Scholarship within the Cormier Honors College means that the academics will push students to think outside the box and take on lots of critical thinking problems. The motto the honors college lives by for academics is, “it is not more work, it’s different work,” showing how there is an emphasis on unique, deeper levels of thinking within the classroom. This pillar is very important as it is the basis for all honors classes that students within the Cormier Honors College will be taking throughout their four years at Longwood University. Below are some examples of unique, different work that is emphasized within the honors college:
Freshman Year Honors Classes:
- History 150- Within this class, we had to write an eight page time travel paper. The class was called, The Early History of Gods, so we mostly discussed ancient times over in Europe and the Middle East. For the paper, I chose Ancient Rome as my topic and by writing a narrative time travel essay, we were able to as students use our creativity to incorporate in the paper while at the same time applying everything that we had learned from that class.
- Citizen 110- The final project we had to complete for this class consisted of creating our own syllabus for a class on a topic of our choice. The topic had to be associated around information we learned within our class that semester. By making our own syllabus, it encouraged us students to do outside research on information similar to the topics we learned in class, while making it interesting and fun to be able to put our own twist on it to make it uniquely our own syllabus for a class.
- Physics 103- For our third test, instead of doing a short answer section, our teacher split our class up into groups of three to work on an interactive essay assignment that consisted of solving a real life scenario. Our topic had to do with applying the physics we had learned to figure out what was the best type of plane model for an airline company to use. This was very different and fun as we had to do research on other types of airplanes to compare them to each other, it taught us how the physics can apply to real life, and how to look at the problem from a business aspect as well.
- History 222- Our final project we did for this class was creating a history Buzzfeed article. Throughout the course of the semester, we had annotated primary and secondary sources every day, so for the final project we were told we have to incorporate a lot of them into it. We had to come up with our own topic with sub categories, and within those subcategories were the sources we had covered throughout the semester. This was very unique as it allowed for us to be creative in the way we set up our article, while learning how to incorporate important historical documents into our own writing.