Upper School English Curriculum

In English 9, students acquire and apply the skills and habits necessary for a literate life. The course focuses on the thematic topic of Innocence and Experience, including how individuals and cultures signal childhood and adulthood, the role of knowing the self in maturing, and navigating difference and conflict as we come of age.

English 10 builds on the essential literacy skills of English 9, moving students into analysis of how texts create their meanings and effects. The course focuses on the thematic topic of Truth and Justice, prompting students to explore ways of knowing, structures of power, and mechanisms of justice.

In English 11, students explore essential questions that continue to define American culture: What does it mean to be an American? What is the relationship between individual and community?

Students in ADV English 11: American Literature & Rhetoric will do everything detailed in the English 11 description and undertake an additional focus on rhetoric, the art of using language effectively to persuade and influence others.

This course will provide additional support to students taking English 9, English 10, English 11, or English 12 through extra instruction on and coaching of reading and writing skills.

This course explores the relationships between dominant and subcultures by investigating books that have been restricted or banned by different groups. In America, there is a growing movement to pull books considered “indecent” or “offensive” from classrooms and from school and county libraries.

This course explores the artistry of Hip Hop as a poetic and cultural force that speaks truth to power, builds identity, and reshapes language. By reading and listening to a range of poems and rap lyrics, students will investigate how artists across genres use sound, storytelling, and symbolism to resist dominant narratives and imagine new possibilities for self-expression.

At literature’s core are some big questions, including: “What does it mean to be human?” “How do I matter to the world around me?” and “Are people inherently good or evil?”

The five novels in this course resist being categorized within a single nation’s borders. They also share a preoccupation with whether it is possible to find a shared humanity — i.e., to create some form of justice — that transcends the boundaries of geography and identity both within and among modern nation-states.

This course introduces students to art and literature from and about the Middle Ages. The semester’s work begins with medieval literature (in translation!), asking students to identify and articulate literary tropes in stories about King Arthur and Camelot.

Literature has been an important mode of human understanding and expression for thousands of years. You have been required to study it every year of your education, which has emphasized the primacy of reading with skill. But what is literature for?

This is not a course about a solitary genius who lived and wrote 400 years ago in England, but rather a living, breathing body of literature that is in current production, adaptation, and public discourse all over the world.

Humans are resilient, and over time we have come up with thousands of ways to respond to stressful circumstances. One prominent way humanity responds to hardship, stress, and boredom is through mental escape: by daydreaming or watching TV, by drawing or going on a walk, by playing games or writing stories — and, of course, by reading.

There’s nothing better for a good scare than a ghost story, but entertainment value alone does not explain the persistence of ghost stories across time and cultures. In this course, we will explore the cultural work that ghost stories do.

Outlaw Ocean surveys stories of human interactions with the ocean from the earliest records of the North Sea to contemporary journalism in the South China Sea.

This seminar explores sports journalism as a literary, cultural, and historical phenomenon, investigating how writers have shaped public perception of athletes, games, and social issues.

In this ADV-level semester-long course, students will examine literature that engages with issues such as climate change, public health, economic inequality, and social and racial injustice.

This course will examine the power of race as a social construct — not rooted in biological reality — that has affected American life as much as any other human force or entity.

ADV English 12: Women’s Literature applies several theoretical lenses (e.g., feminist theory, queer theory, formalism, old historicism, Marxism) to the study of literature written by and about people who identify as women.