10th Grade

Semester 1 

Semester 2 

Course Focus: You & The Modern World

This course meets every day, for 5th & 6th periods (12:42-1:32pm) in room 225.

Semester 1 

 Project     Project Calendar     Committees     Foot Rubric    Final Project Rubric 

For semester one, we are going to dive into Globalization and its intricacies. Students will dive into the idea of open course wear, look at vastly different high school experiences across the globe, track the hidden journey of an item (such as a t-shirt, or a microchip) from its origin to ownership and finally, spend time exploring the impact all this rapid economic growth has had on natural resources, ending with students calculating their own personal eco-footprint.  

 

To study globalization can feel overwhelming and complex.  To study it fully, one must consider seven key factors:  Historical; Economical; Access to Resources and Markets;  Production Issues; Political Ideologies and Issues, Industrial Organisation and Technologies.  But, we do not have that kind of time! To condense this lesson, we will focus on three distinct pieces: 

Today trade is a fundamental part of economic activity everywhere

In today’s global economic system, countries exchange not only final products, but also intermediate inputs. This creates an intricate network of economic interactions that cover the whole world.

The interactive data visualization, created by the London-based data visualisation studio Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute, gives us an insight into the complex nature of trade. It plots the position of cargo ships across the oceans for all of 2012.

Great Sources We Will Use 

Our World in Data - Our World in Data’s mission is to publish the “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”.

Gapminder - Gapminder is an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions.

FreedomHouse -  Freedom House rates people’s access to political rights and civil liberties in 210 countries and territories through its annual Freedom in the World report. Individual freedoms—ranging from the right to vote to freedom of expression and equality before the law—can be affected by state or nonstate actors. Click on a country name below to access the full country narrative report.

UN Youth Report on Globalization (short) 

Ethics & International Affairs - The journal publishes original articles, essays, and book reviews that integrate rigorous thinking about principles of justice and morality into discussions of practical dilemmas related to current policy developments, global institutional arrangements, and the conduct of important international actors. 


A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and lived in Iran and France as a child while his father served as a diplomat.  The family was living in Paris when Afghanistan's government was overthrown and the country was occupied by the Soviet Union.  His family could not return home.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1980.  Hosseini was 15 years old and spoke almost no English.  In his first year of school in the U.S., Khaled struggled, but his encounter with John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath rekindled his love of literature, and he began to write stories in English. 

Khaled’s father found work as a driving instructor, and the family’s situation gradually improved, but Khaled, as the oldest child, felt a particular responsibility to succeed in the new country.  He went to college and medical school, married, and set up his medical practice.  During this time, he continued to write stories, and eventually with the encouragement of his wife Roya and father in law, he expanded one of his stories into what would become the international phenomenon The Kite Runner.  By 2005 The Kite Runner had reached the NYT Bestseller list and in 2007 it was made into a major motion picture.  His next novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, sold over 1 million copies in its first week.


After a 2003 visit to Afghanistan, Hosseini began work on his second novel, focusing on the experience of women in pre-war Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation and the civil war, and under the Taliban dictatorship. A Thousand Splendid Suns takes its title from the poem "Kabul" by the 17th-century Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi and translated by Josephine Davis.  " 

"Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye

Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs

And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"

Hosseini explained "I was searching for English translations of poems about Kabul, for use in a scene where a character bemoans leaving his beloved city, when I found this particular verse. I realized that I had found not only the right line for the scene, but also an evocative title in the phrase 'a thousand splendid suns,' which appears in the next-to-last stanza."