The soft scratching of a pencil, the confident voice of a presenter, the slight click-clacking of keys. These are all sounds that you would hear at a meeting of Rho Kappa, a new honor society at LHS.
Rho Kappa is a social studies honor society where students can meet with their peers who share a passion for social studies. Leading the group are social studies teachers Joshua Pratt and Amy Cohen.
“It is a great time for all of us,” Pratt said. “We want to get as many people involved in this fun as possible.”
Rho Kappa does various different activities throughout the year. One of these activities is when members both present and listen to their peers’ presentations.
“Every month has a different theme that has already been come up with, such as women’s or African American history month,” Pratt said. “This month, the theme is Native American history.”
Members regularly work on making morning announcements more fun with history facts.
“We get to come up with fun facts for the announcements,” Cohen said. “It’s fun for the members to research things that they normally wouldn’t in their regular history classes.”
To be a member of Rho Kappa, students need to take at least three social studies classes and get a 3.5 GPA or higher in the classes. They also need to have an overall GPA of 3.0 or higher. Students should also be genuinely interested in social studies as a subject.
“You have to be a nerd,” Cohen said with a laugh.
Cohen and Pratt joked that they call themselves “nerds” all the time because of how much they love history. Rho Kappa is a place where they get to “hang out” with other students who are interested in learning more about history. The group is mostly driven by these history-loving students, and the two advisers are there to watch over the students.
“We just write down the notes,” Cohen said. “I feel more like a secretary.”
One member, senior Madeline Rolfe, has been enjoying her time with the society.
“It’s been fun getting to work together with everyone,” Rolfe said.
As expected, there were struggles when it came to creating this honor society.
“It’s definitely been a challenge trying to get everything to work,” Rolfe said. “Scheduling and just getting the logistics of things figured out has been the hardest.”
Senior Nkechi Wambu is another member of the honor society who is very passionate about social studies.
“Students put a lack of importance towards social studies,” Wambu said. “I’ve seen many kids say it’s useless or not applicable in the real world when in actuality it is a study of the real world.”
Wambu was one of a few students who pushed for the creation of this group. One of her main reasons for this is the lack of cultural understanding at LHS.
“As an African American and Nigerian American I’ve dealt with my fair share of ignorance from my peers,” Wambu said. “I think encouraging them to learn about different cultures might help to lower this a bit.”
Rho Kappa is welcoming new members and is looking forward to the rest of the year.
“Rho Kappa only takes a small part of your day, and encourages you to learn something new,” Wambu said.
