English
Emphasis is on written and oral communication. The curriculum seeks to develop students' reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing (media literacy), and critical thinking. There is a Writing Center for assistance which is staffed during school hours by English teachers.
Ninth graders have a choice of a Global Studies course which will meet for two periods each day; it teaches literacy skills with literature in a historical context and combines freshman English and world history. English 1 is also offered, as a one-period course, and it will teach literacy skills including reading and writing and focuses on putting text in a thematic or literary context. The choice of which course to take should be based on a student's learning style; the Global Studies course will have more interaction and cooperative-based learning. Both English and Global Studies will require a research project to be completed. School authorities decided to eliminate ninth grade English honors in 2009 to permit a "fairer, more efficient process for assessing the willingness and readiness of students to enter the honors program in tenth grade," according to one account. Students can apply for English 2 Honors taught in tenth grade.
Journalism is taught as an elective one-semester course and includes entry-level exposure to the SHS student newspaper. Honors and AP courses are open by application to students in grades 11 and 12. And a course in public speaking will be replaced by a course entitled "21st century media and communications." The English faculty includes novelist Robert Kaplow whose bestselling novel Me and Orson Welles was made into a film.
Read more about this topic: Summit High School (New Jersey)
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“Bourbon’s the only drink. You can take all that champagne stuff and pour it down the English Channel. Well, why wait 80 years before you can drink the stuff? Great vineyards, huge barrels aging forever, poor little old monks running around testing it, just so some woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma can say it tickles her nose.”
—John Michael Hayes (b.1919)
“The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, “All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.” And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)