CLASS XII: SENIOR SEMINARS
College Preparatory Senior English is a sequence of two, one-semester electives that focus on specific literary topics, themes, or authors. Senior electives offer students a unique opportunity for specialized study. Past electives have included The Quest for Identity, Shakespeare’s History Plays, Irish Literature, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Southern Writers, African-American Literature, Women on the Margin, and The Self in Crisis.
Advanced Placement English is offered to those seniors who have demonstrated an ability to proceed to more challenging, college-level work. All students enrolled in this course sit for the Advanced Placement Examination in May.
In addition to one of the required options described above, interested students may also enroll in a yearlong creative writing workshop class, Writers in Residence.
ADVANCED PLACEMENT ENGLISH
In the AP® English Literature & Composition course, which follows the curricular requirements described in the AP English Course Description, students read a selection of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry written during the last four hundred years in order to explore the interconnected concepts of romantic love, gender roles, the role of marriage, and related economic issues. The motifs of money, masks, madness, and marriage provide a framework with which students through reading, writing, seminar presentations, and class discussion explore and evaluate the personal, social, and historical forces that men and women encounter as they navigate the complicated terrain all encounter in what has been characterized as the “battle between the sexes.” Preparation for the Advanced Placement takes place throughout the year. Students sit for the exam in early May.
Reading list:
Summer Reading: Atonement, Ian McEwan and The Art of Fiction, David Lodge
Candide, Voltaire
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Much Ado about Nothing, William Shakespeare
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
A Doll House, Henrik Ibsen
The Summer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing
The Making of a Poem, Mark Strand and Eavan Boland
5 Steps to a 5: AP English Literature, Rankin and Murphy
WRITERS IN RESIDENCE
Designed for students who are passionate about language and serious about pushing their writing skills to new levels, this senior elective is structured and conducted as a true writing workshop. Following a focused study of specific pieces by professional authors, students create short fiction, memoirs, personal narratives, expository essays, and poetry. These manuscripts are carefully considered and critiqued by the members of the workshop. Frequent language exercises, designed to strengthen such writing concerns as diction, sound, pace, and structure, are regularly offered to the class, as are various strategies of vision and revision. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones serve as basic references.