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.

This course meets once a week and Design Thinking meets twice a week during the same period in the class schedule.

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 as "Twelve Angry Men," "The House on Mango Street," "Fahrenheit 451," and "King and the Dragonflies," along with short fiction and poetry from authors including Pablo Neruda and Ellen Oh, provide a framework for oral presentations and interpretive writing. Students develop a foundation in paragraph development, while also engaging throughout the year in creative work and personal reflections.

Encountering rich works such as "Animal Farm," "The Diary of Anne Frank," the play, and the tech dystopia, "Feed"– as well as a wide selection of poetry and contemporary individual student choice novels ranging from Angie Thomas’ "The Hate U Give" to Elizabeth Acevedo’s novels in verse – students refine the skills in close reading 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 both expository and creative writing, moving beyond the level of paragraph development to consider the essay as a whole. 

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 and revise written works in analytical, creative, personal, poetic, and research-based modes, while also honing their skills in presentations and visual projects. Core texts include Salinger’s "The Catcher in the Rye," Henríquez’s "The Book of Unknown Americans," Hansberry’s "A Raisin in the Sun," and works by writers ranging from Dashka Slater to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi to Henry David Thoreau in the anthology "Uncharted Territories." 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. The course delves into the works of esteemed American novelists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, and Celeste Ng, and poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, and Langston Hughes, encouraging students to explore how regional, cultural, and historical contexts inform an author’s style, message and concerns. At the heart of this course is the questioning of the American dream and one's place within it. Through analytical and creative writing, student-led discussions, and projects and presentations–such as the class-wide Jazz Age living museum–students aim to discover how, and why, individuals quest to achieve this dream. 

Students in this course practice close reading and writing using rich texts as a means of understanding the complex world around them today. Exploring a range of major narratives, such as Shakespeare’s "Macbeth," Morrison’s "Beloved," Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice," Hwang’s "M. Butterfly," and Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale," as well as a diverse chorus of voices in poetry, students engage in discussions of class, gender, and race as they reflect on today's world. To do so, students 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.

Students who enroll in this course are expected to take the Advanced Placement exam.

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, such as Ayad Akhtar, Tara Westover, Nathan Englander, and poet Morgan Parker, with selected pieces from classical literature, such as Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray," to help understand the perennial complexities of the human predicament.

What do Sir Gawain the Green Knight, Edward Cullen of "Twilight," and Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy have in common? Each encapsulates a time-period’s ideal romantic hero. We will study notions of romance, beginning with chivalry of Arthurian legend, traveling through permutations of the gothic hero, investigating social commentary in Patricia Highsmith’s "The Price of Salt" and James Baldwin’s "Giovanni’s Room," and ending with technological considerations of more modern romances, such as Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s "This Is How You Lose the Time War." While the genre is often scoffed at or dismissed as “chick lit,” this class will discover how, in fact, romances can be nuanced and subversive, questioning the dominant culture more than reasserting it. The class will conclude with an in-depth investigation of the nuances of romantic comedy’s rise, fall, and rise again in the era of Netflix and BookTok, with specific emphasis on the ever-expanding diversity of experiences and identities represented in the genre, and how the social and political context of a romance novel affects notions of the “happily ever after.”  

Do you believe in ghosts, or are you highly skeptical? Regardless, 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 storytelling—exploring why different cultures fear what they do, and what their relationship with the great beyond  reveals about them. Through texts–such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s "The Woman Warrior," Susan Hill’s "The Woman in Black," Native and African American stories from folklore, and traditional Japanese ghost myths—and films including "The Shining," "Get Out," "Kwaidan," and "The Others"—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 belief systems, and historical trauma represented in these stories through time, and who is subverting the old-fashioned tropes most effectively in recent years? The course contains projects that are creative and analytical, and students 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 semester-long honors course, taken by all seniors, is a project-based class built on the principles of “create, collaborate, innovate.” After hearing from a diverse group of professionals about their experiences tackling difficult local, regional, national, and global problems, students launch into impact and advocacy-based projects in teams. Students design the action projects after identifying, researching, and refining what they see as problems in need of compassionate advocacy, impact, and reform as they  challenge real-world problems with meaningful and realistic solutions. Teams "pitch" and workshop their projects with their peers throughout the semester, and the course culminates in a “Capstone Crawl,” where groups share their work with each other and the wider school community in video presentations and partake in Q&A sessions on theme-based panels.  

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.   

“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.

The Language of Film is an introduction to film studies, which examines California through the lens (no pun intended) of the silver screen. Students explore defining features, tensions, and identities across the urban and natural worlds  that surround us. Through film theory and technique (and behind-the-scenes studio politics), we’ll consider how filmmakers have stereotyped and misrepresented the peoples' history of California, but have also created enduringly brilliant, vibrant representations of it as well. Throughout the semester, students watch movies as homework and in class–and at the occasional nighttime screening–and also write film criticism, engage in projects that draw deep connections among story, setting, character, and create culminating autobiographical or narrative short films, shown at a celebratory Micro Film Screening.  Films include "Sunset Boulevard," "A Single Man," "Blade Runner," "Boyz ‘n’ the Hood," "Gook," "Harold & Maude," "Clueless," "Stand and Deliver," and a series of shorts by a diverse range of Angelenos.  

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.

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.