NHS Students Respond Well To Humanities Class

By Jeff White

The final projects have long been turned in and graded, and a new semester is well underway, yet high school students this week reflected on last semester’s humanities course with enthusiasm.

The honors-level class, which required 30 students to spread out in the high school’s art room during eighth periods, was the combined effort of art teacher Joyce Hannah and English teacher Lorrie Arsenian.

In a school which has an increasing number of cross-disciplinary course offerings, combining English and Art made perfect sense to Ms Hannah, who has been teaching this course at other venues off and on for almost 20 years. “People learn holistically, not in a vacuum,” she said this week.

The course, officially called “Contemporary Humanities and the Self,” involved exploring thematic material that had both literary and artistic value, such as imagery, metaphor and symbolism. Students were charged with considering how individuals were defined and perceived, how one’s self image evolves within the context of heritage and culture, and what impact one’s surrounding environment has on an individual.

Because it was the first time the course was offered at the high school, most students did not know what to expect. “When I read the course description, all I expected was the intertwining of art and English,” recalled junior Erin Thomas. “Other than that, I had no clue what to expect out of this class. Taking this class was like walking though a forest for the first time, because I wasn’t expecting a lot.”

Some students, all of whom were either juniors or seniors, entered the class with no previous art experience. Likewise, some students entered the class as accomplished artists, but lacking solid skills in reading interpretation and writing. The main emphasis of Ms Hannah’s and Mrs Arsenian’s humanities course was on improvement. “It [was] about the journey, not the destination,” Ms Hannah explained.

The subject matter was designed to coincide: students studied gothic artwork and compared its themes to those of gothic fiction. Romanticism was explored through both paintings and poetry.

Most students commented that the course’s greatest strength was that it gave students a somewhat non-traditional way of exploring both subjects. “My favorite part of the course was learning to be more artistic, because so far in high school, I had never taken an art class,” junior Brianna Limebrook said.

“I wanted a different kind of English course, not the traditional writing class,” said Jen Mueller, a senior.

And some of the students’ hard work will soon be on display for the public, potentially at the Booth Library, though according to Ms Hannah the venue has not been determined. Besides some of the exceptional work from throughout the semester, the students’ final projects will be on display.

For their final exams, students had to apply the themes of culture, family, emotions and setting to a project called “If These Walls Could Talk,” which dealt with students’ interpretations of specific locations in Newtown.

A historical site in Newtown formed the base of these projects. Students had to research the site, illustrate a visual representation of the site, and bring it to life through a written narrative.

Jen Mueller researched the history of The Newtown Bee building, because it “has been in town for many years and its history was very significant to Newtown’s past.”

Junior Lauren Bass picked a location she drove by everyday: the Taunton Cemetery. She took walks through the graveyard and read the headstones’ inscriptions, “and I started to get a feeling for what it should be.” Her project consisted of a collage of pictures of the cemetery covered over by dirt. To see the collage, one has to dig through the dirt, which represented “the lost feeling.”

Junior Chris Lyddy researched and presented his interpretation of the Newtown Meeting House. Brianna Limebrook delved into the Balcony House next to Trinity Church on Main Street, which had significance as part of the Underground Railroad.

“In the paper, I made my historical place secretive and sheltering, because it housed runaway slaves in its basement, yet the people on the second story ballroom had no idea what was actually going on throughout the rest of the house,” Brianna explained. “In my art portion, I attached the owners of the house on the second story ballroom to the slaves in the basement together with ribbon, to show all the secrets the house possessed that few in Newtown knew about.”

Because the course required each student to take a careful look at their own individuality, many students cited that the self-awareness emphasis was both the best and hardest part of the class. “My favorite part of the course was the art project where you had to display at least two sides of your own self,” recalled Daisha Manfredonia, a senior. “This was a major challenge to design a project which displayed me as a person.”

Ms Hannah viewed the course as a success, not least because she saw many of her students develop skills they were lacking when they started in the fall. The skills taught in the humanities course are the kind that need to be practiced, she said. “It’s like making a path in the grass. Walking it once won’t make a path.”

And the feedback that she hears from her students can only bolster her enthusiasm for running the course again next year.

“I’m really glad I took this class because I learned a lot about the arts in ways I wouldn’t normally have in other normal English classes,” Brianna Limebrook said.

“I would recommend it to others,” remarked Lauren Bass, “but I would have to warn them to be prepared to really use their imaginations and they will have to look inside themselves for the majority of the answers.”