English II

Students explore why literature crosses cultural borders, examine the challenges and gains of translation, and distinguish universal human themes from culturally specific details. The unit opens with African fiction to anchor the discussion in a specific literary tradition.

Students move from identifying rhetorical appeals to analyzing how they interact and accumulate. Using Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and other public-domain texts, students examine anaphora, antithesis, and parallelism as tools that make arguments emotionally and intellectually irresistible.

Students learn to read drama as a performance text, not just a literary one. Using Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, they analyze dramatic structure, the mechanics of soliloquy and aside, the irony built through audience foreknowledge, and how staging choices transform a script into an experience.

Students examine how nonfiction writers use fiction's craft tools — scene-building, dialogue, characterization, pacing — to render true events with the power of literature. The unit distinguishes memoir from autobiography, analyzes the ethics of narrative nonfiction, and studies how authors construct a reliable (or unreliable) nonfiction voice.

Students develop the analytical essay as a craft, moving from weak thesis statements and dropped quotations to arguable claims, woven evidence, and the claim-evidence-analysis paragraph architecture. The unit culminates in strategies for counterargument — acknowledging opposition as a sign of intellectual honesty rather than weakness.

Students move beyond identifying poetic devices into analyzing how poetic form creates meaning — how a sonnet's structure produces argument, how free verse earns its freedom, and how the relationship between form and content generates the poem's fullest effect. Works by Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Pablo Neruda anchor the unit.

Students apply literary analysis skills to media texts — advertisements, news articles, social media, and online video — analyzing visual rhetoric, identifying persuasion techniques, evaluating source credibility, and recognizing the cognitive patterns that make misinformation effective. The unit treats media literacy as an extension of rhetorical analysis into new forms.

Students read literary texts from different cultural traditions side by side, identifying parallel themes, archetypal patterns, and divergent values. The unit examines how translation mediates cultural encounter, how adaptation transforms source material, and how reading comparatively deepens understanding of both texts — and of the assumptions the reader brings to them.

Students analyze the syntax of professional prose at the sentence level, examining how sentence length, structure, and variety create rhythm, emphasis, and voice. They study the periodic and cumulative sentence as tools of emphasis and suspense, practice sentence combining to reduce choppiness, and analyze how published authors use syntactic choices to create a recognizable style.

Students are introduced to the idea that literary interpretation is always shaped by an interpretive framework — a set of assumptions about what a text is, what it is for, and where its meaning lives. The unit surveys formalism, historical criticism, and post-colonial theory as three lenses that produce strikingly different readings of the same text, developing students' ability to read critically rather than naively and to choose frameworks deliberately.

Students learn the methods of academic research: navigating databases, distinguishing primary from secondary sources, constructing an annotated bibliography, and synthesizing information from multiple sources into an original argument. The unit treats research not as information gathering but as a process of building knowledge — joining a conversation already in progress and contributing to it with your own informed perspective.

Students study irony as a literary and rhetorical mode — verbal, dramatic, and situational — and examine satire as the purposeful deployment of irony for social criticism. Through Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Twain's satirical prose, students analyze how indirection, exaggeration, and the gap between surface meaning and intended meaning function as persuasion — and why humor can reach audiences that argument cannot.

Students learn the structure and skills of formal debate — constructing cases, delivering affirmative and negative positions, cross-examining opponents, and rebutting arguments — through the lens of Lincoln-Douglas format, which centers on values and philosophical propositions rather than pure policy. The unit develops oral argumentation, active listening, and the ability to defend positions under pressure.

The capstone unit asks students to demonstrate the skills of the full course — analytical reading, rhetorical awareness, research methods, and multi-text synthesis — by writing a portfolio reflection and a synthesis essay that draws on texts from across the year. Students articulate how their thinking has changed, what connections across units and disciplines they have made, and what questions remain open. The unit treats the end of a course as a beginning rather than a conclusion.