English I

Students develop close reading strategies — annotation, inference, and textual evidence — using Frederick Douglass's autobiography as a primary anchor text. Reading becomes an active conversation between reader and writer.

Students analyze the craft elements that give fiction its power — plot structure, characterization, point of view, and theme — using Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado' as a primary text for close analysis.

Students develop skills to read poems closely and confidently — analyzing figurative language, meter, sound devices, and poetic form using Dickinson, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, and Langston Hughes as anchor texts.

Students master the skills of analyzing informational texts — recognizing text structure, evaluating evidence and reasoning, identifying author's purpose, and detecting bias — using historical documents and journalism as primary texts.

Students learn to construct rigorous, well-reasoned arguments — building defensible thesis statements, integrating evidence, addressing counterarguments, and deploying rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) in a complete argumentative essay.

Students learn the craft moves that transform a personal experience into a compelling narrative — using sensory detail, scene construction, dialogue, voice, and the revision process to make a reader feel present in a moment that belongs to the writer.

Students learn to conduct focused research — generating meaningful research questions, evaluating sources using the CRAAP test, synthesizing multiple sources into original understanding, and citing in MLA format while avoiding plagiarism.

Students discover that grammar is not merely a set of rules to follow but a toolkit of choices — how sentence structure, punctuation, voice, and clause arrangement shape what a text communicates and how a reader experiences it.

Students build strategies for encountering unfamiliar words — using context clues, morphological analysis, and awareness of connotation versus denotation — and explore how word choice shapes meaning and audience perception across different registers.

Students learn that a literary text does not have a single 'correct' meaning waiting to be found — it can be productively read through multiple critical lenses. This unit introduces reader-response, historical-biographical, and feminist criticism as frameworks that reveal different aspects of texts.

Students encounter drama as a literary form with its own conventions — performance, dialogue, staging, and spectacle — and are introduced to Shakespeare through the lens of theatrical experience. Key dramatic devices including soliloquy, aside, and dramatic irony are examined as tools of audience engagement.

Students develop critical frameworks for evaluating digital sources, identifying misinformation and visual manipulation, understanding how algorithms shape the information they receive, and reading visual rhetoric and advertising with the same analytical skills they bring to written texts.

Students develop the speaking and listening skills central to academic and civic life — including formal public speaking, active listening, Socratic seminar participation, and structured debate. The unit treats voice not as a performance skill but as a thinking tool.

Students complete the course by synthesizing ideas across the texts and skills they have encountered, assembling a portfolio of their best work, and practicing the metacognitive reflection that transforms experience into lasting learning. The unit makes explicit the connections between reading, writing, speaking, and thinking.