English 9 focuses on the development of reading, writing, critical thinking, and study skills. Students consider audience and purpose as they outline, draft, and revise their written work. In analytical paragraphs and essays, they learn to articulate and support insightful arguments about literature and to present their ideas clearly and persuasively. In personal pieces, they reflect on their own experiences, perspectives, and values and develop their authorial voices. To enhance their reading and writing skills, students also study conventions of English grammar and usage, as well as Latin and Greek word roots. Course texts follow the coming-of-age journeys of young protagonists—teenaged characters questioning who they are and what they value. The reading list may include Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a graphic novel or memoir, short fiction, and poetry.

English 10 exposes students to a breadth of literary voices and perspectives. Through a study of works from various cultures and time periods—which provide both mirrors of students’ own experiences and windows into others’ experiences—the course helps to foster empathy and cultural competence as it develops the reading and writing skills necessary to explore these texts. Students also draw upon their study of United States history to explore themes of power, leadership, social hierarchy, and injustice in an interdisciplinary manner. Course texts may include selected short stories and poems, a Shakespearean play, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. In addition, all sophomores participate in the Sages and Seekers program in the spring. Binding these course elements together is a consideration of the role that perspective—both authorial and narrative—plays in the interpretation of a text and the role that societal structures play in shaping perspectives. More specifically, students consider how they can better understand their own individual experiences and those of others through striving to understand worlds that may initially seem vastly different from their own.

This honors course exposes students to a breadth of literary voices and perspectives. Through a study of works from various cultures and time periods—which provide both mirrors of students’ own experiences and windows into others’ experiences—the course helps to foster empathy and cultural competence as it develops the reading and writing skills necessary to explore these texts. Students also draw upon their study of United States history to explore themes of power, leadership, social hierarchy, and injustice in an interdisciplinary manner. Students invited into this class have shown a passion for reading and writing, as well as the ability to handle challenging nightly and long-term assignments. They engage in a rigorous program of reading, writing, language analysis, and vocabulary development, so the pace of the course is vigorous. Texts may include Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, as well as selected short stories, poems, and essays. In addition, all sophomores participate in the Sages and Seekers program in the spring, and students pursue a Passion Project that requires outside reading and culminates in their delivering a TED Talk presentation. Binding these course elements together is a consideration of the role that perspective—both authorial and narrative—plays in the interpretation of a text and the role that societal structures play in shaping perspectives. More specifically, students consider how they can better understand their own individual experiences and those of others through striving to understand worlds that may initially seem vastly different from their own.

IIn this course, students read literature that reflects and comments specifically on American society—literature that often reveals conflicts between the constitutional ideals of individualism, equality, and opportunity and the realities of prejudice, disenfranchisement, and privilege. By reading a variety of American texts and authors, students investigate the stories that we, as a nation, have told about ourselves, exploring whether these stories illuminate truths or obscure them. Students also consider the contexts in which American texts were written and the ways in which context, more generally, can shape and/or constrain the stories that are told and subsequently read. Building on the skills that students have developed in ninth and tenth grade, this course further expands students’ abilities to read and write critically, with an emphasis on developing their voices and honing their skills of analysis as they craft arguments for various audiences. Students also become more adept at reading and responding to literary criticism. Texts may include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Tommy Orange’s There, There, Alison Smith’s Name All the Animals, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, August Wilson’s Fences, Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, along with a variety of essays, poems, and short stories.

This AP course, open to invited eleventh graders, is designed with an American literature framework and prepares students for the AP English Language and Composition exam, which primarily measures writing aptitude and analysis of writing styles. Writing skills are honed through assignments based on diverse American authors, including Native American writers, Puritan writers, and a wide range of poets, essayists, and short-story writers. Major readings may include some of the following works: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, August Wilson’s Fences, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The authors’ biographical backgrounds are also emphasized, and creative writing and independent projects are important elements of the class. Note that all students in this course are required to take the AP English Language and Composition Exam in May.

This AP course, open to invited twelfth graders, is the culmination of the honors English program. While the course prepares students for the AP English Literature and Composition exam, its central aim is to provide an opportunity for sophisticated literary discussion and written analysis. Students pursue a study of a combination of British literature with other literature in English, including Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, George Orwell’s 1984, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, along with a wide range of poetry. These texts are organized around three units that explore the following themes: 1) hierarchies, imperialism, and the legacy of history; 2) truth, reality, and perception; and 3) finding meaning and purpose. This course also fulfills the Rivers IDS graduation requirement through interdisciplinary consideration of several of the texts. Students are expected to master additional texts independently. Note that all students in this course are required to take the AP English Literature and Composition Exam in May.

What does it mean to be an adolescent, and how are these formative years portrayed in literature? How do social identifiers such as race, class, and gender impact adolescents, thus challenging the idea that there is a “typical” experience? In this course, students critically examine texts about teenagers and the teenage experience. They look at ways in which adolescence is typically viewed as a time of self-discovery, filled with newfound freedom, rebellion, and angst—and then explore how potentially flawed and narrow this view can be. Through reading and analyzing texts about teenagers, such as Tobias Wolff’s Old School, Lorene Cary’s Black Ice, and Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, students think critically about personal and societal notions about “coming of age.” In doing so, students also discuss the role that teenagers’ intersectional identities play in the lived experience of adolescents. Students write a mix of personal, creative, and analytical essays. They also read a significant amount of literary criticism and critical theory in order to develop a “Youth Lens” through which they can analyze course texts more deeply. The course culminates in students’ applying this critical lens to texts of their own choosing in an independent final project.

Meet the quick minds and diverse characters of detective fiction: conflicted Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, loner private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and the much imitated but never bettered Sherlock Holmes. Beginning at the foundation of the genre with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the class steps over crime scenes and through dark alleys with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird, and Sue Grafton’s “B” Is for Burglar, among other works. Exploration and critique of the genre’s treatment of issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation are among the unifying threads of the course. Having explored the ways in which crime fiction texts reflect the values, prejudices, and anxieties of their cultural milieu, students end by composing and sharing crime fiction tales of their own, taking the genre firmly into new territory.

Tempered horror stories that feel at once familiar and strange, dystopian literature invites us to look more closely at the world around us. Indeed, the success of trilogies like The Hunger Games and Divergent speak to our collective desire to imagine a future gone terribly awry. But what explains this impulse? What purpose does dystopian literature serve? Is it escapist science fiction or prescient social commentary? This course examines dystopian novels (and films) as both of those things and more. With an emphasis on description, analysis, and comparison, students study classic dystopian texts like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, alongside more contemporary texts and media like St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, Naomi Alderman’s The Power, and the Netflix anthology Black Mirror. As cautionary tales, as allegories, and as windows into unknown worlds, dystopian texts ask us to examine the present moment and to consider the future towards which we might be headed. Students should be prepared to study each text alongside relevant current events and social issues.

The American story has portrayed nature both as the heroic centerpiece of our national identity and as our most fearsome antagonist, celebrating our “purple mountains’ majesty” while awing the barren threat of Jack London’s Alaskan landscapes. In this course, students read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that represent this distinct but expansive literary tradition—from the Puritans’ divining of nature for signs of grace, through the enthrallment of the Concord Transcendentalists and their late twentieth-century counterparts, to contemporary environmental literature’s focus on climate justice and Deep Ecology. The course is writing-intensive, with an emphasis on social, cultural, and political environmental issues and on personal accounts of students’ own experiences in and observations of nature. In this experiential course, students have opportunities to hike in local woods. While primarily centered on American writers and thinkers, other cultural approaches to understanding our natural world are introduced. Writers studied include Emerson and Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, Jonathan Safron Foer, Mary Oliver, John Krakauer, Bill McGibbon, Joy Harjo, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of central ethical ideas: justice, empathy, freedom, and virtue. Students integrate disciplinary contributions from English, science, and philosophy to fashion meaningful resolutions of important ethical questions: What role do empathy and imagination have in moral thinking? How do recent developments in psychology and neuroscience shape our views of identity and responsibility? How can I strive to become a more ethical person in the dynamic world of day-to-day life? By engaging with short stories, poetry, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, students consider the ethical implications of current developments such as generative AI and gene-editing technology. Assessments consist of both personal and analytical responses, collaborative group work, online discussion boards, and multiple projects. The “Disagreement Project” is designed to nurture skills of empathetic, careful listening and dialogue across cultural and socio-political differences.

This course explores the intricate relationship between identity, intersectionality, and the art of creative nonfiction writing. Through a combination of readings, discussions, writing workshops, and individual projects, students engage with diverse perspectives and hone their skills in crafting compelling narratives that reflect the complex interplay of identities in our contemporary world. Students explore various human experiences while learning how different aspects of identity–specifically, race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status–intersect and shape individual and collective stories. By studying works from a diverse range of authors, students gain insight into how identity is constructed, challenged, and expressed through the medium of creative nonfiction. Assessment is based on a combination of participation in class discussions, various writing assignments, peer critiques, and a final portfolio that showcases the culmination of the student’s work throughout the semester.

“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift sings, “but you made her like that.” This course will examine the trope of the “mad woman” in literature as a means to explore the societal norms and pressures experienced by women over time. Beginning with Victorian era conceptions of “madness” in female characters, the course spans literary history to consider the origins of the “mad woman” archetype, the celebration of female autonomy throughout different feminist movements, and, ultimately, the way that women’s anger is portrayed, stigmatized, and utilized not only in contemporary literature but also in popular culture today. Core questions include the following: How and why have women been marginalized through labels of “mad” or “angry” in literature? What is the role of patriarchy, power, and prejudice in such a portrayal? What is the intersection between these literary depictions and mental health, gender, sexuality, and race? How have women throughout literary history fought against such labels, and how can we continue to complicate and challenge these constructs in our world today? Course texts may include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Naomi Alderman’s The Power, and a novel by Toni Morrison, as well as contemporary essays, short stories, and articles.

This IDS course focuses on the way in which writers, thinkers, and artists across many genres and eras have struggled to pose and answer the questions central to finding meaning in our lives: How did we get here? Is there a purpose to our existence? Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of consciousness? What constitutes a meaningful life? How can we thrive in the face of our mortality? We approach these questions through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on both local and published expertise in scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary traditions. Students are introduced to canonical considerations from Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Kierkegaard, along with more modern thinkers such as Walt Whitman, the Dalai Lama, Herman Hesse, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Becker, Mary Oliver, and David Eagleman. This writing-based course features direct instruction and student workshops as final preparation for college writing.

This course teaches students to look at literature through a psychological lens and thus prompts them to begin to understand themselves and others with a bit more clarity. The curriculum is taught with the dual purpose of expanding students’ knowledge of literature, while also introducing them to Freudian Theory, as well as some common psychological disorders. Students examine underlying psychological forces at work in the human psyche through reading short fiction, poetry, novels, drama, memoirs, and case studies. Although much of the reading focuses on mental illness, students also explore issues such as family, power, motherhood, racism, violence, sexuality, and sexism, all of which certainly affect one’s psychological well-being. The literature examines these issues at the personal level as well as in familial and institutional settings. Texts may include Mira Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful, Robert Akeret’s Tales from a Traveling Couch, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, Judith Guest’s Ordinary People, James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, verse by Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes, and short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro.

How can writers effectively capture place in their writing? And how do the places and spaces we inhabit profoundly influence the people that we become? In English classes, students often discuss the importance of setting in the literature that they read. Building from this foundation, this writing-intensive course takes a deep dive into exploring the ways in which authors can use descriptions of place to evoke meaning and develop characters. In doing so, students analyze how places have the power to shape plot, perspective, and identity, both for the characters students encounter and for themselves. The course centers on three major texts: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, and Lauren Groff’s Florida. Students also read various short stories and essays by authors such as Joan Didion, E. B. White, David Foster Wallace, and David Sedaris, among others. Inspired by the various settings and genres that they study, students write analytical responses, short stories, and personal essays, crafting their own pieces in which an understanding of place and its impact on identity is vitally important.

According to journalist George Will, “Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.” Indeed, playing and/or watching sports enables many people to pursue personal goals, to find connection to others, and to believe in and commit to something greater than themselves. Sports are interconnected with the historical contexts in which they are played, and they have been central in political protest and social justice movements. A quick glance at the news headlines also reveals that there is often a dark side to sports, filled with corruption, scandal, and immorality. In this course, students adopt an interdisciplinary approach to study a wide variety of writing and other media about sports in an effort to explore the many roles that sports can play within an individual’s life and within society—the good, the bad, and the nuanced areas in between. Specifically, students consider why and how sports are often the context within which larger societal issues arise. Drawing on disciplines that may include history, science, business, and sociology, course texts comprise a mix of essays, podcasts, and documentaries; student interest determines much of the course content. Students respond to the material through analytical writing, personal essays, Socratic Seminars, and in-class presentations. The latter portion of the course prioritizes writing workshops, focusing on peer feedback, as students complete a series of creative writing assignments about the role that sports play in their own communities. Students of all athletic abilities and team allegiances are welcome in this course.

According to journalist George Will, “Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.” Indeed, playing and/or watching sports enables many people to pursue personal goals, to find connection to others, and to believe in and commit to something greater than themselves. Sports can play an essential role in a person’s development and sense of identity, and they are often deeply connected to dynamics in families and friendships. In this course, students study a variety of fiction and nonfiction literary texts in an effort to explore the many roles that sports can play within an individual’s life–the good, the bad, and the nuanced areas in between. Students also consider how an author can use a story about sports as a means of exploring other subject matter within a literary work. Course texts for 2024-2025 likely include the following: Andre Agassi’s Open; miscellaneous short stories, poetry, and films; the writings of John Wooden; Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks; and Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane. Students respond to the texts through personal writing, analytical essays, Socratic Seminars, and in-class presentations. The course culminates in an independent reading and writing project involving a text of each student’s choice. Students of all athletic abilities and team allegiances are welcome in this course.