In Mr. Lawrence Liu’s Upper School Government class, students are discussing the purpose of government and evaluating whether the most important role is keeping order or protecting individual rights. Students are reading excerpts from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and summaries of John Locke’s view of government. The discussion will help students work on asking questions, citing texts, and evaluating each other’s thoughts. This type of discussion helps build substantive knowledge of history and philosophy and the practical skills necessary to evaluate and think critically. Mr. Liu, who worked as a lawyer both in private practice and in a federal agency, uses his legal expertise and experience in the classroom to help deepen students’ understanding. 

Students in various English classes are reflecting on summer reading through writing and projects. In Ms. Peale’s seventh grade class, students are writing essays about their summer choice books. In eighth grade, students are writing narrative poems to demonstrate the experience of the different narrators in the book Refugee. Students in Ms. Alston’s ninth grade class are making a timeline of the events in their summer reading book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, putting the story, which is in reverse chronological order, into the correct order and choosing the most significant events.  Students in AP Language will be presenting to the class using emblematic images from history, art, or popular culture to help express ideas about the graphic novel of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” talking about the relationship between words and image. 

Last Friday Ms. Melissa Vercammen’s choir class took their music outdoors for a kinesthetic test of their music knowledge. Students lined up along the lines on the blacktop by the lunch tables and had to move their bodies in line with different slabs of pavement to name that note. Students cheered each other on as players were eliminated, testing to see their knowledge of notes using physical space to represent the different letters. Ms. Vercammen, who has been a member of our faculty for more than a decade, is the chair of the arts department and teaches choir, music and Jazz band for students in 8th through 12th grade.