Description: The school year for A Form English is divided into three trimesters. Form A students have English class five times a week. Their English class consists of grammar, vocabulary, literature, and writing. Form A English students will read novels and plays, including some scenes from one play by Shakespeare. Poetry is covered as well, with some attention to creative writing. Class activities include grammar drills, vocabulary exercises, class discussion, lectures, group projects, audio and video presentations, and writing. Inherent to the Form A English curriculum is a constant emphasis on basic study skills. Students will also learn that writing is a process and that all writers are rewriters. Paragraph writing assignments will be included in the progress of the course, leading to the drafting and revision of the five paragraph essay.

Description: The Form I English class is designed to help students develop as strong readers and writers through rigorous study of grammar and literature. At the same time, students gain exposure to a wide array of authors and concepts that they will continue to encounter in the years ahead. Students read novels by Ray Bradbury, Sandra Cisneros, Mark Twain, Richard Wright, and Stephen Crane, as well as Shakespeare's The Tempest. Grammar study centers around sentence structure and the parts of speech. Class activities include daily poetry recitation, practicing active reading strategies and annotation, literary discussion, and group practice with recognizing grammatical concepts. Students continue to master the five-paragraph essay and focus on responding to essay prompts with evidence-based analysis.

Description: Form II students meet daily to review the basics of grammar and to learn the essentials of writing formal, expository essays. During the course of the year, students read three novels, one epic poem by Homer, and a play by Shakespeare. Vocabulary is taught from the literary texts covered in class and a workbook. A central goal of Form II English is the development and nurturing of higher cognitive skills in literary analysis while a secondary goal is to prepare students for the academic rigors of high school. Activities include writing workshops, peer-review, discussion circles, dramatic activities, group projects, and student presentations. The school year for Form II is divided into three trimesters.

Course Length: Three Trimesters
Registration Policy: Required for Form II

Description: As first year students of high-school English, Form III students are expected to demonstrate a sufficient mastery of grammar, mechanics, and usage. Furthermore, upon completion of the year, they should be able to write a traditional, five-paragraph, literary exposition. If review is required on the basics of sentence mechanics, paragraph structure, and essay composition (particularly in the case of transfer students), small group work or individual support is available. Class will be a combination of lecture, reading, note taking, cooperative interaction, creative writing, multi-media presentations, and occasional small projects. Students will read two novels, one Shakespeare play, and an extensive selection of poetry. Practice tests are taken to prepare for the PSATs and SATs. Students are also introduced to the scholarly documentation style of the Modern Language Association. Creative writing is encouraged and often required. The school year for Form III is divided into two semesters.

Description: Fourth Form English provides students with the opportunity to continue developing their critical thinking skills through an advanced study of composition and literature. Work will continue on mastering the mechanics of sound and effective writing while in-class discussions of course material will continually promote clear verbal communication. Texts include a literature anthology, two novels, a Shakespeare play, and a student writing handbook. In-class work will include group discussion, writing exercises in a journal, lectures, timed essays, and exams. At the end of the year, students will be expected to produce an extended, formal literary exposition, complete with properly annotated primary and secondary sources per the commonly accepted scholarly guidelines of the Modern Language Association. 

Course Length: Two Semesters
Registration Policy: Required for Form IV

Description: All Form V Students must take this one-semester class in either the fall or spring semester. This writing intensive course includes studying fiction and non-fiction as well as assignments from the college text Creative Strategies for Academic Thinking and Writing.  By the conclusion of the course, students will be familiar with the canons of rhetoric with emphasis on syntax and style as well as the classic persuasive appeals. 

Course Length: One Semester (offered in fall or spring)
Registration Policy: Required for Form V

Steve Jobs offered the following advice in a 2005 commencement address: "Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice." Society is indeed bound together by fixed beliefs, necessary rules, and shared aesthetics. But how might a person escape the deeply ingrained beliefs or dogma of his culture? In this course we will discuss this bond of culture. What is culture? How is it conveyed? Taught? Enforced? Enjoyed? How does it bind a community and the individuals therein for better or worse? We will explore the relationship between the community and the individual. We’ll also ask how authors are influenced by their racial, sexual, socio-economic, and American identity. Texts include Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and “Benito Cereno” by Melville.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Description: This AP seminar will focus on the literary themes and styles inherent to the period in world literature known as “High Modernism.” Students will read and write about literature from the years leading up to, during, and shortly after World War I. Characteristic work from this period is highly experimental, establishing unique and often avant-garde “voices” which challenge traditional notions of “narrative.” These new literary voices are usually driven by a writer’s desire to represent a modern view of reality that reflects the radical and often-pessimistic philosophies of the time, particularly after the devastation of The Great War. Works to be read which exemplify this “shattered” world view include Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and (of course) Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V and VI.

This course requires the reading, study, and analysis of several of Shakespeare’s History Plays. These dramas include Richard II, Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V. Students will train their efforts on the extensive analysis of individual plays and the exploration of key thematic issues. An important facet that will be pointed out and examined will be the concept of studying these particular dramas from the aspect of an “epic perch,” one from which Shakespeare, like a latter day Homer, poetically recalls and records vital periods of a great nation’s extended history. Additionally, many issues relevant to the Elizabethan era will be discussed and analyzed.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

This Course involves the reading of various literary works (poems, short stories, plays, novels) composed by writers from the American South. The literary works studied in this course will exemplify and explore what makes them truly both “American” and “southern.” Authors will include the following: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, and Jean Toomer.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Looking at the real and imagined boogeymen throughout the ages, this course will ask how a vision of villainy manifests itself on the body, in the mind, and in a culture. Texts include The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

A study of some of the principal contributions to American literature made by black writers, this course will examine the thematic, structural, and stylistic characteristics of African-American literature, from its origins in the 18th century through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Texts will include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and poems and short stories from authors Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Angelina Grimke, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Phillis Wheatley, Richard Wright, and others.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Poet Adrienne Rich said, “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” In this era in which women and men of various generations debate the standards, obligations, and opportunities for women, we will look with fresh eyes on the ways in which images and characterizations of women in literature have developed and evolved over time and the ways in which these representations reflect and shape women today. Voices we’ll hear from include Kinkaid, Rich, Plath, Castillo, and Woolf among others.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

This course explores the motivations of famous literary characters from a Psychoanalytic perspective. As a precursor to delving into the course’s literary content, readings introducing “psychoanalytic aspect” will be required; however, students need to plainly understand the course is topically centered on literatureand no prerequisite related to the subject of psychology is required. Works penned by Shakespeare (Macbeth), Ring Lardner (Champion), Franz Kafka (The Hunger Artist), Edith Wharton (Ethan Fromm), Dorothy Parker (Big Blond), J. D. Salinger (Perfect Day for a Bannafish), and others will be explored. The summer reading selection is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

“One grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” lurks behind many thematic assumptions of nineteenth century American literature. Although Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglas, and Emily Dickinson don’t directly engage Herman Melville’s greatest creation, all of these writers anticipate and/or address issues tackled in Moby Dick . The radical philosophical themes explored by these writers, and how these themes continue to shape American thought, will be closely examined during the semester. Relevant chapters of The Whale will be interspersed throughout our studies of the period in American letters now commonly known as “The American Renaissance.” The class will take a field trip to Frederick Douglass’ home in nearby Anacostia. Summer reading will be a collection of Poe’s short stories and poems.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Man has always been fascinated by how other people confront obstacles, whether they be environmental, social, or psychological. Ultimately, the challenge each person encounters defines him or herself either partially or completely. This class will read a spectrum of works as they explore the dynamic way in which people address significant fears. Students will study Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Shakespeare’s King Lear, McEwan’s Atonement, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Joyce’s The Dead, and Tan’s Two Kinds as well as other short stories. Summer Reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment will begin the analysis of this theme.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

In The Greatest Generation,Tom Brokaw relates the stories of individual men and women who “came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America.” Despite suffering from the devastating impact of the 1930’s, this generation became “united with a common purpose …and common values” to defeat the Axis powers and lead extraordinary lives. In this course, we will read narratives of a few of those remarkable Americans who reflect this phenomenal period. Lauren Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Daniel James Brown’s The Boys on The Boat, Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, as well as selected poetry and short stories. Students will read primary source materials, letters from servicemen to family, from two private collections. We will also look at essays of or about great sports figures such as Jesse Owens, and musicians such as Benny Goodman who embody that American spirit.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

From the earliest ages, man has been fascinated with the image of the hero: what makes him tick, act, and how society responds to him. Initially, society revered these heroic figures and honored them throughout their lives. However, society eventually felt challenged and threatened by these heroes. Ultimately, society exiled these seeming rebels. In this course, students will engage in the process of analyzing these issues in light of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Shaw’s Saint Joan and Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons. Integral to such a study is the consideration of man’s free will and its relation to this mystifying and mythologizing process. Students will discuss these works and write analytical essays relating these ideas.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

This course will examine a variety of literature in search of answers to a handful of life's essential questions: how do we distinguish between right and wrong, and what happens if and when we can't do so? How do we respond to ethical dilemmas? How are one's moral and psychological traits shaped, and what control do we have over shaping them? In contrast, what effect do our surroundings, whether cultural, emotional, geographical, or physical, have on the shaping of those traits? This course will examine the thematic, structural, and stylistic characteristics of a variety of texts, including Shakespeare's King Lear, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Heller's Catch-22, and selections from various American poetry movements of the 20th century.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Styles and methodologies of leading may be ruthless, heroic, unwilling, or transformative. What enables leaders with various styles to emerge? How do groups achieve a common purpose? Are leaders born, called, trained, or tempered in time? This class will explore these thematic approaches to leadership through examining texts that include Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” Jose Saramago’s Blindness, Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, and Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. This course will also focus on careful reading and critical analysis of literature as well as continued practice in composition skills. 

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI

Students will closely study the work of four or five major poets, poetic movements, or poetic forms. Alternating between these academic units, students will "workshop" their own original poetry. All students will be required to write original poetry and share it with the group. Some poetry to be studied will be decided by the instructor; other poetry to be studied will be decided by the dynamics and interests of the group. Poets and/or movements studied in the past include Shakespeare, W.C. Williams, ee cummings, Sylvia Plath, Sekou Sundiata, Muriel Rukeyser, T.S. Eliot, the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance and The Surrealists. Although the bulk of poetry studied will be from the twentieth century, the group will also spend a portion of the classes reading and writing traditional poetic forms such as sonnets, villanelles and sestinas.

Course Length: One Semester
Registration Policy: Elective for Forms V & VI