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Explore our Curriculum

US English

The NCS English curriculum emphasizes careful, extensive reading as the keystone of sound verbal skills. We encourage students both in and out of class to read and write for pleasure. The English Department sponsors numerous creative writing opportunities and provides students in grades 9 and 10 with selected texts for summer reading to enhance their course work the following September.  We encourage 11th and 12th graders to choose widely from the electives offered, keeping in mind that exposure to a variety of traditions, genres, topics, and points of view enriches each student’s unique way of seeing the world and expressing herself or himself.

Grades 11 and 12
All English courses at this level are one-semester NCS/STA coordinate electives. During the last two years at NCS, students are required to take four consecutive semesters of English. Foundations in American Literature must be taken during the junior year. All courses are designed to refine skills in a variety of modes. Materials are chosen to broaden the student’s acquaintance with major works of literature.

  • Af-Am Writers 1970+

    STA

    With the end of Jim Crow laws and the legal victories of the civil rights movement, many African American writers began to remap the literature. They turned both inward and outward, reshaping the landscapes of community, history, myth, and identity. In this course, we will explore how and why African American writers from the late 20th century to the present have re-imagined the literature. In achieving these goals, each text under consideration will be placed in its historical and cultural contexts. The class will be primarily discussion-based, with students developing their analytical skills through both formal and informal writing assignments. Authors may include Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, August Wilson, Audre Lorde, Ernest J. Gaines, Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, and Justine Phillip Reed, among others.

  • American Modernism

    STA

    “Make it new”, coined by the poet Ezra Pound, still stands today as the slogan of American Modernism, an experimental literary movement that occurred in the early 1900s. But what did Modernism seek to “make it new” from? The answer to this question can be found in another: Why is the Harlem Renaissance often taught separately from Modernism, even though it occurred within the movement? This course will show how the trends we consider to be Modernist—a rejection of realism, an embrace of abstraction, an attention to psychology and fragmented perspectives, and a focus on the urban/rural divide— actually emerged in writings that must be traced back to the various historical, racial, and gendered contexts of the 19th century. We begin the course with the first half of Jean Toomer’s Cane, a text that poses crucial questions about the pressures of history and identity. We then loop back to the Civil War and Post-Reconstruction era, analyzing proto-modernist works by Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and ending back in high Modernism with the second half of Toomer’s Cane and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  • Ancient Literature

    STA

    Our readings in this course are from the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, spanning a period of some 2,500 years. We start with outstanding literary works of ancient Mesopotamia (Exaltation of Inanna, Gilgamesh), Egypt (Sinuhe), and Canaan/Israel (Hebrew Bible, Baal Cycle), plus Wisdom Literature from all three regions. We then move to the Greco-Roman world, beginning with its grand narrative, the story of Troy, and spending fully a third of the course on selections from major Troy-related epic verse (e.g., Iliad, Aeneid) and drama (e.g., Agamemnon). After a brief look at Sappho’s pioneering lyric poetry, we devote several sessions to Plato’s dialogues featuring his mentor, the ever-enigmatic Socrates. The course concludes with selections from history writing from the Roman Tacitus.

  • Asian-American Literature

    In this course, students will examine the dynamic relationship between Asian-American literature and the histories of the various Asian ethnicities in the United States. Literature by authors of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Indian descent will provide fodder for unraveling both similarities and differences of experience among the various ethnicities. Furthermore, students in this course will examine the following sub-topics: the immigration experience, the formation of cultural and political identities, literary framing of social and systemic racism, stereotypes, generational challenges, and gender issues. The shifting function of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in U.S. culture and economy will be a focal point as we explore how Asian-American literary concerns and styles have evolved with that shifting function. 

  • Banned Books in U.S.

    How powerful can a book be? Why do governments ban or censor books? What is lost when governments restrict access to certain books and ideas? Is restricting access to books always bad? By reading and examining literature banned not by popes and ayatollahs, nor by communist or fascist regimes, but by governments in the United States, students grapple with these questions and others about censorship. Readings may include such works as George Orwell’s 1984, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

  • Black Lives in Literature

    Black Lives in Literature takes as its subject the excellent writing by African-American authors from the South since 2005. Some of the literature engages explicitly with the destruction along the Gulf Coast caused by Hurricane Katrina that made apparent the enduring inequities that result from the racialized history of the United States. Much of the literature engages explicitly with injustices in the criminal justice system. However, all of the literature lives in the historical context that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Students will read fiction, poetry, and memoir from a diverse group of black American authors and examine the literature in the historical contexts of Hurricane Katrina and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well in the context of the historical roots of the civil rights struggle and previous voices in that struggle.

  • Coming of Age Novel

    This course considers how the experience of “coming of age” is depicted in 19th- and 20th-century British and postcolonial novels. We will discuss how questions of gender, sexuality, class, race, family, education, work, and religion contribute to characters’ personal development in novels by writers such as Charlotte Brontë, E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. These novels stage, respond to, critique, and/or reimagine contemporary cultural narratives of coming-of-age, testing the ability of the bildungsroman form to accommodate protagonists whose gender, sexuality, racial identity, and/or class may place them at the margins of social power structures. We will supplement our reading with literary criticism about the bildungsroman and other frameworks developed by literary scholars who study the evolving (and enduring) tropes of coming-of-age narratives. Students will reflect on how literary coming-of-age narratives both responded to and influenced important social and historical developments of the 19th and 20th centuries that created and protected adolescence as a stage of life. More generally, we will consider how history, culture, and politics affect the ways these authors represent the experience, the aims, and the very possibility of “growing up.”

  • Comparative Lit

    STA

    Based on the assumption that literature reflects the scientific discoveries, historical events, and philosophical views of the period in which it was written, this course examines several works authored between 1600 and 1900 not only as major artistic achievements, but also as expressions of the Renaissance, Neo-Classical, and Romantic worldviews. Authors studied will include Shakespeare, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Blake, and Dostoevsky, among others. The reading material will be supplemented by relevant music and art samples.

  • Cr Writ:Poetry/Prose

    In Creative Writing: Poetry and Prose students read and study published poetry and short fiction to inspire their own creative work. In the study of verse, students read Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town and Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook as they learn various poetic techniques, including using figurative language, rhyme, and meter, as well as how to write in different poetic forms. For fiction, students learn about characterization, point of view, dialogue, and dramatic conflict. Students workshop their creative pieces with their classmates and learn about the benefit of revision and being part of a community of writers. The course culminates with students completing creative writing portfolios, which consist of intensive self-evaluations and the creative work they have written, workshopped, and revised over the course of the semester.

  • Creative Writing

    STA

    This course offers students the opportunity to develop their writing talents under the guidance of the School’s writer-in-residence. The focus of the course—poetry or prose or both—is left to the direction and interest of the instructor.

  • Crossroads in Am Identity

    STA

    The course focuses on the following questions: How do American writers of differing ethnic origins negotiate cultural difference? In short, is writing a quest for ethnic voice or a quest for unity? How do writers intersect? The term “crossroads” evokes important questions for contemporary writers: In what way do these writers contest the American identity, and to what extent can the term “double-consciousness” be extended to these writers? The selected texts have a broad interrelationship, and the course will explore the inter-dialogue between the “American” side of experience and the rich cultural roots from which each writer emerged. Some of the writers and works include Lost in the City, Edward P. Jones (African American); Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall (Caribbean American); Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (East Indian American); and selected stories and poetry of Chinese American, Korean American, and Chicano authors.

  • English 10

    Students continue to develop their oral and written expressive skills while reading significant works of British literature within their literary and historical contexts. For three quarters of the year, students study major literary figures and movements, beginning with early modern expression and ending with 19th‑century Victorianism and early Modernism. During the fourth quarter, students will focus their study on a book they choose from a list of predominately 19th‑ and 20th‑century authors from Britain and the former British colonies. Students will conduct research and write an original work of literary criticism.

  • English 9

    English 9 begins with the presumptions that telling stories about and from within one’s culture is one of the most profound expressions of humanity and that it is a grave human responsibility to know how to read and interpret stories from multiple perspectives. Consequently, English 9 introduces students to literature in several genres from around the world and teaches students the skills to read, understand, and write about literature. The year begins with a focus on close reading skills as students read and study poems, personal essays, and short stories from various cultures. Students will then read several novels, including graphic novels, and two plays as they apply their developing skill as readers and writers to longer and more complex works and the cultural contexts that produced them. Students will write repeatedly through the year in analytical and creative modes. With literature from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, English 9 seeks to teach students to engage with a variety of expressions of humanity from around the globe.

  • Expository Writing

    STA

    This class emphasizes the skills needed to write clear, correct, and reasonably graceful English. The course format will include prose models, consultations with the instructor, and lectures. Students will be expected to write weekly essays of no more than three pages. Course texts will include Writing Prose, The Practical Stylist, The Elements of Style, and The Harbrace College Handbook, 15th edition.

  • Foundations in American Literature

    By considering American authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this course examines literary movements that were fundamental in defining American literature: Romanticism and the American Renaissance; Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism; and the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. Drawing upon the rich and varied literature of these periods, instructors will supplement novels with short stories, drama, and poetry. Novels may include The Scarlet Letter, Work: A Story of Experience, The Awakening, Yekl, O Pioneers!, The Marrow of Tradition, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Passing, and When Washington Was in Vogue, among others. A required course for NCS students in their junior year.

  • From Page To Screen

    This course is organized around a fundamental question: how do directors and screenwriters adapt literature for the silver screen? In other words, how do they transpose content from a written medium into a visual one? In this class, we will read James Monaco’s How to Read a Film, as well as a variety of short texts and novels alongside their respective filmic adaptations. While honing our close reading skills, we will learn how to analyze or “read” the techniques and aesthetics of film, among them mise-en-scène or frame composition, montage or sequence, camera shot, lighting, and soundtrack. Students will watch films the weekends after we read and discuss assigned readings. Note: Some of the films are rated R. Readings and films may include: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaptation, Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (1992) and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), Jane Austen’s Emma and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Tim Burton’s 1999 adaptation, Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and the HBO 2020 adaptation and Zack Snyder’s 2009 adaptation, and Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report” and Steven Spielberg’s 2002 adaptation.

  • Global Perspectives

    This course examines postcolonial literature by women authors through the lens of intersectional feminism. Students explore 20th and 21st century literature by women authors from a variety of national and cultural backgrounds, including African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and South and North American. Books include Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, among others. Students discuss such themes as national identity, gender perception, class differences, political power, alienation, dislocation, and communication through their reading of novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, and essays by acclaimed women writers. The cultural milieu in which the literature is set, the traditions from which it arises, and the ways in which the questions of these texts remain relevant for contemporary discussions of social inequality will be an important focus of study.

  • Humor in Comic Literature

    By examining theorists of humor from Plato to Freud, and by looking at examples of comedy from Shakespeare to Jon Stewart, this class examines how humor works, especially in literature that predominantly uses humor as its mode of discourse. The class examines how comic literature works to make readers laugh and how comic literature works in society. Students read theories of humor as well as comic literature from several genres. Literature from a variety of cultural contexts may include: Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, short fiction, a satire by George Schuyler, and essays.

  • Interpreting Lit, Interpreting Film

    STA

    In this course, we will study both source literature and essays of film theory and aesthetics from these key genres: Crime, The Western, Historical Fiction, and War. Our critical theory work is informed by Rudolph Arnheim’s groundbreaking Film as Art; literature will include short stories and poetry illuminating each genre’s modes of representation, including the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, Phil Klay, and Layli Long Soldier, among others. The goal of the course will be to immerse ourselves in literary representation and theory and to use this knowledge to examine how visual media makes meaning. Films will be viewed in class. 

  • Literature & Spirituality

    STA

    This cross-cultural course will examine short stories, novels, and poetry situated in distinct religious contexts. Tayeb Salih, Gita Mehta, Leo Tolstoy, Salman Rushdie, Graham Greene, and Rumi, among other writers and poets, will provide windows into themes, symbolism, and techniques that evoke an awareness of the range and richness of human spirituality.

  • Medieval Literature

    STA

    This course will examine a variety of texts created in Europe and the Near East from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries—the period traditionally known as the Middle Ages. A principal aim of the course will be to understand our texts as embedded within an historical context, yet, as literature, also speaking beyond this context. Accordingly, our readings will be grouped into a series of “cultural clusters” as follows: Preface: Disintegration of the Roman Empire; Sixth-Century Italy; Saxon England; The Crescent of Celtic Nations; Arabia; The Frankish Kingdom; Norsemen/Vikings/Normans; Crusades: Christian/Muslim Conflict; The 12th-Century Renaissance; Chivalry/Courtly Love; Crises of the Late Middle Ages; Epilogue: Dawn of the Modern.

  • Modern Amer Drama

    STA

    American drama serves as a vital component of twentieth century American literature. This course addresses issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality within the literary landscape of our emerging nation, with particular attention to the elements shaping the genre.  Special focus is given to the societal, political, and cultural influence of works considered, including those by Rachel Crothers, Tennessee Williams, Susan Glaspell, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner. 

  • Nar Race & Freedom

    STA

    Drawing on the rich literary traditions from the Caribbean and the United States, this course illustrates how narratives of race and freedom are constructed and charted in the works of North American writers.  Students will examine various themes which frame these hemispheric literary productions, including slavery, colonial and post-colonial, identity, and culture, to name only a few.  In locating these thematic concerns, each text under consideration will be placed in its historical and cultural contexts.  Although there will be lectures, the class will be primarily discussion-based, with students developing their analytical skills through both informal and formal writing assignments.  Authors may include Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others.

  • Protest in Literature

    In this course, students will investigate the specific use of literature as a means of recording, understanding, and attempting to advance change in societies across the world. Units will be organized regionally around specific kinds of social protest and will use fiction, historical texts, and nonfiction prose to investigate how writers use different forms of literature to incite social change. Students will explore such themes as national identity, discrimination, trauma, rejection of social systems, political power, alienation, dislocation, and communication in novels, essays, and poetry as well as primary historical texts. Selected readings investigate different perspectives of social movements and ask students to recognize both universal and disparate elements of protest.

  • Science Fiction

    In this course, students will consider the genre of science fiction in order to cultivate a deeper understanding of the implications and applications of science, how art and science can influence each other, and, more broadly, which genres “count” as literature. Students will begin with Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein as a means of entering the debate about the proper role of science and ambition in human progress. They will trace the genre as it evolves to become more mainstream, culminating with Margaret Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake or Hillary St. John Mandel’s 2011 Station Eleven. Through novels, as well as science writing, short stories, and historical texts, students will explore the ways in which science can expand art, and vice versa.

  • Shakespeare as Resistance

    STA

    While traditional readings and interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays have not considered notions of resistance to race, religious difference, and “otherness,” recent scholarship reveals that Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights had a global awareness of these issues through trade, travel, exploration and immigration. This course will examine not only these textual issues, but also explore how we read and  perform the plays today. The class will make use of the Folger Shakespeare Library, available performances, both theatrical and filmed versions, and consider a representative selection of comedies, tragedies, and problem plays.

  • Southern American Lit

    STA

    Writer William Faulkner once said: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” The American south is a region rich in history, culture, and conflict, and in southern literature, the south itself is at once setting, character, and story. For reasons to be studied -- the human struggle at its foundation? The breeze-less humid days? -- the south has produced some of America’s finest and most compelling writers. This course will explore the theme of place in classic and modern southern literature, calling on the stories of such writers as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Jesmyn Ward.

  • The Short Story

    STA

    This course examines short stories of various cultures from the 19th century to the present. Students will study the works of European, American, Latin American, African, and Asian authors.  In close readings of selected short stories, students will analyze narrative techniques, themes, and symbolism.  In understanding each writer’s work, attention will be paid to the historical development of the short story as a genre, as well as the cultural contexts in which the assigned stories were written.  The class will be primarily discussion-based, with students developing their analytical skills through both formal and informal writing assignments. Authors may include Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Haruki Marukami, Ben Okri, and Amy Tan.

  • Writing Politics

    This course helps students learn to write rationally and persuasively about their political beliefs. The course also places those beliefs in the context of the philosophical debates at the heart of the political and economic systems in the United States. Students write a series of essays modeled after newspaper op‑ed pieces. In addition, students learn about philosophical arguments that support and challenge the existence of the state, democracy, and the market economy by reading about the work of Emmanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nozick, among others.

  • Writing Seminar

    This one‑semester course is designed to further the student’s understanding, practice, and enjoyment of the art of creative nonfiction. The class format includes the study and discussion of assigned readings by established essayists, writing‑in‑progress seminars, and workshopping sessions. Students use model essays to guide their study of writing. The course provides the opportunity to practice an effective writing process, cultivate a literary voice, and gain confidence writing in a clear, engaging style. We will study and practice several modes of writing throughout the semester: the personal essay, person and place sketches, the OpEd, the definition essay, and others. All writing will grow out of the writer’s personal experience and interests.

Department Faculty

  • Photo of Priscilla Siu
    Priscilla Siu
    English Teacher & English Department Chair
    202-537-2311
    Bio
  • Photo of Mark Bland
    Mark Bland
    English Teacher
  • Photo of Kerri Hunt
    Kerri Hunt
    Bio
  • Photo of Geoffrey Schramm
    Geoffrey Schramm
    English Teacher
    202-537-3128
    Bio
  • Photo of Tony Speranza
    Tony Speranza
    English Teacher
    202-537-2352
    Bio
  • Photo of Pete Thomas
    Pete Thomas
    English Teacher Long Term Substitute
3612 Woodley Road NW Washington, DC 20016 202.537.6300