English
Overview:
The English Department has specific objectives and goals for each course and student. The department believes that the study of literature encompasses cultural and aesthetic purposes that are equally important to skill development. The study of quality literature should lead students to investigate certain fundamental questions, and should stimulate them to begin formulating their own answers. The study of literature helps reveal certain underlying patterns in human existence. It also stimulates students to express and to reveal their own thoughts and emotions in writing.
The department believes that the study of language, communication, and literature should lead students away from provincialism to broader views and wiser choices. Recognizing that language arts skills are basic to all learning, the department works to develop in each student continual growth in the basic skills of reading comprehension, critical thinking, and expository writing. The refinement of students' speaking and listening skills is also an area of focus.
Goals
The broad purposes and objectives of the English Department are achieved through the continual implementation of the department's goals in all classes:
1. Students will continually learn new vocabulary and develop contexts for the use of those new words.
2. Students will understand that language is shaped by historical, geographical, and cultural forces.
3. Students will work with analogous reasoning by examining and consttructing verbal analogies.
4. Students will recognize, interpret, analyze and evaluate specific literary genres.
5. Students will be exposed to core texts that have helped shape Western culture, and will study the relationship between an author's work and its historical context.
6. Students will be given an opportunity to broaden their awareness of literature, historically and culturally, through assigned and independent readings, and will be required to respond creatively to these readings.
7. Students will learn to evaluate their spoken messages for accuracy, effectiveness, significance, and propriety.
8. Students will receive instruction in speech and communication in an experiential active approach and will receive constructive feedback on all speech activities.
9. Students will understand writing as a developmental process that is holistic rather than an accumulation of skills.
10. Students will be given clear and consistent criteria for the evaluation of assignments that focus first on the content, and second on the semantic and syntactic elements.
11. Students will be given frequent opportunities to do original writing, gaining consistent experience in working through the entire writing process.
12. Students will develop a sense of appropriate expression (correct usage) and punctuation primarily through frequent monitored writing exercises, and secondarily through grammar and usage exercises.
13. Students will format papers and presentations in a clear, organized, and neat manner.
English Department Courses
English 9, 10, 11, 12
College Preparatory English 9, 10, 11, 12
Advanced Placement English 11, 12
Search for Identity
A Lost Generation
Telling Stories: Myth, Memoir and Fairy Tale
Speech and Composition
Creative Writing
Electives:
Books to Film
Space in Time
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