COURSE REQUIREMENTS

112 Literary Genres

Grade: 9 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In this course, students will explore a wide range of literary genres, including realistic novels, Shakespearean comedy, allegory, epic, ballad, and lyric poetry forms such as the sonnets and the villanelle. Students will write analytical and expository essays in response to the variety of literary works they encounter, and they will also generate their own creative pieces in the style of the poets, essayists, and fiction writers explored. A research paper project will be assigned to allow students to demonstrate that they are able to synthesize the skills and perspectives they have been practicing all year. Students work extensively on grammar and punctuation mastery, along with vocabulary development.

111 Literary Genres Honors

Grade: 9 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In this course, students will explore and analyze various genres, including poetry, short stories, mythology, dramas and novels, while developing skills for recognizing and analyzing both fiction and nonfiction literature. Students will explore various works for their technical and artistic value. Students will be asked to identify the author, poet or playwright, and to study his or her life in order to understand the human experience connection. Students will be able to identify and apply a wide selection of literary terms that will be introduced, defined and analyzed. Students will study techniques to strengthen reading comprehension and improve their level of vocabulary. Students will review and practice proper grammar and mechanics, punctuation, and the Five Step Writing Process. The students will have assignments that are both creative and expository in nature. Students will also learn effective listening and speaking skills in order to improve a student’s communication and presentation skills.

122 World Literature and Writing Composition

Grade: 10 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In this course, students will be asked to think critically and comparatively about two of literature’s most enduring questions: What is universal in the human experience across time and space, and what is culturally specific? By reading ancient Athenian tragedy, early modern Japanese short stories, Chilean verse, and the Nigerian postcolonial novel, students will engage with the rich diversity of human literary expression. Grammar lessons build on the previous year’s topics, and regular vocabulary work stresses the varied, fascinating sources of English’s rich trove of words. Students will have the chance to write in styles they may not have encountered extensively before, including magical realism, satire, and East Asian comic drama.

121 World Literature and Writing Composition Honors

Grade: 10 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In this course, students will explore and analyze a variety of poems, short stories, nonfiction, dramas, sacred texts and essays from Africa, Ancient Greece and Rome, Southwest and South Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe, and both early and modern Americas. Students will continue to explore various works for both their technical and artistic value. Students will be asked to identify the author, poet or playwright, and to study his or her life in order to understand the human global experience connection and identify a universal truth to support a thesis. Students will continue to identify and apply a wide selection of literary terms that will be introduced, defined and analyzed. Students will continue to study techniques to strengthen reading comprehension and improve their level of vocabulary. Students will review and practice proper grammar and mechanics and punctuation. The students will have assignments that are both creative and expository in nature. Students will also learn effective listening and speaking skills in order to improve a student’s communication and presentation skills.

132 American Literature

Grade: 11 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In this historical survey of American literary expressiveness, we begin with Anne Bradstreet’s Puritan verse and finish in the company of contemporary masters of the novel such as Toni Morrison. In their encounters with the various eras and movements of our nation’s cultural life in sequence, students will experience the wide sweep and lasting importance of American fiction, essays, and poetry. Class members will write extensive critical essays in which they trace themes such as individualism vs. communitarianism, wilderness vs. civilization, and religiosity vs. secularism, and they will seek connections between the questions and preoccupations of diverse American writers and our modern concerns and aspirations.

131 American Literature/Critical Reading Honors

Grade: 11 • Full Year • 1 Credit

Honors American literature reads a similar roster of major American authors to the curriculum featured in the College Preparatory course. Additional, more challenging supplementary readings provide a deeper and more complex picture of some of the liveliest and most important debates in American literature. The chief difference between Honors and College Preparatory American Literature lies in a more rigorous and ambitious schedule of writing assignments: Honors students will address the questions of identity, justice, and transcendence that lie at the heart of our natural literature in frequent synthetic essays and other written responses spanning a wide range of genres.

133 AP English Language and Composition

Grade: 11 • Full Year • 1 Credit

In many respects, Advanced Placement English Language and Composition follows much the same reading sequence of enduring American classics as the two American Literature courses, and in order to prepare students for the AP exam in the spring, this course heavily emphasizes American nonfiction and rhetorical prose. In addition to practicing strategies for both the essay and the multiple choice sections of the exam, students will explore the fascinating world of rhetoric and its various devices from the inside as they draft not merely analyses of literature, but also Horatian and Juvenalian satires, memoirs, editorials, and even political speeches. In the words of the College Board, “AP students are not expected or asked to subscribe to any one specific set of cultural or political values, but are expected to have the maturity to analyze perspectives different from their own and to question the meaning, purpose or effect of such content within the literary work as a whole” (CED 117). Accordingly, we will range freely across a wide variety of rhetorical approaches and situations, and students should expect to encounter authors and points of view that will challenge their assumptions.

142 British Literature and Analytical Writing

Grade: 12 • Full Year • 1 Credit

British Literature is a senior level course in which students will receive an overview of British literature from early Anglo-Saxon to the twentieth century. Course study will include a variety of genres—epic poems, plays, poetry, novels, historical documents, and speeches—all presented in a thematic pattern. Literary study will be infused with historical applications for a better understanding of the social and historical context of the readings. Students will critically read and evaluate both informational texts and visual texts. Composition in all genres is a major component of this course, as well as development of analytical and critical thinking skills. Grammar, mechanics, and usage will be covered within the context of the literature and writing.

141 British Literature and Critical Analysis Honors

Grade: 12 • Full Year • 1 Credit

British Literature is a senior level course in which students will receive an overview of British literature from early Anglo-Saxon to the twentieth century. Course study will include a variety of genres—epic poems, plays, poetry, novels, historical documents, and speeches—all presented in a thematic pattern. Literary study will be infused with historical applications for a better understanding of the social and historical context of the readings. British Literature is designed to emphasize independent thought and critical thinking. Students will experiment with different types of writing, including literary analysis, persuasive writing, and research-based writing. There are also visual presentation projects incorporated into the class to teach students how to create an effective presentation. Grammar, mechanics, and usage will be covered within the context of the literature and writing.

140 AP English Literature and Composition

Grade: 12 • Full Year • 1 Credit

The AP English Literature and Composition course is designed and taught thematically with an emphasis on core readings along with modern and contemporary selections that illuminate and expand upon a variety of themes. This advanced course will engage students in careful reading and analysis of a challenging set of literary works from a range of genres including the novel, short story, poetry, and drama. Students are expected to be active readers as they analyze and interpret textual detail, establish connections among their observations, and draw logical inferences leading to interpretive conclusions concerning the big questions in life. This class closely follows the requirements described in the AP (CED), including the fundamentals of literary analysis and composition.

Students will encounter both vigorous discussions and an ambitious writing component emphasizing expository, analytical, and argumentative writing about literature. These approaches provide students with an academic experience equivalent to that of a college-level literature course. According to the College Board, “AP students are not expected or asked to subscribe to any one specific set of cultural or political values, but are expected to have the maturity to analyze perspectives different from their own and to question the meaning, purpose or effect of such content within the literary work as a whole” (CED 117). Readings or discussions in class concerning controversial topics will be sensitively handled and restricted to appropriate academic discussions.