Course Overview
Contemporary Writers is the study of literature written since the end of World War II. 

Course Essential Questions:

• How can contemporary texts help me understand the human experience?
• How do contemporary texts help me understand the world and shape my place in it?
• How are issues raised by contemporary texts connected with each other and with the world around me?

High Priority Benchmarks: These are the state standards that are the focus of what students will learn in the course.

• 11.1.4.2 - Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and synthesize their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex synthesis.
• 11.2.1.2 - Write with varied use of elements of grammar and mechanics to align voice and style with the publishing plan.
• 11.2.5.2 - Write to respond to literary text, analyzing multiple literary with texts with common genre, author, or theme.
• 11.2.7.2 - Plan and conduct independent research from a wide variety of sources including academic journals and peer-reviewed sources, demonstrating understanding of subject of investigation, and share findings in writing.
• 11.3.1.1 - Exchange ideas through storytelling, discussion, and collaboration, both as facilitator and participant, expressing ideas, intentionally considering the perspectives of Dakota and Anishinaabe people as well as other perspectives. 

Units: 
The course units will include Individual and Community, Themes in Contemporary Literature, and Survey of Authors.

Activities: 
Students should expect to read, write, and discuss every day.  In addition, students will participate in book clubs, Socratic seminars, research to support a study of contemporary authors, and presentations.

Project: 
Survey of Contemporary Authors - Students will explore a contemporary author of choice and present information about that author and their works.

Course Overview:
Graphic Novels will focus mainly on stories that are told through a combination of text and visuals - though other styles texts will be included, as well. 

Course Essential Questions:

• How do I read and analyze graphic novels as a unique form of literature?
• How do words and pictures work together to communicate ideas?
• Why is the graphic novel an effective way to tell certain stories?
• How do graphic novels provide a unique window into the human experience?

High Priority Benchmarks: These are the state standards that are the focus of what students will learn in the course.

• 11.1.4.2 - Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and synthesize their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to provide a complex synthesis.
• 11.2.1.2 - Write with varied use of elements of grammar and mechanics to align voice and style with the publishing plan.
• 11.2.5.2 - Write to respond to literary text, analyzing multiple literary texts with common genre, author, or theme.
• 11.2.7.2 - Plan and conduct independent research from a wide variety of sources including academic journals and peer-reviewed sources, demonstrating understanding of the subject of investigation, and share findings in writing.
• 11.3.3.2 - Create and present a piece of digital work or digital communication, which may include ethical remixing or transformation of work, for a specific, current, relevant purpose; publish work, considering the audience, demonstrating understanding of digital footprint.

Units: 
The course units will include Pivotal Moments, Heroism, and Character.
 
Activities: 
Students should expect to read, write, and discuss every day.  In addition, students will participate in book clubs, Socratic seminars, research related to book club texts, and presentations.
 
Project: 
Memorable Moments Digital Project - Students will craft a digital memoir throughout the course utilizing a comic-book style.  Each unit will conclude with one thematic installment.  At the end of the course, students will share their completed memoirs.

Course Overview:
Humanities is the study of how people process and document the human experience. Humanities encompasses the full range of human thought and creativity.

Course Essential Questions:

• How do we analyze and respond to creative expression?
• How does human experience impact human expression
• How does creative expression throughout history impact us today?

High Priority Benchmarks: These are the state standards that are the focus of what students will learn in the course.

• 11.1.6.1 - Evaluate how the author's, including Dakota and Anishinaabe authors, purpose, stated identities, biases, and perspective shape the content and style of a text.
• 11.2.1.2 - Write with varied use of elements of grammar and mechanics to align voice and style with the publishing plan.
• 11.2.2.2 - Write to reflect how personal perspective, identity, and voice have developed and changed over time, in relation to the global community.
• 11.2.7.2 - Plan and conduct independent research from a wide variety of sources including academic journals and peer-reviewed sources, demonstrating understanding of subject of investigation, and share findings in writing.
• 11.3.1.1 - Exchange ideas through storytelling, discussion, and collaboration, both as facilitator and participant, expressing ideas, intentionally considering the perspectives of Dakota and Anishinaabe people as well as other perspectives. 

Units: 
The course units will include Forms of Human Expression, Inquiry and Collaboration, and Individual Application.
 
Activities: 
Students should expect to read, write, and discuss every day.  In addition, students will participate in book clubs, Socratic seminars, group research projects, and presentations.
 
Project: 
Personal Museum Capstone Project - All students will gather and reflect on artifacts of personal significance throughout the course as we explore various forms of human expression.  Students will share their collections with classmates to demonstrate their mastery of learning.

Course Overview:
Real World English is a course designed to provide experience with the type of reading and writing most commonly found in the workplace and daily life.

Course Essential Questions:

• How can I read complex technical and informational texts effectively?
• How do I communicate effectively in print and through media?
• How can I enhance my discussion and collaboration skills?

High Priority Benchmarks: These are the state standards that are the focus of what students will learn in the course.

• 11.1.7.1 - Examine validity of reasoning, relevance and sufficiency of evidence supporting arguments in several texts to evaluate credibility of frequently used sources.
• 11.1.8.2 - Evaluate the impact of academic, technical, and domain-specific vocabulary, including words and phrases, on content, style, and meaning of informational text.
• 11.2.1.2 - Write with varied use of elements of grammar and mechanics to align voice and style with the publishing plan.
• 11.2.5.1 - Write to inform or explain, comparing, integrating, and evaluating factual information to convey complex ideas accurately, choosing the best text structure to inform or explain on chosen topic for particular audience, building on skills from previous years. 
• 11.3.1.1 - Exchange ideas through storytelling, discussion, and collaboration, both as facilitator and participant, expressing ideas, intentionally considering the perspectives of Dakota and Anishinaabe people as well as other perspectives. 

Units: 
The course units will include Reading and Writing in the Workplace, Reading Technical Documents, and Exploring a Career.
 
Activities: 
Students should expect to read, write, and discuss every day.  In addition, students will participate in book clubs, research about a chosen career path, presentations, and Socratic
Seminars.
 
Project: 
Career Exploration Presentation - Students will research about a chosen career path, including the type of communication required, and then present the information to the class.

Summary of Text: This novel offered a vision of a totalitarian society where the government controls individual thought and even reality. It presents a variety of issues regarding human nature. 1984 is a great modern classic of “Negative Utopia” – a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary work that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. 
Sensitive Content: language, sex, violence

Summary of Text: Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian , which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he thought he was destined to live. 
Sensitive Content: discrimination, language, sex, violence

Summary of Text: Who is Jenna Fox? Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a coma, they tell her, and she is still recovering from a terrible accident in which she was involved a year ago. But what happened before that? Jenna doesn't remember her life. Or does she? And are the memories really hers?
Sensitive Content: language

Summary of Text: Heroes, monsters, gods, battles, and kings - the legend of Ulysses is brought to life in this classic retelling of The Odyssey.
Sensitive Content: violence

Summary of Text: Bunny and Nasir have been best friends forever, but when Bunny accepts an athletic scholarship across town, Nasir feels betrayed. While Bunny tries to fit in with his new, privileged peers, Nasir spends more time with his cousin, Wallace, who is being evicted. Nasir can’t help but wonder why the neighborhood is falling over itself to help Bunny when Wallace is in trouble.
When Wallace makes a bet against Bunny, Nasir faces an impossible decision—maybe a dangerous one.Told from alternating perspectives, this is a heart-pounding story about the responsibilities of great talent and the importance of compassion.
Sensitive Content: language, violence

Summary of Text: Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins are two young men, one black and one white, whose lives are forever changed by an act of brutality. The story is told in Rashad and Quinn’s alternating perspectives (Reynolds pens the voice of Rashad, and Kiely has taken the voice of Quinn), as they grapple with the complications of this moment which seep into their families, school, and town. Eventually, the two narratives weave back together, and begin the first step for healing and understanding racial injustice.  
Sensitive Content: language, stereotypes, violence

Summary of Text: All Jin Wang wants is to fit in. When his family moves to a new neighborhood, he suddenly finds that he's the only Chinese American student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl…
Sensitive Content: language, stereotypes, violence

Summary of text (from Random House): A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
Sensitive Content: language, sex, stereotypes

Summary of Text: The author shares the story of his challenging upbringing in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. The memoir includes references to stories from Irish folklore, traditional Irish ballads, English poetry, and popular Irish films and actors. There are also many references to historical events in Ireland, such as the English conquest and the Potato Famine.
Sensitive Content: language, sex

Summary of Text: Sophocles' story about the individual’s duty to the gods versus government. Antigone must deal with the question whether or not to disobey a law she feels is unjust.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: With a narrative that combines heart-stopping martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs with life lessons that speak to all of us, "The Art of Learning" takes readers through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process. Rather than focusing on climactic wins, Waitzkin reveals the inner workings of his everyday method, from systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, to honing techniques into states of remarkable potency, to mastering the art of performance psychology.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society. Unlike the married women around her, whose sensuality seems to flow naturally into maternity, Edna finds herself wanting her own emotional and sexual identity.
During one summer while her husband is out of town, her frustrations find an outlet in an affair with a younger man. Energized and filled with a desire to define her own life, she sends her children to the country and removes herself to a small house of her own: "Every step she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual. She began to look with her own eyes; to see and apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon the opinion' when her own soul had invited her." Her triumph is short-lived, however, destroyed by a society that has no place for a self-determined, unattached woman. Her story is a tragedy and one of many clarion calls in its day to examine the institution of marriage and a woman's opportunities in an oppressive world. 
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.
Sensitive Content: sex

Summary of Text: Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. One night Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions. Lina hopes her messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles.
Sensitive Content: language, stereotypes, violence

Summary of Text:  This novel is a letter that details the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son,Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. 
Sensitive Content: stereotypes, violence

Summary of Text: In a world where past gender selection has led to an imbalance in genders (5 boys for every 1 girl), the boys must compete for a wife. Sudasa, as a girl, has lived a life of privilege while Contestant 5 is merely a working boy who has to compete with four other boys to win her hand in marriage.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: Best friends Jeff and Wiley are legends. There is practically no one in their school who hasn’t been nicknamed by the duo. They’ve dubbed their own underachieving class “The Dim Bulbs”, their pop-eyed principal is better known as “Deer in Headlights”, and their enormous new English teacher, Mr. Hughes, is “Mr. Huge.”  But now some of the nicknames that Jeff and Wiley have invented are backfiring on them. Will the duo be able to get it together before it’s too late?
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: The Lockwood brothers are supposed to be able to survive anything. Their dad, a hardcore believer in self-reliance, has stockpiled enough food and water at their isolated Nevada home to last for months. But when they are robbed of all their supplies during a massive blackout while their dad is out of town, John and Stew must walk 96 miles in the stark desert sun to get help. Along the way, they’re forced to question their dad’s insistence on self-reliance and ask just what it is that we owe to our neighbors, to our kin, and to ourselves.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours’ walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya’s in an astonishing and moving way. Includes an afterword by author Linda Sue Park and the real-life Salva Dut, on whom the novel is based, and who went on to found Water for South Sudan.
Sensitive Content: mild violence

Summary of Text: Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Sensitive Content: sex, violence, language

Summary of Text: In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman--who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband--conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished.
Sensitive Content: None

Summary of Text: Who is Jenna Fox? Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a coma, they tell her, and she is still recovering from a terrible accident in which she was involved a year ago. But what happened before that? Jenna doesn't remember her life. Or does she? And are the memories really hers?
Sensitive Content: language

Summary of Text: The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them. Suddenly they’re keenly aware of things beyond their block in Queens, things that are happening in the world—like the shooting of Tupac Shakur—and in search of their Big Purpose in life. When—all too soon—D’s mom swoops in to reclaim her, and Tupac dies, they are left with a sense of how quickly things can change and how even all-too-brief connections can touch deeply.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different—and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text:  As battle cries of the American Revolution echo in the distance, servants flutter about preparing for one of New York society’s biggest events: the Schuylers’ grand ball. Descended from two of the oldest and most distinguished bloodlines in New York, the Schuylers are proud to be one of their fledgling country’s founding families, and even prouder still of their three daughters—Angelica, with her razor-sharp wit; Peggy, with her dazzling looks; and Eliza, whose beauty and charm rival those of both her sisters, though she’d rather be aiding the colonists’ cause than dressing up for some silly ball.
Sensitive Content: mild language, mild violence

Summary of Text: Ali Cross has always looked up to his father, former detective and FBI agent Alex Cross. While solving some of the nation's most challenging crimes, his father always kept his head and did the right thing. Can Ali have the same strength and resolve? When Ali's best friend Gabe is reported missing, Ali is desperate to find him. At the same time, a string of burglaries targets his neighborhood -- and even his own house. With his father on trial for a crime he didn't commit, it's up to Ali to search for clues and find his friend. But being a kid sleuth isn't easy -- especially when your father warns you not to get involved! -- and Ali soon learns that clues aren't always what they seem. Will his detective work lead to a break in Gabe's case or cause even more trouble for the Cross family?
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins are two young men, one black and one white, whose lives are forever changed by an act of brutality. The story is told in Rashad and Quinn’s alternating perspectives (Reynolds pens the voice of Rashad, and Kiely has taken the voice of Quinn), as they grapple with the complications of this moment which seep into their families, school, and town. Eventually, the two narratives weave back together, and begin the first step for healing and understanding racial injustice.  
Sensitive Content: language, stereotypes, violence

Summary of Text:  Two years after being airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975, Matt Pin is haunted by the terrible secret he left behind and, now, in a loving adoptive home in the United States, a series of profound events forces him to confront his past. This powerful first-person story is told in free verse.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text: Red’s inexplicable power over the wind comes from her mother. Whenever Ruby “Red” Byrd is scared or angry, the wind picks up. And being placed in foster care, moving from family to family, tends to keep her skies stormy. Red knows she has to learn to control it, but can’t figure out how.
Sensitive Content: none

Summary of Text:  When twelve-year-old Maddie hatches a scheme for a secret sleepover with her two best friends, she ends up waking up to a nightmare. She’s alone—left behind in a town that has been mysteriously evacuated and abandoned. With no one to rely on, no power, and no working phone lines or internet access, Maddie slowly learns to survive on her own. Her only companions are a Rottweiler named George and all the books she can read. After a rough start, Maddie learns to trust her own ingenuity and invents clever ways to survive in a place that has been deserted and forgotten.
Sensitive Content: none