Syllabus Eng11
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Page 1
Excerpted from
On Course for Success
A Close Look at Selected High School Courses
That Prepare All Students for College
Model Course SyllabusEnglishחGrade 11
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
6412
Page 2
Model Course SyllabusɗEnglishGrade 11
Course Description/Overview
English 11 will help you become a skilled reader of works written in a
variety of periods and genres. The course will also help you become a
skilled writer, composing for a variety of purposes. Through critical reading
analysis, you will determine how the resources of language contribute to
effective writing.
Course Content
ו Write essays for the following purposes:
Comparison/Contrast
Օ Definition
Cause and Effect
Օ Literary Analysis
Interpret and evaluate both fiction and nonfiction American writings
according to their historical, social, and cultural context
Օ Respond to writing selections by analysis
structure, diction, point of view, syntax, voice, purpose
Օ Respond to writing selections by synthesis
compare/contrast to other works
Օ Respond to writing selections by evaluation
effectiveness of the piece
Օ Prepare documented essays, using both primary and secondary
sources, on topics related to American literature and/or correlating
historical periods
Use a variety of prewriting techniques to gather information and ideas
Օ Revise writing to improve elements
word choice, presentation, content, organization, voice, conventions,
and sentence structure
Օ Increase knowledge and use of new vocabulary
Acquire and use grammar, punctuation, and usage rules
Օ Read literature, paying special attention to literary elements as well as
relating the literature to your own lives
Participate in class discussions by posing questions, acknowledging
othersՒ points of view, building on them, and expressing unique opinions.
Course Materials
Blue or black ink pen
Օ Clasp folder or three-ring binder for class notes (class notebook)
Assorted essay preparation materials
Օ Loose-leaf paper for in-class reader response journal entries
Thin spiral notebook, clasp folder, or bound composition book for your
personal journal
Օ Pencils (will be allowed on some assignments)
Colored pens (for editing)
Օ At least one floppy disc/diskette
Textbook, as needed
Օ Class notebook
Book and/or essays we are reading
թ 2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 3
Course Policies
Attendance: Class attendance is vital. Frequent absence will adversely
impact your grade. When absent, check with reliable classmates for
handouts or assignments missed. Handouts will be in trays along the back
wall, assignments on the whiteboard in the front of the room.
Tardy Policy: The schools Tardy Policy will be strictly enforced.
Late Work: will not be accepted from students unless the absence is
officially excused. Any assignments not submitted when called for on the
due date will be considered late. Due dates for formal compositions will be
set well in advance.
Make-Up Work: as a result of an officially excused absence is the
responsibility of the student. Assignments given before your absences are
due on the day you return to school. You will receive no more than one
week to submit make-up work. There is no make-up procedure for work that
has an announced due dateҗno exception.
Plagiarism: You will receive a copy of the schools Plagiarism Policy.
Plagiarism is claiming someone elseҒs work as your own. Any material taken
from another source must be cited and quoted. Plagiarism is illegal. It will
result in an automatic zero for the assignment plagiarized.
Homework: Work in English comes not as a steady stream, but as sizable
chunks. You must learn to pace your assignments over the weeknights or
major writing assignments over the weekends in conjunction with work from
other classes and extracurricular-mandated time. If your total workload
becomes intense at times in other classes, then tell me and I will readjust
due dates. Check with me during school or phone me at night if you do not
understand any particular assignment. Please do not abuse this privilege
by waiting until the last minute to start homework and then find you have
questions.
Group Work: Some assignments will require you to work in groups. You will
have the right to choose your groups; however, I reserve the right to assign
groups. Group expectations and grading will be discussed in class.
Work Ethically: All students are expected, on their honor, to be honest and
trustworthy. This trust is necessary for a positive working environment. I ask
you not to lower yourself in either my eyes or, more importantly, in your own.
I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to own your work, not
give it away or take it from other students.
Handbook Considerations: Student ID must be worn and be visible at all
times.
The rules listed in your school handbook will apply and should be followed
in this classroom (e.g., gum, beverages, and food items should be
disposed of outside of the classroom). The teacher will work with the
student to correct unwanted behavior. Tend to your personal needs before
you come to class (restrooms, lockers, grooming).
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 4
Grading Policy/Assessment
Two primary kinds of grades are earned in this class.
ɕ Process gradesThese are grades you achieve in the process of
learning class material (including class discussions, class work,
homework, grammar and vocabulary assignments).
ו Product gradesThese are grades you achieve that show knowledge
and mastery of material (including exams, quizzes, essays, projects,
discussions).
The grades you receive for quarters and semesters in this class are 50%
process and 50% product.
For most major assignments, I will provide the rubrics or explain the
expectations that I will use to assess your work.
Extra Credit: Opportunities will not be offered, because Honors students
are already receiving extra דcredit toward their GPA. There may be
opportunities for non-required assignments occasionally during the year.
These assignments allow students to get another good grade in the grade
book and are not required.
Course Procedures
Class Notebook: The notebook should act as a file-retrieval system. Use a
divider system to allow a place for a list of assignments, a section for at
least a page of notes from class each day, and a final section for class
handouts. Notebooks will receive a grade unexpectedly sometime within
each semester. The serious, committed student will conscientiously add to
his or her notebook daily (all entries dated, titled based on content, and
written in readable writing in black or blue ink). The notebook will often
boost the student hovering between two grades to the higher grade.
Notebook evaluation criteria will be handed out during the first week of
class.
Personal Journal: You will be asked to make two 45-minute entries per
week, and these entries must have dates and sequential page numbers.
The specific requirements and options for journal entries will be discussed
in class.
Turning In Assignments: All papers written outside normal class time must
be typed or written in black or blue ink using only one side of the paper.
The assignment format guidelines will be handed out in class. All
assignments will be due at the beginning of the hour on the date due.
Communication: Respect your fellow students. Do not talk when someone
else has the floor. Share your ideas, but courteously.
Personal Statement
ԕ Students can always expect to have some type of immediate or
extended reading assignment; therefore, a student should hardly ever be
able to say that he or she has nothing to do for Honors English 11.
Relationships: The goal in this classroom is to develop a positive,
personal relationship between the teacher and each student.
Օ As a teacher I believe:
1. All learning is active, involving critical dialogue with the text, the
teacher, and fellow students.
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 5
2. Writing is a way of knowing that begins at its best with what is
incongruent, ambiguous, or contradictory.
3. Appropriate teaching for Honors students exploits and builds on these
tensions.
4. Writing which brings these tensions to the surface ultimately resolves
them.
5. This process not only prepares you for English 12 but also suggests
an approach for life-long learning.
Additional Information
ɕ Progress Reports: I usually send home a report only if a student is
missing one or more assignments, unless the parents or guardians
specifically ask for a specific schedule for reports. Parents or guardians
may call me whenever they wish to check up on their son or daughter. I
stay up to around 10:00 p.m.; parents may still call me later if they are so
worried about their child in my class that they cannot sleep.
English/History Writing Lab: Use this excellent support. The tutors in the
Lab can help you revise, brainstorm, organize, and plan.
Օ Tutoring Service: A tutoring service staffed by volunteers from local
universities, community members, and the high school seniors in the
National Honor Society are available in every subject and are usually
available during study halls or free periods.
School Library and the Computer Lab are open before and after school.
The staff is helpful, informative, and eager to help.
Օ Reaching Me: Parents, please feel free to contact me at home when you
feel the need to check on your students progress or whenever you or
your child have a concern with the content or methods I employ in
teaching the class. After ___ years I still thoroughly enjoy teaching and I
will try to provide my students with a rich and meaningful year of self-
growth and self-discovery within a rigorous and relevant academic
curriculum. Here are my numbers (school phone, home phone, e-mail,
etc.)
ҕ Appreciation of My Students: Probably most of the time when I respond
to your work in writing, my words will be of a necessarily critical nature.
However, I want you to know that I notice and appreciate your effort and
I value each of you as an important member of the class regardless of
the grade you receive. Your grade does not in any way equate to you. I
wish to help you discover your gifts and cultivate them for use in a
meaningful life.
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 6
Description of a college-preparatory Grade 11 English course
The college-preparatory Grade 11 English course is a continuation and an
expansion of the college-preparatory Grade 10 English course. Though the
Grade 11 course continues with a focus on literature and the reading of
works of literary merit, this courseɒs focus should be less on helping
students comprehend difficult texts than it was in Grade 10. In a similar
way, the study skill of note-taking, which needed to be taught and
reinforced in Grade 10, should be firmly understood and utilized by
students now. Students should now be writing with correct grammar, and
should be moving beyond simple correctness toward writing with grace
and wit. The Grade 11 course is often a more highly
interdisciplinary course than the Grade 10 course: the
higher-level course has a focus on history and the
language of philosophy and rhetoric, as well as on
continuing to teach students how to read literature
through a theoretical lens.
In terms of reading and literature, the focus in many
Grade 11 English courses and textbooks is on American
literature and its history; in studying American literature,
then, Grade 11 students should learn to recognize the
significance of a given context for the meaning of a
literary work. They should learn how to analyze the relationship between
social commentary and American literaturethat is, they should be able to
see that The Crucible is a commentary on the times in which it was written,
as much about the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s, as it is about the
Salem witch trials; they should be able to understand the commentary Mark
Twain was making on the regional, political, and social issues important to
the times during which he lived in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
even as they learn about the controversy surrounding that book in times
since. Students should learn how to identify the persuasive techniques
used by American writers throughout historyחthe audience for whom The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was written, for
example, and the rhetorical strategies used in that earliest of all slave
narratives. They should learn how to evaluate the writing of early American
writers and they should be able to tease out ways in which the themes and
values in that early literature relate to contemporary issues.
In other words, students in a college-preparatory Grade 11 English course
should be provided with more than simply a knowledge of the chronological
placement of literature and literary movements in history; they should
understand the ways that the texts they read were influenced by and
influenced the history of their times, the ways that writers of different genres
influenced each others work, and how these different kinds of literature are
part of a conversation about what kind of a country America might be.
But not all Grade 11 English courses are focused on American literature
and American history, and there are other skills and understandings related
to the reading of literature that are important for students to acquire at
Grade 11. As the Grade 10 students were learning how to use a variety of
theoretical lenses through which to view the works they study, students in
Grade 11 should be studying dominant philosophical and religious ideas
upon which the works they read rest.
ҩ 2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Students should now be
writing with correct
grammar, and should be
moving beyond simple
correctness toward writing
with grace and wit.
Page 7
Thus, students will be continuing to learn how to analyze great writing using
the works of theorists such as Saussure, Frye, Bloom, Lacan, or Iser, and
they will also be reading in phenomenology, philosophy, and aesthetics. For
example, students might read Aristotles Poetics and write an essay on the
subject of aesthetic values throughout history; they might compare modern
ideas about tragedy, character, and drama to those of Aristotle. Students
should learn the philosophies connected to the literature they read, as well:
when they read The Scarlet Letter students should learn about the
underpinnings of Puritan thought; when they read Siddhartha students
should read Huston Smith or Mark Epstein on Buddhist
philosophy; when they read Emerson and Thoreau
students should learn how those writers used and
contributed to the theories of Transcendentalism.
Grade 11 students should be doing a considerable
amount of reading outside of class, on their own.
Students should read at least 300 pages a quarter,
from a teacher-approved book listҗof essays,
autobiographies, works by political and science writers,
by biographers and history writers, as well as fiction
making an appointment to talk to their teacher about
the book theyגve read when they are ready. The teacher
will enter the book or books read in each students reading log; this log will
be part of the studentҒs grade.
At least one major paper will be a semester-long, multi-
tiered research project. Students will be requiredusing
specialized reference tools (e.g., a dictionary of
symbols, a usage dictionary), theory from a noted
Western philosopher, a work of literature, relevant critical
essays about that work, and other information necessary
to their chosen taskחto define, conduct, and write their
own research project, composing open-ended research
questions and revising them as necessary. Students
should find, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize the
primary and secondary sources they userejecting
those that are biased or in other ways fallaciousחand
must synthesize the themes and concepts they learn
about in their research; practice outlining their paper,
using note cards and bibliography cards; and organize
the materials into a coherent whole, writing an elegant,
well-argued, well-supported, precise, and confident
analytical research paper, with documentation in a
correct prescribed style.
In addition, students should write in other forms. Some of
this writing may be connected to students reading:
writing a stream-of-consciousness essay when they read
Joyce, writing a discussion about the relationship
between history and memory when they read SpiegelmanҒs Maus,
discussing the way language shapes thought or the importance of
occasion and audience when they study speeches of the past, or writing
an essay analyzing Hamlet through a postmodern lens. Students should
also be asked to do the kinds of writing often valued in the workplace, such
as writing a proposal for a project, outlining a business plan, or transferring
into laymans terms steps necessary to complete a technical task.
ҩ 2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
In all of this work students
should be learning to
question the works they
read and to ask questions
about the world suggested
by those works; they should
be asking analytical and
philosophical questions of
each other in class; and
they should be learning to
think critically about their
own writing, the reading
they engage in, their
teachers statements and
propositions, and the
persuasive language they
see being used in the world
around them.
Grade 11 students
should be doing a
considerable
amount of reading
outside of class,
on their own.
Page 8
In all of this work students should be learning to question the works they
read and to ask questions about the world suggested by those works; they
should be asking analytical and philosophical questions of each other in
class; and they should be learning to think critically about their own writing,
the reading they engage in, their teacherҒs statements and propositions,
and the persuasive language they see being used in the world around
them. They should increasingly take responsibility for their own learning.
Suggested texts for a college-preparatory Grade 11 English course
The list offered here is only suggestive. It is not intended to be prescriptive
or all-inclusive. It provides examples of the works that were being read in
the college-preparatory Grade 11 English courses we studied.
Drama
Macbeth, The Piano Lesson, Blood Wedding, A Raisin in the Sun, Othello,
A Dolls House, Hedda Gabler, Fences, Arms and the Man, Oedipus the
King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Three Theban Plays, Desire under the
Elms, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, The
Importance of Being Earnest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
Waiting for Godot, No Exit, Equus, Hamlet, M. Butterfly
Nonfiction, Memoirs, Essays
The Souls of Black Folk, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Maus, Stride Toward Freedom,
Walden, AristotleҒs Poetics, The Birth of Tragedy, Anatomy of Criticism,
Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Dust Tracks on a Road
Essays by recent writers such as Baldwin, Berger, Camus, Dillard, Hurston,
Kozol, Moody, Orwell, Paglia, Rodriguez, Sontag, Steinhem, Steele, Vargos
Llosa, and West; essays by writers of the past such as Carlyle, Ruskin,
Disraeli, Engels, Arnold, and Pater
Fiction
Sula; Song of Solomon; Gullivers Travels; The Screwtape Letters; Jubilee;
Frankenstein; Bless Me, Ultima; Krik? Krak!; One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovitch; Madame Bovary; The Waiting Years; The Hour of the Star;
Nervous Condition; Heart of Darkness; Things Fall Apart; One Hundred
Years of Solitude; The Grand Inquisitor; The Chosen; The Metamorphosis;
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Quicksand; Brave New World;
Siddhartha; AliceҒs Adventures in Wonderland; The Awakening; Wise Blood;
Middle Passage; Dreaming in Cuban
Movies
The Seventh Seal, Citizen Kane, Rashomon, Apocalypse Now
American Classics
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Black Boy, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Invisible Man, The Grapes of Wrath, Cane, The
House of Mirth, My Antonia, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Death Comes for
the Archbishop, Billy Budd, The Red Badge of Courage, Leaves of Grass,
The Great Gatsby, Ethan Frome
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 9
Important American Documents
William Faulknerɒs Nobel Prize Lecture,Ӕ John F. Kennedys ғInaugural
Address, Martin Luther KingԒs Letter from a Birmingham Jail,Ӕ The
Declaration of Independence, Lincolns ғSecond Inaugural Address and
ԓGettysburg Address, Jonathan EdwardsԒs Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry GodӔ
Poetry
The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Inferno,
Beowulf
Short Fiction by Author
Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Pearl
Buck, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov,
Kate Chopin, Eugenia Collier, Anita Desai, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes,
Ha Jin, Charles Johnson, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine
Mansfield, Bobbie Ann Mason, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, James Alan
McPherson, Herman Melville, Susan Minot, Tim O�Brien, Frank OConnor,
Flannery OҒ Connor, Tillie Olsen, Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allan Poe, J. D.
Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Richard
Wright
2004 by ACT, Inc. All rights reserved.