Teaching Materials
Below are links to materials I created or adapted for use over the course of my eight years teaching high school English. I have put them online for public consumption in the hopes that:
a) teachers and students can derive some benefit from my work, and
b) teachers can utilize these documents and projects as starting points to be improved upon for the benefit of their students.
Educators, please feel free to download, share, adapt, and re-mix my work to fit your students’ needs.
The documents linked below are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. I hereby waive the attribution requirement on my teaching materials under the condition that they are used in the course of classroom teaching; any other use must attribute me as the author.
Courses & Descriptions
British & Irish Literature
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Most materials are from the Honors-level course I taught, but can be easily adapted for any group. Works studied include Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and three plays by Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband. Supplementary works include Everyman, A Modest Proposal, The Rape of the Lock, and assorted poetry from the Romantic and Victorian periods, as well as the works of The Beatles and the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen.
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Major American Writers
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This course examined various perspectives on being American. Three major works studied were Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Supplemental texts come from various periods in American history, starting with Native Americans and Puritans and ranging through the early twentieth century.
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Multicultural Studies
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This was an interdisciplinary course (English/Social Studies) that I co-taught with a Social Studies teacher. This survey course examined the history, contributions, accomplishments, and struggles of various sub-groups in American history and culture. Cultures studied include African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Arab-American, Jewish-American, Native Americans, People with Disabilities, and LGBT.
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Shakespeare’s Comedy
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In this nine-week course, students read, watched, discussed, and performed three of Shakespeare’s comic plays: Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Measure for Measure. The final exam essay asked them to view The Merry Wives of Windsor and/or Much Ado About Nothing and discuss stylistic similarities to the three core works.
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Sophomore English
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Focuses primarily on 20th century American literature (with one notable exception) and addresses an array of social issues via the literature. Works studied included Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Miller’s The Crucible, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Lawrence & Lee’s Inherit the Wind, and Knowles’ A Separate Peace.