This course is meant for students who are transitioning from middle school to high school. Students will investigate the purposes for which authors write and will become purposeful readers and writers. Lessons and activities will focus on the process of writing—pre-writing, drafting, editing, and revising. Students will work in editing groups, help each other revise drafts, and learn the qualities of good writing. They will learn techniques for crafting well-written sentences, logical paragraphs, and coherent essays. Students will read, study, and discuss writing styles, and they will practice what they have learned in numerous writing assignments.

This class will focus on reading critically and passionately and on fostering creative writing skills. Students will read poetry, short stories and other works of literature, and write responses to the readings. They will visualize the imagery and explore the themes of literature in relation to their own lives. For more inspiration, class activities may include drawing and art, campus explorations, and a visit to a local museum. Students will share their insights into the mind of the author and seek to understand their own writing processes. Through improvisation, class discussion, and writing exercises, students will learn to identify and experiment with various narrative techniques. They will develop a portfolio of their own creative writing and will also write one analytic essay that will reflect their growing expertise as readers and writers.

This class will provide a vehicle for students to fortify high school level reading and writing skills. Students will mold facts, speculations, beliefs, and opinions into cogent, powerful statements. Through reading, class discussions, and group work, students will investigate different styles and forms of writing that provide a range of models for approaching thinking and writing. Emphasis will be on learning to refine thinking and on improving writing through editing and rewriting. Students will be assigned approximately 2-4 pages of writing, in addition to regular reading assignments, per class.

This course, taught at the advanced high school level, will allow students to strengthen their analytical reading and writing skills. Students will practice reading with care and will hold meaningful discussions about the texts they study. They will learn to produce well-organized, well-written, well-developed, and intellectually complex essays. They will perform the stages of writing from clarification of the assignment to final revision, working on grammar, composition, and editing.

Creative Writing provokes poetry slam crowds into riots of raucous applause. Volumes and volumes of song lyrics are learned by heart, their mini-stories educating us about profound life truths as well as any great orator. Creative Writing frequently saves us from predictable joke-telling conventions so that we are surprised to be laughing so hard. Will you slam and song-truth and rescue audiences from stale jokes in this course? Sure! You’ll revise and craft tone so that you can assure a reader, “This narrative came from a living, breathing, thinking being.” But in your clever, meta-narratives, you’ll also be mindful not to trample on your purpose or message or content like some attention-starved class clown who impedes other students from learning the day’s lesson. In this course, students will read short stories, poems, and a couple of novels, discuss the form and purpose of meta-fiction, and revise their writing through class workshops before presenting their finished work.

In this seminar, students will explore numerous forms of poetry, ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, from different cultural traditions. Each week will feature a different form or set of forms (sestinas and villanelles, sonnets and ballads, haiku and tanka, etc.), with students writing their own pieces following the framework. While the course will focus on student writing, numerous readings will illustrate the approach of formal poetry, and the power of expression within constraints. in addition to flexing their creative muscles, students will learn literary terminology, the grammar of the sentence, and literary analysis as a foundation for their own future work as writers and readers.

Students in this course will prepare for college-level work by applying their critical reading, thinking, and writing skills to a range of topics, including literature, ethics, and science. They will develop research and writing skills necessary to succeed beyond high school, and the will practice writing in the different registers and genres of academic fields at the college level. Students in this course should already have mastered writing for high school and will challenge themselves to synthesize information from a variety of sources in order to arrive at thoughtful and original conclusions. Through focused revision and editing, students will be able to craft clear, purposeful contributions to their fields of study.