English

English Mission Statement

The mission of the Priory English Department is to cultivate engaged learners, critical thinkers, and clear communicators. Our focus on reading and writing about a variety of literary genres aims to develop students’ intellectual curiosity, empathy for diverse experiences, and sense of personal voice. By studying a range of texts-- from fiction to visual media-- across the boundaries of time, place, and culture, students explore how literature both reflects and shapes the world. Students uncover the relevance and intrinsic value of texts as they consider the historical and social contexts in which they are created. Through their English coursework-- from conventional literary analysis to innovative project-based learning-- students participate in a conversation of making meaning. We encourage them to see multiple perspectives, hear multiple voices, and articulate understandings with flexible and compassionate mindsets. Ultimately, our program emphasizes the importance of reading, thinking, writing, and speaking as powerful pathways to self-discovery and connection with others, as well as potential instruments for civic engagement and social justice.

English Curriculum Trajectory

Our program integrates a grade 6-12 humanities-based education. In middle school, students begin to develop the tools to become critical readers, writers, and thinkers. As they transition to high school, they sharpen these literacy skills through texts, essay assignments, and open-ended projects of increasing complexity and rigor. The 9th and 10th grade Foundations English courses introduce a range of literary genres and styles, and scaffold students’ mastery of formal composition by emphasizing close reading, literary analysis, the writing process, and grammatical conventions. This survey of the literary spectrum-- from World literature to Western canonical and contemporary texts-- prepares students to make informed course selections in the 11th and 12th grade, during which they are offered electives of diverse topics. Our upper division electives allow students to delve deeper into areas of their interests, and further reinforce the skills of research, critical analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of texts. These courses present a shift in rigor that invite students to investigate the intersectionality of economics, politics, sociology, and the arts; to grow a sense of equity and cultural sensitivity; and to practice intentional engagement in a learning community.

English Foundations I

Course Length: Year
Open to Grades: 9
Prerequisite: None

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 20 minutes
Graduation Requirement: Yes

This course explores genres of storytelling--a novel, a film, short stories, poetry, and a graphic novel from around the world. Given the broad geographic scope of the works, the essential knowledge centers on the study of culture, identity, and perspective. Students read and annotate, discuss interpretations, write analytical pieces, develop visual understanding tools, and craft creative prose that mimics the originals. The course culminates in a visual memoir that initiates students' reflections that occur in the English curriculum and lead to the personal essay before college applications.
English Foundations II

Course Length: Year
Open to Grades: 10
Prerequisite: Foundations I

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 25 minutes
Graduation Requirement: Yes. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

Foundations II focuses on the relationship technology and science have with literature about the human experience. The course examines literature's ability to criticize society's flaws, to challenge the status quo, to promote civil disobedience, and to speak personal truths. The course uses novels, poetry, plays, and innovative works with characters who grapple with navigating societies and intersecting identities. Students write essays, character analyses, develop visual schemas of story facts and meaning, discusss close reading passages, and ultimately craft a reflection first-personal reflection on their interactions with technology and science that helps set a foundation for the personal essay at the end of junior year.
Advanced Topics: Post-Colonial Literature

Course Length: Semester

Open to Grades: 11, 12

Prerequisites: None

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 30 minutes

Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level.

In this course, students will study literature written in English from formerly colonized nations in their historical and cultural contexts. They will examine central concepts, questions, and debates in postcolonial studies. The course concepts include postcolonialism’s commitment to interrogating dominant history, indigenous cultures, forms of identity and attachment, and versions of modernity centered on the nation. It will also explore experiences of diaspora and migration and consider the relevance of the term "postcolonial" in the twenty-first century"? Essential Questions include: What histories produce postcolonial literature as well as the field of postcolonial studies itself? What literary forms and language choices do postcolonial writers use, and why? How are literature and politics related to one another? What are some problems with the very term “postcolonial”?

Taken together, AT Nature Writers (a semester course) and AT Post-Colonial Literature (a semester course) create a year-long Advanced Topics course. Students must take the course for the entire year to receive the .5 grade bump. Students will still have the option to sit for the AP English Literature Exam on-site at Priory.
Advanced Topics: Writers and the Wilds

Course Length: Semester

Open to Grades: 11, 12

Prerequisites: None

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 30 minutes

Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level.

In this course, students will discover the genre of nature writers in the United States over time. They investigate the reasons authors choose the genre and the outdoors as a sense of place to these writers: the wilderness, the mountains, lakes, National Parks, and more. The emphasis will be on creation of the genre and reading nature through writing. Students will discern the elements that contribute to “good” or effective nature writing, and they will emulate their understanding while practicing the craft.

Taken together, AT Nature Writers (a semester course) and AT Post-Colonial Literature (a semester course) create a year-long Advanced Topics course. Students must take the course for the entire year to receive the .5 grade bump. Students will still have the option to sit for the AP English Literature Exam on-site at Priory.
Banned Books

Course Length: Semester

Open to Grades: 11, 12

Prerequisites: None

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 30 minutes

Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

What do To Kill a Mockingbird, The Things They Carried, and 1984, have in common besides being books you read at the Priory? At some point, they’ve all been banned from schools or libraries. Why did people fear these books? Can books be “weaponized”? The First Amendment guarantees American citizens the right to free speech, but are there boundaries to this freedom? This literature course explores censorship and whether it’s ever justified. We’ll look at who has challenged books, what their reasons were, and when those books were successfully banned. How are these decisions related to social conventions, values, and fears? We’ll take a deep dive into banned novels as well as explore poetry and young adult literature. By semester’s end, you’ll be prepared to take a stand for the books you love.
Discourse of Dining: Food and Literature

Course Length: Semester
Open to Grades: 11, 12
Prerequisite: Foundations I and II

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 30 minutes
Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

Food, like books, can sustain and celebrate life. But also like books, food can serve as an expression of yearning and loss. In what ways is food intake about more than nutrients? And how can food choices be an act of social justice? Exploring food’s symbolic bonds between people and their environments, the course focuses on consumption and its rituals that can be simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. The materials will detail relationships between traditional and modern agricultural practices, tracing the histories of people, land, food, and (dis)connection. Coursework will consider the meeting of food and word (in fiction, poetry, recipes, memoirs, and research) and the way it informs large social categories such as culture, gender, ecology, and family. With periodic Franklin Garden meetings, students actively apply what they read to the kitchen and the soil through cooking and gardening activities that relate to course readings.
Gender and Literature

Course Length: Semester
Open to Grades: 11, 12
Prerequisite: Foundations I and II

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 20 minutes
Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester

Throughout United States history, a wide diversity of authors have created literature, though their efforts and the preservation of their works hasn’t always been acknowledged. In recent years, researchers have made concerted efforts to locate, publish and analyze literature by female authors, allowing readers a chance to view the materials as a gender cohort. This course will study major examples of literature by female authors during United States history supplemented by well-known non-fiction essays about gender and great art. Students will also read counterparts written by men at the same time period to discern contrasts in content or style. Students frequently reflect on previous school texts that contribute to a description of "women's lit" and "a guy thing." The purpose of examining these works–short stories, poetry, and a novel–is to study them as a classification, discerning--if-possible--stylistic traits and subject matter associated with the gender designation.
Gothic Literature

Course Length: Semester
Open to Grades: 11, 12
Prerequisite: Foundations I and II

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 45 minutes - 1 hour
Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

What monsters lurk in the darkness of our collective consciousness? What are our greatest societal fears and anxieties, and where do they come from? In Gothic Literature, students will explore the gothic tradition and its many legacies, especially in our culture today. Students will critically examine the multiplicity of gothic texts as they respond to the crossroads of culture, economics, politics, and technology. Students will articulate in oral and written mediums how gothic literature continues to evolve as a form that expresses fear of the new, unknown, and misunderstood. The rigor of the course derives from an in-depth study of a wide range of texts, including fiction, poetry, essays, films, and paintings. Students will be expected to engage with diverse and challenging texts in a variety of contexts for informal and formal writing. This is the perfect course for lovers of monsters, ghosts, existential dread, psychoanalysis, and all things spooky!
Literature through the Camera Lens

Course Length: Semester

Open to Grades: 11, 12

Prerequisite: Foundations I and II

Estimated hours of homework per class period: 45 minutes - 1 hour

Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

In Literature Through the Camera Lens, we approach films as works of art that can be "read" like texts. In our reading of various films, we explore how directors, like authors, use a set of devices to convey meaning. For example, how might a director use angles and camera motion to illustrate a protagonist's state of mind? How do color scheme and motif work to reinforce a larger theme? Like texts, films can be read through a set of critical lenses to fully investigate their commentary on the world. With an aim to gain a deeper understanding of both individuals and societies, we employ psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, and postcolonial lenses to uncover what films can say about our minds, our relationships, and our place in the world.
Pop Fiction

Course Length: Semester

Open to Grades: 11, 12

Prerequisites: None.
Estimated hours of homework per class period: 30 minutes
Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

The slasher. The gunslinger. The femme fatale. The android. The superhero. The last girl. The gumshoe. The alien. The monster. The ghost. Whether in novels, graphic novels, film, short stories, or other genres, these figures feature prominently in the literature adolescents and adults consume. Critical responses to “best-selling” books often consider it as inferior to “literary” genres, though their stories resonate with millions of readers. Students will explore popular fiction spaces that respond to contemporary cultural exploration, commentary, and critique. The students will have choices and options for discovering popular fiction alternative visions of the world, because their narratives are deeply rooted in the time period of their creation.
Witness, Voice, and Advocacy

Course Length: Semester
Open to Grades: 11, 12
Prerequisite: Foundations I and II
Graduation Requirement: Satisfies 1 of 4 required English semester electives at the Junior/Senior level. **** Students may elect to take this course for Honors credit at the outset of the semester.

Truly successful misdeeds leave no witnesses – they disappear in the sands of time along with the lost voices of their victims. In opposition to this, witness literature bears testimony and gives voice to silence. It is an act of both remembrance and resistance, written for one explicit purpose: that we not forget. It is through this literature that we come to know those who would otherwise be lost to history. This course will center on powerful voices, their challenges, resistance, and healing. From Ghana to the Holocaust to Rwanda, readings in this course will explore colonialism, genocide, and the slave trade in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, examining the different ways literature can be used to communicate “truth” to its readers. We'll conclude the semester by looking at ways we can turn our new knowledge into action and advocacy for victims of oppression.

Our Faculty

Michael Botsch

Upper School English Teacher

University of Notre Dame - M.Ed.
Saint Anselm College - BA

mbotsch@prioryca.org
Kena Chavva

Upper School English Teacher

Barnard College of Columbia University - BA
University of Pennsylvania - M.S.Ed

kchavva@prioryca.org
Andrew Daniel

Middle School Humanities Department Head

(650) 851-6190

San Francisco State University - BA
San Francisco State University - MA

adaniel@prioryca.org
Kathy Gonzalez

Upper School English Teacher

(650) 851-6171

San Jose State University - BA
San Jose State University - MA Education

kgonzalez@prioryca.org
Jane Healey

English Department Chair

(650) 851-6104

University of Notre Dame - BA
Baylor University, - MA
University of Minnesota - Ph.D.

jhealey@prioryca.org
Jessica Senn

Middle School Humanities Teacher

(650) 851-6159

Stanford University - BA
San Jose State University - MFA

jsenn@prioryca.org
Jennifer Wallace

Upper School English Teacher

Santa Clara University.

jwallace@prioryca.org