Đọc, suy nghĩ và viết nhận thức là trọng tâm của mọi khóa học tiếng Anh dự bị đại học.
At all grade levels, work includes informal class discussions, close reading of literature, and frequent writing assignments such as reading quizzes, analytical essays, and creative fiction and verse. Classes are small and provide ample opportunity for individual time with instructors as well as group work. The literature studied throughout the four-year program represents a variety of genres, styles, periods, and voices, sparking intellectual curiosity and developing cultural awareness.

Students enroll in an English course every semester. English I (ninth grade) and English II (tenth grade) are yearlong courses in which students develop the writing and analytical skills that they will use throughout their College Prep education and beyond. Through writing, revision, and exercises, students deepen their understanding of grammar and principles of style. In the eleventh and twelfth grades, students choose from thematic semester-long seminars.

In addition to courses offered by the department, there are opportunities for students to develop their interest in literature and proficiency in writing. Students at all grade levels are encouraged to submit material to the school newspaper, arts magazine, and literary journal. English seminars are complemented by field trips to off-campus performances and guest lectures from literary scholars, writers, and musicians.

Danh sách 2 mặt hàng.

  • Tiếng Anh I (lớp 9)

    In English I, students engage with literature in a variety of ways. Students develop skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, while also practicing collaborative engagement—working together and learning from one another. Classes feature lively group discussions, practice in close reading and finding textual evidence, instruction in the art of writing coupled with frequent writing exercises, and regular lessons in grammar, style, and vocabulary. Texts include Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Arturo Islas’ The Rain God, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Sanjay Patel’s The Ramayana: The Divine Loophole.
  • Tiếng Anh II (lớp 10)

    English II broadens students’ experience with major literary genres, traditions, and writers, while exploring tropes of power and consciousness in literature. Building on the composition and discussion skills introduced in ninth grade, English II provides sustained practice in essay writing as students cultivate their voice as writers. Students continue to work extensively with poetry, fiction, and modern essays, developing skills in critical thinking and close reading. Themes of identity, self-knowledge, and cultural hegemony reverberate within the texts and writing assignments. Major texts include Orwell’s 1984, Linda Hogan’s Power, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
I loved everything we read, but Native Speaker was by far my favorite book. Our teacher expertly facilitated discussions in class and I enjoyed hearing how everyone connected or interpreted the work differently.”            
                   
— Student  

Seminars—11th and 12th grades

Danh sách 14 mặt hàng.

  • The Art of the Personal Essay

    This creative writing course invites students to be an essayist of their own experience. Students uncover past, present, and future versions of themselves and seek the other self located in the reader. This course helps students find who they might be writing to and why. To inspire their writing, the class reads a diverse body of classic and contemporary essays, using a writer’s lens, layered on top of a literary critical one, that focuses on emotional and conceptual arcs and techniques of voice, narrative, imagery, and style. Books include a course reader and The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate. Inspiration is taken from a selection of essays and poems by Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Naomi Shihab Nye, Angela Davis, Pablo Neruda, Lyla June, N. Scott Momaday, and more.
  • The Body Electric

    From the printing press, radio, and film to the internet, robotics, and artificial intelligence, the inescapable comingling of humans and machines defines the current era. This course asks what it means to be human in the “Machine Age.” Students consider the ways that writers “sing the body electric,” in poems and novels that question what it means to be human and probe the ethics of artificial intelligence, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These readings are grounded in the historical understanding of the rise of modern self-hood alongside our mechanical inventions. Students encounter the first literary cyborgs in nineteenth- century industrial texts, and screen films that reflect on their own mechanical production including Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon—described as the first “science fiction” film, Bladerunner, and other recent visions of cyborgs. More than simply thinking about how anxieties and longings shape society’s visions of humans and machines, the course considers whether literature is the essence of human creativity or itself a beautiful machine, an ingenious device.
  • Counternarratives: The Weight of History

    Through postmodern American literature, this course examines the lasting effects of the past and the weight of historical family narratives on how individuals construct their identities in the present. Students consider the pressures of “big” histories (social, racial, political, gendered, religious) upon individual lives and explore individuals’ varied attempts to transcend these histories through stories that run counter to norms and conventions of storytelling. Texts include David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Luis Alberto Urrea’s House of Broken Angels, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, and John Sayles’s film,
    Lone Star.
  • Deadliest bắt

    Like the sea itself, the literature of seafaring brims with adventure, salt, sublimity, and peril. The journey begins with a work of autobiographical nonfiction that sets the terms for the course, The Life of John Thompson, a Fugitive Slave and continues to survey its history, from such classics as Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to Spielberg’s iconic summer blockbuster Jaws. Readings include selected sea songs and chanteys, as well as essays, stories, and poems. The centerpiece for the course is that greatest of all fish stories and literature’s deadliest catch, Melville’s epic, Moby-Dick. A probing investigation of whiteness, masculinity, and the leviathan of American slavery, Moby-Dick distills America’s foundational contradictions in a sprawling adventure story that is equal parts buddy novel, political satire, philosophical treatise, and whale encyclopedia. An excerpt from Toni Morrison’s landmark essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” helps situate Moby-Dick in mid-nineteenth-century debates over slavery.
  • Phục hưng Harlem

    “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” –Zora Neale Hurston
    In the aftermath of World War I and the great migration of African-Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line, the Harlem Renaissance began. Part of the Jazz Age and a flowering of all art forms, the Harlem Renaissance gave birth to many pivotal African-American cultural figures who still loom large today, such as Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and more. This seminar surveys many of the pivotal writers and thinkers who shaped this illustrious moment through works including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun; poetry by Langston Hughes, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Countee Cullen; short stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Charles Johnson; and sections from influential sociologists, such as Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
  • Jane Austen

    Why are we culturally obsessed with Jane Austen? From reimagined Jane Austen “action figures” to Bollywood adaptations, from memes to merchandise to musicals, Austen’s popularity remains remarkably high. This course explores Austen’s continued relevance today alongside her historical and political context. The class focuses on three of her novels paired with their contemporary adaptations: Emma and the film Clueless; Sense and Sensibility and Ang Lee’s films; Northanger Abbey and film, television, and graphic novel adaptations. These works underscore Austen’s artistic innovations and development as a writer and invite students to consider her legacy and reception. Students examine how writers and artists from a wide array of nationalities, cultures, and backgrounds have taken her writing as a model for social commentary—from Ta Nehisi-Coates who dubbed her “Jane Awesome” and to poet W.H. Auden who
    praised her “shocking” exposure of the “economic basis of society.”
  • Kindred Spirits: Friendship in Literature

    Aristotle says that a good friend is “a second self” and that friendships are essential to happiness. Friends can offer care, solidarity, and paths towards undermining structures that alienate and marginalize; friends can build community, upend hierarchies, and produce change; and friendship “holds a mirror up to us,” continues Aristotle, giving us a truer picture of ourselves. But friends can also be rivals, competitors, and sources of envy. In this course, students explore the complex, rewarding, occasionally bewildering nature of friendship. Readings include Toni Morrison’s Sula, Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
  • Latinx Literary Crossings

    —Gloria Anzaldúa 
    Drawing on works by Latinx writers, the class explores stories about borders: sites where land, people, and languages converge. In Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek, which tells of the struggles of a woman ensnared by the conventions of a patriarchal culture, the border is not only physical, but metaphorical—it represents a dividing line between cultures and families, between past and future, between community and isolation, between safety and danger. Central to the course is Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, which uses artful yet uncomplicated prose to tell the tragic story of twenty-six immigrants, many of whom perished while crossing the US-Mexico border through Arizona. This course examines works of short fiction by Ana Castillo, Junot Diaz, Manuel Muñoz, Josie Méndez-Negrete, Juan Rulfo, Tomás Rivera, Piri Thomas, Helena María Viramontes, and Miguel de Cervantes, and concludes with examination of the economy of language employed by authors of flash fiction, ultra short stories, such as Ana María Shua, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Frederick Aldama, and more.
  • On the Road: Literary Journeys

    From the hero’s journey to the spiritual pilgrimage, these literary characters are really going places! This seminar explores the literature of travel and migration. From mythical tales, like Homer’s Odyssey or Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, to American cross-continental peregrinations, like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Krakauer’s Into the Wild, to global diasporic narratives, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, this seminar will look at both the ways in which travel changes the characters in these texts and the ways in which the characters bring all their biases and problems with them, affecting the places they visit: for wherever you go, there you are!
  • Poetry

    “I recall that one time he told the people to read the poems out loud because the spoken word was the seed of love in the darkness”—Tomás Rivera

    Through a study of the formal elements of poetry—line, speech, syntax, diction, and voice—and close examination of a wide variety of poetic forms and styles across literary traditions, students in this course are able to hone their own poetic sensibilities. In its examination of poetic forms, the course pays particular attention to the influences and intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Students work towards reading poetry with both an intuitive eye and a mastery of technical terminology, offering their own poetic perspectives in a set of revised poems.
  • Something Wicked

    From the weird sisters of Macbeth to the Wicked Witch of the West, witches have been an object of hate, fear, and fascination. In our modern understanding, “witches,” like those of the Salem trials, were women who suffered brutal punishment for defying religious, patriarchal, or colonial power. This course will examine Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the context of King James’ obsessive fear of “black magic,” before reading archival material Joseph Glanvill and Cotton Mather on the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692-93. Students will then turn to Arthur Miller’s dramatization of the trials in The Crucible, and Maryse Condé’s fictionalized account of the trials from the perspective of the Black woman of Native and Caribbean ancestry who was the first to be accused in the actual trials in I, Tituba. Other readings include Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch, Sylvia Townsend Warners’ Lolly Willowes, and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling.
  • Toni Morrison

    Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has written some of the most deeply human, complex, and inspiring storytelling in American literature. This course considers her whole career, covering at least three of her novels and some of her shorter fiction and non-fiction work. Students track Morrison’s criticism of what she called “the master narrative” and the development of her philosophy of “rememory” to describe the Black American experience (and consequently the American experience) and map a path forward. The course starts with her first novel, The Bluest Eye—a powerful and traumatic work situated in the middle of the Black power era and second- wave feminism—and works toward her fifth and most acclaimed novel, Beloved, in which she puts forward ideas about how to move past America’s racialized and gendered trauma and into a more joyful, transcendent future. Through a deep dive into her inspiring oeuvre, Morrison teaches not only how to read her books but a new way of reading literature itself.
  • ¡Viva la Revolución!

    Why does the 1910 Revolution continue to loom so large on both sides of la frontera? Why does everyone know the names of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata? (“Es mejor morir de pie que continuar viviendo de rodillas/ Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”)
    This seminar delves into the history, literature, and art central to the fall of the Porfiriato and the promise it offered to land reform and citizenship rights for women and Mexico’s indigenous population. The course examines the gendered elements and the significant role women played in the Revolution. Readings include Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho, Sandra Cisneros “Eyes of Zapata,” Andrea Saenz’s “Everyone’s Abuelo Can’t Have Ridden with Pancho Villa,” Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel (a spy during the Revolution and the co-founder of La Cruz Blanca, the White Cross), and some short fiction by María Cristina Mena and Katherine Anne Porter. Corridos are studied through the works of famed ethnomusicologist Américo Paredes (With His Pistol in His Hand). The course culminates with the art of Kahlo, Orozco, Rivera, and Siquieros and includes a trip to San Francisco to visit some of Rivera’s murals.
  • Những gì sông biết

    Why are rivers so deeply bound with storytelling, and why is flowing water such an enduring metaphor for human experience? What did Heraclitus mean when he said: “you cannot step into the same river twice”?
    Or William James when he coined the phrase “stream of consciousness”? This course seeks to know rivers in their physical immediacy and cultural complexity, focusing on writings in which rivers are not merely background setting for human drama but essential characters and contested spaces in the drama itself. In the texts, the river is more than a medium of recreation and meditative self-reflection. It is also, and more importantly, the site of agonizing conflict between indigenous peoples and their colonizers; between the enslaved and their enslavers; between the natural and the technological; between what poet Robert Hass calls “an elder imagination of the earth” and an impoverished vision of the planet as mere material for human exploitation. The readings include Solar Storms by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and activist Linda Hogan, Crossing the River by British novelist Caryl Phillips, and River Notes by nature writer Barry Lopez—river works that raise probing questions about the development of Euro-American empire, the history of the African diaspora, and the relationship between human beings, nature, and the more-than-human world.

Past seminars that may be offered again

Danh sách 6 mặt hàng.

  • Coming of Age

    This course investigates the change from youth to adulthood, the features that stories about this time in life share, and how this fascinating transition is imagined across time periods, literary genres, and differing points of view. The course readings investigate what it means to grow up, leave home, find adventure, encounter disappointment, return to one’s origins, and reflect on what it means to change. Focusing on coming-of-age stories in which a young person learns—not just from books and school—but from experience itself, students explore the “novel of formation” as an enduring cultural form in art and entertainment, starting with its ascent in the nineteenth century with Jane EyrePride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Little Women. The course then explores contemporary coming-of-age tales in literature and film, including We the Animals by Justin Torres, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. 
  • Environmental Literature

    This course investigates the historical relationship between humans and the natural world, examines environmental racism and injustice, and considers the human experience of the global climate crisis. Students explore their own place in nature through writing and discussion, ask big questions about their cultural, moral, and practical relationships to the natural world, and find ways to connect the course’s learning to action. Students are challenged to understand humans’ current relationship to nature—and the urgent climate crisis—by reading today’s environmental writers.
  • Hyphen: Asian-American Literature

    Hyphenated identities—those of Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, Filipina/o-, Vietnamese-, and Indian- Americans—come together in this seminar, which explores the diverse voices of Asian-American literature. From classic to contemporary, the rich works in Asian-American literature help answer a few overarching questions: What makes Asian-American writing distinctive in terms of style, form, and theme? How do authors capture their heritage, with its ancient and modern histories, religious traditions, and family/social norms?
  • Life of the Skies

    “Birds are the life of the skies,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “and when they fly, they reveal the thoughts of the skies.” This course looks—and listens—closely to the avian presence in literature and the arts beginning with selections from the ancient and medieval classics of bird literature and continuing to the rich tradition of poetic response to birds in English and American lyric poetry and popular song. Imagery from Bird: Exploring the Winged World, develops students’ appreciation of the wealth of symbolic associations various cultures have bestowed upon birds and an understanding of their radical otherness as members of the nonhuman world. Students practice birding, learning to identify local songbirds and shorebirds and raptors and reflect on its history as an activity, scrutinizing John James Audubon’s life story alongside his masterful bird illustrations, while considering recent efforts to decolonize avian nomenclature and make birdwatching a more inclusive endeavor. Texts include Hansen’s Birds of Point Reyes, James’s Birds of Berkeley, Mary Oliver’s Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds by Billy Collins and David Sibley.
  • Marvelous Futures

    This seminar explores the signature aspects of Afrofuturism and magical realism (lo real maravilloso). Are they distinctive? What, if anything, do they share? Is the Caribbean the geographical and cultural center of these two genres? Are they exclusively born out of oppressive regimes? Do they seek to liberate or placate? With these questions in mind, readings include W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Comet” (arguably the first Afrofuturist work), Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber.
  • Reframing Native American Literature

    This class examines storytelling in Native American fiction, centering on N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Linda Hogan’s Power, and Tommy Orange’s There There. Students consider how writers reimagine place, from Florida to California, drawing from oral traditions to fashion new stories as a form of resistance and dissent. As a point of contrast, students read excerpts from John Rollin Ridge’s nineteenth-century novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta and James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales.” Other readings span genres and tribal affiliations, including poetry by Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and John Trudell and short stories by Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and Anita Endrezze. In addition to examining these texts through careful reading, discussion, and writing, students listen to and learn from indigenous storytellers in the Bay Area.

On teaching poetry

Trường Dự bị Đại học

mens conscia recti (đàn ông conscia recti)

một tâm trí nhận thức được những gì là đúng