英文

Perceptive reading, thoughtful inquiry, and effective written and oral communication are at the heart of every College Prep English course. At all grade levels, students read literature closely, write frequently in analytical and creative forms, and participate in discussion-driven classes.

Questions generated by students and teachers—about texts, the world, and the human condition—shape collaborative conversations around an oval Harkness table. This active, student-centered approach gives students regular practice in engaged discourse and helps them develop confidence in their ideas and voices.

Classes are small, allowing instructors to respond to students’ individual learning needs while creating ample opportunities for collaboration. The literature studied throughout the four-year program represents a variety of genres, styles, periods, and voices. Through this work, students strengthen their critical and abstract thinking, cultivate curiosity and attention to detail, engage their imaginations, and deepen their empathy and appreciation for the diversity of human experience.

Students at College Prep enroll in an English course every semester. English I (ninth grade) and English II (tenth grade) are year-long courses developed collaboratively by faculty teaching teams. In these foundational courses, students build the writing and analytical skills they use throughout their College Prep education and beyond. Through frequent writing, feedback, and revision, they deepen their understanding of grammar and the principles of style. In the eleventh and twelfth grades, students choose from thematic, semester-long seminars.

Beyond their courses, students have many opportunities to develop their interests in literature and strengthen their writing. Students at all grade levels are encouraged to submit work to the school newspaper, arts magazine, and literary journal. English seminars are also complemented by field trips to off-campus performances and guest lectures from writers and literary scholars.

2个项目的清单。

英语一（九年级）

In English I students develop skills in close reading, critical thinking, and analytical writing, while also practicing collaborative engagement—working together and learning from one another. Classes feature lively group discussions, practice in finding textual evidence, instruction in the art of writing coupled with frequent writing exercises, and regular lessons in grammar and sentence study. Texts include The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, works by Sophocles including Antigone and The Oedipus Cycle, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and a wide variety of additional texts representing a diversity of cultures and voices.
英语二（十年级）

English II broadens students’ experience with major literary genres, traditions, and writers, while exploring tropes of power and consciousness in literature. Building on the reading, writing, and discussion skills introduced in ninth grade, English II provides sustained practice in essay writing as students cultivate their voice as writers. Students continue to work extensively with poetry, fiction, and modern essays, developing skills in critical thinking and close reading. Themes of identity, self-knowledge, and cultural hegemony reverberate within the texts and writing assignments. Major texts include George Orwell’s 1984, Linda Hogan’s Power: A Novel, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Seminars—11th and 12th grades

8个项目的清单。

Art of the Personal Essay

“Essay,” originating from the Old French “essai” (to try), evokes the heroic attempt to capture experience with words. Though modest compared to a grand novel or epic, the personal essay relies on a characteristic self-awareness, brevity, and fragmentary brilliance that makes it a deeply human form. As E.B. White reflects at the close of “Ring of Time,” “a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.” This course explores how a range of masterful twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers succeed at these delicate literary feats, with reading units organized around artistry, family, identity, the body, nature, and vision. Authors include Joan Didion, George Orwell, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Zadie Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chang-rae Lee, and Melissa Febos. To foster artistic renewal, students use reflective journaling techniques inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy. Ultimately, students learn to read as writers—analyzing style, structure, and transitions—as they craft and workshop three personal essays of their own.
Art of the Short Story

The best short stories pack a massive punch in tiny spaces—distilling entire worlds, minds, and cultures into a few ferocious pages. This course explores the short story as a form of precision and provocation, inviting students to mine the micro-format for its most brilliant gems. Working chronologically and traversing the globe, students encounter some of the world’s most powerful stories, learning to identify the specific strategies writers use to conjure profound, culture-changing ideas in record time. Students engage in analytical writing and creative exercises as they develop their personal styles, building a portfolio that celebrates intentional, adept, and compact writing. Alongside classic authors like Poe and Chekhov, students examine modern and contemporary masters including Octavia Butler, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ursula Le Guin, Carmen Maria Machado, and George Saunders. The course also draws on other mediums which model vivid, speedy storytelling, including podcasts, narrative-rich music, and excerpts from films.
The Body Electric

Human lives are increasingly melded with machines. From the printing press, radio, and film to the internet, robotics, and artificial intelligence, technological inventions consistently redefine modernity and what it means to be human. Taking its title from Walt Whitman’s celebratory poem, this course explores how writers “sing the body electric,” tracing the relationship between modern selfhood and mechanical innovation. Students read novels that probe the ethics of artificial intelligence and question the boundaries of humanity, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. These readings are grounded in a historical look at the first literary cyborgs in nineteenth-century industrial texts, alongside screenings of films that reflect on mechanical production, such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. This seminar debates whether literature stands as the pinnacle of human creativity, or if it is itself a beautiful machine—an ingenious device designed to generate meaning.
Contemporary Stories From India and Sri Lanka

What drives the human impulse to yearn? Does defining that ineffable feeling bring an individual closer to their goal or distance them from it? This course explores the art and arc of the quest—personal, familial, and communal—through contemporary literature from South Asia. The literary journey begins with Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, tracking a trio upriver in search of an elusive creature in the Sundarbans. The seminar then turns to Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, following a protagonist on a metaphysical mission to find meaning and justice in the aftermath of his own murder. The exploration concludes with the short stories in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, which trace the distinct quests of Muslim women in Southern India striving to keep their inner flames glowing. Through close reading and discussion, students investigate how journeys can diverge, shatter, or begin anew. Assignments include analytical responses to the texts, a personal journal, and a creative rendering of a family quest.
Counternarratives: The Weight of History

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” As Audre Lorde’s 1984 maxim suggests, rewriting history requires unconventional literary strategies. This seminar examines how marginalized authors and artists develop alternative modes of storytelling to challenge dominant cultural myths and hegemonic norms. These authors consider the lasting effects of marginalized groups and the weight of historical and family traumas on how individuals construct their identities in the present. Through close readings, analytical writing, and vibrant class discussions, students uncover powerful throughlines of resistance that transcend specific borders and backgrounds. Texts include David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and John Sayles’s film Lone Star, alongside works by contemporary visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Barbara Kruger.
Creative Resistance and Gallows Humor

This course grapples with the idea that during times of crisis humor is a radical tool for survival rather than a mere distraction. Students explore how playwrights and authors turn to performance in the face of war, imprisonment, and exile while using creative expression as a strategy for resistance, witness, and community building. The course examines the role of beauty during times of great suffering, probes how gallows humor navigates complicity, uncovers the surprising ways that adaptation offers imaginative redemption. Through close readings, analytical essays, and lively discussions, the class considers texts that stage art as a form of defiance, spanning from antiquity to the modern day. Works include Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, Euripides’ Medea, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, Jai Chakrabarti’s A Play for the End of the World, Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good, and the film Sing Sing. Beyond critical analysis, students bring these theories to life through creative performances and adaptations of their own.
The Hero, the Individual, and the Crowd

How does one distinguish oneself from others, and what happens when those boundaries dissolve? Through the exploration of three principal figures—the hero, the individual, and the crowd—this course traces how literature maps the forces that construct group and individual identity. Investigations span from the distant past to the far future, examining how narrative structure, cultural context, and genre shape human self-understanding. Students engage with stories that raise characters up, tie communities together, pull societies apart, or swallow the self whole. Coursework includes literary analysis, personal reflections, and creative compositions. Texts include Beowulf, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.
Jane Austen

Why does cultural obsession with Jane Austen endure? From “action figures” and Bollywood adaptations to memes, merchandise, and musicals, Austen’s popularity remains remarkably high. This course explores Austen’s continued relevance alongside her specific historical and political contexts, focusing on three of her novels: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Northanger Abbey, as well as modern adaptations like the film Clueless. Students examine how authors from diverse cultures and backgrounds use her writing as a model for social commentary, engaging with contemporary works written in the tradition of Austenian satire, such as Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool and short stories by Zadie Smith. The seminar investigates why writer Ta-Nehisi Coates deems her “Jane Awesome” and poet W.H. Auden praises her “shocking” exposure of the “economic basis of society,” ultimately questioning what enduring connections readers feel to her stories, characters, and social insights. The semester culminates in a creative project in which students design their own Austenian adaptations.

I loved everything we read, but Native Speaker was by far my favorite book. Our teacher expertly facilitated discussions in class and I enjoyed hearing how everyone connected or interpreted the work differently.”

— Student

Seminars—11th and 12th grades

8个项目的清单。

Is Paradise Lost?

John Milton’s Paradise Lost, written by a blind revolutionary and published in 1667, has influenced creators from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, and continues to inform contemporary stories about rebellion, gender, and divinity. After being on the losing side of the English Civil War, Milton set out to write the first epic poem in English to “justify the ways of God to men”—a fittingly audacious task for a man who commanded nine languages and had publicly defended both divorce and regicide. Spinning a twelve-book epic from a few spare lines in Genesis, Milton introduces a complex, uncomfortably appealing Satan alongside a romantic, doomed Adam and Eve. The course grapples with the core tensions of the text: If the fallen world is entirely predetermined, does that implicate God in humanity’s failure? And why is the character of Satan so inherently attractive? Paradise Lost helps students expand their capacity to navigate complex syntax, interrogate theological dilemmas, and find beauty in difficult, foundational literature.
Kindred Spirits: Friendship in Literature

Of all the ways individuals relate to one another, few bonds are as rich in significance and ambiguity as friendship. Friends can offer care, solidarity, and paths toward resisting marginalization; they can build community, upend hierarchies, and produce change. According to Aristotle, friendship “holds a mirror up to us,” giving a truer picture of the self. Yet friends can also be rivals, competitors, and sources of profound envy. This course explores literary depictions of the complex and rewarding nature of these bonds across time and genre. Readings include Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Hisham Matar’s My Friends, and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, alongside poetry by W.H. Auden, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Robert Burns, and John Ashbery. Through close analysis and discussion, students investigate not only how and why relationships form, but also how those connections ultimately reflect and define individual identity.
伦敦电话

London has long been imagined as the center of crime, theatricality, modernity, and, most significantly, empire. This course studies London as a constructed imperial center, examining Victorian and Edwardian literary works set in its streets alongside postcolonial novels that follow imperial lines to South Asia and West Africa. The literary journey begins in 1843 alongside Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, transitions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s gritty Victorian alleys with Sherlock Holmes, and moves into the twentieth century with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own, which interrogate patriarchy and empire. From there, the seminar fast-forwards to Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, a postcolonial novel linking London and Calcutta through World War II and Partition, and concludes with Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which moves between London and West Africa to explore identity in an age of neo-colonial appropriation. Through close reading and analytical writing, students track how the literary landscape of “The Big Smoke” shifts across centuries of global history.
Moby-Dick

There is nothing quite like Moby-Dick. Herman Melville’s epic tale distills America’s foundational contradictions in a sprawling adventure story that is equal parts buddy novel, philosophical treatise, political critique, and whale encyclopedia. The contemporary writer Ocean Vuong calls the novel “the ultimate permission-giver” for its audacious, genre-bending approach to storytelling. This seminar treats the book as an ahead-of-its-time work that anticipates the formal experiments of twentieth-century modernism. Through the communal experience of reading a long, challenging novel, students learn to sit with structural difficulty, revisit passages with fresh eyes, and navigate a text that resists easy interpretation. Along the way, the class practices close and recursive reading, careful annotation, and analytical writing, paying close attention to how meaning unfolds at the level of language itself. The course concludes with a student-designed final project and a whale-watching field trip.
Rage, Romance, Resilience: A Literary History of the AIDS Epidemic

How do art and literature serve as instruments of survival and activism? This course investigates the profound outpouring of fiction, poetry, theater, film, and visual art that arose in response to the AIDS crisis from the 1980s to the present. In the face of early systemic government neglect, impacted communities—including gay men, people of color, and intravenous drug users—organized extraordinary grassroots responses to save themselves. This seminar concentrates on how queer writers, artists, and activists channeled grief, passion, and anger into creative resistance and public memorialization. Throughout the course, students explore the deep relationship between mourning and political action. Works studied include Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the documentary How to Survive a Plague, essays by Douglas Crimp and Susan Sontag, and visual art by Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Star Trails and Cautionary Tales

How do human identity and autonomy shift in an increasingly “sci-fi” world? This seminar explores the boundaries of personhood, memory, and authorship through the lens of speculative fiction. The course centers on Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, using it to interrogate literary critic Roland Barthes’ famous theory that a text belongs entirely to the reader’s interpretation rather than the author’s intent. Students investigate the psychological space where humans meet technology, as well as the larger philosophical implications of storytelling. Readings and viewings draw from master speculative fiction writers like Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Philip K. Dick, and Ted Chiang, alongside visual and audio narratives from films and shows such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Minority Report, and The Expanse. Students produce short response papers and journals, culminating in a creative project where each student pens an original science fiction short story to be compiled into a collaborative class anthology.
The Thing with Feathers

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote. This seminar looks and listens closely to the avian world in both literature and life. Students explore poetic responses to birds through Mary Oliver’s Owls and Other Fantasies while practicing careful observation of birds in their own environments with the help of Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles. Through disciplined exercises in “intentional curiosity,” students develop habits of close attention, sensory description, and reflective writing to cultivate a deeper relationship with the natural world. Two hybrid works of nonfiction—Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine— explore the intimate meeting points between the human and nonhuman, inviting sustained analysis of grief, obsession, and humility within the context of the climate crisis. Coursework moves from short writing that blends the personal and the poetic to analytical essays, culminating in an original birding journal that synthesizes observation, research, and literary analysis. The course includes a field trip to the California Raptor Center at UC Davis, a campus visit from West Coast Falconry, and optional weekend birding excursions.
Toni Morrison

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison produced some of the most deeply human, complex, and inspiring storytelling in American literature. This course considers her entire career, examining her influence as both a writer and an editor on the landscape of American publishing. Readings cover her seminal non-fiction work, Playing in the Dark, alongside three foundational novels. The seminar tracks Morrison’s incisive critique of what she termed “the master narrative” and the development of her philosophy of “rememory,” exploring how her narratives navigate racialized and gendered trauma to reach a place of joy and transcendence. The chronological journey begins with her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, continues through the epic Song of Solomon, and culminates with her masterpiece, Beloved. Through a deep dive into this extraordinary oeuvre, students learn how Morrison’s work teaches readers an entirely new way of interpreting literature itself.