931 Exploration of Identity
required major
summer reading: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Grade: 9
Ninth grade students study literature from various historic periods that centers on stories that explore issues of identity. Included in the curriculum are stories from Genesis, a Shakespeare play, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , A Raisin in the Sun, Black Boy, Persepolis and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Vocabulary study is based on words drawn from the texts, and students are quizzed on these words throughout the year. Teachers emphasize expository writing with three substantial essays each semester. Through active reading, students learn to support their arguments with carefully chosen textual examples and consolidate their knowledge of MLA format, style and correct punctuation by drafting and revising their essays. In keeping with the theme of identity development, students plan a one-day experience project in which they explore a hobby or potential career and write an essay about that experience. Concurrent with our critical and structural study of short stories and poetic forms, students write their own short stories and various poems, compiling by the year’s end a writing portfolio.
941 The Poetry of Language
required major
summer reading: To be announced.
Past selections have included Steve Lopez’s Third and Indiana and Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Grade: 10
Students in sophomore English examine the ways that writers create meaning through imagery and language, as well as the ways that writers are created by their own worlds. Students analyze selections from Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and they read Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone; Macbeth, Othello, or another Shakespeare selection; 19th century novel, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Teachers select short stories by authors such as James Baldwin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Julie Orringer, and students read a sampling of African American poets from the vintage publication FIRE! The study of rhetorical devices is at the heart of the tenth grade, with a close eye on Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Dramatic and oral presentations are particularly important; students memorize and perform choral odes, soliloquies, blues songs, and scenes. Formal and informal writing provide frequent opportunities for students to work on usage and coherence in their own creations. Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers is the reference text for writing and editing. Weekly vocabulary lists are drawn from the reading.
951 Literature in Context
required major
Grade: 11
Junior English emphasizes close textual reading with particular attention to the historical contexts of literature and the relationship between form and content. Books studied include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Romantic poetry (Keats, Coleridge, Blake and Wordsworth), Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. Students undertake an intensive study of the essay, using The Norton Anthology that includes essays by Langston Hughes, Richard Rodriquez, David Sedaris, Chang-Rae Lee, and Margaret Atwood. Writing is a central focus of the course: students write analytical essays, creative nonfiction, position papers, poetry, satire, and short fiction, using Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers as a reference for editing and usage. Individual writing conferences provide students with help in revision. Students complete an independent reading project, a poetry memorization, and several class presentations.
961 Identity and Global Aesthetics
required major
summer reading: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and another book to be announced.
Grade: 12
An intensive required course in the analysis of challenging literary texts and writing effectively. The literature frames issues of aesthetics and politics in a global historical context, emphasizing major literary movements such as realism, modernism, and postmodernism, as well as major historical trends such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and postcolonialism. The course covers a range of genres from Shakespearean tragedy, to modern and postmodern fiction and drama, to poetry and the literary essay. Students will examine the ways in which identity is formed through language, the politics of self and other, and the tensions that exist when an author attempts to write both artfully and meaningfully. Literature will include Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison; Dubliners, James Joyce; Hamlet, William Shakespeare; Collected Essays, George Orwell; The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga; Goodbye Columbus. Philip Roth; Eat The Document, Dana Spiotta; and a representative poet to be designated on a year-to-year basis. Writing assignments designed to build skills and to explore important concepts will include in-class essays, an expository personal essay, a comparison paper, a paper using secondary sources, an essay based on a moral dilemma, a creative work of prose, a character analysis, and an original poem. Additional writing assignments are given that could serve as possible college essays. Other requirements include vocabulary tests for words drawn from each book and a substantial memorization.