The Jr High

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Environmental archaeology, domestication, early state formation. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Comparative empire, exchange systems, collapse literature. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Pre-Columbian archaeology, agricultural systems, decipherment. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Climate history, epidemiology, agrarian and commercial revolutions. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Columbian exchange scholarship, Atlantic systems, global silver. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Mother course — the full scholarly treatment. Industrialisation, urbanisation, energy transitions, the anthropocene. Written for teachers: subject mastery, teaching moves, and Praxis preparation.

Plough, plague, monsoon and caravan: a world remade by climate, disease and the routes between. Sixth graders weigh the heavy plough, the Black Death, Champa rice and the Little Ice Age, and learn to decide which cause mattered most.

Oceans joined, species exchanged, labor coerced: the first truly planetary environment. Seventh graders trace sugar islands, the silver mountain, trade winds, the fur trade and the first global cities, and learn to weigh nature against human choice.

The century that made the modern world: the factory, the railway, the clock and the city that went up. Eighth graders study walking cities, coal, skylines, air conditioning and today's data centers, and learn to explain why settlements take the shape they do.

The continent was worked land before it was colonised, and the colonies were investments before they were societies. Where the line between servant and slave hardened, and why.

A revolution argued in print and paid for in credit. Who it was for, who it left out, and how a survey grid turned a war aim into property.

Cotton made slavery a growth industry, rail decided where cities appeared, and the argument over both was settled by war and then unsettled again.

Number is a place before it is a quantity. This course walks the wall of ST09 — counting, the fraction wall, the decimal slide, the ratio table, the negative floor, graph-paper country — and every rung is a drawer a child can open with their hands.

The most original idea in the K-6 dictation, built as a course: a child who records the same measurement daily is doing statistics before the word arrives. A column of your own numbers becomes a middle and a spread.

Measurement produces number; number produces comparison; a map is an argument made of both. Runs from the ruler and the balance to the scale bar, the choropleth and the lie every flat sheet tells about a round world.

Where a claim must be shown, not asserted. Angle, argument and area, taught as the demand for a reason. The room is named for what it requires: prove it or drop it.

Geometry, drawn before it is argued. Point and line taken on faith, everything after earned: congruence, similarity, the right triangle, the circle, area, and the stone yard's solids — each claim walked to the Proof Room and made to show its work.

Algebra begins at a pan balance: whatever you do to one side, do to the other. From the balance to the function machine, the slope ramp, the crossroads of two lines, the scatter field, the growth hall and the parabola arch — each hall ends where its rule breaks.

Variables, expressions and equations; linear functions, slope and systems; exponents, quadratics and exponential growth, worked on real data from the estate's cities and buildings.

Grade 6 core math. Students reason with ratios, rates and percents, divide fractions, meet negative numbers and absolute value, write and solve one-step equations, and describe data with center and spread.

Grade 7 pre-algebra. Students compute with all rational numbers, solve proportional problems and percent change, write and solve two-step equations and inequalities, work scale drawings and probability, and arrive ready for Algebra I.

A booster for grades 5–6. Letters stand for numbers, bar models turn word problems into equations, balance moves solve them, and growing patterns become rules and points on a grid. Students arrive at Pre-Algebra 7 already thinking like algebra students.

A booster for grades 5–6. Students read rates from tables and graphs, find distance as the area under a speed graph, add halves that never quite reach one, and trap pi between polygons as Archimedes did. Limits and accumulation, made visible.

The bridge from middle school to Precalculus. Slope becomes a rate of change, secant lines close in on a tangent, rectangles add up to areas under curves, and infinite series reach finite sums. Students meet the calculus story of Archimedes, Newton, Leibniz and Agnesi before the formal course.

Politics begins where two neighbours share one well. The town meeting, the fence line, the petition - self-rule at the smallest scale.

The franchise as a moving line: who holds the ballot, who is kept from it, and what each extension cost. Eighth graders study property tests, the secret ballot, ward machines, suffrage marches, poll taxes, recounts and gerrymanders, and learn to defend a claim about who votes.

A school is counted before it is taught: who has an IEP, who has a 504 plan, who lives below the line — and every count decides money, rooms and rights.

From the first light to the first rock: thresholds of complexity before there was anywhere to stand. Seventh graders handle evidence for the Big Bang, the forging of atoms in stars, and the dating of rocks, and learn how science reads a past no one saw.

Life takes the planet: oxygen, extinction, drift and the long wager that produced the mammals. Eighth graders read rocks, fossils and moving continents as evidence and learn to argue why some forms of life ended and others carried on.

What things are made of and what they do to each other. The element as a physical object you can hold, the reaction as an event you watch happen, and distillation as the oldest argument that a mixture is not a substance.

The three invisibles. A magnet acting at a distance, a machine multiplying a push, and light behaving like nothing else in the building — each taught by what it does rather than what it is called.

Life at four magnifications: the cell under the bench lens, the habitat behind glass, the body opened as an instrument, and the bird that flies to the rail and will not hold still for anyone.

The two sciences you cannot bring indoors. Rock, weather and sky are read from evidence left behind rather than experiments run to order, which makes them the best training in inference the building has.

Every science begins with an instrument, and every instrument is an argument about what is worth measuring. The ruler, the vault of historic instruments, the supervision bench and the room of objects too large to ignore.

The Code Shop, the Workbench and the Wire. A program is an instruction a machine cannot misunderstand, which is a far harder thing to write than a sentence a person can. Students build with variables, loops and functions, debug like detectives, and follow a message as bits across the internet.

The school's first English course reads two things that fit together: Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (in the 1873 George Makepeace Towle translation, public domain) with the wonders wall as its map, and the Sherlock Holmes stories as a course in inference from detail. Hall one follows the wager leg by leg and ends on the day that wasn't; hall two teaches what a sentence lets you conclude — and what it does not. Hall three, Tales Around the World, climbs the Beanstalk: Puss in Boots and the trickster, Alice and the logic of nonsense, Oz as the American fairy tale (and the money reading, weighed as a debate), and Cinderella across the world as tale type 510A, each read with its first illustrator.

Composition taught where the material lives: every week the writer takes a different hall and works one move on it — noticing, describing, claiming, defending, revising — until the essay stands. The museum is the text; the docents are the sources.

Grade 6 core reading and writing. Students cite textual evidence, trace a theme and an argument across a whole text, judge claims and reasons, and write arguments, explanations and narratives that hold up to a reader's questions.

Grade 7 core reading and writing. Students analyze how a story's elements interact, compare a text with its film or staged version, evaluate an author's evidence, and write arguments that acknowledge and answer the other side.

Grade 8 core reading and writing. Students read classic and modern literature and serious nonfiction, analyze word choice and structure, spot conflicting evidence, and write the argument and research essays high school expects.

Grammar, mechanics and usage, grades 3-8, taught as tools a writer chooses: sentences and their parts, punctuation that changes meaning, verb tense, pronouns, spelling patterns and the editing eye that catches errors before a reader does.

Where each student starts and how far they have come: a fall placement check, a winter check-in and a spring benchmark in reading, math and language usage, each turned into a plain report for the family and the teacher.

How to ask an SI system a good question, check its answer against a source, spot bias and made-up facts, and use it without handing over private data. Ends with a checked research report and a class rulebook for SI.

Write a precise brief, judge competing prototypes with a decision matrix, and improve a design through rounds of testing: water filters, balsa bridges and egg drops.

Drawing, color and paint, printmaking and collage at the kitchen table, ending in a portfolio shown in the online gallery. Each student buys a small studio kit.

Pinyin and the four tones, greetings and family, numbers, time and food, with first characters and short conversations. Students in grades 6-12 recite Li Bai, present a family album, and order a meal in Mandarin by the end of the course.

Characters and radicals, daily life and school, and cities and travel across China, reading and speaking in longer exchanges.

Nouns and cases, verbs and Roman daily life, and reading adapted Latin, with the Latin roots inside English and science.

Participles and clauses, Roman history read in Latin, and Latin at work in English, law and science. Students in grades 7-12 read Caesar, Livy's heroes and Augustus in his own words, and come out able to read longer Latin and find it in their own town.

Building a fitness plan, eating well without dieting, and caring for mind and safety, with an activity log the student keeps.