Humanities, run by Ms. Small, is a course that combines ELA, history, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience that asks the question of what it means to be human. In each unit, we read a multitude of different types of texts to get a good foundation on what the topic is, before being able to branch out and express our views on the topic through essays, video skits, creative written works, art pieces, etc.
The Walden skit was our first big project for Humanities. In this project, we had to work in groups to create a skit inspired by our summer reading book Walden. My group–comprised of Liam Bratane, Tanay Mangal, Sam Wheatley, Avanti Moghe, and I–created “Thoreau, Interrupted”, which was about Thoreau being transported to the modern era and seeing his giftstore before panicking and being sent to group therapy with a bunch of MAMS students. It was overall a great way to start the year and make new friends, as well as being a really fun experience.
This assignment was the essay that concluded our satire unit, which was a very enjoyable unit. For this essay, we got to choose a satire of our choice and analyze it in any way that we wanted, whether that be how the satire fails, whether the satire is more effective than a serious text of the same issue, or even just what made the satire successful. I chose to analyze one of the texts we read in class, “Friday Black”, and analyze how the author used different techniques to call attention to the mistreatment of employees by companies and customers.