Reply to Humanities prgm at Poolesville

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have an 11th grader in the Humanities house. She was also in the Humanities program at MLK. She loves reading, writing, history. She is not into art, so she wishes every single field trip did not focus on art, but she’s been very happy in the program. The workload was very manageable in her freshman and sophomore years, but it’s a lot in 11th grade and this is really the first time in her scholastic career that she’s feeling stress, trying to balance so many APs and calculus and physics and ECs and SAT prep. There are great opportunities for kids to participate in ECs at Poolesville because the school is small. It’s a wonderful cohort because the kids take academics seriously. DD has a great group of friends (many also from MLK) who are very supportive of one another. There’s a lot more drama among the girls in Global. There is socialization between the kids in different houses.[/quote]

Do you recall what some of the books/(fiction, nonfiction) your daughter read in the humanities program in 9th and 10th grade?[/quote]

9th grade - various poems, Lord of the Flies, The Tempest
10th grade - The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, Brave New World (might’ve been 9th), Song Yet Sung, The Great Gatsby
11th grade (so far) - chose to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks out of several options, Julius Caesar
[/quote]

Most of those books are part of the regular MCPS curriculum too. What's different?[/quote]
The assigned reading isn’t a big part of the humanities magnet experience. The thing that sets the magnet apart (besides cohort) is that the curriculum weaves themes throughout English, history and arts classes and includes lots of projects. Some of the projects are the same competitions that students across the county participate in (National History Day, for example), but because the 3 humanities classes are coordinated,  students have the opportunity to go deeper. Sometimes the humanities classes will have a block schedule to allow students a lot of time to work on a project. The humanities program is very focused on research and writing.

My child attended MLK, so projects like making a documentary aren’t new to my kid, but the quality of the finished project is next level by the time they’re in high school.

Also, an activity like History Bowl is huge at PHS. They send way more teams to competitions than other schools, despite the fact that PHS is a small school. There’s no concept at PHS of kids being nerds because they’re brainy, because that’s typical there.[/quote]

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