English III Honors (American Literature) 2009 Fall Semester Syllabus
(This is a tentative Syllabus for the first Semester of English III/American
Literature. We will complete everything by the end of the first semester.
This does include essay writing, speeches, EOC objectives, Latin morphemes,
and American literature. You will have a history test each time we cover a
time period of American literature and then you will have a literature test
as well. Furthermore we will have timed writings once every nine weeks as
well. Please keep this syllabus as a guide for you during the first semester.
1st Nine Weeks
A. Summer Reading/Essential Literature (2 weeks)
1. “A Raisin in the Sun” and Mice of Men Study guides
2. Go over Study Guides
3. Test over “A Raisin in the Sun” and Mice of Men
4. Go over Essay Writing
5. Critical Analysis papers on summer reading novels
B. Collection 1: Puritanism and Rationalism (2 weeks)
1. Narrative of Mary Rowlandson
2. Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
3. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
4. Abigail Adams and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
5. “The Declaration of Independence”
6. William Bradford “Of Plymouth Plantation”
7. Test over Collection 1 History
8. Test over Collection 1 Literature
9. Timed Writings will be spontaneously announced
C. EOC objectives including Latin morphemes (2 weeks):
1. Confused Pair of words
2. Capitalization and Punctuation
3. Pronoun Antecedents
4. Sentence Structure-Fragments and Run on Sentences
5. Analogies
6. Fact vs. opinion
7. Cause/effect relationships
8. Persuasive devices: bandwagon, loaded words, testimonials, name-calling,
plain-folks, misuse of statistics, card-stacking
9. Subject-Verb Agreement
10. Difference between primary, secondary, tertiary sources
11. Similes, metaphors, personification, hyperbole, allusions, irony, sympol
D. Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” (2 1/2weeks)
E. Begin Collection 2 (Romanticism)
2nd Nine Weeks:
E. Collection 2: “Romanticism” (3 weeks 1/2)
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “From Nature”
2. Emerson’s Self- Reliance
3. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”
4. Gandhi’s view on Non-Violent Resistance
5. King’s letter from Birmingham City Jail
F. EOC objectives using Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King’s speeches/Latin
Morphemes:
6. Logical fallacies, differentiate between implied and stated evidence,
deductive reasoning vs. inductive reasoning, identify a statement that
reveals the author’s biases, stereotypes, assumptions, or values within a
writing sample, identify a false premise within the text, identify the main
claim, premise, evidence, or conclusion of a given argument, select an
additional sentence to add on to within a text, select a rebuttal statement
that best refutes the arguments, distinguish between the strongest and
weakest points of the arguments, paradoxes
G. Comparison/ Contrast Essay Gandhi, King, and Thoreau (You will choose two
leaders) (One Week out of the above three weeks)
7. Background of Helen of Troy
8. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Raven”, and “Fall of
the House of Usher”
9. Edgar Allan Poe “To Helen”
10. “Helen” by H.D.
11. Timed Writing will be announced spontaneously
H. Collection 3: Romanticism continued, American Masters: Whitman and
Dickinson (1 week and a ½)
I. Persuasion Speeches/Power Points (2 weeks)
J. Final Exam
African-American Studies Fall Semester Syllabus
“You will begin to understand that we came from somewhere that once was the
place to be and somebody that once was the man everyone had to see. Then
I’ll show how man was made a slave and how a slave was made into a man. I am
America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black,
confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my
own; get used to me.”
Ch. 1 Beginnings in Africa
A. Human Origins and Early Civilizations
B. Great Empires of West Africa
C. Kingdoms of East and South Africa
Ch. 2: The Atlantic Slave Trade
A. Slavery Becomes a System
B. The Middle Passage
C. Africans in the Americas
Ch. 3: African Americans Help Create a New Nation
A. Blacks in Colonial America
B. The Revolutionary War Era
C. Citizenship in the New Nation
D. African American Culture
Ch. 4: African Americans in the New Republic
A. The Slave System in the South
B. Free African Americans
C. African Americans resist Slavery
*Read Novel Kindred by Octavia Butler*
2nd Nine Weeks
*Finish Kindred
*Literary Film Sankofa, a comparison piece to Kindred
*ESSAY (Topic will be announced)
Ch. 5: Steps to Freedom
A. The Anti-Slavery Movement
B. The Coming Conflict
C. The Civil War-Freedom Won
Ch. 6 Blacks in the Reconstruction Era
A. Life After Slavery
B. The Politics of Reconstruction
C. The Emergence of Black Political Leaders
D. Reconstruction Comes to an End
Final Exam
