winter 2007 - Concord Academy

Seniors’ Studiesby Charlie Hruska ’07CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE WINTER 2007Every week, about a dozen CA students, including one faculty member, gather ina classroom to learn Korean. They repeat common phrases, practice simple Koreanvocabulary, sometimes watch popular Korean TV shows.The class has a formal syllabus, and the teacher follows up with students tokeep them on track. No matter that this instructor is only seventeen, an internationalstudent who was motivated to teach Korean by peers who showed an interest in hernative language.“Last spring, I was talking to a friend about how there are so many Koreans atCA and how he wished he understood Korean,” said Janice Kim ’07. “I thought itwould be cool if I could somehow manage to teach Korean somewhat formally tostudents.”Janice turned the course she began last spring into a senior project, a privilegegranted to a few students to do interdisciplinary work during their final year at ConcordAcademy. She describes her class as a bridge between two cultures.Janice and two other students this year—Gwen Blumberg and LouisaDenison—have shaped senior projects that allow them to study a language outside thepreframed classroom structure, to combine other passions with high-level work in theirchosen languages.Gwen is creating an activity book for elementary school children—full ofrecipes, short stories, coloring, and crafts—in Spanish and English. The idea came toher during a summer trip to Peru, where she worked with orphans. “There I was incharge of keeping a bunch of kids in an orphanage entertained each morning, so I hadto come up with activities to do with them,” she said. “Most were activities thathopefully the kids could continue to do after I left, as I wasn’t there all that long. That’sreally how I came up with the idea for my senior project.” Besides compiling the activitybook, Gwen plans to incorporate research in her project about the controversysurrounding bilingual education.Louisa is tackling French literature for her senior project, combining extensivereading (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, and Madame Bovary) with Frenchcooking to illustrate the role of women in nineteenth-century France. “The kind of foodyou eat, who prepares the food, who eats the food—all these aspects of eating reallydefine your social position and your own values,” she said. “I’m hoping to use food as alens to view the different social standings and lives of the French women I am readingabout.” She isn’t sure yet what she’ll be serving at the presentation. “I’ll steer toward thesweet side of things, since I doubt CA wants to taste some of the extravagant meatcourses the French favored back then,” Louisa said.While the sweets may disappear rapidly from Louisa’s plate, the lessons offoreign literature will not. “There is something incredibly valuable about readingliterature in its original language,” Louisa said. “I’m really lucky to have the opportunityto decide what books I want to read—and to shape my project around what I take fromthese books. Already, I am finding Madame Bovary full of beautiful words anddisturbingly persuasive characters.”28