Satisfies both semesters of the American Literature requirement

The AP Language and Composition course is designed to help students understand the arguments that authors make in their texts. Students will also strengthen their own ability to form and defend strong arguments in a wide variety of text types. Through this course the students will engage in reading a wide variety of texts of various lengths with a focus on the author’s rhetorical style. In every unit the students will practice the writing skills necessary to be successful on the AP Exam. All students enrolled in the course must take the AP exam in May.

Prerequisites:

English 10, department approval

Term:

Full year

Eligible:

11th, 12th grade

This course will survey American poetry from its early periods through contemporary authors, celebrating what makes poetry a uniquely flexible and creative form and exploring connections that exist between poets of different eras, styles, and identities. We will study canonical, classic American poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, and also contemporary poets like Layli Long Soldier and Danez Smith. Throughout our reading, we’ll ask what makes a poem “work,” what makes particular poems a part of the American literary tradition, and what we can borrow from other poets as we develop our own voices. Critical and creative writing will be required in class; close readings and analytical essays, as well as a portfolio of student-produced poems, will together demonstrate students’ understanding of technique and form. Workshops will provide opportunities for students to share their writing and receive constructive feedback, and student-led discussions will be a regular part of our class routine. 

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

“If your aim is to change the world,” writer Tom Stoppard noted, “journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon,” This course allows students the opportunity to change their world by creating reliable, accurate and independent news reporting. We will read current newspapers each day in order to learn about our world through the major forms of journalistic writing: investigative, news, features, columns, and reviews. In class, we will practice writing in each of these forms while honing in on what is urgent and interesting to write about in the moment. As active journalists, we will report, investigate, and interview in order to shed light on the world for others. With each short piece of regular and timely writing, students will be building a comprehensive portfolio of their own work as part of a capstone project. Portfolios may include written assignments, audio recordings of interviews, photographs, and notes in order to reflect the accomplishments of each student during the semester.

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Fall, Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

American Bestsellers 

Satisfies one semester of the American Literature requirement

The primary goal for the American Bestsellers course is for students to engage with the literature that really fires the American imagination today. The books we read will be current bestsellers and the themes we investigate in class and write about will be themes with which American society is currently grappling. Students will have lots of choice about the topics to pursue and how they choose to share what they have learned, though all students will be required to practice close reading, because that lies at the heart of sound literary analysis, strong logic, and eloquent writing. Students will also be expected to try some creative writing. By the end of the semester, students should have some sense of the current literary conversation in America and be able to articulate their thoughts about important themes our country is currently wrestling with.

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Fall

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

This course explores works by American authors who identify as part of the LGTBQ+ community. In the US, non-conforming sexualities were ostracized if not criminalized until well beyond the AIDS crisis of the 80s, so these authors are often writing against oppressive majorities. Queer literature has permeated a wide array of genres, so in this course we will take a cultural studies approach and look at everything from drama to novels to memoirs and comic strips. Through literature, film and other media, we will explore the evolution of queer representation in the U.S. We will examine well-known texts like Tony Kushner’s epic play Angels in America as well as less popular texts such as Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home. 

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Fall

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

During the pandemic, one of the biggest hits on television was Squid Game, a perplexing and extremely violent depiction of adults playing high-stakes kids’ games with deadly consequences. While the events of the show seem way over the top, understanding what happened to Korea in the twentieth century makes the show less a fantasy than a commentary on the perils of modernization. Korea, still divided into two nations, endured Japanese occupation, a civil war sponsored by the world’s superpowers, and modernization at breakneck speed that saw the country transform from an agrarian economy to a world leader in technology, all in the space of a handful of decades. To understand this history (and Squid Game), we may read works like The Dwarf by Cho Se-hui (a collection of stories), and Our Twisted Hero by Yi Munyol. We will also examine the experience of Korean immigrants to the US with a work like Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee. These major texts will be supplemented by short stories, poetry, folklore and film.

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Fall

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

“The Earth is what we all have in common,” noted American novelist Wendell Berry. In this course we will read and write about this common, yet unique relationship we share with our physical world. We will go outside and write about our own experiences in our immediate surroundings through personal narratives. And we will form our own opinions on current environmental debates in order to write persuasively as advocates for those causes. In preparation for this work, we will read and write about the relative and ever-changing value that Americans have placed on the plants, animals, and people that occupy our environment in order to consider different perspectives. Most readings in this course will be narrative nonfiction and personal and persuasive essays that seek to understand nature in relationship to an American identity. Essential questions include:

What is the relationship between nature and American identity?  

What is the relationship between self and society? 

How do I engage with the natural world around me? 

How can I write about nature and our environment in an impactful way?

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Fall

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

The state of Colorado is an attractive place for authors looking to write about natural beauty or historically significant events, and in this course we will explore both fiction and nonfiction literature set in the Centennial State. Our readings may include works like Erika Wurth’s Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, as well as portions of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, books with significant passages set in Leadville and Longmont respectively. These and other texts will help us answer questions about how the state’s natural resources have been viewed, how the conflicts between indigenous peoples and settlers have evolved and how marginalized groups–particularly Latinx people–have established communities in Colorado.

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

Despite being a relatively small island nation, Japan has been an economic and military superpower; it also has an old, tradition-soaked culture that values craft. In this course, we will attempt a survey of Japanese literature that helps us gain a broad understanding of Japanese culture, aesthetics and history. We will include texts ranging from The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, a text about court life from around 1000 CE, to A Wild Sheep Chase Haruki Murakami, a twentieth-century take on the detective novel. Please note: In part (though not in all cases) because it has been ritualized at times in Japanese culture, several of the texts for this course depict acts of suicide. 

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

No discussion of “The Great American Novel” can be complete without addressing Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Most simply, his narrative chronicles the journey of a young black man through the South and into the North as he observes the way the racial politics of his world works so often to confound him. But this is no simple novel. As Ellison himself said, the titular character’s "curiosity and blundering ... transcend any narrow concepts of race and hit us all where we live."

This is a big book -  in content (500+ pages) and context. To better understand what lies beneath the surface and address the novel’s salient questions about race and racism in America, we will examine each chapter closely to try to understand each moment’s significance. To do so, we will be tackling the challenging context that informs Ellison’s work, including important historical thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Marx, as well as contemporary critics of Ellison’s work itself. To enhance our understanding, readings of the novel will be supplemented with documentaries, museum explorations, and contemporary films. Students will be expected to read and research extensively, participate in discussion consistently, and write coherently about both the novel and the historical and cultural context that we explore.

Prerequisite:

English 10

Term:

Fall

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

Literature and popular culture often suggest that the American West is a place emblematic of American values like freedom and rugged individualism, and that cowboys represent a supremely American archetype; in this interdisciplinary course, we will examine to what degree those ideas are true. Studying fiction, film, music, and non-fiction, we will explore how romantic notions are often at odds with historical and cultural realities, paying particular attention to the stories of people whose experiences have been omitted from the common narratives of the American West. Students should leave the class with a deeper knowledge of where the myths of the American West came from, and a better understanding of how literature, film, music and visual art have both reinforced and challenged those concepts as the West itself has evolved.

Prerequisite:

English 10

Term:

Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

As author Annalee Newitz notes "The most powerful works of SF don't describe the future - they change it." We will use this framework to explore 1) how classic SF works have sought to change their own societies, and 2) consider how contemporary SF might be forecasting or changing the world we will live in tomorrow.  Along the way we will unpack the political, cultural, and environmental issues in our own world that the authors hoped to expose through their speculative world-building. Classic short stories will provide students with a solid framework for analysis, while contemporary works of literature, film, graphic novels and video games will challenge students to apply these ideas to address different formats and different societal issues. Students will also have the opportunity to offer their own commentary on society through a creative world-building research and writing project.

There are two goals for this course:  one is for students to become familiar with American short stories, and the other is for students to explore and develop their own skills as writers of short fiction.  We will begin the semester with unformed free writing to help students find their thoughts, their voices, and their styles. At first students will write anonymously, and, in reading one another’s work, will focus discussion on what strikes them about one another’s creativity.  As we move further into the semester, we will spend more time on what makes a work short fiction and the particular attributes and limitations of that style. 

 

There will be short assignments that require students to recognize the functions of form, structure, and style as they read celebrated American short fiction.  Other assignments will hone close reading skills. The major assignments will be short stories. Most of the discussion in this class will be guided by the students as they respond to each other’s writing and seek to help one another make progress in their stories.

Writing Your World is a course that uses the English language to help students discover the needs of their own communities as well as their own voices and their own agency in solving the problems that they identify in their environments.  Language is a powerful tool, and therefore the course begins with a study of the concepts of voice and agency. Students will be given time to explore and articulate their own values. We will move from there to identifying and assessing the vital issues of the Front Range.  Students will choose an issue that matters to them, establish a goal that they can achieve using language, and then set about achieving those goals. The work will involve such skills as research, blogging, interviewing, presenting, writing letters, perhaps writing fiction or nonfiction, etc.  Possible issues that students might choose include environment, teen pregnancy, addiction, eating disorders, depression, suicide, homelessness, hunger, literacy, education, diversity, justice, immigration, abuse, or violence, but it will be up to students to decide what they wish to address. At the end of the course, each student will present the results of their work, which must be published, whether that be through newspaper articles, websites, self-publishing, or some other means, making students answerable to the general public as well as to the instructor.

Prerequisites:

English 10

Terms:

Spring

Eligible:

Juniors, Seniors

There has never been any shortage of stories about WWII, but the last decade or two has brought an explosion of excellent literature that explores the war, the build-up to it, and its aftermath from new perspectives.  In this course we will seek to understand what it is about WWII that so transfixes the modern mind by reading fiction and non-fiction written by and about women, minorities, and children who lived through the war.  As we do with any good examination of history, we will look to the past to learn what we can do better today, so we will also be drawing from current events for our discussions about the paths of humans and of civilization through the 20th and 21st centuries.