5 Weeks, 13 Students: The Best Summer of My Life!

This picture shows all 13 students in front of the Meeting House at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. This image is important to me because it shows me and all the friends I have made during these memorable 5 weeks. My new friends come from all across the globe, some from as far away as Andover, Massachusetts!

 

Sadness overwhelms me as I prepare to leave Andover. The five weeks have gone by all to fast, and I am worried I might never see my new friends ever again. At least I can walk away knowing that I have learned a lot. I have learned more here at Andover in only five weeks, than at my regular school which lasts for about ten months! The best part was that for once in my life, I actually loved school. It will be hard for me to leave the amazing people I have met and befriended, but I must leave Andover. Hopefully I can attend Phillips for high school.

            I have learned a lot at Summer Session.

Some of the things I have learned are:

~New Skills

• How to take Cornell Notes
• How to make good plot charts
• How to write an annotated bibliography

~New Ideas

• 20 innocent people were killed during the Salem Witch Trials
• Indian Boarding Schools were an attempt to assimilate Native Americans into white culture
• The Nacirema are a present day civilization that has been around since the late 18^th century

 

I have learned a lot this summer, and I will miss all of my friends and teachers. I know that someday I will look back upon these memories and hopefully remember everyone I met and everything I did.

The Summer With You All…

Many people may be enjoying their lives at the beach with the sun and the sand in the summer while we are at Phillip’s Academy summer session lower institute Dig This studying history, but nonetheless, we enjoyed our summer.

  Dig This is a course offered by Phillip’s Academy Andover focused on the study of history and archaeology. During the course, we covered the American history from the 1600s when the Europeans just arrived at to the early 1900s when Indian boarding schools were established. This course is rich and interesting but learning about almost 300 years in 35 days may cause confusion in minds but the benefit is always bigger than the detriment. 

  We all learned about this summer and there are three ideas that I think is presented to us through the history that we learned about. First, I found out that its never so simple as the English/White against the Indian/Native Americans. There are times when the Indians splits into groups and fight against each other and there are also times when the Indians or the Whites just fight among themselves! The causes of these conflicts are also complicated. Even though many people uses a specific event as the beginning of a conflict or war, but from all we learned, it is not so. There are always many causes that piles up that finally and then in the end starts the conflict. The short term triggers are important but the long term causes are what actually made the people angry. No conflict happens without a series of causes adding up. The last but not least idea is that all the conflict involves the word L-A-N-D land. The Indians were able to divide their land well because their land was divided according to the number of people they have which equals to their battling power. But as the Europeans come along, they grant themselves he ownership of all the land in which they find and give them Christian names as if they were the first to discover them ignoring the Indians’ rights over the land. As more and more Europeans come along, thy chase Indians out of their land with both threat and seduce the Indians into selling their land. The Southern Removal Act (trial of tears) is a very good example of a conflict over land.

  During the summer and especially the digs we had at Rebecca Nurse Homestead, we all learned many skills that we would probably have no chance to learn if we did not join the Summer Session. We learned the methods and the steps of an archaeological dig from the creation of a unit to the noting and picture taking of features and strata. For every hour we spend in the field digging, there will be ten hours spent in the laboratory studying these artifacts that we find. During the summer, we were also able to learn some basic ways to determine the date of artifacts like pipes by the diameter of the hole through the stem, pottery by design and decoration, bottles by shape and organism products by the amount of carbon left in a cell. There are also other skills we learned like how handle artifacts and that the acid on fingers will harm the artifacts. We can also determine a piece of artifact to be rock or ceramic by seeing if it sticks to your tongue. Ceramic does, rocks don’t.

  This summer session teaches us not just the history itself but also the experience of our ancestors which will hopefully help us in the future. Anyone who comes will say that it was worth it to spend your summer holiday and I hope more and more people can experience the courses provided by Phillips Academy Andover, enjoy and learn at the same time.

 

This is a picture of our whole class plus Mr. Newhall, Little Mr. Newhall (John), Ms. Tully and some of the other instructors who helped us at the dig. I find this picture meaningful because it shows what we’ve done during the summer and almost everyone involved. Even though it captures only a second of the 35 days of our summer session life, it reminds me of all my experience through the summer.