Humanities focuses on answering the question, “What does it mean to be human?” through readings, discussions, and writing assignments. Over the summer, we read Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, and began the year by examining this historical novel and its relevance to what makes humans unique. Our next unit focused on the American education system. An assignment from this unit can be found below. For the current unit, we are looking at race and ethnicity. This unit will end with Mass Academy's annual Day of Diversity, a celebration of the diversity of our school's students.
Every year, the incoming Mass Academy class takes a trip to Camp Bournedale where they participate in activities to get to know new classmates. One such activity is writing a skit in an assigned group about Walden, the summer reading book. My group (Kweku Akese, Alex Kaneko, Annie Tie, and Anne Wu) wrote an interview with Henry David Thoreau and other characters.
The first essay of the year followed a unit on examining the American education system through readings such as articles, excerpts of books, an autobiography, and a graphic novel. My paper addresses how schools can create more supportive learning environments by using examples from various texts and personal experience.
Satire is a form of writing in which the author writes with the intent of raising awareness of a societal problem and provoking a change. Generally comical or absurd, satire can take many different forms. After reading and watching numerous examples of satire, the class was tasked with creating original satires in small groups on a modern issue of our choice. My group chose to address Rush Culture in the form of a newspaper article that proposes the solution of adding an hour on to every day.