Ms. Small teaches Humanities. Humanities is like a history and English class combined. For the first half of the year, we learned about
an ancient civilization, and we wrote essays on texts that we read. We did units on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. We also looked at some of
Ray Bradbury’s texts and some satire. Later in the year, we looked at the Enlightenment, some poetry, and some science fiction.
The Walden Chamber Players, a group of musicians based in Boston, also came in early April to
perform for us.
For summer reading, we had to read Thoreau's Walden and write reflections on each chapter. During the first few weeks of school, we were split
into small groups, and we were tasked to create skits that had something to do with the text. We then performed the skits at Bournedale,
which was an overnight trip in early September that was designed to help us get to know each other better. Our group’s skit,
named “Inside Doubt,” incorporated elements from the movie, Inside Out,
to summarize three events from Walden.
In a more conventional assignment, we read a chapter from Homer’s The Iliad, which was an epic, and acted out Euripides’s
The Women of Troy, which was a tragedy. The two texts were about The Trojan War. Even though both texts were from Ancient Greece,
they were written several centuries apart. In an essay,
I wrote about how the tone used by the author in each text shows how Greek civilization in each author’s time period felt about war and why.