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English 9

During the first half of the year, students worked on six formal essays, two literary critiques, and accompanying journal entries. The second half of the course has been devoted to a close reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet for which students kept in-depth scene-by-scene character diaries, a character sketch, an overview, and wrote original poetry. Students also read related Renaissance writing and applied the knowledge of the day to Shakespeare’s characters. Students also produced significant original pieces for their creative writing projects. A great portion of the class revolved around the research paper project: library and on-line research, documentation, and in-text citation. Related readings have been assigned and documented. The class explored the basic elements of the writing process from pre-writing to proofreading and intensive revision. We have investigated issues of grammar and usage as they apply to an individual’s writing. Our classroom method encouraged discussion within a co-operative workshop environment emphasizing peer feedback. Critical thinking skills, time-management, interpersonal and meta-cognitive skills have been stressed throughout the course. Students received informal assessment during the semester focusing upon their particular needs and a portfolio has been submitted for the final grade.

English 10

During the second half of the year, after reading Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and Orwell’s Animal Farm, students develop ideas into a working thesis for their individual research paper topics. We learn library research and Internet skills, proper MLA documentation, and how to balance in-text citation. We continue our study of logical fallacies. Students also continue to keep a journal in which they write directed entries as well as entries of their own choosing. Our class reads Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing keeping character diaries as we discuss and explicate the text and students also do individually researched presentations related to our reading. Students meet public speaking requirements by delivering an original play and a speech related to Animal Farm and a memorized soliloquy from Shakespeare. The final project is an epistolary exchange, a comic, and poetry for a creative writing component. We implement the website for our class in which discussion over homework and other topics may be explored outside the classroom: http://becky@beckycooper.com/atyp. The class continues to hone the basic elements of the writing process from pre-writing to proofreading and intensive revision. We investigate issues of grammar and usage as they apply to an individual’s writing. Our classroom method encourages discussion within a co-operative workshop environment emphasizing peer feedback. Critical thinking skills, time-management, interpersonal and metacognitive skills are stressed throughout the course. Students receive informal assessments during the semester focusing upon their particular needs and a portfolio is submitted for the final grade. The basic texts for the course are Robert Schole’s’ The Practice of Writing, Paul Escholtz’s Subject and Strategy, Battin, Fisher, Moore, and Silver’s Puzzles About Art: An Aesthetics Casebook, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and the detailed fallacies of logic found at the following website: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/.