The ninth grade summer reading was the graphic novel, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. The unit focused on distilling the main ideas of the novel, understanding the problems of singular viewpoints, and developing a five-paragraph essay.

I learning about the decolonization, we focused on the British in India and how damaging the Partition with Pakistan was. Additionally, we talked about the Cold War and how it influenced African decolonization to understand the influence of major world powers in the continent.

For our Judaism unit, we focused on the history of the religion and in understanding how anti-Semitism affects Jewish people worldwide today. By reading several primary and secondary scholarly sources, we discussed how we could do better as a society.

Created as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, this mini-unit explores the famine of Mount Lebanon and disease, offering a closer look at how war affects people who never fought in it, and exploring why some histories are silenced.