Virtual Open House
Humanities
The Humanities department, like every other department at Nova, focuses on teaching language arts, history, and world languages through inquiry, discussion, and projects. In this section of the Virtual Open House you will find recorded interviews done with humanities teachers with Nova, and past students projects to give you an idea of what learning humanities is like at Nova High School!
Social Studies at Nova
Listen to Katja and Adam talk about Social Studies and interdisciplinary classes at Nova!
Ethnic Studies at Nova
Nova High School is one of the only schools in the district to teach Ethnic Studies classes, and is setting the standard by requiring an Ethnic Studies course as a graduation requirement.
Listen to Ella and Melissa talk about Ethnic Studies at Nova!
Language Arts at Nova
Listen to Jaydalen and Debbie talk about Language Arts classes, book projects, and student-centered education at Nova!
World Languages at Nova
For the past fourteen years, Nova’s World Language Department has been comprised of a single person: Lydia Condrea. Lydia is an incredible linguist who studied and taught many languages, including French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, and Greek. Along with teaching languages, Lydia also helped facilitate the learning of several languages, such as Japanese. Lydia taught all of her classes through immersion, allowing students to study language through songs, movies, games, work books, and conversation. It was a beautiful and incredibly effective curriculum, and was beloved by students and staff alike.
Lydia was planning to retire sometime in the next few years, but, due to the pandemic, she decided to retire at the end of the last school year (2019-2020). As such, the 2020-2021 school year is a time of transition for the Nova language department. For now, Lydia has kindly returned to us to finish up any language independent contracts she had with students, and teach French to those who are interested and need credit. If students would prefer and are eligible, they can also earn language credit through Running Start, taking language classes at a Seattle community college. Over the course of this school year, the students and staff at Nova are working hard to create a new language department, one that we are excited to share with the students who will be joining the Nova community next fall.
Past Student Projects
"This short story was written in a studio Ghibli film studies class" (Content warning: death)
“Nova has really allowed me to grow into my interests and take a deep dive in my love of writing and philosophy. This is a project I made as a part of a philosophy independent. Nova's project based education really allows the students to take an in depth, individual inquiry into complex subjects” (Content warning: hate groups, racism)
“I got an assignment about writing an essay in Film Class about my experience with race. Obviously, I'm white, so it's mostly about privilege, but it's specifically about my experience with the gifted and talented system? I kind of diverged from the initial topic a bit but I like where I went with it. [Content] warning for racism, classism, and swearing.”
"I took a class from Brian in my sophomore year, and we spent time throughout the semester playing the stock market game. At the end of the semester, we all wrote a prospectus for our made up companies based on what we did during the stock market game. That class really sparked an interest in economics for me."
“For Debbie's Studio Ghibli class, I had the opportunity to learn the soundtracks of the movies on piano as my projects for that class. It really helped me engage in the class when I didn't feel like writing.”
“I am currently in LGBTQ+ History and Curriculum class that is taught by Eyva. We are building the curriculum for the rest of the school district so that the LGBTQ+ community has more representation in education, history, arts, pop culture and society at large.” (Content warning: homophobia, violence)
"When I did US History, one of our assignments was to teach an hour long lesson to our classmates about one of the topics we were researching. I ended up teaching my lesson about the end of slavery through the lens of economics. It was a pretty incredible opportunity to practice my public speaking skills in a very supportive and relaxed environment--and it didn't hurt that the topic I got to teach to my classmates was one I was really interested in."
"I love most creative assignments but one of my favorites is from a Terrance class. We had to make up our own version of what happens after death in second person (using you/ yours). It was such a cool concept and vague enough for anyone to go wild with it."