English

Reading, thinking, talking, listening. This class provides the foundation for your four years of Commonwealth English classes: you learn how to read with sustained attention—to listen carefully to the particular language of a text, to perceive its impact, and to express what you have discovered in short, well-constructed essays.

In class discussion, you work with your classmates on trying out and refining your ideas about a reading. You get plenty of practice writing—and plenty of feedback, too—with frequent one- to two-page analytical essays; sometimes you will have the opportunity to imitate or parody distinctive styles of writing.

Texts may include: The Iliad or The Odyssey (dovetailing with the ninth-grade Ancient History course); Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, or Julius Caesar; Brontë, Jane Eyre; Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Thomas, Under Milk Wood; Naipaul, Miguel Street; Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Kingston, The Woman Warrior; Dillard, An American Childhood; and a smorgasbord of folktales, short poems, and stories.

Freshman year I learned to glean the most information I could out of a small block of text. I learned to read not just for plot, and soon realized that the books I was reading were full of subtleties to be discovered—words begging to be underlined, connections waiting to be made.

The plot thickens! As a tenth grader, you will refine your skills as a literary critic. You work with a variety of texts in which you encounter narrators who cannot be trusted, plays in which no character is “right,” and heroes who are not necessarily sincere (or even particularly “heroic”). You learn to piece together an argument based on increasingly complicated textual evidence; close reading will help you to find your way and draw conclusions about complex matters even in the absence of a trustworthy narrator’s strong helping hand. And in your essays, you’ll focus on how to describe clearly the perceptions you uncover.

Texts often include: Shakespeare, Macbeth or Richard II; Dickens, Great Expectations; short stories by Hemingway, Lawrence, Mansfield, Welty, Lahiri, and others; essays by Orwell; dramatic monologues; and Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Kincaid, Annie John.

Commonwealth English classes fundamentally change the way you interpret the written word. By the end of English 10, I had come to realize that we often put too much store in the idea that words have to make immediately obvious, straightforward sense.

AP This year is devoted to listening to the enormous expressive range of the human voice as rendered in written words. We pay increasingly close attention to diction, tone, patterns of speech, the arc of an argument—to the way so much hinges on exactly how things are said by poets, characters, and narrators. Take Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose intense urge to speak the truth drives him to express himself in a multitude of voices. We study literary works in a non-chronological order designed to allow particular voices to resonate with and build on each other. And we read at a leisurely pace, often aloud and together. We spend most of first quarter on lyric poems to sharpen your listening skills; then we move on to longer works. Focused critical essays analyzing passages help you uncover nuance and confront ambiguity. Authors include Gwendolyn Brooks, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Terrance Hayes, James Joyce, Kiese Laymon, Shakespeare, and Derek Walcott. .

I remember reading Joyce’s Dubliners we might spend an entire class discussing only a single page. Whole conversations grew out of a single word. It was gut-wrenching. And it was the first time I had ever felt so engaged and moved by a piece of art.

This class offers you the chance to read and then to write in a variety of forms beyond literary analysis: memoirs, journalism, science writing, and polemics on such topics as climate change. In the spring, you and your classmates will produce a New Yorker-like class magazine that is usually distributed to the whole school.

Possible readings: a compilation of autobiographical, journalistic, persuasive, and science writing by authors including Milton, Abraham Lincoln, Florence King, Louis Menand, and Steven Pinker; Shakespeare, Othello; Milton, Paradise Lost; Austen, Pride and Prejudice, or Wharton, The Age of Innocence; stories by Tolstoy and O’Connor; Stoppard, The Real Thing; and Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

After reading essays that were informative, elegant, shocking, and beautiful, it was my turn. In writing my personal essay for reasons for writing, I found my voice.

We’ll spend the first half of the year in this intensive writing course generating a great deal of writing in a wide variety of forms (poetry, personal essay, fiction, and perhaps more, depending on the interests of the group). Students will produce weekly assignments, prepare longer submissions for workshops, and respond thoughtfully to one another’s work. The idea in the beginning will be to experiment, play, and produce. At the middle of the year, each student will define a project that they would like to work on in the second semester. This could be a collection of poems, a series of short stories, or an extended work of fiction. Students will then use the weekly exercises to help them develop this work-in-progress and will workshop selections in class. At the end of the year, students will present and read from this final project. Readings vary from year to year, so students may enroll in the course for a second year, and it will be duly noted as Creative Writing 2.

When we think of Shakespeare’s most famous (or at least culturally prized) plays, we often think of the tragedies—and yet Shakespeare wrote nearly twice as many plays that fall under the headings of comedy and romance: plays that focus on wonder, miracle, magic, and reunion. Why was Shakespeare so drawn to the genres of fairy tale, medieval romance, and myth? What did those types of stories allow him to do? How might the idea of character be influenced by the more fantastical elements of these plays? This elective will explore some of these plays, with an eye toward answering these and other questions. Texts will include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and another play to be determined.

Reading Shakespeare with a teacher who is so enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the plays and the period was amazing. As we worked our way slowly through Shakespeare’s lines (Commonwealth close reading!), she helped us discover and appreciate the beauty and depth of his language—and its playful aspects, as well. Now we all love puns!