This course explores the form, content, and historical context of various works of fiction specifically through the thematic lens of "dysfunctional families." We will focus primarily on questions pertaining to the structure, language, story, and characters of these fictional works.

This Remote Learning Plan was created by Sara Wellman-High Horse in collaboration with Eileen Barks and Caryn Ziettlow as part of the 2020 ESU-NDE Remote Learning Plan Project. Educators worked with coaches to create Remote Learning Plans as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.The attached Remote Learning Plan is designed for Grade 9-12 English students.  Via HyperDoc, Students will study the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken” and research biographical information, personal letters, and scholar videos and articles to answer analytical questions; and apply their knowledge of poetic literary devices and poem traits/characteristics to the poem, “The Road Not Taken”. This Remote Learning Plan addresses the following NDE Standard: LA 12.1.6.c; LA 12.1.6.d; LA 12.1.6.f; LA 12.1.6.i; LA 12.1.6.l; LA 12.1.6.nIt is expected that this Remote Learning Plan will take students 2 days to complete.Here is the direct link to the Google Doc: Robert Frost & "The Road Not Taken"

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

A free mini-book to prepare students for the SAT exam with lessons and questions in math, reading, and writing.

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, is a MI exemplar for grades 11 "“ CCR taught at the upper high school level and in AP English. This three lesson unit looks at a variety of schisms and divisions in the novel. It provides a close reading of the novel by considering Dostoevsky's view of human nature, through his characters; the theoretical division Man v Superman; the societal setting in the novel.

Students will view a short video in which questions have been embedded to activate their interest.  They will then read the story of the Last True Hermit, Christopher Knight.  Knight lived for 27 years in the woods of northern Maine before being caught.  He survived by building a camp deep in the woods and stealing from cabins in the surrounding area.

The students will analyze the author's point of view and the way the various characters interact in the story.  Their analysis is assessed using a short writing assignment.

This can be modified for the general education classroom.  A supplemental text, "By the Waters of Babylon" by Stephen Vincent Benet, is included.  Students can read this text and then answer the questions that are also included.

William Butler Yeats occupies a dominant position in the lives and work of the Irish poets who followed him. We will explore some of that poetry, and consider how later poets, especially female poets, tried to come to grips with, or escape from, that dominance. As a seminar, the subject will place special emphasis on student involvement and control. I will ask you to submit one ten-twelve page essay, two shorter (five page) essays, and to accept the role of "leadoff person," perhaps more than once, That role will demand that you choose from among the assigned readings for that session the poem we should focus upon, and to offer either a provocative articulation of what the poem is about, or a provocative question which the poem confronts, and which we should grapple with, as well.

Extensive reading of works by a few major poets. Emphasizes the evolution of each poet's work and the questions of poetic influence and literary tradition. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic for Fall: Does Poetry Matter? Topic for Spring: Gender and Lyric Poetry. The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.

A selection of poems, arranged by theme, with a list of poetic terms.

Aspects of the tragic as a mode of literature and a quality of lived experience pursued in readings that extend from the warfare of the ancient world to the experiences of modern life. Authors include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Conrad, Dinesen, Faulkner, and Camus. Includes viewing of at least two films. "Tragedy" is a name originally applied to a particular kind of dramatic art and subsequently to other literary forms; it has also been applied to particular events, often implying thereby a particular view of life. Throughout the history of Western literature it has sustained this double reference. Uniquely and insistently, the realm of the tragic encompasses both literature and life. Through careful, critical reading of literary texts, this subject will examine three aspects of the tragic experience: The scapegoat; The tragic hero; The ethical crisis. These aspects of the tragic will be pursued in readings that range in the reference of their materials from the warfare of the ancient world to the experience of the modern extermination camps.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Hamlet" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Macbeth" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Othello" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "Twelfth Night" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.

In this lesson, students explore the historical context of  Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading  his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850.  Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.

Students, scholars, bloggers, reviewers, fans, and book-group members write about literature, but so do authors themselves. Through the ways they engage with their own texts and those of other artists, sampling, remixing, and rethinking texts and genres, writers reflect on and inspire questions about the creative process. We will examine Mary Shelley's reshaping of Milton's Paradise Lost, German fairy tales, tales of scientific discovery, and her husband's poems to make Frankenstein (1818, 1831); Melville's redesign of a travel narrative into a Gothic novella in Benito Cereno (1856); and Alison Bechdel's rewriting of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in her graphic novel Fun Home (2006). Showings of film versions of some of these works will allow us to project forward in the remixing process as well.