English

“Describe a conversation with an adult that you’ll never forget.”
“Are you satisfied with your present age, or would you rather be younger or older?”
“Describe a turning point in your life, a time when a change in circumstances affected you.”

These are examples of writing prompts from this course, a wide-ranging exploration of narrative and creative composition. By giving students opportunities to write about what matters to them, and by emphasizing the skills of reflection, description, and elaboration central to both personal and expository writing, this course lays the foundation for composition across Flintridge Prep’s broader curriculum.

Exploring authors from a variety of genres, students gain confidence in literary interpretation, using basic concepts such as plot structure, characterization, setting and theme. Works such a The Diary of Anne Frank, Of Mice and Men, Twelve Angry Men and Fahrenheit 451, along with short fiction and poetry by Phillis Wheatley and Langston Hughes, provide a framework for oral presentations and interpretive writing. Students develop a foundation in paragraph development and move forward to the multiple-paragraph essay, examining the relationships among composition, vocabulary and grammar. As a creative project, students produce video book trailers.

Encountering rich works such as Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun, as well as a wide range of poetry and contemporary choice novels, students refine the skills in close reading and insightful writing vital to effective literary analysis, with particular emphasis on symbolism, figurative language, theme and tone. Engaging in group projects, oral presentations, personal narratives, and content-oriented compositions, students advance their skills in expository and creative writing, moving beyond the level of paragraph development to consider the essay as a whole and mastering more sophisticated techniques of narration, illustration and exposition.

Students travel across time and place via texts that address the search for self amid change and challenge, both internal and external. In this yearlong “writing boot camp,” students respond to novels, plays, short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Students draft, revise, polish and complete written works in analytical, creative, personal, poetic and research-based modes, as well as honing their skills in presentations and visual projects. Core texts include Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and course packets representing richly diverse and international authors. Students receive regular feedback from teachers, as well as self-critique and peer-edit each other’s work to develop writing voices that are strong, cogent, and lively.

This course connects canonical texts of our past to contemporary literature exploring life as it exists in the America we inhabit today. From Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, students explore how regional and historical contexts inform an author’s style, message and concerns. At the heart of this course is the questioning of the American dream. Through analytical and creative writing, through student-led discussions, and through projects and presentations, students quest to discover whether this dream is attainable or merely a myth.

Students in this course practice close reading and writing using rich texts as a means of understanding the complex world around them today. Through careful study of many of literature’s touchstones—Othello, Pride and Prejudice, Candide, A Streetcar Named Desire, Beloved, Black Swan Green, This is How You Lose Her, and Citizen: an American Lyric—students engage in discussions of class, gender, and race as they reflect on the world we live in. To do so, the course encourages students to embrace ambiguity and nuance as they craft increasingly sophisticated essays. To complement their written analytic work, students also engage in creative projects, Socratic Seminars, and presentations to demonstrate their mastery of the material. In preparation for the AP examination, students write a series of timed interpretive essays from past exams and practice multiple choice strategies.

This semester-long honors English course, taken by all seniors, combines a college lecture style with a culminating research project. The course examines how individuals search for personal identity in group, cultural, and political contexts. During the first half of the course, students attend several lectures and one classroom discussion each week, introducing them to college-style teaching methods. The second half of the course features a scholarly research project with seminar-style feedback from peers and teachers, culminating in a celebration of student projects in a program of oral presentations.

California, and its movie-making mythical center known as Hollywood, have been the center and subject of incredible creativity and myriad narratives spanning more than a hundred years of film history. This course will trace the cultural and cinematic history of place, concentrating on the Golden State from north to south, exploring concerns, tensions, and identities--both shared and individual--across the urban metropolises and natural landscapes that surround us. Supplemented with introductions to the language of film theory and technique, we’ll consider how filmmakers have stereotyped and misrepresented the peoples' history of California, but have more likely created important, enduring, complex understandings of it as well. Beyond the frame itself, students will also learn some behind-the-scenes politics of the major studio system and waves of independent filmmaking. The course culminates in the creation of short films and/or scene screenplays, as solo artists or in groups.

Throughout its relatively brief history as a modern city, Los Angeles has been both the center and the subject of a wealth of culture and artistry. The class explores the rich, urban experience of Los Angeles through fiction, fact and film. This semester-long course is an active and curious cultural history in which we focus on classic and 21st century texts on the page and screen. Through the lenses of both literary and cinematic theory, students analyze major Los Angeles themes while looking closely at how those elements figure in our own subjective notions as well as the intersecting worlds of landscape, socioeconomics, industry, lifestyle, and aesthetics.

This class will explore a unique assemblage of diverse voices in contemporary literature through a combination of prose, poetry, and drama published since 2001. The most important facet of the course will be our collective effort to understand both how/why the literary imagination attempts to explain and examine the rapidly changing world around us. The course will supplement some of the more highly-regarded authors of the new millennium with selected pieces from classical literature to help understand the perennial complexities of the human predicament.

Do you enjoy experiencing Shakespeare’s plays more than studying them as dusty relics? This course embraces the work of the greatest writer in the English language in performance. Immersing ourselves in a short sampling of dynamic plays, we compare film renditions and—pending the availability of local productions—attend a live performance. Students explore Shakespeare’s timeless understanding of human behavior in a series of performance projects; written work consists of creative, character-based explorations.

Do you believe in ghosts, or are you highly skeptical? Regardless of your answer, are you somehow intrigued by the eerie, bone-chilling “pleasure of the shudder”? Whether or not scary stuff is your thing, this course will introduce you to the widely varied realms of ghost fiction and film—from the classic haunted house tales to modern psychological thrillers, and with a heavy emphasis on global folklore and storytelling—exploring why different cultures fear what they do, and what that reveals about them. We will seek answers to such questions as: When are ghosts more than merely spirits of the departed? Are they metaphors or our own subconscious emotions, such as guilt, fear, and frustration? How are gender, race and religion represented in these stories through time? The course contains projects that are both creative and analytical, and students even have the option of penning their own short fiction or filming original scripted scenes. Come see why ghost stories are, in fact much more about life than what comes after.

This course is a study in the history of science fiction from its 19th-century precursors to the present and beyond. The course will pay special attention to the shift in the genre's status, from respectable work of the imagination ("speculative fiction") to despised escapist entertainment ("pulp") and back, before it became a spectrum of subgenres (cyberpunk, horror, "literary,” etc.). The interpretation of the science fiction texts is thus set within the history of science fiction readers, publishers and writers, from the earliest pulps to massive "convergence culture" science fiction that straddles books, film, TV, and internet fandom. All facets and outlets of the genre will be source material for the mixed lecture and discussion course format.

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” These are the opening lines of Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. These are the first 24 words that Didion wrote in 2004 after her husband suffered a sudden heart attack and died at the dinner table. These are the four lines that changed the way Americans talked about grief. In this course, students will spend a semester inside the mind of one of America’s greatest writers, Joan Didion. They will read a wide variety of her texts: her essay about hippies in the 60s, her opinion piece about the gaudiness of the Getty Villa, and yes, her memoir about the sudden death of her husband. Additionally, students in this course will deconstruct not only the writings of Joan Didion—her style, her structure, her words—but also the psychology and mythology of the writer herself. Students will write analytical papers, complete creative projects, and keep a Didion-style notebook documenting their lives and the world around them. By the end of this course, students will understand how a writer becomes a cultural icon.

Students in this class examine the universal principles that inform all good writing—essays, short stories, speeches, blogs, screenplays, etc.—and apply these principles to their own work. The class considers the writer’s essential questions: What ideas do I want to convey? Who is my audience? What is the form that best suits my purpose?

Form and structure are paramount to this course. Examining models of effective writing, students recognize elements of form and emulate these elements in their own writing, developing precision, economy, style, and voice, along with rhythm, tone, balance, and fluidity.

This fourth-year English class expects both student autonomy and collaboration, encouraging regular peer feedback on works in progress.