Athenian’s Revamped ACI Curriculum

Photo Credits: Zoey Patterson

By Zoey Patterson

Every student at the Athenian Upper School remembers how exciting and terrifying it was to start ninth grade, how curious we all were about what the year would bring, and how little we knew about what to expect. But for this year’s freshmen, the experience is noticeably different to how it was just two years ago.

Last year was the first in which ninth graders took Computational Thinking and Sociology instead of ACI (Arts, Culture, and Identity, in which students took a quarter each of drama, visual art, music, and health). This year, the ninth grade history curriculum has been drastically changed and renamed from “World Cultures” to “World History.”

Computational Thinking is the modification least based in the previous curriculum, marking a switch from teaching all ninth graders about the arts to teaching them the basics of logic and computer science. This transition was controversial, but it may not be as binary as it seems.

“There’s STEM, right, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and there’s some people who say STEAM, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics,” Mark Lukach, ninth grade dean, said. “It’s kind of putting the A into the STEAM.”

The course is, however, centered on computer science and the skills it requires, and while it does lose most of the arts education, it is also important for students’ cognitive development.

“It’s not just programming, because Megan does a lot of stuff that’s actually completely removed from computers,” Lukach said. “It’s just about logically sequencing cause, effect, cause, effect, etc., which is a really helpful outlook, this idea of a logic-oriented view of the world.”

However, learning about computer science is also an important part of the class.

“My major takeaway from CT was how important coding was in the everyday world,” David Montgomery ’24 said in an email. “Especially with the final project, where we got to make a useful program, the class really showed me how coding can help both fulfill simple needs or solve global issues.”

Computational thinking prepares students not only for the wider world, but also future Athenian classes.

“It’s laying a framework and a mindset that is so crucial to all logic-based classes, which I think are primarily science and math, but also, even language follows a lot of logical patterns,” Lukach said.

In addition to being useful, Computational Thinking is, at least for some students, challenging and engaging.

“I'm not hugely into coding, but it was super interesting to take this class because not only did we learn about coding, but we learned a lot about different ways of thinking and how to solve different types of problems,” Anastasia Evans ’22 said in an email.

The other half of the year (some ninth graders start with Computational Thinking and some with Sociology) is Sociology, half of which deals with health and wellness and half of which deals with social justice.

The Health quarter of Sociology is relatively similar to the Health quarter of ACI, but it is now taught by Mark Lukach rather than by several faculty members (the specific teaching team changed from year to year).

“I have a pretty clear vision of the class from start to finish, and I know that everything we’re doing is kind of working in the same direction towards this final project,” Lukach said. “The reason that project makes sense is because as we keep going through all this stuff, I’m always sort of trying to connect the dots.”

This project, being enabled by there being a singular teacher, has no basis in the Health quarter of ACI.

“The final project for the Health class is [that] students build a self care plan,” Lukach said. “They basically say, how do I take care of myself around the issue of my diet? How do I take care of it around my exercise? Around my sleep? Around my mental health? Around my stress management? Around all these other things.”

However, there are disadvantages to having a single teacher.

“What was great about [ACI Health] is it exposed...students to a lot of people,” Lukach said. “You got to meet the counselor, you got to meet the learning specialist, you got to meet the athletic director, etc.”

These changes aside, taking Health for a quarter remains an important part of the ninth grade experience.

“We often are so busy in our lives that we tend to forget to check in with ourselves and assess our state-of-mind, and I think it's really important to have a class dedicated to doing that,” Montgomery said.

The other quarter, which focuses on social injustice, is equally important.

“It’s really looking at the structures in society that have created injustices,” Lukach said. “We look at race, gender disparity, sexual orientation and gender identity, immigration (I call that origin), and then also wealth, and then those become the lenses through which we look at society and try to talk about how to make it more just.”

Having a dedicated quarter to learn about these issues helps prepare ninth graders for later engagement with these issues, not only in their lives but within the Athenian community.

“We talk as a school a lot about social issues, and I often feel that ninth graders can sometimes be a bit intimidated and feel like they’re thrown into the deep end of the pool,” Lukach said. “The idea behind the social justice unit is to not necessarily learn everything, but at least learn...core ideas, so that ninth graders can feel confident going into...discussions, so that they know that [they are] a culturally competent member of the community.”

This new quarter on cultural competence also has to do with the change in ninth grade history.

“Cultural competence as a skillset has always been taught in World Cultures, but the idea was, ‘Let’s keep that in World Cultures, but let’s really solidify it in a separate class so that World Cultures can in fact be also a really clear history class,’” Lukach said.

However, focusing on history has helped the class itself become more culturally competent.

“We’re digging more deeply into these non-western cultures that...in the World Cultures course, were only really seen in relationship to colonialism,” Marty Rubio, history teacher, said. “We thought, well, we really need to tell the story of cultures before that, and really appreciate their richness, and then you can deal with the trauma that was brought about by imperialism.”

The format of the class has also changed, particularly the types of assignments given.“We moved away, at least in the first semester, from these really large assignments like the Hero/Villain Essay [an essay wherein students chose a historical figure and wrote about whether they were a hero or a villain] to smaller, more pointed writing assignments,” Rubio said.

These assignments all go into each student’s “Historian’s Journal.”

“The Historian’s Journal is an opportunity for students to reflect on deep questions about a particular unit,” Rubio said. “They’re usually questions of controversy, where you have to kind of argue for something or really reflect on...how that particular historical case is making you think about your own values.”

An important outcome of the course is the development of a historian’s skills.

“Those skills would involve document interpretation, weighing the validity of documents—so, initially, the stuff that the teachers will put in front of you, but then eventually...the students have to go out and find sources that are representative of really different arguments in history,” Rubio said. “We wanted to make sure that students came away from the course with the sense that the way you write history is an argument.”

Yet the skills learned in the class are not the only important part.

“Focusing on world history, we’re putting a context for any subsequent work, so when you do US History, that will really fill in the gaps, but you will have a sense of where the US fits on the world stage in history,” Rubio said. “And then I think a lot of the seminars that are offered are just really deeper dives, closer looks...and this will give you a general, and probably a broader, perspective to situate lots of different courses that you will take as a seminar.”

The course also aims to be an engaging experience for students!

“I didn't particularly enjoy history in my middle school, but this year, I really have enjoyed this class,” Stephen Klein ’24 said.