English

The Upper School English Department encourages students to read as writers and write as readers so that they come to recognize and appreciate both the art and the craft of verbal expression. Through careful, active reading and the respectful exchange of ideas in discussion our students come to understand rich texts, recognizing the intentional choices writers make--from diction and syntax to patterns of allusion and figurative language--and appreciating how those choices create meaning. Influential literary works that span eras, genres, and cultures provide opportunities for a broad investigation of the human experience and the vast world of ideas. We want our students to become lifelong readers, who reach for a book both for pleasure and for their own edification, and so we encourage them to maintain a robust independent reading life beyond the classroom.

The Upper School English curriculum is designed to grow student proficiency and confidence in written expression. Students write frequently, both informally and formally, and practice all stages of the writing process, from pre-writing to drafting through to revision and publication. They learn to make intentional choices around precise diction and meaningful sentence variety in their own writing in order to express their ideas fluidly and effectively to a chosen audience. They become comfortable writing in various nonfiction modes (narrative, persuasive, descriptive, analytical, reflective), learning how to suit voice and formality to occasion; they also try their hands at writing fiction and poetry, thereby broadening the array of expressive options available to them as well as deepening their appreciation of the craft of writing. Students in every year undertake the systematic study of vocabulary and grammar as a key components in the growth of effective writing skills.

English I

English I Honors

Skills and attitudes taught in ninth grade English lay the foundation for the reading, thinking, and writing required by Upper School and college. The course approaches the study of literature by genre, giving almost equal weight to novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and drama. Titles of specific texts may well vary from teacher to teacher, but all sections of ninth grade will acquire and practice the skills of annotation, analysis, discussion, and composition that will help students establish themselves as sophisticated readers and thoughtful writers. Representative works taught in ninth grade might include: The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros; excerpts from An American Childhood, Annie Dillard; An Enemy of the People, Arthur Miller; When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka; The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger; The Sonnets and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare; Night, Elie Wiesel; The Book Thief, Markus Zusak; short fiction, nonfiction and poetry (selection varies).
Students enrolled in the Honors class will meet extra challenges, including complex reading and writing assignments held to a higher grading standard, a greater focus on analytical writing, and a substantial research paper.

English II

English II Honors

Literature and Composition II plays a pivotal role in the development of students on their journeys to become sophisticated readers, writers, and thinkers. Before students face the pressures inherent to college selection in upper grades, they have the opportunity to be steeped in literature and ideas within the safety of our classrooms. Students will be expected to write analytically and creatively, formally and informally. Developing as scholars means students will practice skills of annotation and close reading while adding to their personal canons of literary knowledge. It also means taking intellectual risks and honing the skills of revision and peer review as they take increasing ownership of their work. Representative works taught in tenth grade might include: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer; Lord of the Flies, William Golding; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; Othello, William Shakespeare; Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (selection varies)

AP English III, IV: Year-Long Courses

AP English Language And Composition

This college-level English course, open to eleventh and twelfth graders, engages students in the task of becoming better readers of prose written in a variety of disciplines, during different eras, and within many rhetorical contexts. It also helps students develop their writing skills so that they can communicate their ideas effectively to target audiences. Most importantly, AP Language challenges students’ thinking about the texts that they read and cultivates their abilities to parse information; to recognize fallacies of argument; to grapple with misinformation; and to make effective and productive decisions based on their assessments. In other words, AP Language is the study of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies, in students’ own work as well as in others’.

Students use their honed critical reading, thinking, and writing skills for a variety of purposes, including their best possible performance on the Advanced Placement Language and Composition Exam in the spring. Of utmost importance, this course is designed to raise students’ awareness of the interactions among a writer’s purpose/purposes, audience, occasion, subject, and techniques for communicating effectively. Representative works taught in AP English Language and Composition might include: Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire; The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan; Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose; Hamlet and Henry V, William Shakespeare; short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (selection varies).

AP English Literature And Composition

This is a college-level course open to seniors. The central focus of the course is how authors use the resources of language to express meaning in imaginative poetry and fiction. Class discussion might cover topics as diverse as close syntactical analysis of a single sentence, to a poet’s evocative use of allusion, to the role of hubris and catharsis in Shakespeare. Over and over, students are required to move beyond mere observation and to get to argument, to an assertion about why authorial choices matter. The daily work of the course prepares students both for the AP exam in May and for a lifetime of voracious independent reading. Representative works taught in twelfth grade might include: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Arcadia, Tom Stoppard; Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad; Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver; The Color of Water, James McBride; Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller; The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien; Macbeth, William Shakespeare; short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (selection varies).

Honors English III, IV: Semester-Long Courses

Students wishing to fulfill their English requirements at the Honors level are able to choose from a variety of semester electives. These courses vary in content, reading selections, and topics, but they are identical in their grading expectations and skill instruction. While students must take at least 1.0 credit of English each year, students may take more than the required number.

American Literature of the Jazz Age

Explore the vicissitudes of the 1920s and 1930s, a time of intense freedom as well as restraint within the United States. It encompassed women’s suffrage, flappers, speakeasies, and the eventual emergence of the Harlem Renaissance, but it was also grappled with Jim Crow laws, the aftermath of the First World War, and the Great Depression. To gain a fuller sense of both the era and its literature, we may also explore other cultural media of the time, such as experimental painting (surrealism, art deco, O’Keefe, Dali, etc.), silent film, blues music, and, of course, jazz. Readings may include: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, short stories “A Soldier’s Home” and “In Another Country” by Ernest Hemingway, The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, and poetry by T. S. Eliot, Countee Cullen, e.e. cummings, among others.

Climate Fiction Honors

Care about the earth? Want to speculate on what might happen if we do not address climate change? “Cli Fi,” first coined in 2007 by journalist Dan Bloom, is a genre of literature that centers on the effects of climate change on society. In this course, students will read fiction focusing on a future in which we did not address climate change. Possible core texts could include Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline. Other key readings in the course might include nonfiction by writers Dan Bloom, John Muir, Bill McKibben, Rachel Carson, Jeff Goodell, Barbara Kingsolver, and others.

Coming to America: Immigrant Voices of the 20th-21st Centuries

This course explores the immigrant experience: (How) do immigrants remake themselves in an unfamiliar world? How do immigrants find (and keep) their voice and make a place for themselves in this country? How do immigrants remember their origins, keep their traditional values and culture, and register new experiences? Course readings could include The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya, The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, and American Street by Ibi Zoboi. Shorter texts by authors and poets such as Francisco Jimemez, Hannan Arendt, Li-Young Lee, Joseph Brodsky, and Czelsaw Milosz will also be included.

Defense Against the Dark Arts: Harry Potter & the Hero’s Journey

The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, catapulted reading back into popular culture and shaped an entire generation of young readers and thinkers. What few people realize, however, is that this series is more than “just” a children’s series. Rowling used some of the 20th century’s darkest figures, including Adolf Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan, as inspiration for her villains, and her exploration of mortality speaks to one of humanity’s greatest questions: What happens to us after we die? This allegorical series provides students with a perfect entrance into some of the most controversial and debated topics of all time. Texts will include excerpts from the Harry Potter series, primary source documents from the 19th and 20th centuries, and excerpts from The King James Bible.

Gothic Literature: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

In this course, students will dive into the murky depths of literary Gothicism. Gothic writers, the most well-known of whom is Edgar Allan Poe, dedicated themselves to exploring the deepest, darkest parts of the human consciousness. Themes of madness, lost love, the grotesque, the supernatural, isolation, alienation, and death abound in these spine-tingling stories that will keep you up listening for things that go bump in the night. Possible texts: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner; “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe; “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe; Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Picture of Dorian Grey by James Joyce; The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

I Laughed. I Cried. It Was Better Than Cats! It Was Shakespeare!

This course will use biographical, cultural, and performance perspectives to help students discover Shakespeare’s impact within and beyond his time. Students will analyze a comedy, a tragedy, and some of the Bard’s sonnets. Writing will be analytical, creative, and research-based, and the class will culminate in an original performance to depict student interpretations of one of the stories, using the secrets they unlock about Shakespeare’s ticket to success. Readings may include: Macbeth, As You Like It, and sonnets.

The Open Road: A Study of Travelogues and Travel in Fiction

The Open Road explores the privilege of traveling and what it can do for us; the advantages and disadvantages of “the staycation” and cyber-travel through alt-worlds and virtual realities; and the choices that all of us will need to make about the footprints we leave wherever we go. Readings will include poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, William Wordsworth, Homer, and Constantine Cavafy; essays by David James Duncan, Mark Twain, and Richard Rodriguez, among others; passages from Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and Ernest Hemingway; a travelogue by Bill Bryson; and one novel, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Engaging in a number of different types of writing, students will also write about their own journeys, both literal and figurative, and about those journeys that they hope to take in the future. Technologies will include writing their own blogs, charting movement using Google My Maps and GPS tracking; presentation tools such as Canva; and short film making.

Outsiders in American Literature

In the canon of American literature, we see a fair share of misfits and outsiders. Whether it’s a mischievous Tom Sawyer or a disillusioned John Proctor, these types of literary characters and their authors shine a light on the dynamic American experience. Students will explore various genres, authors, and characters with an eye on those individuals who find themselves on the outside looking in. Texts and authors include Tom Sawyer, The Crucible, Into the Wild, works by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Pat Mora, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Poetry for Everyone

Whether they realize it or not, all people love poetry and build their worlds around it. Even those who break out in hives at the mere mention of iambic pentameter or metaphor listen to popular music and memorize the lyrics to country classics, rap anthems, and rock and roll masterpieces. In short: poetry, in its various forms, means something important to all of us. Many people, however, do not read written poetry because they do not understand it or cannot see the appeal. This semester-long class, Poetry for Everyone, takes away the scariness and pain of poetry by first helping students find the poetry in themselves and their own worlds and then by comparing those findings to what the world’s great poets plumbed from their own souls and experiences. In doing so, students will travel through time, rocketing back and forth from past to present to explore different contexts, genres, and subject matters and then pulling those elements into their own writing. In the process, students will come to realize poetry’s power to enrich their lives and make it more meaningful and beautiful. They will come to realize that poetry is truly for everyone, including them.

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