Welcome to our English class.  This is a full year class, which will focus on reading and responding to literature, creative and critical thinking, writing, and vocabulary.  I look forward to an enjoyable and rewarding class with you!

In this class students will be building on concepts and skills that he or she have learned in the previous years.  In Freshman English, students were introduced to different literary terms and had some practice identifying different literary elements in texts.  Now, in 10th grade Advanced College Prep, students will see how these different elements work to create good literature.

Students will study a wide range of texts including journals, novels, poems, short stories, and nonfiction forms including memoir, biography, letters and newspaper and magazine articles.  In addition, students will go beyond the literature and their reading to see how other art forms including music, films, and paintings have expressed a point of view about a given issue or theme.

The course is also committed to the development and refinement of language arts skills in reading, speaking and writing.   Focusing on writing persuasive and comparison and contrast essays, students can develop life long skills in presenting an argument, weighing and presenting evidence, clarifying thought and making meaningful connections.  In addition, there will be frequent practice for the CAPT exam that students take in the spring where students are expected to read, interpret, critique, make a connection to a short story.

The final result should be students who have the ability to weigh, evaluate, and understand different points of view.  They should be able to communicate those different points of view as well as their own and to see the merits and problems of each.