Past Courses

American Literature (2011-2012 and 2013-2014)

This advanced high school course will be a lively tour of our country’s exciting and diverse literary history. Reading fiction, memoirs, essays, and poetry, we’ll enter the worlds of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson,  Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and many other writers. We’ll study movements and trends such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Realism, and Modernism. This course gives students a crucial foundation in their American literary heritage and prepares them for the reading, writing, and critical thinking colleges require.

Creative Writing (2012-2013 and 2013-2014)

The Creative Writing Tutorial operates asynchronously, which means that you take the class at your own pace without group meetings. You also have five one-on-one conferences with the tutor to discuss your work, each meeting about half an hour long. We’ll study facets of fiction such as structure, tension, setting, characterization, yearning, point of view, and dialogue. Each of the ten units consists of a reading assignment (published fiction and/or essays on writing) and a creative writing assignment. Writing assignments range from exercises focused on particular craft elements to rough drafts or revisions of longer pieces. Sometimes you will also write a response reflecting on the published fiction or essay.

Introduction to Writing and Literature (2011-2012 and 2012-2013)

This course combines the study of grammar, writing, and literature to provide a complete English course at an intermediate level (6th-8th grade). Students will learn the five-paragraph essay form and write a variety of compositions, including but not limited to a character analysis, comparison/contrast essay, a persuasive essay, a short story, and poetry. Our reading list will take us around the world and back in time through both classic works and Newberry Award winners.

Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2009-2010)

One of the greatest periods in the history of British literature, the 19th century saw critical developments in attitudes toward society and nature, religion and science, education and aesthetics. In this rigorous, high-school-level course, students will study Romanticism and Victorian literature through close reading of major poets and novelists, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, and Wilde.

Greek and Roman Literature (2008-2009)

From tales of love, war, revenge, forgiveness, and adventure to the meanings of happiness, friendship, and justice, this rigorous high-school-level course will introduce students to many works of literature, history, and philosophy that form the foundation of Western Civilization. Students will read the Iliad, the Odyssey, seven Greek plays, and the Aeneid in their entirety, as well as selections from Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy, Cicero, Catullus, and Horace. By the beginning of next summer, students will be better-read than the majority of college graduates!