English

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, he writes that, “America is a nation peopled by the world, and we are all Americans.” However, the history of America is fraught with violence and subjugation, specifically toward marginalized groups of people. In this course, we will read a diverse group of authors whose fiction examines the interaction with and integration into American society. We will discuss the formation and erasure of identity, intergenerational conflict, and why these recurring themes of violence and subjugation continue to pervade our society today. Course readings might include works by Philip Roth, Julie Otsuka, Dinaw Mengestu, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ronald Takaki, and Arturo Islas.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers and taught above the AP level. This course explores the concept of “passing”—when one hides his or her identity in respect to, for example, race, religious affiliation, gender identity, sexuality, and socio-economic status. The course asks such questions as: What does it mean when one lives a life of passing? What are the underlying factors that prevent an individual from showing up as himself or herself? Is passing about coping or about escaping? How do these narratives help us better understand ourselves? What does it take for individuals to be their true selves? Students will explore their own experiences with passing as the class examines how identity is shaped, concealed, and revealed. Texts may include: Passing by Nella Larson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, edited by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page, and a selection of short stories.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In this course, we will explore authors who probe the complicated relationship between humans and the earth, sometimes imagining a world where humans so drastically alter the lived environment that it becomes an uninhabitable dystopian space. We will peruse works from authors like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Allen Ginsberg, N.K Jemisin, Barbara Kingsolver, Nnedi Okorafor, and Henry David Thoreau. We will contextualize the readings historically and culturally, looking at brief articles about ecocriticism, animal studies, and environmental racism. Students will contemplate the immediacy of these texts in light of new scientific projections of the planet’s viability through writing assignments that will likely include three papers.

Exposition is a required fall term course for Sixth Form students that focuses on the personal essay. Students read a range of published essays that might include works by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Ocean Vuong, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Amy Tan, and E.B. White. Students typically produce four essays, and the course utilizes the workshop model which requires clear, consistent, and thoughtful feedback from the teacher and students. After receiving feedback, students are expected to revise their work extensively before submitting a final draft. In this way, the course emphasizes the role of revision in the writing process and the deep relationship between good thinking and good writing.

In Fifth Form English, students study a range of prose, poetry, and drama with a focus on expanding their analytical, creative, and personal narrative writing. The expectation in Fifth Form English is that students will move from a general understanding of structural, thematic, and stylistic elements in their written work, to more nuanced and sophisticated interpretations of texts. Readings come from a range of authors, time periods, and genres, and the focus in class is to hone close reading skills and for students to showcase a keen understanding of literary and poetic devices. All students read Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Morrison’s Beloved, with additional works chosen from authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cormac McCarthy, and William Faulkner. Most Fifth Form students choose to take Advanced Placement examinations in English Language and/or Literature at the end of the year, and teachers offer support and resources for students to excel in those examinations.

In Fourth Form English, students examine a range of literary works including the novel, short fiction, drama, and poetry. Authors that students will study include, but are not limited to, Shakespeare, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Teachers emphasize close reading and clear, focused writing that exhibits an understanding of literary and poetic devices. The majority of Fourth Form writing is analytical, though students will also write personal narrative and creative works.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. This course will examine science fiction and speculative fiction within a variety of media from around the world. We will explore the broader genre of “speculative fiction,” which refers to fictional works that envision alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. As students investigate the ways in which these texts reimagine the past and visualize the future, they will also gain knowledge of the regional, cultural, and historical differences and forms of change that have impacted the development of the genre internationally. Students will learn how to formally analyze a variety of media, including novels, films, graphic narratives, music, and radio broadcasts. Some sample texts: Lucian of Samosata, Excerpts from The True History, Selections from Iraq + 100:  Hassan Blasim, “Foreword,” Hassan Abdulrazzak, “Kuszib,” Ra Page, “Afterword”, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Vol. 1: Activation, Isaac Asimov, “Introduction,” “Robbie” and “Evidence” from I, Robot, “The Last Question”, Jericho Brown, “Dear Dr. Frankenstein”, Walter Mosley, “Black to the Future”,  Nalo Hopkinson, “Greedy Choke Puppy” and “A Reluctant Ambassador”.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Before there was Bridgerton, there was Jane Austen! In this class, students will study Austen’s works, likely Lady Susan and two other novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, or Emma). We will explore Austen’s biting wit and her cultural critiques, revealing the backdrop to the famous love stories that continue to inspire adaptations for the last 200 years. Through her brilliant writing, we will learn more about the Regency period and its expectations of women, courtship, marriage, class structures, and more.  Students will be assessed through class discussions, presentations, and a variety of writing assignments.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko proclaims that, “Greed - for lack of a better word - is good.” Surely, the authors we love would bristle at Gekko’s dogged pursuit of financial gain. It seems that the world of literature and the world of finance are quite content to avoid acknowledging each other; authors focus on art, financiers focus on money, and there is a sense that any interaction with the other side might dilute their respective work. However, there are moments when the two worlds collide, and these texts will be the focus of our study. We will look closely at the interplay between imaginative expression and business. What is the relationship between literature and the economic world? Can literature help us to understand the impacts of capitalism and globalization? Course readings might include works by Edith Wharton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Conrad, Mohsin Hahmid, Michael Lewis, and Jane Austen.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. The course is about human rights violations. It gives a voice to the marginalized through the study of narratives that speak to their strength and resilience. These narratives show there can be strength in shared suffering and that people aren't only victims. The content requires students to think critically about concepts like courage, resistance, empathy, and forgiveness. The course asks students to consider the role of the bystander in the presence of discrimination and persecution. Texts and supplementary materials include: Mother to Mother by Sindive Magona, Bound for the North Star: True Stories of Fugitive Slaves by Dennis B. Fradin, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Who (or what) is an American? What has the term “American” meant throughout history to the people living in what we call North and South America? How might issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender among other social constructs inform and impinge on our definitions of “American” identity and culture? How do literature and film help to create a national and/or transnational community? Through an introduction to the literary and cultural productions of the Americas from the pre-Columbian era to the present, this course seeks to explore the complexities of and broadness of the terms “America” and “Americanness.”

The course will expose students to a broad range of films and literature emerging from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. (All readings will be in English translation where applicable.) As this is a class with a comparative focus, students will be encouraged to draw connections between and highlight differences among authors throughout the Americas. Topics for the course may include: inter-American creation stories and foundational myths, formation of American republics, North-South dialogues, and American modernism(s). Possible authors and directors for the course include, but are not limited to: Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Maya Angelou, Walter Salles, José Enrique Rodó, José Vasconcelos, José Martí, Elena Garro, Fernando Ortiz, Ruben Dario, Herman Melville, Nicolás Guillén, Fernando Meirelles, Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Clarice Lispector, Rachel de Queiroz, and Laila Lalami.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Despite Isabel Allende’s worry in 2009 that magical realism was no longer vigente [prevalent], the commercial success of Coco (2017) and Encanto (2021)—which together grossed over $1 billion dollars—suggest that contemporary audiences are still drawn to the mode’s narrative potential. This course will explore some of the literary and cultural roots of magical realism, in which the quotidian is combined with the fantastical, a narrative alchemy that prompts readers to question reality, identity, and more. We will study novels, poems, art, and movies from Central and South America in an effort to better understand the significance of their “magical” elements, examining the degree to which it reveals a deeper structure that is at once political, revolutionary, and philosophical. Course readings will include Allende’s The House of the Spirits and different stories, poems, and excerpts from a range of authors (Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others).  

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In this class, we will start with some excerpts of Gothic literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, then trace the genre’s tendrils as they continue to reappear again and again in literature, art, and pop culture. The villains and supposed heroes depicted in these texts can tell us about the fears of the cultures/people we will explore, which will open our discussions to topics of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability/disability. This class will draw on a range of authors that may include Tracey Baptiste, Ambrose Bierce, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, David Hoon Kim, Florence Marryat, and Edgar Allan Poe. In writing assignments that will likely include three papers, students will not only consider how the monsters in these texts reflect the fears of the people creating and reading the stories, but they will also confront the monstrosity within their own histories and narratives.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. As an introduction to the art of writing for the stage, this course will encourage students to create their own one-act plays while developing an understanding of structure, character, and motivation. Students will produce a series of written assignments, each of which will emphasize a particular aspect of the playwright's art, such as developing conflict, believable dialogue, and thematic ideas. The class participates in the Massachusetts Young Playwright's Festival. Particularly successful plays may be produced in the One Act Play Festival. Students may take the course more than once. Enrollment is limited to eight students.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. The class will read selections of poems from the past 4000 years from all over the world as students learn to emulate the styles of a broad range of poets and develop their own creative voices on the page. Some poets the class may focus on include Basho, Li Po, Sappho, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Rainier Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Audre Lorde, Carol Ann Duffy, Billy Collins, Tracy K. Smith, and Ocean Vuong. Students will learn to write ballads, odes, haikus, sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, and free verse. They will also research the life and poetry of one poet in detail and present that poet and his/her work to the class.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In this course, we will turn our critical lens to the moving image and “read” and write on a variety of seminal films. We will study the cultural and social impact of film on 20th century thought, learn the specific language of film, read film theory, and examine the filmmaker’s use of literary devices such as symbolism, narrative viewpoint, foreshadowing as they move from the page to the screen. In our study, we will explore the work of influential national and international, as well as classic and contemporary, directors or “auteurs,” such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio di Sica, Francois Truffaut, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Jordan Peele, Alfonso Cuaron, and Bong Joon-Ho amongst others. Assessments will be in the form of papers (shot by shot analysis, critical readings of films); the final assessment will be "Anatomy of a Scene'' from a film of your choice.

Second Form English is designed to develop students' foundational reading and writing skills. Students are introduced to a range of texts which include novels, drama, and poetry by a diverse group of authors including Shakespeare, Martha Southgate, Elie Wiesel, Patricia McCormick, Marge Piercy, Harryette Mullen, Nicki Giovanni, and Pablo Neruda, among others. Students also receive formal grammar instruction. The class focuses on developing close reading skills and enhancing students' ability to understand plot, character, and thematic elements as well as extending their ability to make inferences. Students work collaboratively during class discussions and small group exercises. Writing assignments range from the personal to the analytical, from journal entries to formal papers, with an emphasis on analytical and argumentative essays.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Writers from the American South have a vision of American life that is complex and problematic. How does this literature speak to conflicts we recognize within our country today? The harsh realities of slavery and of prejudice, of long-lasting discrimination, are part of life in the South. The writers we will read take on this topic and what it means to have the past haunt the present, from the era of the Civil War through the modern day. The authors we will study may include Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Natasha Trethewey. We will consider the burdens and beauties of this rich literary tradition. We will do a variety of writing assignments in response to the literature we read.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. We all love a good journey story–human beings have in their nature a need to seek and to find. In this class, we will explore origins of the pilgrimage narrative by looking at excerpts from Journey to the West by Wu Cheng-en, remind ourselves of the hero’s journey with excerpts from Homer’s The Odyssey, and explore how even a deity must venture on a quest to meet his fate in The Ramayana, version by R. K. Narayan. We will then look at how recent fiction remakes and reshapes that human need to find meaning and to understand the world around us through a journey. In this latter part of the course, readings will be pulled from the following list: The Reivers by William Faulkner, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Into the Wild by John Krakauer, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

 Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. Woven through the poem are allusions to texts that span across time, such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the legend of the Holy Grail, Shakespeare’s plays, art, popular song lyrics, Eastern and Western philosophy, the Bible, and the Upanishads. By studying excerpts from these texts, students will explore the way in which Eliot’s intertextuality transformed the way poetry was written. The class will culminate in a writing project where students will spend the last few weeks of the course writing their own prose poem, in imitation of Eliot, using material from their own lives—books, mythology, songs, film, media, art, history, sports, politics, cultures and traditions, etc.—as sources of inspiration. 

In Third Form English, students develop close reading skills and writing with precision and confidence. Students work closely with teachers on their writing process which includes skills like brainstorming, organization and structure, thesis statements, topic sentences, introductions, conclusions, and proofreading strategies. Students also receive formal grammar instruction. Readings consist of novels and drama from authors including Sophocles, Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston, and Celeste Ng. Poetry is also studied and includes selections from poets such as Billy Collins, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, Amanda Gorman, and Robert Frost among others.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. We have turned to images of the future in literature for hundreds of years, often projecting our fears, anxieties, and hopes onto imagined lands and times. Utopian and dystopian narratives encompass a range of different possibilities, shifting from so-called paradises to hellish landscapes that uncover and voice core questions that we must contend with as a society—what communal values do we hold most dear? What do we most fear? Can we imagine a place free of inequality? How do we define identity in relation to authority? Could a “perfect” society last? These stories have also offered the theoretical possibility of an escape from different systems of power, even those so deeply embedded that they seem immovable and eternal. We will study accounts from the 16th century on to explore what these narratives can tell us about some of these societies in the past as well as our own, an urgent register now as we confront the active dismantling of democracies around us and the haunting image of what might replace them. Course readings might include works by Thomas More, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Philip Roth, Suzanne Collins, Mat Johnson, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and Arundhati Roy.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. Where do you draw the line between fiction and non-fiction, between true and imaginary? In this course, we will look at a spectrum of writing, beginning with historical writing and hard journalism and moving to the more nuanced genre that has become the nonfiction novel. Students will produce their own forms of the genre along the way, as well as some analytical essays on the texts, developing their credo as they work through example texts. In the final paper, students may be asked to draw their own line between fiction and non-fiction by explaining and defending the choices in their own research and writing. Possible texts include: essays by Lee Gutkind and David McCullough, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, John Krakauer's Into Thin Air, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Lorraine Cary’s Black Ice.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. This course will consider women's voices in a variety of forms (stories, essays, novels, and poems), the issues these works raise, the roles heroines accept or reject, and the way we as readers respond to the ideas on the page. The reading list will include writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nora Ephron, and Natasha Tretheway. Writing will take the form of journal responses, analytical essays, and narrative essays.

Open to Sixth and Fifth Formers. In a workshop setting, writers in this class read a selection of stories from The Best American Short Stories of the year, study Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft (exercises and recommendations for fiction writers), and evaluate each other’s short stories. Students typically present a piece of short fiction once a week.