High School Language Arts

American Literature   12th Grade
Mrs. Alysia Horst

This course seeks to engage the students with writings of fellow Americans from the early explorers to modern America.  They will explore the meaning of the “American experience” as it relates to literature and our lives today.  Students will learn to use history and psychology to understand the context and meaning of the works.  This class will be a mixture of lecture and class discussion to challenge students to reflect and analyze what they have read.

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
• O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
• The Adventures in American Literature, Pegasus Edition, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

 
British Literature
Mr. Steve Notestine

British Literature covers non-American Literature in the English Language from 1500-1950.  The general themes of the course are contained in the intellectual movements of the British Isles with a special emphasis upon the spiritual dimension for the artistic history and social changes of the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Medieval Studies   10th Grade
Mr. John Tardiff

The Middle Ages encompasses many developments which today we take for granted.  Bound books, spaces between words in sentences, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, castles, chant, polyphony, religious orders, schools, waterwheels, universities, merchant banking, algebra, theology, optics, and ships that can travel on the open sea.  Those ships will sail the Atlantic Ocean and around Africa opening up trade routes that will springboard Europe into becoming the most powerful region in the world.

In our class we will use a textbook Medieval Europe: A Short History, but we will also read literature and primary texts. Students will understand how the Empire collapsed and converted to Christianity, how the barbarian tribes operated and related to one another before their conversion, be introduced to the Old English Language and the Literature of the northern cultures, and glimpse the Roman Empire’s continuation in Byzantium and the rise of Islam. Additionally, students will witness the intellectual life and material culture of the Middle Ages, understand the good and the problematic aspects of the Italian Renaissance, and see how life as caricatured in The Canterbury Tales will be disrupted by war, corruption, and eventually the Reformation.

• Medieval Europe: A Short History by Charles Warren Hollister, Judith M. Bennett
  
• Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

 
Public Speaking: Religious Topics   10th Grade
Mrs. Lynn Dery

The objective of this course is to help give students effective tools for public speaking, help them conquer any fears that they may have, and help give them an effective means for communicating the most important message of all…. Christ and His Church.  This course will also help them develop strategies for spontaneous prayer and teach them how to lector.

• John Paul II Beginning Public Speaking DVD series
• Course material written by Lynn Dery

Ancient Literature/Composition and Rhetoric   9th Grade
Mrs. Alysia Horst and Ms. Anna Catalano

Ancient Literature explores several key thematic questions: what it takes to be a leader, the psychological effects of war, why humans love storytelling, what it means to live a good life or be a wise person, how to deal with hardship.  We explore these topics from the perspective of the language, history, and storytelling of the Greeks, Jews, and Romans.

About one quarter of this course is given over to English Composition.  This means that the course will require many writing assignments, and those writing assignments will undergo multiple revisions.  Class time will be taken aside to analyze writing, to read Elements of Style, and to practice rhetorical argumentation.

• Antigone by Sophocles
• Iliad by Homer
• Hadestown by Anais Mitchell
• Elements of Style by Strunk and White
• Odyssey by Homer
• Apology by Plato
• The Book of Ecclesiates
• The Book of Job
• The Aeneid by Virgil
• Against Cataline by Cicero
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Classical Composition: Refutation and Confirmation, Memoria Press.
• Classical Composition:  Thesis and Law, Memoria Press