Interdisciplinary Humanities Grade 7

2018-19 School Year

September 3, 2018

We leapt into academic content on the very first day, exploring a symbolism-rich poem called "The Summer of Black Widows" by sharing our ideas and wonderings about various lines. The next day, we used these ideas to develop theories about the poem's message, which involves the importance of collecting and remembering people's stories. This led into a series of short writing tasks for which I asked students to examine aspects of their identities that can seem invisible or misunderstood. Our class also engaged in two days of collaborative revision, finalizing a student-generated list of classroom expectations by debating issues of clarity and focus. Each of this week's activities was aimed at setting the stage for our project work in humanities this semester, which will encompass anecdotal storytelling and productive disagreement.

September 14, 2018

We launched our Student Bio Mini-Project last week by exploring numerous staff bios (biographies) from the HTMNC website. These have been our "mentor texts," inspiring us and setting high standards with their energy, variety, and structure. From the staff bios, the students not only compiled a list of potential topics to include in their own bios but also played around with techniques related to pacing, transitions, and artistry. In this way, the project has become a vehicle for experimenting with new language skills and strategies. Our class has also spent part of each morning trying out different ways to break apart or connect the components of run-on sentences, focusing not only on grammar conventions but also on the shifts in meaning that result from choosing, for example, to link two sentences with "for" rather than "but." After working with a succession of graphic organizers and other planning tools, this week the students drafted their bios during class time and then embarked on a complex protocol for small-group revisions, which challenged each student to offer constructive suggestions while honoring the intentions and the spirit of the student writers. While this project does have an exhibition goal, the process is just as important -- the students are learning about each other, about themselves as collaborators, and about their ability to use language in increasingly sophisticated and deliberate ways.

October 5, 2018

In the past three weeks, our class has launched a system for independent reading, a full-class novel, and the MindShift project. After "speed dating" up to 25 books in a whirlwind class period, each student took home their most promising match and compiled an "on-deck" list of titles they'd like to read during the year. Each day for 20 minutes, the entire school pauses for KBAR ("Kick Back and Read"), giving students time to read their chosen books without distractions and with regularity. Upon finishing a book, students will write a farewell letter to it -- or a breakup note, if they abandon it early -- as their vehicle for reflection; I will also be checking in with each student one-on-one during KBAR time to discuss their books. Please support your student in finding books they might love (visit the public library!) and carving out time in the evenings and on weekends to curl up and read.

For our full-class novel this semester, we have begun reading The Outsiders, a compelling book in its own right that will also support the content of our upcoming project, MindShift, which we launched last week. The launch occurred organically after I offered the class a sample breakup note to Green Eggs and Ham and found myself pummeled with good-natured criticism for hating such a beloved book from the students' childhoods. So... I decided to preview our project on shifting people's thinking by doing my best to shift the class's thinking about this book, using techniques such as anecdotal storytelling and aligning beliefs and values, which we will be practicing as part of the project. The students are now excited to identify their own Green Eggs and Ham -- their own unpopular opinion that they'd like to help skeptics understand.

October 20, 2018

It’s been an intense week in our class as we’ve encountered and discussed a number of powerfully told stories aimed at shifting people’s minds about important issues. This week we began incorporating historical case studies into our MindShift project, with a focus on 1950s America. We contrasted the tragic narrative of Emmett Till with the inspirational narrative of Claudette Colvin (Who? Your student can fill you in!), prompting a fascinating conversation about society’s view of teenagers and which teens are most likely to garner adults’ sympathy and admiration. We also viewed the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and explored its allegorical representation of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, while continuing our conversation about teenagers' influence on adult opinion using the episode's character of Tommy.

All this was done alongside our continued reading of The Outsiders, which has begun to echo the themes of our history lessons: groups segregated from one another, the temptation to view “the other” with suspicion, severe consequences for disrupting the social code and for standing up to injustice. All of these stories, real and fictional, serve as models for how our students can think about telling their own MindShift stories, and they also lay the groundwork for the next stage of the project, which will examine constructive ways to disagree with those whose opinions and identities one might initially abhor.

November 2, 2018

We finished reading The Outsiders last week, and this week each student wrote a structured analytical paragraph explaining what, in their opinion, the author was trying to shift her reader’s thinking about. To plan the paragraph, we used a graphic organizer to sequence an opinion (thesis/claim), two aspects of the book that support that opinion, and examples and quotes from the text for each (evidence). This process was challenging for some, empowering for others, and important for everyone, as it laid the groundwork not just for one component of the MindShift project but also for more sophisticated writing they will do in high school.

This week we also figured out our topics and groupings (small group, partner, or individual, based on student preference) for the narrative component of the project, and we examined another MindShift narrative, this time a groundbreaking nonfiction magazine essay by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas about his life as an undocumented immigrant. As with our earlier texts, we looked at both the techniques the writer uses and the power of the narrative to change people’s understanding of a topic. Our class also played a series of interactive grammar games outside on the turf and subsequently worked on enhancing an earlier assignment (a free-write narrative about the hiking field trip) with adverbs and prepositional phrases.

November 16, 2018

Last week, our class experimented with two contrasting approaches to disagreeing with someone. The first, called “The Uh-Uh Game,” required each player to shoot down whatever their opponent said in an attempt to “win” the argument. The second approach, called “The Uh-Huh Game,” instead challenged the players to paraphrase their opponent’s point and identify a belief or value they have in common before offering a new point; most rounds of the game culminated in a solution to the disagreement that attempted to honor both sides’ values. The class agreed that the first game is more fun to play and more closely resembles the arguments they typically have with their friends and family, while the second game requires more attentive listening and seems more productive. The students were so engaged in these games that they collectively decided to make the Uh-Huh Game the centerpiece of our MindShift exhibition next month, in order to teach their visitors the skill of “listening to understand” and to use this technique to shift people’s thinking about real-world issues they care about.

This week, they got to work organizing their opinions, potential pros and cons, and information they’re learning from online research. As of today, some students have filled up their organizer while others have a ways to go; regardless, once we return to school after Thanksgiving our focus will be on planning for our Uh-Huh Games and composing powerful narratives to accompany our topics at the exhibition. Between now and then, I encourage you to ask your student about their project topic and engage in some good-natured conversation about their emerging opinions. And if you should suddenly find your Thanksgiving dinner threatened by an erupting family disagreement, consider calling on your seventh grader to help everyone play the Uh-Huh Game and feel listened to and respected, no matter their opinion.

December 7, 2018

For the past two weeks, our students have been composing, revising, and editing their MindShift narratives. These stories are designed to put a human face (or in some cases an animal face) on the issues they have been researching, with the aim of making readers more sympathetic to their opinion. I introduced the class to Aristotle's three argument components of logos, pathos, and ethos, and the students are working to balance all three in their exhibition. They are also finding ways to incorporate into their writing some of the language techniques we have studied throughout the semester, such as adverbs, strategic lists, dialogue, transition phrases, and "bookends." At the exhibition, you will get to read their finished narratives and engage in conversation with the students about their opinions using the "Uh-Huh" approach to disagreement. Next week, we will be practicing these conversations and preparing the tangible aspects of the exhibition. 

December 14, 2018

We're looking forward to welcoming you to our team's MindShift exhibition this Tuesday evening! The exhibition will include a conversation room and a quiet reading room. You may visit the two rooms in any order or float between them.

In the conversation room, students will be stationed at tables based on their chosen issue. When you approach their table, they will share with you their point of view on the issue and then invite you to disagree with them or express skepticism about something they've said. Their mission is to engage you in a civil, respectful, and listening-oriented conversation that builds bridges between opposing perspectives. So even if you think you agree with them completely, please challenge yourself to disagree, even just a little, so that they can demonstrate their emerging skill for you.

In the quiet reading room, you will have an opportunity to read short narratives that the students have written in order to "humanize" their issues, since stories are often more effective than arguments alone. Once you've read a narrative, we encourage you to jot down on a Post-It note something specific you appreciated about it or learned from it, so that the author(s) can know the impact of their work.

As the evening concludes, there will be a whiteboard where you can share your takeaways: what you used to think, and how your thinking has begun to change. Thank you for your continued support of this impressive and impassioned group of students! See you next week.

February 8, 2019

We launched our interdisciplinary project, Unwrapped, on January 22 by visiting the local Vons supermarket and having each student catalog data about a packaged item they purchased. Over the coming months, we will be figuratively "unwrapping" this item, and many others, by investigating what's inside it and how it interacts with our bodies, and by exploring the inside story of its historical, economic, and ethical impact. (The students will also literally unwrap their items after our exhibition on March 21!)

We began the social studies component of the Unwrapped project by exploring aspects of the history of food in America: differences in how Native Americans and European colonists viewed their relationships to food, animals, and the land; the evolution from specialized shops to supermarkets to big-box stores; and, using our class text Chew on This, the emergence of fast food and the triumph of efficiency and sameness. (This last topic was the premise of a vigorous simulation in class over the past two days!) Embedded in these discussions are larger issues of cultural values, economics, and ethics, all of which we will routinely revisit as we progress through the project. Students have also been conducting research on the packaged item they purchased at Vons on our walking trip, learning about the history of the inventor, brand, and distribution company and getting a sense of how multinational corporations operate for both good and ill.

In language arts, we have been studying transition language in informational text, building on strategies we first worked with last semester. After searching for transitions in our food-related readings, students applied these techniques first to a humorous “letter” addressing a food they despise and then to a short paragraph based on their Vons item research. We have also been working on systematically expanding our first drafts, paying close attention to categorizing and paragraphing.

February 22, 2019

It’s been a busy two weeks in humanities. Following our simulation of different approaches to efficiency and consistency in restaurant kitchens, we explored the food industry at the local and regional level, guided by Chapter 3 in our class text, Chew on This. Highlights included examining online maps of San Marcos and Vista for evidence of the shift away from main streets and toward fast food-populated freeway exit ramps; two competing narratives of Taco Bell’s food prep process; and the surprisingly relevant lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” As students progressed through the chapter, they filled out a pro/con chart to solidify their understandings of what society gains and loses from particular innovations and practices.

This led us to evaluate as a class the effort by California’s legislature to gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour. We also discussed the complexities of organizing a labor union, using the examples of young McDonald’s workers in Montreal and Cesar Chavez’s leadership of the United Farm Workers here in California. Students later used their pro/con charts to compose paragraphs explaining the range of perspectives on a specific topic, practicing (once again) their use of transition language to gain better control of the order and flow of their prose.

Over the last few days, Chapter 2 has introduced us to strategies that food companies use to market their products to children. After reading about research approaches like focus groups, brain scans, and restaurant kids’ clubs, we analyzed television commercials to find examples of “propaganda techniques” such as bandwagon, deck stacking, straw man, virtue signals, and the like. (Some of these commercials were Saturday Night Live spoofs, aimed to highlight the absurdity of the real ads we viewed.) Many students chose to share their favorite food commercial with the class and lead the conversation about its use of propaganda techniques.  

March 15, 2019

The final stage of our study of food economics began with an exploration of three seemingly unrelated questions: Why is corn in so much of our food? Why are processed junk foods typically cheaper than whole foods? And why do the USDA’s guidelines seem to contradict much of the scientific consensus about nutrient intake? By analyzing USDA “pyramids” and other published images, touring the website of the National Corn Growers Association, reading excerpts from articles about corn allergies and food deserts, and viewing a series of recent news reports, we ultimately connected these questions using two new vocabulary words -- “lobbying” and “subsidies” -- and constructed the triangular relationship among consumers, the food industry, and government. The students seemed particularly interested in the politics of school lunches, so we brought to our class Lynley Connor, High Tech High’s Food and Nutrition Services Manager, who engaged the students in a lively Q&A and helped us understand how our own food experiences at school are influenced by funding, regulation, and the complicated math of healthy eating.

As we began planning for our exhibition, we also took the time to read portions of a chapter in Chew on This about animal agriculture, or “factory farming.” The students clearly cared a great deal about what they learned, and their written responses to questions about whether they should consume factory-farmed meat and whether it’s best not to know how our meat is produced revealed a deep and sometimes tortured ambivalence among the minds in the room. I have told these students how proud I am of them for the way they have engaged over the past two months with complex material that most people don’t encounter until college. As a group, they truly have risen to the occasion.

2019-20 School Year

September 2, 2019

We've been busy sampling piles of books from our classroom library and selecting titles for our personal independent reading lists. As part of this process, we have conducted close analysis of many types of first pages, ultimately constructing a list of strategies writers use to entice their readers to flip to page two. Each student has committed to experimenting with at least two of these strategies as they compose "page one" of an imagined book in which they themselves are the central character. They will also be deliberately embedding key information about themselves into their narration, in the style of some of the best book openings. We will work vigorously on composing these first pages next week. In conjunction with this mini-project, and to begin our social studies work, we will be familiarizing ourselves with presidential candidates from both major parties, looking specifically at the rhetorical strategies they deploy in support of the stories they want to tell.

September 17, 2019

We have spent these last two weeks learning, practicing, and applying a series of writing techniques within both our "first page" mini-project and our emerging study of the presidential campaign. One set of techniques involves rhythmic rhetoric, specifically lists and repetition, and the other involves the art of breaking apart and connecting sentences using various punctuation tools and conjunctions. In addition to experimenting with each of these techniques in our written drafts, we have begun to view speech excerpts from the leading presidential candidates in order to analyze how they use these techniques to draw us into the different stories they are trying to communicate about America. (So far, we've listened to Trump and Warren deliver stories about the people vs. the elites, and Biden and Harris frame stories about living up to American values.) In the run-up to last Thursday's candidate debate, we also discussed whether a president should focus on big, bold solutions or instead on what seems most possible right now -- presently a major fault line among the Democrats. My aim here is both to get the kids excited about the political conversations in the country and to provide authentic examples of ways that they themselves can make their writing and speaking more engaging. We ended this week with an "iceberg" activity, mapping our identities according to their level of visibility; this will become relevant as we expand our own stories and develop our characters.

October 4, 2019

We finished our Page One mini-project by adding dialogue and experimenting with visual design concepts to make each student's page look unique and professional. The final pages are now on display in our classroom. In conjunction with our proofreading efforts, the students took a series of assessments on finding and fixing run-on sentences and on formatting and punctuating dialogue.

The Page One mini-project has led seamlessly into a deeper study of identity, rooted in the accessible metaphors of an iceberg (identities that are visible vs. those that are not as obvious) and a closet (identities that we hide for fear of how others might react to them). Each student has written a series of paragraphs examining not just their own icebergs and closets but also those of central characters from their independent reading books, in an effort to focus on more than just the plot of a story. Our class also recently embarked on a dynamic three-day "fishbowl" simulation to test and evaluate various approaches to group collaboration and problem-solving, focusing on how to achieve the best balance of caution and affirmation, creativity and structure, logic and intuition. Each of these strands of our curriculum -- hooking readers into a story, using metaphors to explore identity, and collaborating productively -- will emerge as important pillars of our upcoming interdisciplinary fall project.

November 1, 2019

Our team's project launch at Mighty Awesome Escape Rooms generated lots of excitement among students about what they themselves might create together for our exhibition. Mighty Awesome's founder and lead designer, Cory Reeder, is volunteering as our professional consultant for the project and spent nearly an hour speaking with our class, sharing a variety of behind-the-scenes tips on elements ranging from story craft to the physics of puzzles. He will be back during this coming week to work with small groups of students.

In humanities, we have spent much of our class time collecting ideas for our thematic escape rooms. Using a series of collaborative processes, the students arrived at nine themes and have just wrapped up their research in small teams. The lessons, skills, and writing tasks embedded within this work include: identifying key features and patterns of popular literary genres; researching and taking notes with an eye for purpose and organization; and communicating information as both a functional report and a formal essay. Next, new groupings of students will map out various escape room narratives using techniques they learned in earlier mini-projects

Elsewhere in the curriculum, students shared the best pieces of advice from the interviews they conducted about working with others (thank you to everyone who sat for an interview!). We also have been experiencing periodic deep dives into the presidential campaign and the impeachment inquiry, both of which have allowed us to explore basic civics, governmental structures, and disagreements about legislative priorities.

January 30, 2020

Thank you to everyone who played our escape rooms and helped with constructing them and then dismantling them. We have one or two more trips on the horizon for our current Battles of the Bathroom project, so stay tuned! We also have secured at least one professional consultant: a magazine editor in New York who recently launched a literary publication about bathrooms (seriously!) and is interested in publishing our students’ work, individually or collectively, in an upcoming issue. More on that soon, too.

Our focus in humanities class has been on making sense of informational text. Specifically, we have worked on identifying the main idea of an article and noticing key transition language that might help us prioritize details. Our texts have taken us to the early civilizations of Pakistan’s Indus Valley and ancient Rome, as well as plague-ridden medieval cities and King Henry VIII’s palace, not to mention a curious tribe called the Nacirema. (If your student hasn’t yet brought up the Nacirema, ask them!)

A common theme throughout these texts has been, you guessed it, bathrooms. In examining how different cultures and eras have thought about infrastructure, privacy, and the environment, we begin to consider values we might have wrongly assumed are universal, and analyze how a society approaches questions of social status. We ended this week sharing our own experiences with feeling excluded, misunderstood, or accommodated based on our identities -- and uncovered hidden advantages we might never have realized we enjoy. These ideas will become relevant next week as we dive into more modern dilemmas involving justice and access for groups of people that our public facilities don’t always seem to be built for.

In other areas of the curriculum, we have increased the frequency of our reading jots and have written our first retrospective analysis of our jots, and we continue to follow the presidential campaign as the voting finally begins in Iowa on Monday.

February 14, 2020

We have just scheduled two exciting new off-campus activities for our project! On Friday, February 28, we will conduct fieldwork at shopping districts (each car will visit a different location in North County) to evaluate restroom design for sustainability, accessibility, and hygiene. Then on Tuesday, March 3, we will take a field trip to Lake Hodges to study the watershed and access to clean water.

In humanities, we have spent the last two weeks investigating two historic “battles of the bathroom”: the movements to racially integrate public spaces and later to make such spaces accessible to people with disabilities. As we explored articles, poetry, memoir excerpts, and film footage of the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and the 504 sit-in in San Francisco, we asked ourselves difficult questions about activist strategy and how people’s identities can affect their ethical perspectives. A highlight was our video chat with Erin Sheehy, the editor of Facility magazine, during which students asked her great questions about her research and writing. Students also extracted unfamiliar words from Erin’s articles to comprise our new vocabulary list and practice “word sleuthing” strategies in informational texts. (Part of their homework this weekend is to use these words in their own interactions, so be prepared for some more sophisticated language from your student!)

An emerging side project in our class, related to both our history content and our presidential campaign study, has been experimenting with different ways to make decisions as a large group. We have held an Iowa-style caucus, a distributed-vote gallery walk, and a secret-ballot affirmation vote, evaluating each method afterward. Beginning next week, we will look at more modern controversies involving gender-specific restrooms and consult with two San Diego architects who have ideas for how to solve a diverse set of societal dilemmas with one unique design approach.

February 24, 2020

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I’m writing to give you some context for today’s humanities lessons, which will involve a discussion of gender identity. I’ve found that some parents appreciate a preview of topics like this one, to help them follow up in their own way with their kids if they feel the need.

Our third “Battles of the Bathroom” case study, after the civil rights protests and the sit-in for disability rights, is the more recent clash over who gets to use which gender-specific public spaces. In each of these studies, we’re not painting people as heroes or villains but rather working to understand different perspectives, on both the desirability of change and the strategies for achieving it. Our guest speakers tomorrow will show the students a design proposal that addresses the concerns of all the stakeholders in this debate.

During this short case study, we’ll do the math of “potty parity;” learn new prefixes and root words; clarify defintions of unfamiliar terms, including transgender; analyze persuasive essays and speeches; and explore the historical assumptions about women that gave rise to sex-segregated restrooms in the first place. I’ll be approaching this content and students’ questions as a teacher of social studies, not of health or biology, and with a tone of curiosity, not of ideology. I also feel strongly that learning this content in a humanities context can nurture students’ empathy for others and help them think more analytically about the society they live in.

As always, don’t hesitate to reply with any questions or thoughts. Thanks for reading!

Mike Fishback

March 14, 2020

Dear Parents and Guardians,

First, a huge thank-you for everything each of you is doing to help our community slow the spread of this coronavirus, whether it's by staying at home, maintaining a 6-foot distance from others when you're out, helping family members or neighbors, caring for young kids while working from home, or serving our community on the front lines as a medical worker.

While the school is not allowed to require the completion of online work during this time, it is very important that each student continues a routine of meaningful learning. Our teaching team is compiling daily activities that are "optional but recommended." I am sending mine a bit earlier so that interested students can view and comment on the Biden vs. Sanders debate streaming live on Sunday evening. Feel free to get involved in any of the daily activities in the document; I designed them with family time in mind, and they are open-ended in order to invite conversation.

A quick word about current events: While I'm promoting Sunday's debate as part of our ongoing study of the election, and I've offered an article about the 1918 flu pandemic as a history lesson, I also hope students will follow as much of the news as they can -- or can handle. As events unfold, whether in the political sphere from President Trump and other officials or elsewhere, you know your child best. We are living through history, which can be exciting and also frightening. Thank you for your partnership.

Stay well,
Mr. Fishback