Decisions and Revisions
Essential Questions:
- How much control do we have over our lives?
- What role does choice play in our search for meaning?
- What are the causes and effects of agency and passivity?
Content:
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Herman Melville, “Bartleby”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
- T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
- Albert Camus, The Stranger
- ----------------- “The Myth of Sisyphus”
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Skills and Processes:
- Direct class discussion
- Develop critical abilities as readers
- Improve skills as writers of analytical prose
- Prepare and present class meetings, both in collaborative groups and as individuals
- Apply principles of unguided peer reviewing and metacritical self-review for both content and style
- Use techniques of active reading, class note-taking, and test-taking
Assessment:
- Three analytical essays are assessed for both content and style in individual conferences
- Tests emphasize reading comprehension and synthesis
- Peer reviews
- Metacritical writing
- Discussions about critical analysis and persuasive writing
- Class presentations are assessed for both class plan and execution
Resources:
- Consultation with departmental handouts from grades 9-11