Students and teachers prepare for the Humanities Symposium
With the arrival of April, the time nears for the annual high school Humanities Symposium, which will be held on Saturday, May 25th this year. As always, the Humanities Symposium aims to showcase the best student work from the current school year in the humanities subjects: English, drama, art, music, and film.
What is different from previous years is the fact that, this year, students can apply to be a presenter by turning in an application form that describes the medium and content of their work to their subject teacher. The applications were due on April 3rd, and teachers are supposed to evaluate the work and announce their decision by April 10th, a date that is tentative and subject to change. Meanwhile, as usual, the teachers themselves can still nominate and recommend quality works their students produced. For the history department, works which won National History Day awards remain a priority, and to promote the AP Capstone program, multiple AP Seminar project presentations will occur as well as a few AP Research project presentations. The selection of works, according to Mr. Jeff Boldt, “will be based on two criterias: one, that it is of exceeding excellence and quality – basically, a work that goes above and beyond and deserves a wider audience; two, an attempt is made to select and show a variety of different types of works, from videos, to Power Points, to poetry and paper readings, to even dramatic and musical compositions. For example, the English department will try to avoid filling their sessions with just readings of student essays.”
Then, after the teachers have finalized their choices, the qualified students are expected to learn about their session assignments and obtain the guidelines and expectations form, the content of which depends on the type of work they are to present. After that, students should prepare their presentations and rehearse so that they are ready on the day of the humanities symposium.
Another change in the preparation process for the humanities symposium is the presence of students on the core organizing team. This year, Jessie Wu (11B), Matthew Yang (11A), Angela Dai (11C), and Leon Chong (11A) joined Mr. Boldt, Mr. Scott Sanders, Mrs. Sharon Ma, Mrs. Jeannie Hooi, Mr. Kevin Olson, Mrs. Irina Edwards, and Mr. Roy McMaster. In fact, Matthew Yang and Leon Chong gave the informative presentation on humanities symposium in late March to high schoolers, a role that used to be performed by Mr. Boldt himself. According to Matthew Yang, “We are basically taking a portion of the teacher’s tasks. Jessie is team leader. Right now what the student team is doing is mainly promoting, [and] the teachers still make the room requests and give out the application forms to their students themselves. Since we aren’t close to the day [of the actual event, however,] we didn’t get to the logistics of setting up the rooms and stuff yet.” Mr. Bodlt explained that the student team is “learning the ropes” this year, and “will be fully taking over the planning and organizing process next year. “Going forward, teachers will act in an advisory capacity and a student team will take more ownership and responsibility over running [The Humanities Symposium]. [Then] during their senior year, it will be the responsibility of the student team to raise up a new team to take over for them when they graduate.”
Featured Image – Humanities Symposium theme poster – Photo courtesy of Jessie Wu
By Gracier Dai