North Forsyth has a new club on the rise. It’s called Conspiracy Theories and it takes place every Wellness Wednesday in room T1104. The session is run by Mr. Castleberry, a 10th grade world history teacher, with the purpose of ultimately taking an in-depth look into the conspiracy theories that surround historical events in order to have students interested in doing research on the topics. He will be covering a range of different theories with well developed evidence as well as some with less grounded evidence. Castleberry is pushing for this session to be turned into a full on class and claims that the “sneaky underhanded goal is to create a class where people willingly do research to prove that they are right… [and] convince kids that research can be fun, depending on what it is”

Mr. Castleberry states that he has put a lot of thought into how he would like this class to function. On Mondays and Tuesdays, he wants to explain and provide information for the theories without any bias on if they are true or not. On block days, he wants his students to divide up in groups and perform their own research and develop their own ideas on how much weight the conspiracy holds. By the following week, every group should present their opinions with at least a few paragraphs of information to support themselves. Each theory is a unit, and they should get through one  unit every week and a half. The entire class would be optional and one semester long. “Ideally, I’d like it to be a support to AP.… the way that we’d conduct it, it would be AP level research, AP level writing, and AP level presentations. I think everybody who took that class would be better prepared to take an AP course”. Right now, however, he expects little to no work from students on Wellness Wednesday. He simply wants to show students what this could be if it was made into a class. Brandon Brooks, a junior, says “I think that this should be a real class, I honestly do.”

Castleberry states that he has been planning on hosting Conspiracy Theories for a few years and that Wellness Wednesday has finally given him the opportunity to live out his dream. “As soon as the school decided to do Wellness Wednesdays,” he says, “I had students come up and ask if I was finally doing it”. He claims that  getting a student to become engaged is the hardest thing a teacher can do; the difference between this and normal class is that you can choose to be here. Ian Heller, a sophomore, stated that the class was interesting because, unlike other classes, it goes into detail about the theories that surround historical events. Castleberry explained, “there was a lot of engagement right off the bat which surprised me because a lot of the students don’t actually know me… I left the first 9/11 class elated because of all the students chasing a desire to learn.” 

Castleberry proclaimed that his goal in life is to make lecturing as fun and as entertaining as humanly possible. “I think that in education lecturing has been demonized,” Castleberry stated.“In any field you go into for college all you’re going to do is listen to lectures. So I model my teaching styles off of my best professors… At the end of the day I am wildly passionate about what I teach, I think that it’s important. I don’t think that it is a do-nothing class that doesn’t matter ”