Ninth Grade

Educate powers of observation through a study of polarities.
Ninth grade sees the unfolding of the force of intellect. The young person begins to form independent opinions based on the experiences of life. As the freshmen plunge into the new experiences of high school, so they are also plunging into physical and hormonal changes of adolescence, and into the realm of abstract thinking.

The ninth grade curriculum is sensitive to these tremendous developmental changes and is grounded in the realm of polarity the ninth grader is experiencing. It provides the students with the opportunity of seeing their inner experiences reflected back to them in outer phenomena. In physics, for example, the students study the polarity of heat and cold; in geography, the drama of plate tectonics; in humanities, the history of the theater and in particular, tragedy and comedy; in art, black and white drawing.

Through the tension of the polarity, students are summoned to exercise powers of exact observation; in the sciences, to describe and draw precisely what happened in the experiments and demonstrations; in the humanities, to recount clearly a sequence of events or the nature of a character without getting lost in the confusion of details. The objective is to train exact powers of observation and recollection so that the students can experience in the often-confusing wealth of phenomena of the world around them the steady ballast of their own thinking. Strengthening powers of conscious perception in the students gives them the basis for later years of study, even beyond high school.
OVERVIEW           9TH GRADE            10TH GRADE           11TH GRADE           12TH GRADE