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NA NEWS
THE ARTS
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Elective Pursuits THE UNSUNG HEROS OF OUR CURRICULUM by Jeff Vinikoor, Humanities Department Chair English teacher Stephanie Acquadro grew up watching and loving good movies. “When I was little and most of the viewing fare on early TV was old movies,” recalls Stephanie, “my mom could walk through the room, glance at the screen and say, ‘Oh, look. It’s Beulah Bondi’ or ‘Akim Tamiroff!’ – like I knew who they were. But after years of a steady diet of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, I was hooked.”
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s an adult, Stephanie’s interest in the silver screen never waned, and in 2001, after taking a film theory and history course at New York University, she created Film Studies, a senior elective course that has allowed her to share her passion with Newark Academy’s students. Today, Film Studies remains on the roster of academic electives offered as part of the Upper School program. Independently designed by Newark Academy faculty and departments and approved by the school’s Curriculum Committee, academic electives are untethered from standardized curricula and external examinations. As a result, teachers have increased flexibility in terms of scope and concentration. “It is hard to overestimate how important this is to the feeling and experience of freedom in the classroom,” explains Upper School Principal Rich DiBianca. “The teachers can innovate and detour as they see fit.” Science teacher Amy Hone has taken advantage of the opportunity to innovate in Anatomy and Physiology, an elective she has taught for seven years. “Everyone loves learning about how their body works,” says Amy, who designed the course to serve the needs of both students who are naturally drawn
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to the biological sciences and those who are fascinated by the subject matter but less certain of their skills. The course offers students the opportunity to understand at a sophisticated level how the human body operates, with animal dissections and other investigations supplementing classroom study. On any given day, one might find students in Amy’s laboratory grappling to understand a model of the heart or examining human skin cells. According to Amy, “Dissection of the fetal pig is always a high point of the year.” Dr. DiBianca jokes that academic electives are “the unsung heroes of our curriculum,” since they are neither part of a required course sequence nor affiliated with the International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement programs. Of course, the students who enroll in electives – typically juniors and seniors, many of whom take an elective as an extra (sixth) academic course – come to appreciate their unique elements. Elana Widmann ’10 took Politics of Change as a sixth academic course during her junior year. In this year-long elective created by Humanities teacher Amy Schottland, students examine the cultural and political ramifications of the 1960s as well as the challenges facing the