What does loss of biodiversity indicate about an ecosystem? When does culture become an act of resistance? How do places compose—or discompose—us? What is consciousness?

All questions worth answering and all derived from the newest spate of electives offered at Commonwealth School. Keep reading to learn more about these exciting college-level classes—and be sure to meet the teachers behind them, too. 

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Advanced Topics in Neuroscience
Teacher: Ms. Sundberg

What is a brain? What is consciousness? How is personality encoded in the genome and wired in the brain? Commonwealth Biology classes touch upon these topics, but there is so much more to explore. This course starts with a review of the cellular structure of the nervous system before diving deeply into the molecular pathways involved in nervous system communication. A molecular background will prepare students to read scientific publications investigating the neuroscience of topics including motivation, emotion, sleep, and learning.

Environmental Science
Teacher: Ms. Mathur

Through significant lab and field work, this class studies the interaction between natural systems—solid earth, air, water, and other living organisms—and humans, with the purpose of understanding and responding to human-induced environmental change. Topics addressed include ecosystems, renewable and nonrenewable resources and conservation, human population dynamics, local environmental quality (including air and water pollution and hazardous waste disposal), toxicology, and human health. Ultimately, this background will facilitate an exploration of global changes and their consequences, including climate change and loss of biodiversity. Environmental science is an interdisciplinary field, and as such the class investigates issues not only from the scientific perspective but also from economic, political, and sociological angles, including discussion of environmental laws and regulations and issues in environmental justice.

Medieval Islamic Mathematics
Teacher: Mr. Letarte

This course will focus on the accomplishments of Muslim mathematicians in the 600-year period between the destruction of the Library at Alexandria and the Crusades. Often neglected by math and history books, Muslims made mathematical contributions of great theoretical and practical significance, from pioneering new solution strategies for the great problems of geometry that had been left unsolved by Euclid and other Ancient Greek thinkers to developing powerful computational methods for decimal arithmetic and extraction of roots and compiling tables of trigonometric ratios. Their work in spherical trigonometry was particularly impressive, allowing them to solve such intricate problems in navigation and astronomy as determining the rising times of stars and estimating the distances and bearings between cities. The mathematical ideas to be explored in the course are striking by virtue of both their beauty and their accessibility to those with only modest mathematical preparation. As the Muslims’ choice of topics of study seems to have been governed somewhat by religious and cultural factors, questions of a historical nature about Islam are bound to arise, and the course endeavors to address these questions from a historical perspective in addition to doing the mathematics itself. 

Russian Literature in Translation
Teacher: Mr. Conolly

Students in this class can expect to explore how Russian letters in the 19th-century responded to trends in Russian society, especially Russia’s rapid westernization and the simultaneous development of its identity as a separate civilization, one appointed with a historical mission to save Europe from itself. The course investigates how intellectuals responded to the repressive, imperialistic regime that emerged from this tension, paying particular attention to the ways writers navigated state censorship and other forms of social control, whether they chose to resist the “system” or promote it. And it does not shy away from observing the through lines between tsarist, communist, and contemporary Russia. Though the class begins with an exploration of works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Karolina Pavlova, the latter stages focus on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, both as social critics and penetrating psychologists. In Tolstoy students will also find a defender of ethnic and religious minorities, reading, among other works, his late novella Hadji Murat, a sympathetic depiction of a Dagestani Muslim rebel. In addition, the class gives ear to some non-Russian voices within the Russian empire, such as Taras Shevchenko and Adam Mickiewicz, the “national” poets of Ukraine and Poland, respectively. 

South of the Border: The History and Culture of the Other Americas
Teacher: Mr. Péréz

This course will attempt to account for the dazzling multiplicity of American peoples, cultures, and stories, from the colonial era to the present. We will discuss the devastating impact of colonization on the indigenous peoples, the ideas that informed the urban planning and the administration of the new colonies, the struggles of the oppressed and the enslaved, the emergence of nation-states in the wake of the Independence movement, and the societies created by the clash of cultures and traditions. We will explore concepts like transculturation, hybridity, and syncretism and will read some of the texts that decisively influenced the new republics’ nation-building, such as Our America by José Martí, The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos, and Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire. We will explore culture as a site of agency and resistance for communities that have been traditionally marginalized or excluded from the national project. Last but not least, we will pay special attention to the complex history of the region’s interactions with the United States from the nineteenth century onwards. 

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