English

English 9

English 9 focuses on writing as a process and on reading culturally diverse works that center on the ways individuals act as part of communities. Students concentrate on the process of developing their essays through such stages as pre-writing, outlining, first and second drafts, peer reviews, and metacritical reflections. Students are introduced to elements of style while also learning how to structure arguable persuasive essays, compelling narratives, and imaginative poems. They acquire the fundamental patterns of critical thinking and the vocabulary necessary for written and spoken analysis of literary texts. Other skills important to a student’s Upper School career, such as class participation, note-taking, recitations, and presentations, reinforce the school values of collaboration and community. (Full year course)

English 10

English 10 asks two essential questions. How do people write to effect change? How does the act of writing foster growth in the writer? Each of our core texts and each of our assignments helps students to develop their critical thinking, reading, writing, and presentational skills in order to empower them as change-makers. Our reading list focuses on the dialog between the English canon and the modern and contemporary texts that have responded to the canon. Put in terms of Salman Rushdie’s famous article, we examine how and why the “Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” Students develop their writing skills through formal correspondence, through creative and persuasive narratives, through close textual analyses, and through writing and reciting poetry. As presenters, students teach each other about important terms and concepts related to literary study and to the study of culture and identity. Students write about and then teach each other about poetry, and then each student takes a turn working with a partner to teach the class about part of a reading. Working in groups, sophomores create and perform an original dramatic scene or adaptation of a Shakespearean scene through the Othello Response Project. Finally, through the year-long Agents of Change project, students reflect on and become advocates about social issues that matter to them.  Each sophomore develops a portfolio of persuasive writing that furthers their goals in confronting their chosen issue and that chronicles their personal growth through advocacy. Prerequisite: English 9. (Full year course)

English 11

English 11 (Year) English 11 offers an opportunity to study some of the key texts of American literature from the colonial to the contemporary period, with a special focus on the periods of the American Renaissance, the late nineteenth century, and Modernism, and a consistent interrogation of the ways in which categories of gender, race, and social class have inflected the question of what it means to be an American. Readings include selections from Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Lan Samantha Chang, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joy Harjo, and Tommy Orange. The course continues development of students’ analytical abilities by drawing on and extending the interpretive skills developed in English 9 and 10, and also seeks to increase students’ reading speed in anticipation of the demands of college humanities courses. Writing assignments continue the development of narrative and analytical skills, and include a personal narrative designed to serve as a first draft for the college application essay. Over the course of the year, students continue to develop their presentational abilities; by the end of the year, they are responsible for planning and teaching the majority of class sessions. Prerequisite: English 10 (Full year course)

American Studies

American Studies is a field of study that integrates many traditional disciplines into a single search for the answer to the question, “What is an American?” In our American Studies course, we will look at American lives. What richness, spirit, creativity, and heartbreak do we see in the Dreamers, the Builders, the Rulebreakers, and the Seekers? How do these individuals reinforce or challenge our ideas about who is an American? How have experiences of colonialism, immigration, enslavement, westward expansion, urbanization, and war impacted Americans, and how can we better understand these experiences through studying the past and present in dialogue with one another? Where do we see ourselves in this tapestry of American experience? To answer these questions, students will be simultaneously enrolled in English and Social Studies classes with common units and work will be coordinated by the instructors, creating a cultural studies approach to both historical and literary content. We will cross disciplines, examining primary and secondary historical texts, literature, film, visual art, and music. We will seek to understand not only what happened and what was written, but what it meant to diverse groups of Americans and how it connects to American culture today. Writing assignments continue the development of narrative and analytical skills and will offer the opportunity for some creative writing as well. Over the course of the year, students will also continue to develop their collaboration, research, presentation, and project-based learning skills, and will be responsible for planning and teaching class sessions. American Studies is worth two credits and satisfies both U.S. History and English 11 requirements. Prerequisite: English 10. (Full year course; one credit in English and one credit in Social Studies)

Senior English

The Senior English requirement is met through completing fall and spring honors-level semester electives. Fall Senior English includes writing a research paper; in the spring, public collaborative projects are required. Honors Dialogue for Democracy or the Honors Palma Seminar may count  toward the spring-semester Senior English requirement. Honors semester electives are open to students in grade 12. 

Honors Dialogue for Democracy

What role does journalism play in creating and maintaining a healthy democracy? How might we learn to be more critical media consumers and, in turn, more deeply engaged democratic citizens? In this interdisciplinary course, students will consider these questions as they learn about the history and role of journalism as foundational to democracy. Over the course of the semester, students will study journalistic ethics, media and rhetorical analysis, the history of print media, news in the divided digital age, and core journalistic writing and multimedia production skills. In addition, students will spend time in the community in and outside of school learning from both experienced journalists and local citizens. As part of the CatlinSpeak staff, students will practice writing and publishing for an audience by producing weekly content and one print edition per semester of CatlinSpeak, an award-winning, student-created online news magazine and print newspaper. This is an honors-level year-long class offering one Social Studies credit and one English credit (which can count toward a senior’s spring-semester English course). This course is open to all grade levels and may be taken more than once for credit. Students who take more than one year of the course will be eligible for editorial and other leadership positions. Open to all Upper School students.  (Full year course)

Crime and Punishment (Honors Palma Seminar)

Justice, we believe, resides at the intersection of law and order, and in the swift, even-handed, and transparent response to crime with punishment. Western society prides itself on the establishment and preeminence of the rule of law, celebrating the triumph of reason and civilization over the so-called rule of the jungle. And yet, the halls of justice bear their share of inconsistency and unfairness, and the constructed notions of innocence and guilt permeate our culture(s) in manifold complex ways. This interdisciplinary, full-year seminar will explore crime and punishment from a number of different angles, including the Judeo-Christian origins of our legal system, a review of the specific criminal and legal mechanisms in the USA, philosophical and critical responses to innocence and guilt, the psychology of violent crime, forensic science, literary perspectives (including Dostoyevsky’s tome), and contemporary cases. Experiential learning opportunities are a critical part of this course, so students should be prepared for occasional obligations outside of school hours. This course will count for a half-Social Studies credit and a half-English credit. This course is open to all students. (Year-Long Course)

Senior English

The Senior English requirement is met through completing fall and spring honors-level semester electives. Fall Senior English includes writing a research paper; in the spring, public collaborative projects are required. Honors Dialogue for Democracy or the Honors Palma Seminar may count  toward the spring-semester Senior English requirement. Honors semester electives are open to students in grade 12. 

Honors Banned Books

This course will focus on works of literature that have been banned in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will examine why these works of literature are banned. They will explore questions such as: What is so powerful about literature that makes people fear it? Who are the censors trying to protect? What makes a book dangerous? Readings may include Beloved by Toni Morrison, Maus by Art Spiegelman, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. (Fall-semester course)

Honors Creative Nonfiction

How can prose writing convey fact, subjectivity, and creativity simultaneously?  We will explore this question as readers and writers, searching to better understand the history, boundaries, practices, and potential of the prose genre known as “creative nonfiction,” which includes memoir and narrative journalism as well as nature, travel, and food writing.  Students will study this genre through reading texts such as Peter Hessler’s account of being an American living in China, Molly Brodak’s memories of growing up as the daughter of a bankrobber, James’s Baldwin’s exploration of facing racial discrimination as a factory worker during World War II, Chang-rae Lee’s narrative of childhood family dinners, and Hope Jahren’s consideration of a tree. Students will also explore the genre through their own creative work: exercises in style, structure, voice, and format will give students opportunities to improve their prose and to explore the world around them through the writing process. Finally, students will draft, workshop, revise, expand, and share their own works of creative nonfiction. (Fall-semester course)

Honors Exploring the Long Novel: Reading Great Expectations

Charles Dickens is often accounted the greatest British writer after Shakespeare, and his novel Great Expectations is recognized as one of his richest works: a coming of age story that offers a probing exploration of the issues of class, gender, social change, and power in Victorian Britain, couched in a prose that is sometimes pathetic, more often humorous, but always stunningly inventive. Yet the length and digressive nature of Dickens’ work can make it a challenge for modern readers to tackle. This course aims to give students an opportunity to immerse themselves in Dickens’ world in a supportive and expansive context. We’ll read the book slowly and deliberately, paying attention to its labyrinthine plotting, its striking characterizations, and its complex prose style. We’ll examine the influence that rapid urbanization, imperialist capitalism, shifting gender roles, and even the business practices of nineteenth-century publishing exerted on the text. And we’ll investigate the book’s critical and creative legacy, looking at how Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial critics have demonstrated the novel’s continuing relevance to the contemporary world, and examining a few of the film and television adaptations it has inspired. (Fall-semester course)

Honors Hysteria: Literary Madness

Literary Madness will explore depictions of madness and mental illness from the western canon from the ancient world to the present. Readings will include poems, short stories, plays, and (excerpts from) longer narratives. Writers may include Euripides, Chrétien de Troyes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Browning, Bronte, Gogol, Poe, Chesnutt, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Gilman, Tennessee Williams, Plath, Morrison, Li-Young Lee, Natalie Diaz, Chuck Palahniuk, Susanna Kaysen, Irenosen Okojie, Lena Nguyen, and Hualing Nieh. Satyajit Ray’s Monihara, Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind and Todd Phillips’ Jokerare film possibilities. We will read some clinical and cultural hypotheses about madness, and readings about female “hysteria” and the psychological doubleness caused by racism, to better understand the reasons for creating a sustained literary voice of instability, and to consider its goals and significance. (Fall-semester course)

Honors Monstrous Transformations

In this class, we will explore what it means to be human, and what it means to be “civilized.” Can humans claim moral superiority? What does it mean to be a “beast” or “monster”? Human identity depends on boundaries created by factors as diverse as culture, religion, science, race, gender, sexuality, and class, and we will examine how these boundaries are imagined, maintained, crossed, and transgressed in the transformations dramatized in ancient and modern texts, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Is maintaining these boundaries what makes us human? Or crossing them? (Spring-semester course)

Honors Mystery and Detective Fiction

This course will explore the conventions and structure of mystery and detective stories. Students will learn about mystery and detective fiction through literary analysis and creative writing projects. They will also examine and experiment with storytelling techniques that create suspense. Readings may include Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosely, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, Sarah Paretsky by Indemnity Only and selections by Raymond Chandler and Arthur Conan Doyle. (Spring-semester course)

Honors Nature Writing

What is “nature” and how do we experience and write about it? In this course, we will examine, as readers and writers, the intertwined concepts of nature, wilderness, and the outdoors through exploring the past and present of American nature writing, including our own. We will trace the history of this genre through the work of writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Roderick Nash, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard, then turn to more recent writing by authors such as Barry Lopez, Jon Krakauer, Cheryl Strayed, Drew Lanham, Helen McDonald, and Carolyn Finney; and we will also study films such as Pelican Dreams and Minari. Our reading will help us to better understand how nature serves as a literal and imaginative space in which to consider questions of identity, including aspects of race and gender, as well as to reckon with pressing cultural issues such as climate change and antiracism. Our work as readers of nature writing will happen in tandem with exercises and activities that offer students opportunities to stretch and grow at our own work at exploring and writing about nature. In the latter part of the course, students will draft, workshop, revise, expand, and share their own works of nature writing. (Spring-semester course)

Honors Reading and Writing Memoir

Facing the prospects of leaving home and childhood’s end, you may find yourself reflecting on your life to date. The liminal state of the spring-term Senior presents a ripe opportunity for memoir. In this course, we will explore the range of genres, styles, and techniques evinced in the work of great memoirists. We will focus in particular on memoirs that address the exigencies of difference, drawing from the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, Alison Bechdel, GB Tran, and Sheri Booker. While reading various subgenres of memoir, we will produce our own autobiographical compositions through a term-long writing process. Shorter-term analytical assessments, a creative imitation, and presentation projects will help us engage with and learn from the best in the field. As part of our culminating experience, we will share selections from our stories with the broader Catlin Gabel community. (Spring-semester course)

Honors The Southwest

The Southwest, no mere tourist destination, has been formed through a rich and turbulent history. As we will see, “the Southwest” has not always been “south” or “west” to its occupants. It contains some of the Western Hemisphere’s oldest living cities, including Taos Pueblo and Acoma Sky City. It has been the site of longstanding civilization, agriculture, artistry, and cultural conflict and fusion. Native American peoples, Spanish explorers, Mexican settlers, and many waves of later immigrants have encountered each other here. As such, we have inherited one of our most vibrant artistic and literary traditions from the Southwest. This course will explore Southwestern literature and culture, drawing readings from the works of Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Cormac McCarthy, and Gloria Anzaldua. (Fall-semester course)

Honors The Story America Tells Itself about Itself: Exploring the Western Film

The primacy of the Western among American film genres has long been recognized. This course will examine the Western film from the beginnings of American movies to the present day. Often dismissed as uniformly simplistic, cliched, and even reactionary, a closer look at the Western reveals that it not only constructs, but often questions and subverts key concepts of American identity and culture.  Starting with the form’s origins in the works of James Fenimore Cooper and the Dime Novel, we’ll examine a number of films from both the classic and current era, teasing out what they tell us about American ideology and contemporary American reality. We’ll examine how the genre addresses issues of individualism and community (Stagecoach, High Noon), race (The Searchers, Buck and the Preacher, Little Big Man), gender (Johnny Guitar, Meek’s Cutoff, The Power of the Dog), and violence (The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven). Students will also learn the basics film analysis, with a special emphasis on elements of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound. Since most of the “reading” for this class will consist of watching the films themselves, students will be asked to attend weekend screenings in Gerlinger Auditorium, with a concomitant reduction in homework load during the rest of the week. (Spring-semester course)

Please note: GOA English electives do not count toward English requirements.

Academic English Accelerator

This program helps English language learners in grades 9-12 improve their academic English. The program adapts to meet students' needs and goals, but is intended for students nearing English proficiency. Students will bring work from their courses to language coaching sessions with the instructor. There, they will improve their written and oral communication. They will submit drafts of writing assignments and record rehearsals of presentations. They will set goals and receive feedback and coaching on their English expression. When students enroll, GOA will request student scores on any standardized English language proficiency assessment. This will determine if the program is the right fit for the student. Most students in this program score at least B1 or B2 on the Common European Framework, or 4 on the WIDA scale. The AEA is not an English grammar course or an introductory academic English course, so in order to benefit from the AEA, students need a level of English proficiency that matches or exceeds the suggested standardized test scores. AEA students are often attending or planning to attend English-only high schools or universities. Students may enroll in this program during the Summer, Semester 1, Semester 2, or any combination of the three. In the summer, students in this program must be taking another GOA course. In semesters 1 and 2, we recommend students in this program take another GOA course, but we do not require it. This program is not graded. (Fall- or Spring-semester course)

Creative Nonfiction Writing

This course focuses on the art of shaping real experiences into powerful narratives. Students will examine diverse professional examples of the relevant and evolving genre of creative nonfiction while developing their own original works, reflecting stories from their lives and from the communities around them. (Fall-semester course)

Fiction Writing

This course connects students interested in creative writing (primarily short fiction) and provides a space for supportive and constructive feedback. Students gain experience in the workshop model, learning how to effectively critique and discuss one each other's writing in an online environment. In addition to developing skills as readers within a workshop setting, students strive to develop their own writing identities through a variety of exercises. This Online Fiction Writing Course, titled International Connection: The Globalization of Creative Fiction Writing, capitalizes on the geographic diversity of the students by eliciting stories that shed light on both the commonalities and differences of life experiences in different locations. Additionally, we read and discuss the work of authors from around the globe. (Spring-semester course)