Christopher De Kuiper
Professor Bartlett
Teaching Women Writers
July 10, 2005

Honors Junior English (373) - Course Overview / Outline

Mr. De Kuiper
Office phone: 847-480-7252
Email: cdekuiper@glenbrook.k12.il.us

English 373
Our work will have four parts: thinking, skills, concepts, and content. Your entire education is supposed to help you become an independent thinker. And as our exploration of concepts will make clear, a thinker has to be conscious of how he or she is thinking. Thinking is a self-conscious endeavor. So much of what you will be asked to do is to reflect on your habits of mind, to define and evaluate them for yourselves. As in all of your language arts classes over the years you have been in school, we will still be working to develop the necessary skills to make you proficient writers and readers, as well as effective listeners and speakers. Your study will be organized under concepts, large ideas that become categories for the information you encounter as you live and as you study. You will forget many, many particular facts and discrete pieces of information, but if you actually develop some level of understanding of a concept, you are not likely to forget it. The content is our vehicle, the stuff that makes ideas real and substantive, and our content will be predominantly literature.

As we begin our study, organize your materials to help you construct an overall understanding. Save what you write, the tests you take; you will be asked periodically to cull through completed work, to revisit ideas, and to create from the work done some evidence of growing understanding.

Instructional Strategies
This year, we will employ instructional strategies, practices, and devices that are consistent with the assumptions outlined above:

• Writing to Learn / Writing to Show Learning
• Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening as Components of the Critical Thinking Process
• Problem Solving
• Portfolio / Presentation / Seminar
• Authentic Assessment
• Collaborative Learning / Community of Interpretation

Major Inquiry
How do we make sense of our world and ourselves? How do we balance self and other? How are individual identity and personal consciousness part of, yet separate from, culture and history?

3rd Year Emphasis
Is there something we might call an American identity, an American consciousness? How can the literature and history of American help us to define or to understand who we are? What can the literature and history of American tell us about our values, assumptions, and habits of mind?

Concepts
Autonomy/conformity, consciousness/unconsciousness, identity/anonymity, gender/race/class, nationality, humanity, mind, soul, individuality

Method
During the course of the year, we will explore the above questions and concepts by studying core works and question clusters listed below.

Required Texts and Unit Overviews

Required Texts

• The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
• The American Heritage Dictionary
• Rules for Writers
• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
• Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

Unit 1: Consciousness
We will begin the year with Question Cluster A, which focuses on the abstract concept of consciousness. Breaking this big idea down into its aspects makes this idea more manageable: awareness, perception, perspective.

• "Such, Such Were the Joys," George Orwell
• "Seeing," Annie Dillard
• "Blindness," Jorge Borges
• "Who is it Can Tell Me Who I Am," Gina Berriault
• Cluster A

Unit 2: Success vs. Fulfillment, The American Experience

• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• selection of related essays, stories, and poems
• Clusters D and B

Unit 3: Identity, Class, Race, Gender

• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston
• selection of related essays, stories, and poems
• Cluster B

Unit 4: Research Paper

• All clusters

Unit 5: Individuality, Conformity

• Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
• A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
• Cluster C

Floating Unit: (Mostly modern, mostly American) Poetry

<< McCarthy / Orwell Lesson Plan