Creative Writing - second semester

“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 description and elaboration central to both personal and expository writing, this course lays the foundation for self-reflection and composition across Flintridge Prep’s broader curriculum

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

Leadership - first quarter

This quarter long course is an introduction to leadership principles and practices. Guided by the values and honor code of Flintridge Prep, students will learn about leadership styles, ethical decision-making, and community impact. Students will explore the ways that leadership extends beyond formal roles and recognize their capacity to lead through everyday actions.

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," and "Other Words for Home," along with short fiction and poetry from a wide range of authors , provide a framework for oral presentations and interpretive writing. Students develop a foundation in grammar identification, usage, and 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, short fiction, 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," the film "Good Will Hunting," 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, Rebecca Makkah, and Celeste Ng; poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Joy Harjo, and Langston Hughes; and films such as "The Truman Show" and "The Matrix," encouraging students to explore how regional, cultural, and historical contexts inform a text'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, as well as video essays and film pitches–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 and short fiction, 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 required to take the Advanced Placement exam.

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 the chivalry of Arthurian legend, traveling through permutations of the gothic hero from Lord Byron to "Twilight," investigating social commentary in Malinda Lo’s “New Year” and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and studying the iconic film "Pretty Woman." 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 concludes with an in-depth investigation 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 shapes 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 spooky 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 an 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 the gothic collection "The Haunted Looking Glass," Lafcadio Hearn’s legendary anthology "Kwaidan," Maxine Hong Kingston’s "The Woman Warrior," and Susan Hill’s "The Woman in Black,"–and films including "The Shining," "Get Out," "All of Us Strangers," and "The Others"––we will seek answers to such questions as: When are ghosts more than merely spirits of the departed? Are they metaphors for our own subconscious emotions or the enduring nature of peoples’ collective experiences? How are gender, race, belief systems, and historical trauma represented in these stories through time, and how do storytellers like Jordan Peele subvert old-fashioned tropes? The course contains analytical and creative projects, and students have the options of penning their own short fiction, recording podcasts, or 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 and led by an interdisciplinary faculty team of six, 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 Conference where groups share  their work in spaces across campus with each other and the wider school community, with video presentations followed by Q&A sessions on theme-based panels.

It can be difficult to find your voice. It can be even more difficult to find someone to listen. This creative writing class— which will be at times conducted in the traditional format of most college and graduate-level writing workshops— encourages communication. As the great writer Octavia Butler observed, writers workshops "give you a kind of rented audience. They interpret your work back to you, and you can see if you’re communicating what you think you are.” Together we will investigate what makes a piece of writing “strong” and then study various examples of meaningful work through an analysis of short stories, poems, and novel excerpts. Students will engage in daily short writing exercises, culminating in two writing workshops and a final creative project. Readings include works by Aimee Bender, Tommy Orange, Lydia Davis, Ocean Vuong, James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Chandler, and Carmen Maria Machado.

“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 Didion's writings style—her structure, her words—but also the psychology and mythology of the writer herself. Students will write analytical papers, complete creative projects (including one drafted at the Getty Villa as inspired by Didon’s landmark essay on it), 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 close studies of film theory and technique drawn from a course reader and textbook called This is How You Make a Movie, 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 night time screening (pajamas welcome)–and also write film criticism, engage in projects that connect story, setting, and character, and create culminating autobiographical or narrative short films, shown at a celebratory Micro Film Screening at the historic Vidiots theater in Eagle Rock. Films include "Sunset Boulevard," "A Single Man," "Blade Runner," "Boyz n the Hood," "Gook," "Clueless," and "Stand and Deliver."

Who doesn’t get tempted to challenge authority? To ask the bold question, “Why”? Or even to subtly go against the norm in their actions, appearance, opinions? Human nature practically dictates that at some point in our lives, we must challenge authority to carve our own individuality, freedom, and forward path.

This course will examine notions of dissent through various genres, voices, and time periods in literature and film. Moving beyond just a “difference of opinion,” we’ll explore how authors use their writing to oppose social, political, and cultural or ethnic conventions, as we become inspired to question, resist, and reimagine the world. We’ll even delve into how writing itself can be a form of disruption, breaking from traditional literary style, tone, and expectation. Authors for this course will include, poetry by: Emily Dickinson, Joy Harjo, Walt Whitman, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Marilyn Chin; fiction by: Herman Melville Sherman Alexie, Charles Yu, Jack Kerouac, Julia Alvarez, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeffrey Eugenides, and David Sedaris; films include: "Into the Wild," "Mona Lisa Smile," and "Carol."

Students will be responsible for personal exploration through journal writing, active class engagement, reading annotations, analytical writing, and a final independent text/ paper of their choosing where they get to demonstrate their own ability to defy and inspire change. Come join the rebellion! 

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, including "Hamlet," "The Merchant of Venice," and "Othello," 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, and written work consists of creative, character-based explorations.