English

In English 9, students explore the world, literature, and their own lives through the lens of journeys and quests. By reading texts such as The Catcher in the Rye, Jane Eyre, Antigone, and The Odyssey, we look at these quests as paths to self-understanding. Girls analyze how characters grow, change, and come of age to form identities and relationships as they struggle with external and internal obstacles. Through close reading and annotation, students gain the active reading skills needed to make meaning of challenging works of literature. Students engage in ongoing, scaffolded writing practice by writing and revising reading journals, paragraphs, analytical essays, and creative assignments. Written assignments, mock trials, and debates, as well as an introductory study of rhetoric, offer students practice engaging in persuasive argument. Class discussions and personal writing give girls the opportunity to connect these literary quests to their own lives and the world in which they live.

Writing Skills provides an opportunity for girls in Grade 9 to review, hone, and improve their grammar expertise. We begin our studies with sentence diagramming—a dynamic and challenging way to approach syntax, and the students learn a great deal about the English language. The students diagram grammar forms like prepositional phrases, compound predicates, and prepositional phrases. Once they are comfortable with these concepts, the girls move on to the next units covering punctuation and common grammar pitfalls called Megablunders. Students leave this course with a solid grammar foundation and techniques they can apply to their writing in all courses.

English 10 aims to improve a student’s reading, writing, and thinking skills through a close study of British Literature. Exploring questions of authority and mankind’s place in the world, the course challenges the girls to think abstractly while introducing them to the major writers from the British Isles (and beyond) who have influenced today’s thought, language, and culture. By contextualizing these thinkers within their artistic movements and providing relevant historical background, students learn to synthesize complex arguments and diverse views. Girls deepen their close reading and analytical skills in preparation for future Advanced Placement courses, working to improve their understanding of the effects of diction, syntax, and other stylistic and literary devices in a text. Students write intensively, both formally and informally, analytically and creatively, and be assessed on skill development and content acquisition.

Some texts that may be covered in whole or part: A Room of One’s Own, The Canterbury Tales, Dubliners, Frankenstein, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and 1984.

Through this interdisciplinary approach to the humanities, students enrich their understanding of global cultures by combining surveys of modern history and global literature from 1789 to the present. To this end, students study major topics in world history, including revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic (French, Haitian, Latin American, etc.); imperialism and resistance in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, China, and Japan; World Wars I and II; post-colonialism and the Cold War; and the contemporary world. In parallel, Honors Global Studies exposes students to the scope of literary development, including significant texts from the late Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, Postmodern, and contemporary periods. With particular emphasis on non-European voices, the course hones students’ critical reading and analytical skills by including a variety of literary genres, such as short novels, poems, short stories, plays, and nonfiction pieces, along with supplemental sources in art, music, and material culture. Additionally, through close reading of primary and secondary documents, students are introduced to the principles of historiography as they construct their own historical arguments. By simultaneously contextualizing literary works with relevant historical background and enriching students’ experience of historical events through a literary lens, Honors Global Studies provides a rich understanding of global cultures from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Note: Students who sign-up for Honors Global Studies to fulfill their English 10 requirement must also sign-up for Honors Global Studies to fulfill their History 10 requirement. They are companion courses.

This college-level course provides students with the tools to read and analyze critically a range of prose selections and develop an awareness of rhetoric in the class readings as well as in their own writing. While the primary focus of the class is non-fiction, students engage with dense, provocative, and, sometimes controversial texts in a variety of genres, from classic novels, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, to book-length works, essays, short stories, and speeches from more contemporary writers like Junot Diaz, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion, John. F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. In addition to studying prose, the class analyzes visual texts, including political cartoons and propaganda posters, and constructs complex and well-supported arguments on current cultural issues such as the role of technology in education and the importance of satire to critique and alter public conversations. Students write informally and have many opportunities to work in shorter forms and to write at-home assignments. At heart this class is a college composition course, and they therefore complete several timed essays each month. Revision, including peer and instructor reviews and the writing of multiple drafts, is an important part of most assignments. Much is demanded of the girls, both in terms of the academic workload, and the ability to be open-minded to the acquisition of new skills. By the end of the course, the students have received the tools necessary to become superior readers and communicators.

The equivalent of a first-year college English course, AP English Literature provides students the opportunity to read and write about a variety of imaginative works of recognized literary merit. Using a seminar format, students sharpen reading, critical thinking, writing, and speaking skills while exploring a wide array of classic and contemporary novels, plays, short stories, and poems. In recent years, girls have studied literature by William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Elena Ferrante, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Hilary Mantel, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Athol Fugard, Tom Stoppard, Louise Erdrich, and others.

The introductory course provides students with the opportunity to explore writing and production in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, filmmaking, and podcasting. The course follows a workshop format in which girls share their writing with classmates in exchange for honest, supportive, and constructive feedback. Students seek to create evocative works of their own that engage today’s world. The course culminates in self-publication and submission to writing and media contests.

The advanced course builds upon the previous year, but focuses on the crafting of full-length projects. Each student begins by creating a proposal for their own novel, play, memoir, chapbook of poetry, documentary film, narrative film, stop-motion film, or podcast series. Over the course of the next few months, this small community of artists works together to help each other succeed. By balancing individual work with collaborative workshop, each member of the team seeks to complete and self-publish their own full-length work by the end of the year. The other major responsibility of this class is to design, edit, and publish The Medley, Newton’s literary arts magazine.

The advanced level II course is for seniors who desire to take their craft to an even deeper and more complex level. These students dedicate themselves to polishing and publishing multiple full-length works during the year. They also do presentations on writing, filmmaking, and podcasting for younger students and serve as mentors in the workshop and publication processes.