English
Upper School English would typically take the form of a sequence of two general literature courses (focusing on coming-of-age stories and world literature, respectively) followed by to courses dedicated one to American and the other to British Literature. Of course, every year there is a thematic literature class as well.
Students at the higher levels are often advanced enough to begin studying theories of literary criticism.
Water’s Many Faces
This year’s English theme class will focus primarily on Ecology in Shakespeare! Thunderstorms in King Lear! The degradation of the environment, and the people living there, in Macbeth! The blurred lines of reality between the forest and the court of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream! We know that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the Earth, that much of the climate catastrophes occurring today are directly correlated to human activities, so why read Shakespeare? What could Shakespeare teach us about our relationship to the environment and our role in warming the planet? In this year’s Water’s Many Faces, we move away from Hokusai’s thirty-nine paintings of Mount Fuji to explore several Shakespeare plays and other short stories to analyze how Shakespeare thought about the environment and humanity’s place in it.
English 9
As the new addition to the upper school, 9th graders in English 9 will read coming-of-age texts that reflect their own journey as they enter an exciting new stage of their life.
English 10
Students of English 10 will be exploring texts and authors from different parts of the world to attain unique perspectives on historical events and people’s lives. This class is a precursor to the kinds of texts and readings that they will encounter in American Literature and British Literature.
British Literature and American Literature
It’s time for some theory. While students near their senior year of high school, they begin encountering parts of themselves, their families, and their friends that sometimes prove difficult to understand; as they discover who they are, they come up against the challenge of stratifying themselves into a person they envision themselves to be in relation to the world around them. In both British Literature and American Literature, we not only focus on texts primarily from British and American authors, but we also supplement our readings with Lois Tyson’s wonderful book Critical Theory Today to learn the brief history of literary theory and how it has informed the way we read texts today in schools.