By Makenna ’23
One of the science courses that 11th and 12th graders can choose at the upper school is the Introduction of Psychology course. Being a full year course, the students will dive into many different aspects of human’s behavior and mind. As I am taking the course this year, I have experienced a quarter’s worth and want to share my views.
While it is vital for this course to have lecturing so the students can understand basic terms, we also dive into different real life case studies and partake in our own experiments. In terms of the case studies, we have read articles related to psychology. For example, we learned about one man whose whole personality changed after having a metal rod damage his prefrontal cortex. We also have watched videos with human test subjects to prove a certain hypothesis. The videos are always engaging and make us question how we would act if being experimented on.
Additionally, our teacher will assign us different activities as assessments related to whichever unit we are on. So far we have covered the brain and stages of life. When studying the brain, we were able to choose from many different topics to become experts in and then teach the class about. My group made a short film called, “How to Create A Zombie,” showing all the different brain functions being disabled when turning into a zombie. Another fun activity we partook in is the egg experiment, where two people were assigned an egg to take care of for 48 hours. We had to feed it, burp it, nap it, and the list goes on. The assignment was as creative as we made it so how we took care of the baby (egg) varied from person to person. These are just two examples of fun assignments we have done. Overall, psychology is a fascinating course to select if you are interested in why humans think and act the way they do.
