Discover your voice: In the classroom

Humanities

Humanities is taught as an integrated program at Waring, incorporating literature and history rather than treating them as separate disciplines. Under the umbrella of Humanities, students also explore, in varying degrees, philosophy, mythology, comparative religion, art, architecture, and music history, especially as these relate to the larger ideas being studied.

The Waring Humanities Program develops students who read, write, and discuss critically: they are taught to build bridges between the literary and historical worlds that they study and the world that they live in. As such, the Humanities Program aims not only to prepare students for college, but also to prepare them more broadly, as thinkers, readers, speakers, and “connectors.”

Within their classes students develop chronological literacy, do close literary analysis, write persuasive essays, do primary and secondary source research, and explore broad literary and historical themes—as well as respond creatively, analytically, and personally to the works they study. The Humanities Program continually asks students, in one form or another: Why does this matter? How is this literature and history mine? How am I, at least partly, the product of our collective past?

Discussion is the foundation of humanities and, as such, students are expected to participate regularly in class, typically after they have read—and often written on—a selected text. Notecards, which are personal and analytical responses to reading assignments, are essential to all humanities courses, regardless of level. Another common assignment is the “visual,” defined broadly as a notecard in a medium other than writing. These might be drawn, painted, sculpted, or collaged, but they could just as well be based in music, theater, or dance. Tests and quizzes are given as well, though our evaluations of students are much more qualitative than they are quantitative.

Primary sources are used more frequently, textbooks less frequently. Our Humanities program is often enriched by presentations, plays, simulations, speakers, and field trips. Upper level students sometimes serve as Teaching Assistants (TAs) in 8th grade humanities courses.

Grades 6-8

Sixth and seventh grade students study Africa one year, China and India the next, in a rotating two-year cycle. These students are taught and practice the skills of a humanities student: they learn to read carefully, take organized notes, discuss books in class, and write notecards and essays. Once a week they take a Great Books class, within which stories from either the Junior Great Books Series or the course are discussed. Projects are emphasized as well: the students, for example, do an extensive immigration project one year that investigates their own ethnic roots and a "Town" project in which they investigate their home community.

Eighth grade students are taught thematically: readings and projects are based within a theme that is carried out throughout the year. A recent class, for example, used the theme Journey, and in the course of the year studied Homer’s Odyssey and performed a play based on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Other eighth grade classes have used "myths that shape our lives," "belonging," and "service" as yearlong themes.

Grades 9-12

Ninth and tenth grade students are taught together. They cover a curriculum which alternates year to year between Medieval/Renaissance Europe and Modern Europe; the ninth graders enhance their humanities (and French) learning in Angers, France for four weeks during the year. Eleventh and twelfth graders explore the Classical World and American Studies, in alternating years. A three-week eleven grade trip at the end of the year serves to extend the upper level Humanities Program with the larger world.