English

Our English curriculum emphasizes fundamentally human skills that benefit students throughout their lives.

Students emerge from our program as voracious, critical, and worldly readers; confident, creative, and versatile writers; effective and impassioned communicators; and deep listeners. Our classes revolve around compelling thematic and moral questions, and in our sequencing, we carefully balance breadth and depth, reading and creating, requirements and choice.

Reading is more than a teacher-assigned task; it’s a mindset we cultivate.

Our approach to teaching reading helps students discover its personal and universal value. From 5th-12th grade, we require students to read 100+ books within and beyond the canon:

At least 25 works considered canon,
At least 10 works from a chosen genre,
At least one book from each populated continent,
At least 15 nonfiction books, and
At least 20 books not assigned by school.

Why? So that students have opportunities to find and pursue their individual interests through reading; explore the ways reading has mattered to the human story more broadly; and cultivate their empathy as they explore experiences and emotions that might, at least on the surface, differ radically from their own. Our goal is for our graduates to have built a reading habit that they sustain long into their futures.

Our literature courses are thematic, asking bigger questions.

We love books, as you can likely already tell–but embedded in the design of each and every one of our classes is the knowledge that a good English class is more than just a collection of good writing. You won’t see a listing in our course catalog titled “English 8”; you will see 8th-grade electives including “What Makes a Monster?” and “Coming-of-Age on the Page.” If you ask your 5th grader what their English class is about, they won’t reply “I don’t know, we’re reading The Call of the Wild.”; they might say, “We’re talking about what the American experience is.” In other words, our classes revolve around compelling thematic and moral questions. This structure invites students to compare texts from a wide variety of temporal, cultural and political contexts, leading them to grapple with the implications of these questions, on their lives and on the world. This is not only more engaging but also more memorable, as these connections consolidate learning.

Our curriculum is structured to reflect our belief that reading and creating are equally important pursuits.

We make a sustained investment in craft, offering craft-based workshop courses in addition to traditional literature seminars. In middle school, students take two craft courses, Storytelling & Narrative in their second semester of 7th grade and a craft elective in their second semester of 8th grade. In these classes, students learn to write and create in a wide range of genres and forms (from op-eds to poems to podcasts to analytical essays) and for a wide range of audiences, all while discovering and articulating their unique voices and angles. At Rock Creek, we value high-quality instruction on traditional structures of academic writing, to be sure, but we also value the next step: teaching students to strategically and flexibly deploy a variety of structures with an eye to what the moment and audience calls for.

We teach the start-to-finish process of writing.

In middle school, students will do most of their drafting and iterating in class because we believe writing is enriched by collaboration. Students learn to brainstorm and outline, work through multiple drafts, and edit based on feedback—both from teachers and from their peers. In conjunction with writing, we teach the conventions of grammar from the perspective of their rhetorical significance.

We help students develop presence.

As our classical forebears well knew, it is the fundamentally human skills of persuasive speaking, deep listening, and physical presence that enable individuals to stand out and effect positive change in the world. With the rise of artificial intelligence, these skills are becoming all the more indispensable–and we believe English class is a perfect place to practice them! So–to provide just a few examples–our students memorize and recite a new poem each year, reach a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s immortal words through performance, and bring a written piece of their choosing to life by transforming it into a persuasive speech that they deliver.