HUM 300 Course Description: Humanities (5 days/week--1 credit) This course, a senior requirement, serves as a summation of the high school years as well as an introduction to the intellectual pursuits of college and later life. Through a combination of lectures, readings, seminar discussions, and independent study the students, together with a faculty drawn from all the academic disciplines, explore the experience and culture of an age: its art, music, philosophy, science, literature, history. Each student undertakes an extensive independent project to conclude the year.
For non-Newman people who are reading this page, humanities is the BS course described in the above excerpt from the official school course announcement (circa 2002). The entire second semester is spent developing your own project, which is based on your section's specific sub-topic. Successful completion of the project is a pre-requisite for graduation.
Anyway, for my class, the time period included the roughly 50 years before World War I. My section's specific sub-topic was on The Bon Marché, formerly of Paris. In other words, your topic had to connect in some way to The Bon Marché. I could care less about the French, so I decided to do my project on The Bon Marché of Seattle, which is a city I really love. I decided to do a lecture, which that year required a somewhat lengthy paper and a 15-20 minute lecture complete with a PowerPoint-style presentation.
Since this is such a major project, teachers stress spreading the workload out and not leaving things to the last minute. Procrastination being my middle name, I put everything off for as long as I could. Sure, I got all the books I needed, did a little preliminary research to see if the topic was viable, and even had a general idea of what I wanted to write about. Translation: The Sunday night before the project was due (08:00 CT Wednesday Morning) I still hadn't opened a book.
Therefore, I present my project to you as living proof that one can make a Newman Humanities Project in less than 60 hours and still get an "A." If you find any errors, grammatical or factual, don't bother telling me because I'll just ignore your e-mail. The point is that you can't do a perfect project, but you can do a successful project in such a short amount of time. It also doubled as great preparation for college. The content has not been altered since I turned the project in back in March 2002. And have you ever ordered a large triple cappuccino from P.J.'s at 08:15 in the morning? So without any further ado...
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