Course Syllabus: English 11
Brewster High School
School Year: 2015–2016
Teacher: Mr. Eure
Email: meure@brewsterschools.org
Website: sisypheanhigh.com
For most of you, it’s your junior year, and I imagine you are used to the strange rhythm of the first day of school. We all share an odd mix of exhaustion and nervousness, and you spend most periods adjusting to it, as if you’d been pushed into a lake of freezing water.
The usual lesson revolves around a syllabus and expectations. You might do an icebreaker or two. Sometimes you get a sheet signed. Usually it all blurs together: Barring variations in clip art, it’s the same collection of rules, regulations, and grade weighting that you’ve seen since middle school.
This syllabus is different. Expect to take your time here. In fact, it’s worth noting, before we get to the usual stuff, that this will be the primary mechanism of instruction: the written word. You must read carefully, because I will write carefully, and in my writing are answers to the questions and concerns you haven’t even had yet — about grades, research papers, exams, and so on.
Course Overview
Stripped to its core, this is a course about three things:
- Reading critically
- Thinking rationally
- Communicating effectively
These skills form the machinery of thought and frame a study of language, composition, and the humanities that rely on both. These skills are also so fundamental to learning that it doesn’t matter what kind of academic identity you’ve settled on so far — insisting, as some of you inevitably will, that you don’t like and/or have struggled with English because you are a “math person” or a “music person,” as if identifying a new species of animal. Yet you all need to become more effective communicators, more rational thinkers, and more critical readers. You will need those skills for the rest of your lives.
So we will hone the skills of reading, thinking, and writing. Beyond that, you have a loftier goal: to unsettle, examine, and rebuild your internal mechanism for interacting with and interpreting the world around you. In other words, you will grow through an examination of your beliefs, an analysis of your thinking in relationship to the thinking and writing of others, and a series of answers to essential questions about the subjects we study. We will prompt this with reflective and metacognitive work and a variety of texts from the past and present on subjects as diverse and vexed as gender, torture, and education itself.
This is not a course in memorization or regurgitation, although memory is a critical aspect of your growth as a student. It is also not a course that relies on handouts, checklists, and hoops to jump through. Starting with this syllabus, this course requires you to adjust your expectations and become an equal partner in your learning. The term is autodidacticism — your capacity to instruct yourself. Trust me, trust yourself, and you will do great things.
Grading Policy
Per high school policy, you will receive four quarterly grades and a final exam grade.
The way we arrive at those numbers is called grade abatement, and your quarterly grades correspond to grade abatement profiles. You will be given separate documents that cover the basics of this process, including an exhaustive guide and a series of protocols.
Head elsewhere for the complete set of resources. For now, the two most critical pieces are:
Tests and Quizzes
Tests are bad for you, as it turns out. Very bad for you. We won’t take any more than we need to, and they will be folded into the relevant aspects of grade abatement:
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed analysis and argument
- Demonstrable growth and/or proxy teaching of timed multiple-choice work
Quizzes are redefined here:
The onomatopoeia that your predecessors chose: doki-doki, or the sound of a heartbeat in Japan.
Exams
Toward the end of this course, you will take a high-stakes exam. Some of you will take the College Board’s AP English Language and Composition Exam; all of you will take the New York State Regents Exam in English.
The good news is that high-stakes tests in English are skill-based, not content-driven. You’ll need to memorize a few literary and rhetorical devices, but the majority of these assessments ask you to demonstrate your ability to read, to write, and to think, which are the three basic skills we’ll work on all year.
When necessary, the grade abatement framework will flex to give you access to individualized test prep, and no matter how you struggle, you will never suffer for it — not as long as you are thoughtful, assiduous, and amenable.
The bad news hasn’t changed since 2011:
Required Materials
You should have access to a Chromebook every day. Our classroom will also be set up as a kind of makerspace — a way for you to approach those 39 minutes with a different mindset.
You may bring any smart device you have with you, and laptops are encouraged. Otherwise, you can use whatever binder or folder system you like. Just be sure to read this:
Staying organized is about the only way you’ll see the kind of success those students did.
The Writing Process
One of your goals this year is to create writing that defines you as you move into college and/or a career. You will organize yourself through Google Drive, publish through Medium, and use our website and course subreddit to document your thinking and collaboration.
That’s a powerful digital footprint — the kind of thing an admissions board or prospective employer will see when they search for you online. As an example, here is a member of last year’s graduating top ten:
The world wants you to have a digital presence. This course will help you build it.
The writing itself will be driven by a universal rubric and process called bishop composition. You can read all about it at our main site; for the moment, you should skim only the protocols we’ll use:
At This Point, We Have to Mention Research Papers
The bane of any real love of writing is the phrase research paper, which conjures for most of us (teachers included) a miasma of dull and tedious work. There’s actually something almost anachronistic about “research papers,” because the prompts seem enslaved to the traditional and canonical approach — asking you, for instance, to explicate the allegory in Animal Farm, as if a thousand websites had not already done that for you.
To redefine the research paper, we have to accept that the world has shifted. The requirements for research have shifted. This is now the most important skill you can develop as a reader, thinker, and writer: You must know how to delve into the ramiform and sometimes indiscriminate information of the Internet in order to corroborate data and support claims. To write cogent arguments of your own, you must avoid the plague of relativism that the Internet has created; to analyze and emulate effective rhetoric, you must understand how to sift through the endless (and very often ignorant) voices and perspectives online.
In here, you will do just that: You will learn how to evaluate websites, to connect periodicals and essays and books, to parse bias and fact, and to blend it all with your own burgeoning perspective on the world. By the time you leave here, you should be evolving from a digital native to a digital anthropologist of sorts.
You will also — to put this in traditional, syllabus-y terms — write a research paper during the year. You’ll design an autodidactic unit where you control the process and product.
The Reading Process
It’s simple: Develop a reading habit. Read constantly, discerningly, and actively. Read a little of everything, and read whenever you can. Emulate Malcolm X, who wrote, “I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” You can learn the elements of writing through guides and lectures; you can improve how you write through rote exercises and arduous revisions; but you will never be knowledgeable, never think with any true depth or insight, and certainly never become an effective writer unless you read, read, read.
More importantly, learn to read for yourself, not just because you are in school. And if reading for yourself seems clichéd, reject that seeming cliché; embrace the truth of it, which is that reading makes you a better person. This works for literature as well as the essays you will strive to emulate.
Keep in mind that English still suffers from a conflation of reading with reading canonical literature. At least one of you will look around one day and ask, “When are we going to read a book in here?” I suppose it is impossible to break that association. The answer to the question, however, is simple: Whenever you decide to do it.
Sample Units
The following units have been taught in the past in this course, and they are included to give you a sense of what we might study and the sorts of questions we might ask.
Learning to Lie | A unit built around Stephanie Ericsson’s classification and division essay, “The Ways We Lie.” Also includes a look at Santa Claus and the pervasive lies of everyday life.
Wired for Analogy | A writing unit built around an analogy-driven essay prompt.
Poor Comic Sans | A study of presentation, specifically how it affects meaning in what we write and read.
Linguaphilia/Logomisia | A look at the words we like and the words we hate. Branches into a study of grammar, language, and how words control what we think.
Competitive Eating | Starts with “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” a controversial essay on donating to charity, and continues with texts on empathy. Includes ETA questions for an essay by Ryan Reynolds.
Destroyer of Worlds | An emulative assignment based on writing by Oppenheimer. Branches out into a study of style, power, and war.
Interpersonal Dynamics | A look at how we react to and interact with each other, starting with the dynamics in the classroom and school. Includes a study of the semiotics of respect.
Alligators of the Mind | Violence, torture, and obscenity as part of art and entertainment. Starts with Stephen King and moves into a differentiated look at pop culture.
Brainiac’s Super-Revenge | A unit on opinions, facts, and the curious relationship between them.
The Grammar and Ethics of Seeing | Using Sontag’s philosophy as a framework, we look at the rhetoric of photographs and the way the visual world impacts us.
Art and Artifacts | A study of video games as an important medium that raises questions of art and interactivity. This is an old unit (from 2011 and a course that isn’t even offered now), and it’s one that’s due for an update.
