The beginning of the fall semester is an exciting time at Central, a period of introduction during which students form new friendships and cultivate new interests. It’s also a period of introduction in the classroom, when teachers set the tone for the year with activities that will inspire.
The month of September brought thought-provoking units from all fronts at Central. In Mrs. April McNally’s Health class, students addressed crucial issues of mental health. “As a class, we learned that there should be more awareness and education around these topics,” Mrs. McNally said. Junior Arielle Bronstein discussed some of the media that was incorporated into the lesson: “We watched a Ted Talk about teen depression, and talked about the stigmas surrounding discussions on mental health,” she said. “It was worthwhile.” In the Science Department, the juniors of Mr. Sabyasachi Rath’s Physics class made the Central gym their lab, as they learned about the concept of velocity by using toy cars, meter sticks, and stopwatches. They recorded the distance traveled by cars at different times, then graphed the data and analyzed their graphs to find the velocity of the toy cars. And in Ms. Kayla Whitaker’s American Literature classes, juniors were charged with writing literary journalism essays as their first major writing assignment of the year after having read Dave Eggers’ 2009 nonfiction work Zeitoun, which covers one man’s experience during Hurricane Katrina. Essays ranged from firsthand accounts of stadium concerts and summer work experiences to interviews with family members and friends about political and social events. Junior Ora Nakhon praised the experience: “The literary journalism assignment was very interesting, fun, and enjoyable to write,” she said, “because I got to interview another individual and write about their experience as an engaging story, while also adding my own perspective.”
