9th Grade Curriculum
As the freshmen plunge into the high school, so they are also plunging with new intensity into the materiality of their bodies (with the unfolding of puberty) and into the immateriality of abstract thinking. There is tension in this opposition: often struggle, occasionally even revolt.
The ninth grade curriculum is sensitive to these tremendous developmental changes and struggles. It allows the students to see their inner experiences reflected back to them in outer phenomena. In physics, for instance, students study the opposition of heat and cold; in chemistry, the expansion and contraction of gases; in history, the conflicts and revolutions of France, Russia, and the U.S.; in geography, the collision of plate tectonics.
Through the chaos and tension of these struggles, students are summoned to exercise powers of exact observation; in the sciences, to describe and draw precisely what happened in the lab experiments and demonstrations (without, adding, as yet, an overlay of theoretical explanation); 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 here is to train the students' powers of exact observation and reflection so that they can experience in the raging storm of phenomena around them the steady ballast of their own thinking. Strong powers of wakeful perception form the basis for later years of study -- well beyond high school.
One may summarize the approach of this freshman curriculum with the seminal question: What? What happened? What's going on here? What did you see and hear?
A final note on the freshman year. Unlike some other high school programs, which start at the beginning of history and literature in grade 9 and work their way steadily up to modern times, our curriculum begins in the modern world: 19th and 20th century in history, contemporary short stories in literature, recent discoveries in life sciences, etc. We find that the ninth grader hungers for experiences of the "here-and-now"; the yearning to uncover the ancient beginnings of things has yet to stir.
