Welcome to Mr. Sullivan's English IV Digital Notebook.

NB: expectations for the course are located on the classroom blog: http://digitalcrowsnest.wordpress.com/

English IV is designed to prepare students for undergraduate English and literature courses. Accordingly, the course is organized according to several objectives. Primarily, we work to refine students’ skills as critical readers and writers. To this end, we study several challenging short stories, the lyric poetry of William Shakespeare and John Donne, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In addition, we devote considerable time to the college application process, including as a major assignment the drafting and revising of at least one college-application essay.

Major Objectives / Skills Emphasis

• Critical Writing: Intensive review of multi-paragraph analytical essay format. Students must be able to execute, with a high degree of independence, a fully-realized, coherent, analytical essay. In particular, instructors pay close attention to their students’ ability to formulate good critical questions throughout the writing process; to craft an incisive argument—even absent a highly-specific topic or question; and to demonstrate mastery of a variety of rhetorical strategies.
• Critical Thinking / Discussion: Explicit movement towards student-led discussion (greater student ownership of the direction in-class discussion and analysis). The “seminar” approach.
• Critical Reading: Emphasis on close-reading with all texts (short stories, poetry, Hamlet).
• Additional Goals: Personal Narrative essay skills in order to manage the College Application Essay(s) and supplemental prose associated with the college process.