Curriculum

This course seeks to ground students in the essential elements of effective reading, writing, and speaking. Two major objectives of the course are to teach students to read for meaning and to express themselves clearly and logically through the written word. Writing assignments vary from analytical and personal essays to journal entries and creative exercises. Most assignments emphasize revision and require multiple drafts. Students read and discuss works from many genres and examine how plot, character, theme, and language inform each other. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, William Shakespeare's Othello, and selections of short stories and poems enhance our students' understanding of the power of language and the richness of human experience. English I also includes a formal study of grammar and usage, based on traditional text and online resources, and vocabularly, largely from Wordly Wise 3000.

This course exposes students to many genres of world literature and introduces them to the critical idiom. It places special emphasis on close reading and urges students to explore how figurative language, allusion, connotation, and imagery enhance meaning. Students hone these reading skills through sources through the the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Ha Jin, the poems of W.D. Ehrhart, and the drama of Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”…and the boys  and William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis and Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart complete a selection that we hope will challenge and broaden the perspectives of our young men. Expository essays help students develop analytical and critical skills; personal narrative assignments encourage Fourth Form writers to develop their own voice or rhetorical style. Original poetry, short stories, and frequent print or online journal entries supplement more traditional writing assessments. In order to further their ability to communicate effectively and gracefully, students also continue the study of grammar and vocabulary begun in Third Form, turning their attention to usage and the mechanics of writing. In addition to our online subscription to the grammar and usage resource IXL, students continue to use Wordly Wise 3000 for vocabulary study.

Building upon the grammatical foundation and introduction to literary genres established in Fourth Form, this course offers a selective thematic survey of varieties of the American experience. The course includes selections of poetry, fiction, and essays from authors such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Ken Kesey. Core texts include Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and August Wilson's Fences. Our study of American literature serves as the basis for regularly assigned critical papers and personal narratives. Teachers assign a variety of topics, and as the year progresses, students are given greater freedom to choose their topics and their approaches. The department expects papers to be thorough, well organized, clearly worded, insightful, well documented, and substantially free of spelling, grammatical, and mechanical errors.

The fall term is devoted to honing skills in close reading and careful writing. Students write daily reflections and commentaries, and, in frequent personal narratives and analytic essays, demonstrate their command of rhetorical devices, their emerging mastery of different writing styles, and their growing skill at editing. Resources like William Zinsser's On Writing Well provide accessible and engaging guides for aspiring writers to refine their diction, syntax, and style. Classic and contemporary poetry, creative nonfiction essays, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and William Shakespeare's Hamlet allow students to think deeply about how individuals express their relationships with surrounding social structures. 

This seminar aims to challenge our most motivated students to become better writers. Students read masters of the essay, study their techniques, and imitate their style. They learn to write —clearly, accurately, and above all creatively—about the world around them. Students write across the literary spectrum to showcase their growing mastery of style: analytic essag, sales pitch, personal narrative, reflections on authorial style, comparative essay, monologue in unrhymed iambic pentameter. In the second half of the semester, we use our improved critical reading and writing skills to dive deeply into Hamlet.