Freshmen and sophmores discussing the latest book
The English program at Watershed is built upon the idea that good writing and good reading go hand-in-hand.
We aim to provide our students with a solid grounding in the fundamentals of written English — structure, usage, grammar, organization, and clarity of expression — as well as a far-reaching familiarity with many of the greatest works of world literature. Our goal is to make every student a lifelong reader as well as a confident and effective writer, in the belief that both of these will pay lasting dividends in any walk of life.
To this end, our English classes are both rigorous and informal: intellectually serious but also seriously fun. We want students to experience both reading and writing as pleasurable experiences and to enjoy developing their skills in both areas.
Freshman year
We begin with Ninth-Grade English, a brisk and rigorous grounding in the basics of written expression with an emphasis on composition. Our primary references are The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White and On Writing Well by William Zinsser. This course combines in-class and at-home writing assignments with regular reading of great works in all genres — short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, and short novels — in order to provide students with a broad exposure to literary excellence.
Sophomore and junior years
- Our emphasis shifts more strongly to literature during grades 10 and 11. Students take one semester each of the following courses on a rotating basis:
- English Literature — during the 2009-10 school year, readings included Rudyard Kipling, Evelyn Waugh, Charlotte Brontë, Nick Hornby, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, William Shakespeare, Monty Python, Charles Dickens, and the circle of "Gothic" writers around Lord Byron.
- American Literature — in 2009-10, we read Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, J.D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beat poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Cheever, John Updike, and numerous contemporary writers and poets published in The New Yorker and other periodicals.
- World Literature — In this course we survey the vast range of literature outside the British and American traditions. In 2009-10 we read Goethe, Bernhard Schlink, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel de Cervantes, classic Japanese Noh drama, short stories by Russian, Japanese and Latin American writers, and poetry from around the world.
- Classical Literature — We trace the foundations of world literature from the earliest extant literary works like the Epic of Gilgamesh through the Greek classics, Norse and other legends and mythologies, and the Matter of Britain (Arthur, the Grail, and related subjects), culminating in medieval masterworks like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Dante's Divine Comedy.
Students continue to have regular writing assignments, usually keyed to the reading material.
A relaxed class atmosphere
Senior year
During the first semester, students undertake a course in Literary Masterworks, in which we select one or more ambitious texts — James Joyce's Ulysses, for example — to study in depth. This culminates in students writing a major critical paper in standard academic format and revising it as needed under the instructor's guidance.
The second semester is devoted to Author Studies, in which each student selects a single author, dramatist or poet and examines that person's body of written work in its full cultural and historical context. A student may choose, for example, to read three novels by Virginia Woolf and to research the Bloomsbury Circle, the Modernist movement in Britain, and the factors that shaped the intellectual climate in the inter-war years. Each student presents a lecture to the rest of the class on his or her chosen subject. We schedule these presentations for relatively early in the semester (still at the work-in-progress stage), both to provide helpful feedback to the student-researcher and to avoid conflict with demanding end-of-semester projects due in other classes.