Malone Schools Online Network Courses

Instructor: Briana Titus, Casady School, Oklahoma City, OK

This is a beginning course for students who have not studied ancient Greek before or whose background in Greek is not sufficient for more advanced work. Students proceed through a study of grammar and vocabulary to the reading and writing of sentences and short narratives in the language of Athens of the fifth century B.C.E. Selected topics in Greek history and art are also considered.

Instructors: Farha Abu Baker, Hopkins School, New Haven, CT Kaveh Niazi, Stanford Online High School, Stanford, CA

This first-year course of a two-year sequence is an introduction to Modern Standard Arabic, the language of formal speech and most printed materials in the Arab-speaking world. Students will learn to read and write the Arabic alphabet and will develop beginning proficiency in the language. Through frequent oral and written drills, students will develop their basic communication skills. (First of a two-year sequence)

Instructor: Tilden Daniels, Hopkins School, New Haven, CT

This course is designed for students who have successfully completed French level 5. The college level topics are chosen to prepare students for studying French beyond high school and to provide deeper insight into French and Francophone cultures. Students examine various topics in French language, history, culture, cinema, and literature while interpreting authentic documents. Faithful to the idea of a seminar, the course requires students to be responsible for extensive reading and preparation. Activities including compositions, oral presentations, and discussions enable students to achieve a high level of proficiency in speaking and writing. The literary texts studied are often paired with a film in order to give students an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of francophone culture and to improve their listening skills. Each work is also studied with an historical perspective. For example, La Chanson de Roland is studied along with the hit comedy Les Visiteurs (1993) and an exploration of Charlemagne, the Battle of Hastings, and the crusades. Similarly, L’Exil et le Royaume by Albert Camus is studied along with the film Loin des Hommes (2014) and an exploration of France at the time of Algerian War (1954-1962). With an eye towards the theme of “national identities,” students are asked to consider how each work helps to reinforce and question an individual’s sense of identity and belonging to a nation and its values. This class is conducted entirely in French.

Instructor: Dean Masullo, University School of Nashville, Nashville, TN

Arguably the most influential, important, and closely scrutinized American artist of the past six decades, Bob Dylan is as difficult to define as the nation that produced him. Connecting his work to contemporary theories of cultural memory, this course looks at the ways in which Dylan, both in his music and his cultivation of various public personae, maps the contours of the national imagination and explores the prevailing attitudes of class, race, gender, and place in American culture. Proceeding chronologically and using Dylan’s masterworks and subsequent official “bootleg” recordings as touchstones, students will consider a variety of texts, including poetry, fiction, and cultural history; biography and autobiography; and popular and documentary film, including Greil Marcus’ The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (2001), Murray Lerner’s Festival (1967), D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), and Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005) and Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story (2015). Access to a music streaming service such as Spotify or Apple Music is required; access to video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime is strongly recommended.

Instructor: John Aden, Canterbury School, Ft. Wayne, IN

This course examines the ways our Human Family has sought to create, marshal, contest, and maintain identities through Culture and relations of power. These identities can be appreciated through “lenses of analysis.” The course critically engages the traditional “Big Three” lenses of analysis: Race, Class, and Gender, understanding that Culture serves as an important backdrop against which these identities emerge. Once students appreciate the important ways the Social Sciences have engaged with, written about, and debated these three core modes of analysis, the course expands to incorporate other, equally rich, lenses: age, ableism, intellectual diversity, geographic diversity, cognitive and neurological diversity, and the business case for Diversity, as well as how to study synergistically intertwined phenomena. Film and Critical Film Studies, as well as the role Colonialism has played in the major conflicts of the last 500 years, each serve to enrich student understandings of Diversity.

Instructor: Ellen Johnson, Ph.D., Wilmington Friends School, Wilmington, DE

This course will focus on such cases as environmental sustainability, global energy and food resources, gathered from sources in literature, journalism, and film. The academic study of ethics examines how people make the decisions. Curricula will build on a foundation of theoretical moral theories, more specifically, how one makes decisions when faced with complex, often controversial, issues. No prior knowledge of philosophy is assumed, however, authentic assessment of students’ initial facility with logical analysis will ensure that all students are challenged to grow and deepen their theoretical and practical understandings of the subject.

Instructor: David Seward, Winchester Thurston School, Pittsburgh, PA

The purpose of the course is, to quote the textbook, “By teaching ... the root elements of medical terminology – the prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms of Greek and Latin ... not only to teach students modern medical terminology, but to give them the ability to decipher the evolving language of medicine throughout their careers.” This is in many ways a language course and deals with elements that are used to create terms to meet the specific needs of medical scientists. As material is introduced, students will complete practice exercises during each class meeting, as well as complete approximately one quiz per week. Outside of class, students are expected to analyze and define fifty terms each week. Additional material deals with complex etymologies, the history of our understanding of certain aspects of medical science, and relevant material from Greek and Latin texts.

Instructor: Aaron Lehman, Porter-Gaud, Charleston SC

James Joyce created the most beautiful literature of the Twentieth Century, prose that has thrilled and at times confounded readers for generations. Simply put, Ulysses, his 1922 masterpiece, changed the landscape for the novel as a whole. This course will unpack the mystery and loveliness of two Joyce novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, giving students the close- reading tools to appreciate and make sense of Joyce’s particular literary power, to scale the edifice of Ulysses to see it for what it truly is: a marvel of stylistic achievement, a testament to the ways in which language shapes us as we shape it, and, at its core, a gorgeous love story and an exploration of the everyday heroism that we often overlook. In particular, we will explore how Joyce tried to render the authentic human experience through language: how Joyce wanted literature to look and feel more like life than like “art,” how he wanted literature to mirror the texture of the actual thinking and feeling mind. To that end, while the course will give students an intensive look at arguably the greatest literary mind since Shakespeare, it will also have us—teacher and student alike—consider what it means to inhabit fully our hearts, minds, and selves in the modern world.

Instructor: Linda Rodriguez, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, Jackson, MS

This semester seminar is designed as a survey of literature that focuses on expressions of oppression. From protest to processing, persecuted populations have created many mechanisms to give voice to their suffering. Books, memoirs, songs, short stories, and documentaries will all be used to discover the power of personal experience. Additionally, the class will explore the ways in which oppressed voices have been instruments in forcing positive social change throughout the 20th century.

Instructors: Ellen Johnson, Wilmington Friends School, Wilmington, DE Joyce Lazier, Canterbury School, Ft. Wayne, IN

The objective of this course is to provide students with the tools and experience necessary to better make difficult, ethical decisions. In order to achieve this, we will study and evaluate critically several different ethical theories including Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, and Deontology. Which framework students choose to use as their guide is up to them, but by the end of this course they should be able to defend their choices and ethical decisions clearly. The course strives to develop a cross conversation between two academic disciplines - philosophy (ethics) and biology (medical research, molecular genetics). This is a collaborative teaching effort between Joyce Lazier (background in philosophy and ethics) and Ellen Johnson (background in biology and genetics), and an evolution of two previously existing courses. Both teachers will be present for all classes, focusing on the growth that comes from a shared discourse.

Instructor: Linda Rodriguez, St. Andrews Episcopal School, Ridgeland, MS

The story of equality in America is a tale of achingly slow but steady progress. From the Civil War to the present day, the path toward equal rights has never been direct or secure. This semester course is designed as an interdisciplinary exploration of the quest for civil rights throughout the 19th and 20th centuries as it relates to African Americans, women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, migrant workers and the LGBTQ community. Special focus will be given to the indelible role that the deep South played in the struggle. Students will work with various texts including Supreme Court Cases, memoir, essays, poetry, short fiction, and primary source documents. Additionally, students will design and implement their own oral history projects as a culmination to the class.

Instructor: Dan Jacobs, Roeper School, Bloomfield Hills, MI

Water justice. Gentrification. Housing. Education. Race Relations. Public Safety. Environmental Issues. Is it wrong to shut off water service to households that are delinquent on their water bills? Is access to affordable housing a human right? Should environmental issues take priority over the needs of businesses? Do we have an obligation to help asylum seekers? People all around the world struggle with these and other challenges. In Think Global, Debate Local, we use issues in our own neighborhoods to take deep dives into the facts and philosophies underlying the challenges, values, and perspectives that shape our world on scales ranging from the personal to the global. The overarching goal of this course is for students to teach each other about important topics in their own neighborhoods, towns, states, and regions, and to use debate as a tool to examine the perspectives surrounding those topics. Other goals include achieving a better understanding of complex issues by taking on and arguing for the viewpoints of various stakeholders; discovering ways to shift from an adversarial to a cooperative relationship when disagreements arise; and understanding the ways different values can be used as filters through which a given issue can be viewed. Please note that this course is geared toward beginning debaters with an emphasis on basic argumentation, not competition, although more experienced debaters are welcome.

Instructor: Jocelyn Rodgers, Ph.D., Maret School, Washington, DC

This semester course will provide useful background information in organic chemistry by covering topics not typically found in high school chemistry courses. The course will give insight into the importance of the chemistry of carbon compounds to our daily lives. Topics covered will include organic nomenclature, structural formulas, stereochemistry, bonding, reaction mechanisms, and chemical transformations of functional groups. Completion of the course should make students more confident in their chemical background when entering college biology or chemistry courses.

Instructor: Jocelyn Rodgers, Ph.D., Maret School, Washington, DC

This semester course explores aspects of chemistry that are often skimmed over or omitted in most chemistry courses—chemical applications and the history of chemistry. Real-world applications abound in areas such as nuclear, medical, atmospheric, industrial, food, water, and consumer product chemistry. We will begin with an exploration of energy sources such as nuclear power, solar power, and lithium ion batteries. We will then explore computing—both the properties of the elements that power the computers we use every day as well as computational techniques that have revolutionized the ability of scientists and students to visualize and understand chemical processes at a molecular level. Throughout the semester, we also explore the history and life events of scientists who discovered the chemical elements and have impacted the history of the world through chemistry. In independent projects, students will explore the periodic table for daily applications and technologies, from cell phones to photovoltaic cells to medical treatments. This course will be heavy in applications and theory, with less of the traditional problem-solving found in other courses.

Instructor: Jay Noland, Mounds Park Academy, St. Paul, MN

The main purpose of this course is an introduction to mathematical modeling through graphical, numerical, symbolic, and verbal techniques. We will focus on data from and explore social justice issues such as the Wealth Gap, Achievement Gap, Climate Change and others. We will use elementary functions (polynomial, exponential, logarithmic, etc.) to build models and address questions with the goal of developing scientific reasoning and problem-solving skills. Students will also use technology in a range of ways to effectively communicate their hypotheses and conclusions.