English

Grade 10 English Classes • Required
In the fall term, all tenth graders are required to enroll in one of the sections of English 10. These courses are organized by theme, but each focuses on the writing process — brainstorming, drafting, getting feedback, revising — and on the rhetorical modes of description, narrative, comparison/contrast, analysis, and definition.

English 10: Writing About Coming of Age
“Coming of age” is a phrase that stands for growing up, developing, or maturing. These narratives are stories that deal with the experience of growing up. But what does growing up or development even mean when we are talking about human beings? Is this a linear progression toward a finish line, or more of a messy becoming? How does a person’s identity, background, or environment impact this process? In this course, students will explore these questions and many more while they encounter coming-of-age narratives found in graphic novels, short stories, poems, and films. Students will write about these narratives and also create their own coming-of-age stories. Writing assignments could include a personal narrative, an analytical essay, and an article. . 

English 10: Writing About Ideas
Should bodies of water have legal rights? Are corporations people? Is AI a tool or an ideology? What defines personhood—and who gets to decide? Is democracy worth defending? This course is an introduction to contemporary public philosophy and analytical writing. No previous experience with philosophical questions, methods, or readings is required. Through close reading and developmental writing exercises, students will engage with themes like environmental ethics, artificial intelligence, democracy, citizenship, identity, freedom, and justice. By the end of the course, students should feel more confident writing about pressing ideas to different audiences, situations, and contexts.

English 10: Writing About People
People are endlessly fascinating, beautiful, and maddening. We are impossible to understand, and the attempt to do so continues to be an inexhaustible source of material for writers. In this course, students will explore ways of conceiving and structuring the essay by writing about people, including themselves. Readings will include short stories, sections of memoirs, interviews, film, and journalism.

Art of the Essay
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students will work toward a deeper understanding of the essay — its history, its elegance, and its inner workings. If the essay represents the mind in motion, then students will seek to harness that motion and shape it into clear, eloquent, and insightful pieces of writing. To do so, they will study the work of published essayists, write essays of their own, and discuss these works in a workshop setting. Forms covered may include narrative, meditative, and lyric essays.

At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism in Literature and Film
Grades: 11-12
In this course, students will explore cosmopolitanism in literature and films in the 21st century. Thinkers and writers of this tradition invite readers to consider how the complicated condition of “being at home in the world” helps them and the class interrogate facile notions of national identity and its thorny political and cultural entanglements. The work in the course will be to carefully weigh ideas of displacement, migration, cultural disappearance, and genealogies of abuse of power against the possibility of generating new narrative models and analytical tools in the service of a more critical global perspective. This course requires close reading, robust discussion, active listening, and commitment to our collective learning.

Literature of Sports
Grades: 11-12
Why do we love sports, and why has it inspired such exhilarating writing? In this course, students will examine both fiction and nonfiction about great athletes, epic wins, and stinging defeats. The class may consider the nature of fandom, the roles of race and gender in sports, and the business of sports, and famous athletic scandals. Students will be asked to do their own sportswriting, both descriptively and analytically.

Losing Battles: A Study of the Underdog in Contemporary Literature
Grades 11-12
This class will explore twentieth and twenty-first century literature that focuses on the experience of defeat, the recognition of futility, and the paradoxical, ennobling persistence of hope. Students will contemplate why they commit to causes or values — communal or strictly individual — that seem to be at odds with the prevailing character of their moment. What might be gained by holding fast to an apparently sinking ship? The curriculum will include novels, poetry, and non-fiction from all over the world, including America. 

Music and Migration: History and Literature of American Roots Music
Grades 11-12 • This course can be taken for either English or History credit.
There are more differences between us than we can readily understand; there are also more similarities and connections, both historically and in our art. In this course, students will explore departures and continuities across three routes of traditional American migration. Seeking an understanding of the blues, jazz, bluegrass, and country music, they’ll ‘travel’ from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, from Appalachia to the Mid-Atlantic megalopolis, and from Oklahoma to Bakersfield, California. Course texts may include Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues, Michael Ondaadtje’s Coming through Slaughter, and John Steinbecks’ Grapes of Wrath, as well as contemporary documents including the many songs that students will hear together.

Psychology and Literature
Grades 11-12
“Character is destiny” – Heraclitus“
Character is plot” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
If character is destiny, or at least plot, what is character? To answer that question, students in this class will explore theories touching on four psychological domains: dispositional, intrapsychic, socio-cultural, and adjustment. They will use their repertoire of theories to ask crucial questions about the characters they encounter: Why do they do what they do? How do their personalities determine their responses? What environmental or social factors may have affected the development of their personalities? And, of course, students will be asking these same questions about themselves.

Sympathy for the Devil
Grades 11-12
The image of the devil is at once so familiar and so strangely various. He is somehow both a monster reeking of decay and sulfur, and a sophisticated dandy promising pleasures and undermining sureties. By the time the devil meets the young Mississippi blues player Robert Johnson at the crossroads promising him heavenly guitar skills in exchange for his soul, the image of the devil has gathered elements from the Bible and the figure of Dionysius in the Classical Mediterranean world, from West African religion and Caribbean voodoo, from folklore and the European Faust tradition. In this course, students will look at the various cultural threads that inform the figure of the devil and try to decide what it means. Readings will include Zora Neale Hurston’s versions of African-American folk tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides.

The Madwoman and the Mad Women in Literature and Culture
Grades: 11-12
A wise woman once said, “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (Dickinson 620), implying that sometimes what seems crazy might actually be sensible. Women throughout history have often found it necessary to break out of restrictive norms, rage against oppression, and use their bodies and voices in ways that, to some, might appear insane. However, these actions have come at a price. For centuries, women’s bodies and minds have been viewed through the lens of misogynistic medical theories that say women are prone to hysteria due to their wandering wombs, fluid-filled bodies, monthly cycles, and in-born propensity for chaos. These myths have led to restrictions on women’s lives, bodies, choices, voices, and horizons. Within these restrictive systems, women who have dared to resist have often been seen as mad. The stakes of being called a “madwoman” are high, rendering women incarcerated, violated, confined, and even executed. This course will tune into the construction of the Madwoman and mad women (women’s anger) in literature and culture. Assignments will include daily reading and writing homework, a creative project, and a literary analysis paper. 

The Trial
Grades 11-12
In this course, students will consider how the courtroom shapes our understanding of literary character and conflict. The class will consider questions such as: how is life like and unlike a trial? Do trials reveal the truth about people? Do novels and movies? Or do legal battles and literature obscure more than they reveal? How does courtroom drama affect how we understand ourselves and each other? Texts students examine may include: To Kill A Mockingbird, The Trial, The Journalist and The Murderer, OJ: Made in America, and Bleak House.

What’s a Boy to Do: A Study of the Male in American Literature
Grades 11-12
What expectations do boys and young men face? How do these standards of judgment originate? Within American society, are the ideals for masculine behavior universal? How have these expectations evolved and why? In this class, students will explore several male protagonists encountering societal expectations and will dig deeply into the ways and whys of how they respond. Readings will include Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Philip Roth’s Indignation.

Writing Practicum
Grades 11-12
After completing the course, students will serve for the rest of their Park careers as tutors in The Michael Cardin ’85 Writing Center. Preference will be given to juniors; limited seats will be held for seniors.This is an intensive writing workshop that is also about the teaching of writing. Students will write and revise creative nonfiction. In recent years, assignments have included a best earth memory, description of a real or imagined photograph, favorite song analysis, philosophical meditation, and college essay — as well as stories, poems, and AP exam responses. The focus throughout will be on the process of writing, and students will learn — through reading, discussion, role-playing, and lots of practice — the techniques of effective peer tutoring. They will tutor writers from the Lower, Middle, and Upper School.

Writing Workshop: Short Fiction
Grades 11-12
This class centers on the workshop experience, in which each student composes and shares a short story that corresponds to a focal point of the craft (dramatic action, setting, characterization, tone, perspective, dialogue, time management, psychological distance, the unreliable narrator, the extension of metaphor, and the delivery of statement are among the elements that we will explore). Students will read a selection of short stories to bolster their grasp of each unit of study and must be energetic about critiquing one another’s written work.

A Place for Us: Musical Theatre as Refuge
Grades: 10-12 • This course may be taken for an English or Arts credit.
This course will trace the birth and development of that uniquely American art form: the Broadway musical. Students will listen to songs, watch productions, and also do a little singing of their own! Throughout, the class will consider how the changing shape of the musical reflects the identities and experiences of the people who created it, people often considered “outsiders” due to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. Students will examine how composers, writers and performers critiqued, reworked, and affirmed American mythology through these shows. They will be asked to write reflectively and analytically about the musical, and there will be a culminating creative project. Shows to be explored may include: Showboat, Kiss Me Kate, Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Cabaret, Parade, Ragtime, Company, Les Miserables, and In the Heights. 

American Idyll: A Study of Leisure in American Literature
Grades: 10-12
This class will explore the portrayal of earthly paradise, the link between inner peace and the beauty of one’s surroundings, and the pursuit of leisure in American literature. Students will contemplate the relationship between labor and restfulness, whether (and how) the pastoral roots of tranquility have shifted in our consciousness, and whether a devotion to relaxation suggests ethical or spiritual concerns. The curriculum will include fiction, poetry, and non-fiction from the nineteenth century to the present day.

American Romantism
Grades: 10-12
If the United States was founded by a moneyed class that intended to rule, it was also invented by a lineage of people who imagined it as a place where human nature would come to some new and clearer definition, and where individual freedom would be realized more fully through a fuller experience of Nature and of communal responsibility and belonging. This class will look at this lineage from the Transcendentalism of R.W. Emerson and Margaret Fuller to the Abolitionist Black poets of the mid-19th century, through Whitman and Dickinson’s cosmic self to the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, to the experiments in art and education of the Black Mountain School in North Carolina, to the West Coast wilderness poetry of Joanne Kyger and Gary Snyder. Writing assignments will include both personal and analytical essays, and frequent imitations.

Art of the Essay
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students will work toward a deeper understanding of the essay — its history, its elegance, and its inner workings. If the essay represents the mind in motion, then students will seek to harness that motion and shape it into clear, eloquent, and insightful pieces of writing. To do so, they will study the work of published essayists, write essays of their own, and discuss these works in a workshop setting. Forms covered may include narrative, meditative, and lyric essays.

British Poetry
Grades: 10-12
English language poetry has taken countless forms for countless purposes in the hands of a surprisingly ethnically diverse range of peoples. It encompasses hymns to God and chants to nature, magic spells and myth, defences of the established order and calls to rebellion, emotional heights and philosophical depths. In this class, students will read English poetry in all its breadth from classics to pieces that should be or will be classics. They will begin with early Anglo-Saxon rhymes and Beowulf, the 10th century story of a struggling Danish chieftain, and continue through Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Milton and the 17th-century Metaphysical poets, through the most famous philosophical and lyric poetry of the 18th century, the explorations of nature and childhood of the Romantics, look at late 19th-century poetry and modernisms, and finally read the post-colonial poetry of Ireland and the Afro-British Caribbean. Writing will include both imitations and frequent short analytical pieces. 

Children’s Literature / Children in Literature
Grades: 10-12
Is a child merely a small adult without a fully developed neurology? Or are there aspects of childhood experience and selfhood that are simply distinct from adult experience — and which perhaps nourish the adult who is waiting to be? And if this latter model is the truer one, what do these distinct creatures need out of their environments and their education? Different times and cultures have answered these questions very differently, and so in this course, students will read widely, both in literature that has been considered “children’s lit” in various cultures, and also literature that depicts childhood and its worlds of mystery, terror, and enchantment. Texts may include selections from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, and Wole Soyinka’s Aké, as well as myths and fairy tales from around the world.

Crime and Culpability
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students consider complex legal and ethical questions through literary texts. The course begins with the question, “What is crime?” and proceeds to explore deeper questions, such as “Is there a meaningful distinction between legal and moral wrongs?” “Can an individual be culpable for acting within an immoral system?” “How does upbringing affect culpability?” “Can there be culpability where there is no criminal intent?” and “Are there times when the commission of a crime is justified?” Readings include short stories, plays, and novels as well as philosophy case studies and magazine articles. Most of the writing assignments for this class will be analytical.

Curious Entanglements: Crafting a More Capacious Vision of Creative Nonfiction
Grades: 10-12
Your life is worthy of literary attention. This course explores how lived experience can be translated into evocative literature. Students will start by relearning how to pay attention and consider their lived experiences, memories, interactions, conversations, and other messy aspects of life as primary texts for creative nonfiction writing. Through the study of personal essays, autoethnographic vignettes, poetic journalism, and experimental narrative forms, students will become familiar with the interdisciplinary research methods writers use to transform visible and invisible moments into absorbing narratives. The class will also explore voice, narrative structure, description, characterization, dialogue, and reflection, while also examining how writers ethically represent themselves and others with rigorous honesty. Students will underscore writing as a process of discovery, curiosity, failure, and joy that will help them develop their own sense of craft, not bound exclusively to mastery of familiar forms as the end goal. Potential mentored texts are by Ruth Behar, Claudia Rankin, Chaun Webster, Mai Der Vang, Zadie Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ross Gay, Renato Rosaldo, Jeff Schonberg, Ann Lowenhaupt-Tsing, and other writers who make the case, through their work, for a more capacious vision of creative nonfiction.

Electronic Literature
Grades: 10-12
Is a computer programmer a storyteller? Can computers help us craft new literary genres? What is a born digital text? In what ways has digital literature challenged us to rethink the structuring of language, culture, and knowledge itself? This course will help students develop a critical awareness of contemporary digital literature. Students will have the opportunity to learn about literary computational methods, analyze new forms of textuality, apply traditional close reading practices to multimodal narratives, and write their own digital texts. They will pay close attention to writers from the Global South as these authors try to reimagine the landscape of digital storytelling. 

Environment in American Literature
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students will analyze representations of environment in American literature through the lens of ecocriticism. They will start with some foundational ecocritical theory and then move through environmental American literature in several themed units (for example: Animals, Ecofeminism, Transcorporeality, and Urban Environments). The class will note historical context, form, relations to the nonhuman, and the way nature is framed. Students will unpack representations of environment in order to understand their literary value, but also discern the kinds of human/nonhuman relations these representations can provoke or invite. They will contemplate representations and responses to nature as they embark on a service-learning project, The Eco Impact Project, which will allow them to create the kind of representations that bring about sustainable human/nonhuman relations. 

Family Stories
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students will consider how writers tell the story of a family. How does a novel or poem accommodate the voices of each member? How do power dynamics within the family affect the way the story is told? Does family affirm individual identity or restrict it? What counts as a family in the first place? In addition to analyzing literature, students will have the opportunity to write family stories of their own. Possible texts include: Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, and Light in August by William Faulkner.

Graphic Narratives
Grades 10-12

In this course, students will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction graphic narratives to become familiar with the historical development, literary format, and complex visual language of contemporary graphic novels. They will closely examine how sequential, multimodal art challenges our experience of narratives. A particular focus will be on texts that explore power, gender, identity, survival, resistance, hybridity, and joy. Students will write analytical essays and create their own graphic novels.

Introduction to Dramatic Literature
Grades 10-12
This course is designed to build students’ understanding of dramatic literature from its beginnings through its modern iterations. They will focus on landmark plays that exemplify major movements in theatre and drama. The class will move through the plays chronologically, noting the way drama evolves throughout history and also paying attention to the way plays manifest their respective contexts. A major focus of this course is critical reading: the ability not only to understand the surface of the play, but also to interpret what it does on a deeper level. In addition to its consideration of the plays as literature, the course includes an emphasis on staging and performance practices of each era and the cultures that helped inspire the plays. Although this is not an acting or a production course, students will engage in some acting and ponder stage design along the way. There will be in-class performances, viewings of plays, analytical discussions and writing, and a creative, multimodal project.

LGBTQ+ Literature
Grades: 10-12
In this course, students will focus on LGBTQ2IAP+ writers, texts, and issues of the past and present. They will read fiction, poetry, and plays that represent some of the experiences, challenges, and joys of being LGBTQ2IAP+. A major focus of this course is critical reading: the ability to not only understand what the text says, but also interpret what the text does on a deeper level. This course will include short daily writing assignments, a creative project, and a literary analysis paper.

Poetry Writing
Grades: 10-12
In this class, students will allow every poem to be an experiment. They will play with language, attention, emotion, interaction, and structure — always asking, What kind of poem will this kind of play make? What kind of poem comes from sitting in stillness? What kind of poem comes from spontaneity? What kind of poem comes from confession? What kind of poem comes from collaboration? What kind of poem comes from following a strict form? What kind of poem comes from thinking of language as paint we spread on a piece of paper? Though students will engage in regular workshopping, the question will never be “How good is this poem?” Instead, students will train themselves to ask, “What kind of poem do we have here? How can it become more itself?”

The Interview
Grades: 10-12
The best way to get to know someone is to ask them a question. In this course, students will study the art of asking questions. Using the interview as the tool to go beyond the initial query, they will ask individuals and groups about their lives and in so doing, they will hear stories, gain insights, and learn more thoroughly and personally about the people, the ideas, and the particulars of the world, leading to greater and deeper understandings. The class will explore different types of interviews and will unpack a range of models as students work toward publishing their own collection of unique pieces. Texts may include pieces from The New Yorker, Longform, Humans of New York, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as interviews from Fresh Air, This American Life, How to Be Amazing, and other podcasts. 

Writing Workshop: Long Fiction
Grades: 10-12
Like Writing Workshop: Short Fiction, this class centers on the workshop experience, in which students compose and share original narrative fiction for peer critique; however, this class emphasizes techniques to extend a story. Students will continue to study the principle elements of narrative craft, but they will focus centrally on structure. This course builds naturally off of the short fiction workshop class, but it does not require any previous experience in narrative writing. The curriculum will include stories ranging from thirty pages (such as work by Francisco Coloane and James Baldwin) to more expansive narratives of up to a hundred pages (such as work by Peter Taylor, Alice Munro, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Annie Ernaux, John Steinbeck, Jim Harrison, and Alan Sillitoe). Students in this class must be energetic about critiquing one another’s work.