Throughout the Eight and Nine Honors program at WHHS, there are a multitude of projects that are done in an effort to encourage thinking outside the box.
This year, a new project was included within the Nine Honors curriculum: the Genius Hour. This project is similar to an independent studies project, in which the students pick a topic they either love or want to change.
The project is being done at different times for the two different Nine Honors sections. While the afternoon section is nearly finished with their projects, the morning section is just beginning to embark on their journey.
The idea of the project first came from Lisa Brokamp, a Nine Honors Biology teacher for the morning section, as well as a teacher of Anatomy and Physiology.
“I heard an interview on NPR first with a man that wrote a book called What Schools Could Be,” Brokamp said. She read the book over the summer and decided that “this is something that I really want to do with my kids.”
Unlike some projects at WHHS, which have a set rubric with strict guidelines regarding what needs to be done in order to achieve a certain grade, the Genius Hour project is all about variety and uniqueness, and what makes an individual student shine.
“I want to kind of bring creativity back into the classroom, I want to create a kind of love for learning,” Brokamp said, regarding her reason why she initiated this idea.
“It’s totally student driven, they choose their topic,” Barbara Stewart, a Nine Honors English teacher for the morning section, said.
For example, topics could end up ranging from a passion for playing the guitar, blogging about conservation, creating an informational site, building something or even writing a short story, all depending on what the student’s interest is in.
“We have several students who want to play a new instrument,” Stewart said, “we have students writing books, [and] another big category a lot of kids are doing is exercise and health.”
As a Nine Honors Biology teacher for the afternoon section, Jayma George has students with already finished projects.

“One of my favorites projects was a conservation one. We had a student challenge herself to produce as little waste as possible for a month,” George said.
George also said that “another really good one, was we had two students actually end up working together, and they wrote and produced their own song, kind of like a pop rock.”
George said that she believed that the project had an impact on some of the students, but others did not buy the whole concept, or wanted a clearer rubric, as the project itself is very self-guided.
She adamantly wants to pursue it next year, and she is “already trying to work on ways to make it better.”
As the morning Honors section has just begun their Genius Hour journey, only time will tell to whether the newly-created project becomes a success for them as well.