English

English IV students select from a range of course offerings. Options may shift from year to year based on student interest and schedule availability. 

This course engages students with canonical texts and related contemporary texts to practice perspective-taking and identify conversations in literature. Students will explore poems, short stories, films, and novels. The course will build on foundational reading, writing, and discussion skills and employ self-reflective and analytical writing. Students will grapple with identifying and weighing themes that recur in literature. They will create and attempt to answer essential questions about the predictive power of authors past and the choices creatives of the present make in homage or argument. Texts will include familiar and diverse contemporary discoveries. An example from the first semester includes magical realism and hauntings from Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Gilman, and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching. Later in the year, students explore narrator perspectives with a dive into The Odyssey and Circe. We will discuss, write, and critically argue together as we study literature and ourselves.

-Creative Writing 

Creative Writing is a two-teacher, portfolio-based, workshop-style seminar offering instruction in the narrative strategies and distinctive forms and techniques of various nonfiction and fiction genres: memoir, personal essay, reviews, travel and culture writing, short stories, poetry, etc. The course is designed to have two sections taught simultaneously during the same block. One section focuses on non-fiction writing genres (e.g., memoir, personal history essay), while the other section focuses on writing short stories and poetry. At the end of the first semester, the students in each respective block will switch teachers and continue the second component of the course. Typically, writing workshops are free-wheeling explorations of form, style, and content, and this one will be no different. The watchword for this course is energy—how to generate it, how to capture it, and how to use it.

-World Beat: African and African Diaspora Literature 

The African continent is made up of 55 countries, each with a myriad of ethnicities, languages, and literary traditions. Students study the oral traditions and read extensively from authors across the continent through short stories, music, poems, novels, films, and plays. Through a variety of characters, settings, and themes, we will break the notion of Africa as a monolith that has only one story to tell. From the outset of slavery to modern day, the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and North and South America is a story of survival and the resiliency of cultures, religions, languages, and traditions. The literary, visual, and musical arts that arose despite efforts to exterminate and denigrate them are a testimony to their beauty and vitality and demand our attention and appreciation. The syncretic offerings of the African Diaspora are rich with traditions that thrive in modernity and ask us to consider essential questions of home, borders, and identity. We will uncover and celebrate the African roots that have found a home in our everyday lives while honing the skills students will need to thrive in a college environment. By studying the oral traditions of African ethnic groups, students will gain a new appreciation for and enhance their listening skills. Students will also face the challenge of complex literary analysis prompts asking them to examine style in addition to theme, to work on comparative analysis, and to incorporate research and supplemental materials. With the creative and informal writing and projects, students are being asked to explore and express the connections between the literature and their own thoughts on race, gender, and nationality—their identity, in relation to the worlds they experience and study.

Students navigate the environmental landscape of early modern England, using Shakespeare’s work as their north star. While some openly embraced England’s growing power to map, transform, and dominate the natural world during this period, others decried it, raising concerns about resource extraction, land enclosure, pollution, species loss, and deforestation—concerns that still persist today. While some turned to Christian doctrine to defend humankind’s right to master the earth, others feared the cost of trafficking in this rhetoric, reminding us that Christian doctrine also urges us to steward and take care of the earth. Still others called for more creative thinking—asking us to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting, managing, and caring for the earth. With Shakespeare at the center of this course, students deepen their understanding of his work as a record and rebuke of the modes of thinking, practices, and policies that shaped the early modern English landscape. 

Through close readings of Shakespeare’s plays, we will encounter forests and trees, earth and sea, stone and sky, listening carefully to the stories we tell about them. We will brave the “blasted heath” with Macbeth and marvel at the “moving grove” that foretells his fall, weather Prospero’s storm and seek peace on the island’s shore. We will be undone by Lear’s despair for having “ta’en / Too little care of this,” and remade by the Duke’s deep love for “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Along the way, we will engage with ecocritical literary theory and sample environmental writing from across literary history to situate Shakespeare in a long, ongoing conversation about nature, ecology, and humankind’s relationship with the earth. By the end of the year, we will have a deeper, more comprehensive view on Shakespeare’s ecological thinking and, more broadly, the role stories play in shaping our perceptions and treatment of the natural world. As a reminder, this is an honors seminar, meaning that students are expected to complete a substantial amount of reading, writing, and research. 

How do I live a good life? What can I know for sure? Does God, beauty, or evil exist? And really, how do I know that the earth is round and the moon is not a delicious wheel of provolone cheese? This class will engage with life’s most compelling and vexing questions by analyzing and critiquing the musings of philosophers from across the globe from antiquity to the present. Moreover, each student will interrogate, evolve, and refine their own thoughts on such questions. All the while, we will resist pat answers and conventional thinking, aware, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, that “the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can itself be part of the problem.” The class will follow the progression of the “Western” tradition of philosophy that emerged in Ancient Greece and trace its global dissemination.