Course Search 2024-2025

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Upper School Advanced Topics Curriculum

In an effort to provide a rigorous alternative to the standardized curriculum and testing of AP courses, we have created a menu of Advanced Seminars for Seniors and selected Juniors that equal or exceed AP courses in terms of conceptual challenge, complexity of material, development of critical skills and overall preparation for college academics. They are therefore among the most academically rigorous courses we offer. These courses, which are either one semester or full year, are proposed by faculty with a particular interest and expertise in a given field and are subject to a thorough peer-review process, overseen by a committee of experienced teachers with college teaching backgrounds, before being authorized by the School. The seminar format promotes critical thought and discussion, requires students to work independently and is flexible enough to encompass a broad range of course themes. In all Advanced Seminars, the level of reading, writing and critical discussion equals that found in a first-year college course. Seminars are small, and enrollment is by permission of the instructor.


Advanced Topics Fall 2024

Students wishing to take an Advanced Seminar must submit a completed questionnaire and a graded writing sample to the relevant instructor. Interviews might be required, also.

Anthropology of Childhood Games and Play

Instructor: Jack Bartholomew

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Fall Semester

Children have played games since the dawn of humankind, representing ways in which they had fun, socialized, learned norms, and collaborated—establishing social expectations, experiencing independence, creativity, and pushing behavioral boundaries. This course introduces anthropology (especially socio-cultural anthropology) as a field of study, applying it to understand the nature of play and games in various cultures/societies in diverse geographical regions and eras. We ask about the nature of childhood and play, and how similar games are realized in different ways—and what this tells us about other (and our own!) cultures. Students should come to class open to learning about other cultures and reading from challenging, scholarly materials.

Chemical Engineering Process Design

Instructor: Sara Chuang

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Fall Semester

In this course students will have the opportunity to delve into chemical engineering process design in order to understand the scope and impact of process design on the world. Chemical engineering is inherently interdisciplinary and has many applications in pharmaceuticals, energy generation, food and consumer products. How are ice cream bars made? Plastic bags, shampoo? How are these processes and factories designed? Where do the waste materials end up (life cycle analysis)? The course will introduce students to the holistic analysis of an industrial process, and teach them soft skills of communication for conducting meetings, presentations, and working on teams.

Group Theory, Combinatorics, and Rubik’s Cube

Instructor: Ryan Tamburrino

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Fall Semester

As one of the best-selling toys of all time, Erno Rubik’s enigmatic cube has befuddled and entranced countless minds, permanently frustrating some and deeply inspiring others. Immediately recognizable to nearly everyone on Earth, it sets forth an intuitive challenge: put the scrambled cube back into its fully ordered state, where all like colors align with one another. However, this simple premise belies the rich mathematical complexity behind this object. The cube is a tangible example of one of the most powerful mathematical structures: a group. Combinations of moves and rotations permute the pieces in different ways, with the possibility of combining and reducing moves to construct more optimal solutions. In this course, we will learn the fundamental concepts of group theory and combinatorics, using the cube as a motivator for readings, discussions, and problems. Along the way, we will explore how results of group theory and combinatorics manifest in the cube. By the end, students will be able to prove that a cube can exist in over 43 quintillion states, compare different methods of solving, use group theory to construct their own algorithms, and learn how mathematicians proved that any scrambled cube can be solved in twenty moves or fewer - and why it took them over 30 years to do so.

Advanced Seminars Spring 2024

Students wishing to take an Advanced Seminar must submit a completed questionnaire and a graded writing sample to the relevant instructor. Interviews might be required, also.

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Instructor: Jack Bartholomew

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Spring Semester

Artificial intelligence has critical ethical, psychological, and social implications. Applications abound for healthcare, security, e-government and the public sector, transportation, logistics, education-with new applications appearing all the time. A.I. technologies impact fairness and equity, job displacement, potential erroring and misuse by malevolent actors, privacy, and security. In this course we enter this new world, helping you to navigate the challenges. We'll learn about how A.I. works, explore applications, and apply ethics-from classical philosophical theories to modern ethics of technology-to these new concerns. We'll also ask if A.I. can ever achieve consciousness.

Comparative Biomechanics

Instructor: Dennis Evangelista

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Spring Semester

This course examines engineering and physics principles as applied to living organisms and how organisms work. It is relevant for students interested in biology, physiology, medicine, design for humans, and biologically-inspired design and will cross those disciplines. Examples will include topics drawn from scientific literature, including bio locomotion, structural mechanics, biological fluid flow, neural control systems, animal and plant behavior, ecomechanics, evolution, systematics, and more.

Is 21st Century the New Rennaissance?

Instructor: Gorica Lalic

Enrollment limited to: 10

Prerequisites: Honor roll status and permission of instructor

Open to students in the following grades: 11, 12

Spring Semester

The emergence of new media and spreading of information that changes everything. New utopias, new forms of freedom, globalization, wars, pandemics and apocalyptic anguishes. Are these exclusively twenty-first-century archetypes? Not quite. The men and women of the Renaissance lived through it all. This course will allow students to experience one of the richest periods in the history of Western culture, refracted through several lenses of humanistic scholarship. Aside from making connections across academic disciplines of art history, literature, comparative philosophy, religious studies, theatre, and history, students will explore the various ways our prosperous twenty-first century resembles Renaissance life.