In our first essay we looked at the American Education System, and we developed our own prompts for what we wanted to write about. I chose to write about how politics and biases influence the education that students receive, and it was actually very interesting to see the differences in what students are taught based on biases in laws and in teachers. You can see my essay HERE, and to the left. Mrs. Small guided us through the essay writing process, and quite a few interesting ideas emerged.