Welcome to the Core

Just a quick picture I wanted to save for posterity.  Here in the Core at Champlain we pride ourselves on inspiring students to take an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems, and here's a classic example.  I had my students read the first eight pages of a transcript of the fascinating PBS Frontline documentary on the infamous Rockdale County High School sex scandal from the late 1990s.  Essentially, the story started with one high school girl testing positive for syphilis, and then the numbers exploded until it was revealed that there was an underground sex club at the high school that involved dozens of students.  It was a fascinating and troubling social phenomenon.  My students were charged with using some of the concepts we had learned this summer from psychology and neuroscience and sociology and theories of the self - and even literature and art and film - to explain what happened.  Here is the result of the free-wheeling discussion.

The key was to emphasize the different lenses that you could - and should - use to analyze evidence.  We did something similar using the pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison which was equally fascinating but even more depressing.