Course Description: English 9

Organized around universally applicable essential questions and themes, freshman humanities combines both English 9 and History 9 into a comprehensive course that develops critical reading & thinking skills. Students will be challenged to identify and link underlying patterns & meanings shared by literary works, as well as participate in activities that encourage students to think globally and make connections between literature and its social and historical context.

Our goal is to have students engage in meaningful and personally relevant activities, inspire thoughtful reflection about history and progress, and enhance student ability to read carefully and to make intelligent connections between apparently diverse texts. The center of this course is dedicated to laying a solid foundation of skills that will be the basis for subsequent high school and post high school English and History courses. These skills include extracting meaning, interpretation, and coming to understand the ways that all stories converge around—and reinterpret—universal themes. Additionally, students will be provided with a strong set of study skills including note taking and keeping organized binders.

This course will be guided by the following general question: Are human values basically the same across time and culture?

As well as these essential skills:

Communication = To convey information effectively

Interpret = To extract meaning and/or relevance from information

Application/Use = To take what is learned and put it into action

Predict = To use what is learned to anticipate a future outcome

Evaluation = To assess a performance or information

Analysis = To identify and describe patterns and relationships