English

Elective Courses
These courses may not be used to fulfill the graduation requirement in English. Availability of courses is dependent upon interest.

This course is designed to prepare ninth graders for the rigors of high school academic writing. It will cover prewriting techniques including freewriting, outlining, mapping, and reporters’ questions, and it will stress the fundamentals of essay writing. Emphasis will fall on personal as opposed to analytical essays, but the goal of the course is to teach ninth graders what essays can and should accomplish. Teachers will take care to attend to the grammatical and mechanical needs of individual students. The use of word processing is a secondary benefit of this course.

Elective course for students in all grades

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to explore and experiment with different forms of creative writing, including fiction, poetry, and personal essays. By midterm, students focus on a single area, producing by the end of semester a collection, manuscript, or portfolio for assessment.

Elective course for students in all grades

An introduction to writing for newspapers. Students will learn the principles, skills, ethics, and law of news reporting and writing. They will practice news gathering, interviewing, writing, editing, and proofreading. The writing they will do covers the broad spectrum of traditional news writing: straight news stories, features, editorials, sports writing, and commentary. The course is recommended for those interested in writing for The Bridge or for those interested in developing a clear and effective writing style. Students are required to produce writing for school publications. Work for the course includes reading and studying the daily New York Times or Boston Globe. Some attention will be given to writing for magazines and for the Internet.

This course is designed to examine the world of poetry, including the conventions and the techniques of the genre.  It will expand and extend the study of poetry that occurs in core English courses and will prepare students for further literary study.  Students will learn forms and terms of poetry and will study a variety of classic and contemporary poets, from Freneau through Hughes, from Yeats through Dove.

This course, modeled on a seminar, includes the close study of at least three of Shakespeare’s works: a history (e.g., Richard III), a tragedy (e.g., Antony and Cleopatra), and a romance (e.g., Cymbeline). Students will also read selected sonnets to gain an awareness of and appreciation for the range and depth of this singular playwright and poet. Students receive instruction on theater production and history, as well as the Elizabethan era.  Writing will include both analytical papers and personal responses; assignments may also include a presentation on some aspect of Shakespeare's life, work, theatre, or world.

This course will feature a class period and X block devoted to viewing a film of importance in film history and a subsequent class period devoted to discussing the film.  Students will study film as a genre and will learn the techniques and terms particular to film.  Frequent papers will be assigned in response to the films.

Elective course

The course focuses on the study of film, especially satire, and the process of making a film, from concept through script, storyboard, the editing-room floor, and onto the silver screen. The class will make a film as the final project. Films studied include Day for Night; Brazil; Wag the Dog; Run, Lola, Run; plus documentaries on films, filmmakers, and the making of film. Books used include The Moviegoer, The Encyclopedia of Film, and The Oxbow Incident (and attendant short film).

This course must be taken in conjunction with ENG 420

Postgraduates who need or want an additional semester of English are encouraged to take this course combined with ENG 420. Students enrolled in the two-semester sequence will receive more graduated development and extended practice of skills in writing, reading, speaking, and thinking. Whereas students in both courses will be expected to read good literature, write essays, and participate in class discussion, students in the two-semester course will write increasingly analytical papers, read more complex literature (fiction and nonfiction), and have opportunities for independent projects, such as studying a second work by an author read in the first semester.

This is a comprehensive literature course designed to meet the heightened needs of passionate and talented students of English.  Candidates for Honors English should be accomplished students of English who are prepared for a fast-paced and demanding curriculum.  The course elaborates upon the critical reading and analytical writing skills developed and honed in previous English courses through daily reading across a range of genres and regular writing analytical assignments.  The curriculum culminates in an honors project, an intensive project or essay of the student's design, which must be approved by the instructor and presented to the entire class. 

Senior elective

In this course students read the three great epics of the classical world: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid in sequence. These three poems, which describe the Trojan War and its aftermath, stand at the core of Western literature and have provided inspiration to authors, artists, and readers throughout the ages. Students will explore how Vergil uses Greek Homer as the basis for his Roman view of the world and discuss the poets’ presentations of the great themes of war, fate, heroism, the gods, the afterlife, leadership, and the relation between men and women. Students will research and present topics of their own choosing that relate to the works of their themes.

Senior elective

What kind of observations and depictions of war have poetry, the epic, drama, prose narratives long and short, and various kinds of essays offered over the centuries?  What have been the grim glories and bitter shams of such recurrent, large-scale violence? The study of war offers a plethora of likely titles: Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Henry IV plays, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Whitman’s Specimen Days, Ford’s Goodbye to All That and The Good Soldier, a smattering of WW I poets and Housman’s “The Shropshire Lad,” Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, Silone’s Bread and Wine, Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Caputo’s A Rumor of War, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, Updike’s Terrorist, just to name a few.

Senior elective

Students in the course will be reading novels, big novels that have influenced individuals and cultures for decades, even centuries. This course is for those who enjoy reading and who want to immerse their imaginations in the world of words and to meet the authors who have defined the art of writing. The reading list will include literature from various countries and continents, periods of history, cultures, and points of view by such renowned authors as Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Hugo, Bronte, Eliot, Flaubert, and the like. Students can expect rigorous reading assignments and dynamic discussions. Writing will be both personal responses and literary analyses employing techniques of observation and discovery.

This demanding course, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is designed for students who wish to demonstrate their aptitude for reading and writing at the college level. The following are some of the works that have been studied in recent years: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear; Austen’s Emma; Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment; Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss; Lawrence’s The Rainbow; Gordimer’s July’s People; Barth’s The Floating Opera; Updike’s The Centaur; Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces; and a wide variety of poetry.