Exhibitions
2018-2019
Senior Exhibitions
One of our core beliefs at The New School is that endings and opportunities go hand in hand. Just as the ending of a morning module class provides the opportunity for an exhibition to showcase each student’s newly acquired knowledge, skills, and interests, we believe the ending of a high school tenure should be commensurately showcased.
Our Senior Exhibition program is rooted in giving time and support to seniors so that they can make a statement about who they are and what matters to them in an academic setting. Each graduate of the school has shown the ability to demonstrate a unique point of view and contribute to meaningful cultural questions through both formal writing and presentations in a public forum. This makes our graduates uniquely well-suited to the challenges of life beyond the school, especially in college and the professional world.
Billy Pasour
Physics & Music Teacher // Senior Program Coordinator
Class of 2002
Heroes
I have been interested in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel since five years ago. Spending most of my free time during middle school and high school to understand the novel and to explore more about its real history, I have always wished I could have an opportunity to present about the lords in the story and how I feel about them when I have a chance to. Suddenly, when I didn’t have any ideas for my senior exhibition topic, I looked at my bookshelves and decided that I would write about them for my senior exhibition. However, I still didn’t know how to introduce a character in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to my schoolmates properly; luckily, a year before I became a senior, I signed up for a class called “Developmental Psychology”, which taught me about Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is a famous psychologist with his research about the inner evilness of humans. Thanks to his book, I managed to turn my hobby into a heroic philosophical
topic, and expanded it more.
Hanh “Remy” Le
Class of 2019
Controlled Flight Into Terrain
My name is Richmond Forsen, and I am currently a private pilot and a New School student. When I was given the chance to write a paper on any topic I pleased, aviation naturally arose as my topic of choice. After not much deliberation, I decided that I would do a deep dive into a category of accidents called “Controlled Flight Into Terrain” (CFIT). My goal was to write a paper that showed the causes and dangers of CFIT, as well as how CFIT accidents can be presented, in a way that could be understood by the general public. I also hoped to show how CFIT
accidents could be interpreted through the Federal Aviation Administration’s five “Hazardous Attitudes”: Anti-authority, Impulsivity, Invulnerability, Macho, and Resignation. I am extremely proud of my paper, and feel I accomplished both of these goals, taking a very technical and complex topic and making it understandable to those with little prior knowledge of aviation. For the presentation portion of my senior exhibition, I conducted an interview with Todd
Gunther of the National Transportation Safety Board, who was kind enough to come to the school and speak with me, helping to educate those attending on not only CFIT accidents, but aviation safety in general.
Richmond Forsen
Class of 2019
Quarterly Exhibitions
America’s Women
In Carolina’s America’s Women class we studied women’s roles in America throughout history, first and second wave feminism, and women who were important or influential to their time. For the exhibition we were put into groups of five to create a panel discussion responding to the class’ essential question, with each group focusing on a time period’s key issues. A mediator in the group came up with questions for the panelists, who acted as key women from the time period. Each group member came up with answers for the questions based on their woman’s works of literature or interviews and in this way each group formatted each other’s answers into a scripted discussion.
The product was an hour long scripted panel discussion between four influential women of each time period – first and second wave feminism – with a mediator who wrote the questions introducing the women and the contemporary women’s issues of the time. The goal was to educate the audience members of each time period’s issues and convey each influential woman’s stance and importance regarding the topic.
Elena Hamann
Class of 2020
Making Music Together
The Making Music Together class focused on learning the basics of musicianship and band dynamics; the group included singers and instrumentalists. The goal was to share our results in a Coffee House performance. We had to work really hard, but we had fun learning things about leadership, planning, setting up, tuning, etc. that we had never done before.
The Coffee House went well, especially our final piece, “Where is the Love,” in which we showed the passion that had grown for our music. Huge thanks to Virginia for teaching and leading us, as well as to the other performers and everyone who participated by attending.
Mary Alem Gebretsadik
Class of 2022
Second Quarter Scholarly Writing
Reprinted from the May 2019 Newsletter
During the second quarter, The New School put exhibitions on hold so that the whole school could practice their scholarly writing skills. Academic writing is an appealing skill to colleges, and it is required in any professional field. Students also had a chance to hone their essential skills of communicating meaning and critical thinking and analysis over the second quarter while planning and revising their essays.
Students in Jenny Fey’s honors English class “Banned Books” practiced writing primary source analysis essays, which focus on building logical arguments in order to make a deeper analysis of the primary source. In-text evidence of references to the primary source had to be provided as well to give the arguments validity. Students centered their papers around one of two challenged books in America: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. They had to practice making analyses and arguments about controversial topics such as the criticisms of capitalism and the destructiveness of beauty standards. As a student in “Banned Books,” I can say that it was exhilarating at times to form an analysis of these controversial topics, but it was important to learn how to control my opinions so that I do not stray from my thesis and forget the use of evidence.
Instead of exhibitions, students from different grades and morning module classes were grouped into sets of five to discuss each other’s papers. The goal of the exercise was to evaluate how effective each student was at communicating meaning through their writing, especially to students from different classes. Every student had to endure 10 minutes of silence while their peers discussed their paper in order to see how clearly they expressed their points to the readers who lacked background knowledge of the topic. This portion of the peer review is always stressful for the student writer, but it was nice to see how supportive and helpful the criticism was.
The students’ reactions when they discussed my paper were quite funny. After a bit of criticism, they started having a discussion of the American Dream and its merits. I believe that the tangents show genuine interest in each paper, and despite some occasional goofiness, each discussion was grounded in the eagerness to provide feedback to students. The criticism and discussions helped each author improve their writing for the future, especially me.
Ethan Ocasio
Class of 2021