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Welcome to Mr. Jackson's American Literature
Course Description: Semester I
The design of the American Literature class is to continue preparing the student for post-secondary education. The class covers Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Post-Modernism. The course focuses on critical skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, as well as cooperative and individual project management. The students will be faced with authors both familiar and unfamiliar in order to broaden their knowledge of America’s literary history. The firsy quarter's reading list includes Civil Disobedience and Other Essays-Thoreau, Self-Reliance and Other Essays-Emerson, Common Sense-Paine, Favorite Poems-Longfellow, and Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories-Hawthorne, time permitting. The second quarter's reading is focused on the novel and includes The Grapes of Wrath-Steinbeck. Students track the theme of the right to revolutionary thought and action in our country as part of Jefferson's insistence on social responsibility and obligation. Students begin this with a group who broke with the land to form a new world and finish with a people forced from their land in this new world.
Specific Skills: Students will be working on the areas of collegiate-level reading strategies, extending the paragraph, and personal development in conventions. Students will also work with writing extended essays and the use of bundled supports through literary analysis.
Course Description: Semester II
Content: The design of the American Literature class is to continue preparing the student for post-secondary education. Semester II of this class covers African-American literature (with a focus on the Harlem Renaissance). Students will evaluate essays, poems, and short stories from the first fifty years of the 20th century. In addition, Lorraine Hansberry’s explosive drama A Raisin in the Sun will finish out the quarter. The course focuses on critical skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, as well as cooperative and individual project management. The students will be faced with authors both familiar and unfamiliar in order to broaden their knowledge of America’s literary history. Students will be asked to reflect upon various themes; specifically, how Americans of various racial and ethnic backgrounds create identity, how they percieve their own identity, and what role dreams and aspirations have in that definition.
Specific Skills: Students will be working on the areas of Sentence Fluency and Organization in their writing, particularly designed to be carried into their regular practice in timed writing prompts in preparation for the SAT, ACT, and/or other college placement tests.