Senior 3 - English Language Arts

Course Description

Senior 3 is designed to prepare students for university-level studies in the humanities and expand students’ intellectual horizons with material that is challenging, exciting, and fun! At the same time, it acts as both an introduction to the classics of English literature and the history of ideas, taking students on an enlightening and exciting journey that spans from the Middle Ages to the early decades of the twentieth century. Canonical authors to be studied may include Marie de France, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, John Milton, Edmund Waller, Andrew Marvell, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot!

Students will practice the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills necessary to:

• Improve their high-school grades
• Produce outstanding high-school essays
• Engage in advanced intellectual discussion and debate
• Think across paradigms as well as approach intellectual questions in an interdisciplinary manner

Senior 3 focuses on the four key components of all our English Language Arts courses:

• Building sophisticated vocabularies
• Improving grammar skills
• Improving reading comprehension and critical/analytical skills
• Improving critical/analytical writing skills

In sum, this class is designed to improve students’ high-school performance on essays, examinations, research assignments, and presentations across all courses in the language arts, humanities, and social sciences spectrum. Furthermore, Senior 3 begins their preparation to excel in a university environment.

Course Structure:

The Senior 3 year is separated into historical blocks corresponding with recognized literary periods:

• The Middle English Period (c. 1200-1500)
• The Early Modern Period (c. 1500-1660)
• The Restoration and 18th Century (c. 1660-1785)
• The Romantic Era (c. 1785-1830)
• The Victorian Era (c. 1830-1900)
• Modernism (c. 1900-1935)

Course Evaluation:

Students will be evaluated on:

• Vocabulary quizzes
• Grammar activities
• Weekly writing assignments
• Essay assignments
• Mid-term and final exams