Modeled closely on the practices of the city’s finest independent schools, the Humanities Program allows students to undertake a rigorous interdisciplinary study of great literature from around the world. In-school art galleries and other unique elements create an immersive intellectual culture that inspires students to imagine their role on the world stage. Each year culminates in the study and performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays.

Introduction to Humanities

From reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest in fifth grade, to analyzing master works in our art galleries, the Ascend Humanities Program challenges students to think critically, develop writing and oratory skills, and take intellectual risks.

Many selected works connect thematically to museum-quality reproductions of great works of art that hang in specially designed “gallery” spaces throughout the middle school facilities. These gallery spaces are designed for Ascend students to gather outside the classroom to discuss a work of art relevant to a literary work they are studying or a writing assignment they are developing. For example, fifth graders begin the year studying the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. They then study Breughel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” a reproduction of which hangs in a school’s gallery. This study is followed by a close reading of Auden’s famous 1940 poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which was inspired by Breughel’s painting. Students then write their own first-person re-tellings of the myth from the perspective of Daedalus, Icarus, or one of the witnesses.

By emphasizing the development of students’ skills as attentive readers, listeners, and scholars with distinct writing styles and unique perspectives, students’ abilities to empathize and communicate with others are deepened.

Following a rigorous and vertically-aligned math program that emphasizes the Common Core focus on problem-solving, conceptual understanding, and computational fluency, Ascend students develop a deep understanding of math, including algebraic concepts. The program features three essential elements.

• Standards-based instruction block is based on the New York State initiative EngageNY, which develops student skill in pre-algebra, geometry, and first-year algebra. Focusing on depth over breadth, the framework covers a relatively small number of topics, is carefully sequenced grade by grade, and emphasizes computational skills along with conceptual and strategic thinking, following a spiral in which topics presented at one grade are covered in later grades, but at a more advanced level.

• In cognitively guided instruction, students broaden their work in Number Stories to include complex real world math tasks. Students spend a period or more studying a single word problem or real world math problem, constructing their own solutions, comparing approaches, and defending their thinking. Students learn that there is not one “right” way to solve a problem, thereby deepening their understanding of essential mathematical properties and learning how to use mathematical models strategically.

• To develop the fluency and relational thinking required for success in algebra and other higher mathematics, the math routines block develops the ability to perform efficient mental calculations—such as finding the percent of a number—and relational thinking.