Seniors read William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and watched the recent adaptation with Denzel Washington of “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Students in Ms. Seid’s classes reflected on the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…” soliloquy for an essay. The final words of the tragic hero, Scottish general Macbeth, who slays King Duncan in pursuit of power, is a haunting warning about the dangers of unmitigated ambition and the lust for power and blood. 

Poetry Out Loud is back in the Upper School, as students prepare to memorize a poem and present it to their class! This past week and next, teaching artists are coming in from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, coordinating with Engllish teacher Mr. Hotchkiss, who is the school’s liaison for the national poetry recitation competition. Students in grades 9 through 12 will be participating in their English classes other than those in Advanced Placement and Honors Humanities. 

On Tuesday Dr. Anika Prather  addressed parents and faculty in to tell them about the new campus namesake, Dr. Anna Julia Cooper! The timing of her talk was fortuitous, as the Public Charter School Board voted the previous day to approve our application for the 711 Edgewood facility named for Dr. Cooper. Cooper was an author, activist, educator, and academic scholar. Born into slavery, Cooper went on to complete a doctorate and write several books including A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. Her work focused on sexism, racism, class, and labor, engaging in debates through her writing with well known male writers, like W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, and Martin Delaney. She focused on the importance of higher education, an ethos right in line with our new school. Cooper resided in Northwest Washington, D.C. near LeDroit Park. Dr. Prather is a Howard University professor and founder of the Living Water School. She has addressed the faculty previously on her research on literacy and the classical canon.

In eighth grade English, middle school students are starting a unit on memoir, reading books by Megan Rapinoe, George Takei, Sonia Sotomayor, and Jackie Robinson, and the poetry of Langston Hughes. To start the unit, students did research into the similarities between fictional characters and the authors who created them, researching the lives of the authors they read, including Agatha Christie, Alan Gratz, Arthur Miller, Harper Lee, Nancy Springer, Jason Reynolds, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, and Caroline B. Cooney. Children considered how the authors integrated aspects of their own stories into fictional characters.

Students in ninth grade history are hard at work comparing religious philosophies and roots. In Ms. Barroso’s Global History class, students have already studied the Middle Ages in Europe and Japan, and are now embarking on a comparison of Islam, Judaism, Zorastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The evaluations and close reading of texts allows ninth graders to take a critical and analytical eye to evaluate different cultures, noting similarities and differences in their philosophies.