The GC stream is updated throughout the week and will remain the main place for current information.

Course Overview

English I: Forging Identity through Language and Literature, examines how individual people, communities, and cultures form and maintain distinctive identities in an increasingly globalized world. The literature we study will explore the ways in which written and oral language reflect the essential aspects of the human condition as well as examine the diversity of people and cultures. Many of the texts will focus on rites of passage, development of moral and ethical codes, and various cultural and social identities.

Unit I-Understanding Identity

Unit 2-Navigating Relationships

Unit 3-The Outsider Experience

Unit 4-Confronting Challenges and Building Resilience

Unit 5-The Individual and Society: Developing a Moral Compass

Unit 6-Living with Integrity 

Unit 7-Exploring Contemporary Issues 

The course places a heavy emphasis on the acquisition and development of language arts skills.  Learners will gain a sense of empowerment as readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers.  We will discuss process and each student will attempt to acquire an individualized approach to improve reading comprehension, writing development, vocabulary acquisition, as well as their speaking and listening skills.

Reading and writing are two processes that are done most effectively when they are done actively.

I would like to stress that there is not one process of reading and writing that works for everyone, but there is a process out there that will work best for each individual student.  During the course of this class, all students will be challenged to find the reading and writing process that is most effective for them through experimentation with various techniques. 

Course Requirements:

Students are expected to keep a notebook.  

All students will complete readings in an active fashion, specifically through the use of reading logs and the strategies that we have already discussed (plot elements, questioning-interpretation and comprehension, discerning patterns, developing insight, etc.) and those that we have yet to discuss in class. 

All students will complete writing assignments by employing a writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.  At the beginning of the year, I will require students to use specific outlines until we find the one that works best for them. Students will be able to see how interconnected reading and writing are and use their reading logs as pre-writing on essay assignments.

Course Goal

My goal is to produce a class of life-long learners who are eager to enter into the conversation of the literary discourse and feel empowered in the reading, writing, thinking, and speaking processes; which, as we all know, are essential skills in all subject areas and beyond these walls. 

Possible Texts

The Old Man and the Sea                                        The Catcher in the Rye                       

Othello or Julius Caesar                                          To Kill a Mockingbird

Persepolis                                                                       Things Fall Apart

Additional texts will be added and the listed texts are subject to change.