Calling all bookworms! This course is designed for passionate readers who seek to explore diverse genres, engage in thought-provoking discussions, and develop increasing autonomy to analyze texts. Throughout the semester, students will delve into a curated selection of classic and contemporary literature, spanning various cultures, time periods, and perspectives. Readings may include: American Dirtby Janine Cummins, All the Light We Cannot Seeby Anthony Doerr, The Nickel Boysby Colson Whitehead, A Prayer for Owen Meanyby John Irving, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrowby Gabrielle Zevin, The Great Aloneby Kristin Hannah, and Mad Honeyby Jodi Picoult. The emphasis is on fostering a deep appreciation for the written word while honing the skills necessary for independent literary exploration. Collaborative discussions will be a central aspect of the course, providing students with the opportunity to share their insights, challenge perspectives, and refine their communication skills. Students will be encouraged to express their understanding of literature through articulate, persuasive commentary (both written and multimedia) and creative projects, such as writing original pieces inspired by the works they read. Overall, 5 Months, 4 Books aims to foster a lifelong love of reading, enhance critical thinking skills, and encourage students to become independent, thoughtful readers.

A common practice for many people is to create a bucket list of extraordinary, “mountain top” experiences to achieve over the course of a lifetime. While this is a wonderful practice, the truth is that peak, high intensity experiences do not make up most of our daily existence. Our lives are, in fact, made up of small moments that are easy to overlook in the busy rush of living. Pausing to notice and savor these small moments helps us to experience the everyday in a deeper way. Poet W.B. Yeats wrote, “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

In this class, we’ll encounter a variety of essayists, writers, philosophers and poets who celebrate the small joys and ordinary wonders of everyday life, particularly as they are experienced through the five senses. You, the students, will build a practice of noticing and documenting your own experiences of daily, sensory delight. Over the course of the semester, you will write a series of reflections in different genres engaging in what the poet Ross Gay calls “scrounging for delight” and honing your “delight radar.” At the end of the semester, each student will present to the class a deep dive into something small, yet profound, that enriches your own life.

Paris enjoyed a thriving arts and literary scene in the interwar years (1920s and 1930s), attracting many American intellectuals to live and work in the famed City of Light. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes, as well as jazz musicians and stage performers converged in Parisian cafes, bookstores, and nightclubs. In this course, we’ll read a selection of American expatriate writers associated with the “Lost Generation.” We’ll explore the vibrant intellectual and cultural scene of Paris, including artists, musicians and performers. By the time we watch Woody Allen’s comedy, Midnight in Paris, you will know enough to understand all the film’s references to the writers, artists and thinkers who left their indelible mark on this beautiful city. Our class time will be spent in discussion, exploration, collaboration and active participation. The writing you’ll be asked to do will be personal narrative, memoir, creative expression and reflection inspired by and in dialogue with the texts you’ll encounter. We’ll end the semester by hosting a cultural salon, inviting the Menlo adults of your choice to engage in substantive and sparkling conversation with all of you.

As the effects of climate change become increasingly felt throughout the world, the Irish novelist Paul Murray believes climate worry is “the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” Climate fiction, or cli-fi for short, is a genre of literature that deals with the impact of climate change on the earth and on society head-on, by animating it through characters living through these uncertain times.

Many stories within cli-fi, however, such as those in the nascent subgenre of solarpunk, choose to promote solutions to the climate crisis alongside warnings about the effects of climate change. These stories help envision a path forward, and in the process, offer hope to many readers. In this course, we will investigate a variety of writers concerned with climate change and its solutions, including Bill McKibben’s non-fiction, a selection of stories from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Octavia Butler, and Becky Chambers’s novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built.

This course explores the transformative power of short fiction to depict the moral dilemmas of the human experience. Reading stories spanning across diverse historical and cultural landscapes—from the apartheid-era South Africa in Nadine Gordimer’s Jump, to post-earthquake Japan in Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, to the Vietnam War in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and the haunting European gothic worlds of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber—we will examine how literature reveals human strengths such as courage, resilience, and moral reflection in times of conflict. We will consider how historical and geographical contexts shape identity and moral decision-making. This course encourages critical engagement with the authors’ artistic blend of realism and fantasy to challenge our imagination and sense of empathy. Together, we will grapple with the central question: When conflict demands that we respond, how do we redefine ourselves and our relationships with others to make meaningful moral choices?

If the thought of writing another closed-form analytical essay causes you to convulse in fear, you should probably take this class. We will spend all semester experimenting with alternative essay structures, reading, analyzing, and mimicking work by some of the great essayists of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will steal the best storytelling tricks from the fiction writer’s toolkit, and we will borrow strategies of persuasion from classical and contemporary rhetoricians. The course will be built on the workshop model, meaning that you will have to be both brave and nice: over the course of the semester, each student will courageously share his/her original work and will respectfully respond to the work of peers. Expect to be reading, writing, and critiquing constantly, but also expect to kind of sickly enjoy it.

With the re-emergence of dystopian fiction as the most popular genre for young readers, students will be exposed to dystopian classics that paved the way for more contemporary works. Students will explore the political and social climate that prompted the authors to generate their narratives as well as the current, cultural conversations that emerge from these texts. Literature selections include: “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell’s 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

In addition, students will view and analyze mise-en-scene techniques of notable dystopian films and shows including Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Pleasantville, directed by Gary Ross, and selected episodes of the acclaimed British television series Black Mirror. Students will generate personal and social commentaries, a presentation of a dystopian film, and a research-based, capstone paper with the working title “1984 and Today’s Society.”

English 1 students will work to establish their authorial voices while focusing on both reading and writing as active processes. In the fall, students will write a variety of expository pieces in order to deepen their awareness of their own opinions and values. Students then position themselves within larger cultural dialogues as we work on academic and literary arguments based on short stories, novellas, novels, and dramatic works. This practice will deepen their ability to recognize literary devices and will refine their ability to write logically and to support claims with evidence. Finally, students end the year with a focused study of rhetoric using op-ed pieces, speeches, plays, and fiction as inspiration. Students will become familiar with the fundamentals of grammar and punctuation, which they will practice throughout the year; they will also build their vocabularies through structured weekly practice.

English 2 builds upon the foundation of English 1 in writing, reading, and grammatical instruction. Students will experience enhanced independence in crafting the structure of their writing, as well as develop greater complexity, specificity, and personal voice. Developing timed writing strategies further challenges students’ reading literacy and writing fluency. English 2’s curricular focus on American Literature produces many interdisciplinary opportunities with the History Department. Students gain an appreciation of how texts relate to the world around them and to their own lives. By spring, students will more precisely analyze how meaning is cultivated in a text, develop facility with inter-textual analysis, both within and outside of the text, and identify “cultural conversations” that emerge from our readings.

The label of “freak” is a culturally relative term, marbled with overtones ranging from fascination to hatred, repulsion to titillation, and even from fear to camaraderie and celebration. In American culture, the spectacle of the freak show has a long, rich history, full of sociological and psychological implications. This course will explore the ways in which American artists have used the freak character as a means of celebrating our country’s diversity while interrogating and challenging a deep-seated collective fear of ‘deviance’ or ‘the other.’ We will begin by establishing a sense of the historical and sociological context of the freak show in America, and look at the freak character as depicted and promoted through the circus. Then, we will explore the nuanced character of the ‘freak’ in texts that challenge us to question our understanding of issues such as race, ability, gender, sexuality, age, and disease. We’ll interact with a variety of materials: texts outlining key sociological lenses, essays, novels, films, podcasts, and documentaries. With luck, we’ll also host speakers and activists from the Bay Area.

We are a species of mythmakers, and thus our societies are founded in and dependent upon shared narratives. Whether we call them myths, legends, or religions, these narratives reveal much about the human mind and our global cultural heritage. This course will provide a wide-ranging exploration of myths across time and space, from the ancient Indian Vedic texts to West African cosmologies to the stories of the Greco-Roman pantheon and Biblical accounts. Examining various traditions through a comparative lens will help us to better understand the origins of our supposedly modern cultures and provide insight into our continued reliance on shared mythological narratives.

A shape of a house, arising from the mist. A figure, seen from the corner of the eye. A deep and growing sense of doom and danger. Gothic literature has been, since the eighteenth century, not only a genre of terror and place but one associated with underrepresented authors and popular culture. It is not a genre that has been left in the past, however; rather, it is one that has thrived through the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries as it has spread and changed with places and times. We will be exploring some of the roots of traditional gothic literature as a way in which to examine how contemporary authors have made the genre their own through expanding critiques from evil individuals to the systems that allow such evil to flourish. Readings may include texts from writers such as Bronte, Faulkner, Moreno-Garcia, and Huang.

Reading is the basis of our work together; writing, discussion, and oral commentary are the mediums through which you will explore your ideas about the course material. You will be writing both in-class and processed analytical pieces, leading discussions, offering oral analyses of texts, and considering the creative elements that underpin the Gothic.

You’ve seen the headlines: “College Students Can’t Read Long Novels, Professors Weep”; “High Schools No Longer Assign Full Books, Adults Weep”; “Adults Themselves (esp. Men) Don’t Read Fiction - Reese Witherspoon’s Weeping Wins Oscar.” The diagnosis that novel-reading is waning is largely true. Maybe, the longest novel you have read is either 870 or 896 pages, depending on whether you had the hard- or paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

This course is designed to teach you how to not only read, but become immersed in a big, complex story. As a class we’ll tackle a novel none of us (including me!) has read and figure out what we need to know and what skills we need to sharpen to experience it in its fullness. Clocking in at a mere 864 pages, this year’s triple-decker is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004), the Hugo-award-winning fantasy/historical novel by Susanna Clarke. We will engage with historical context and literary theory and even film (Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige); and you will actively help construct the syllabus and assignments: presentations, and writing in many different genres, from the essay to film criticism to fiction.

“If I loved you less,” confesses one of Jane Austen’s heroes, stumbling through a declaration of love, “I might be able to talk about it more.” In this course, we’ll examine the ways writers have depicted love, a feeling so oversized and relentless that it often feels beyond the scope of language.

We’ll read widely: essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, sampling the doomed lovers of ancient Greek myths and tales of courtly love from the Middle Ages, as well as reading modern classics from writers including E.M. Forster and James Baldwin, and contemporary works by the likes of Sally Rooney and Ann Patchett. We will not limit ourselves to renderings of romantic love, but also love between friends, siblings, teammates, and—perhaps the most tender of all!—human-pet dynamics. In group discussions, we will pay close attention to the way these writers resist cliché and find ways to make some very well-documented sensations and experiences feel new. Throughout the semester we will respond to these works in writing. There will be opportunities to respond in academic writing, or to take inspiration from these texts and try your hand at writing your own creative nonfiction and fictional love stories.

Why do humans often look to the past as they try to envision a better future, and what role can the arts play in driving social change? The French word “Renaissance,” or rebirth, has been used to describe this revival of art forms from older times in order to move society in a better direction. Our course begins with the Italian Renaissance of the 16thC, when artists (like Michelangelo) and thinkers (such as Machiavelli) reached back to the legacy of the Ancient Greco-Roman Classical World to develop a worldview that accommodated the growing powers of people outside the traditional power centers of the Catholic Church or traditional nobility. We then turn to the concept of Renaissance in 17thC Mughal India and Ming China (field trips to the Taj Mahal and Forbidden City, anyone?), where leaders of a different ethnicity than their citizens used the arts to consolidate their empires. The course concludes with a look at how the concept of renaissance nourished African-American artists and thinkers in the 20thC Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes is one example) and 21stC Afro-Futurism (think Black Panther) movements. Our interdisciplinary, Humanities-focused approach relies on the analysis of artistic primary sources (literature, art, music, and philosophical texts), informed by a study of their historical context. You will also produce works of art, literature or music to demonstrate your understanding of the course content.

Who is eligible to take this course for history credit? Students in Grades 10-12. Students taking this course for History credit may elect the Honors designation.

Who is eligible to take this course for English credit? Students in Grades 11-12. This course does not carry an Honors option for English credit.

What historical factors contributed to the birth of the self-portrait as a genre in 15thC Western Europe and its explosion in popularity in modern times? How does this trend towards elevating self-representation in the arts and media relate to our current moment, when social justice calls for visibility and representation of diverse identities? In what ways can we see the self-portrait as a form of agency and resistance?To answer these questions about the history and significance of self-representation, we first study the birth of the self-portrait during the European Renaissance. We then read Oscar Wilde’s queer landmark novel The Picture of Dorian Gray(1891) and learn about Freudian idand its influence on the Modernist self-portraits of the 20thC. The 4th quarter is devoted to British feminist Virginia Woolf’s extended essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) and Korean-American author Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart(2021). Our interdisciplinary, Humanities-focused approach relies on the analysis of artistic primary sources (literature, art, music, and philosophical texts), informed by a study of their historical context. You will also produce works of art, literature or music to demonstrate your understanding of the course content.

Who is eligible to take this course for history credit? Students in Grades 10-12. Students taking this course for History credit may elect the Honors designation.

Who is eligible to take this course for English credit? Students in Grades 11-12. This course does not carry an Honors option for English credit.

By building a course devoted to non-fiction, I hope to both broaden and challenge your understanding of what’s happening in the world around us by exploring: Who’s writing about it, what they’re saying about it, why it’s important, and to enter into the conversations that emerge from it. First, we will explore non-fiction writing through the lens of investigative journalism, reading works on various “whistle-blower” topics, as well as viewing a “whistle-blower” film, The Insider and Frontline’s award-winning documentary League of Denial. Additionally, we will read a variety of longer social/political commentaries on relevant topics from publications including The Atlantic, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, and The Economist. As a capstone experience, you will each conduct your own in-depth investigation into a topic of your choosing. Bring your opinions!

Honors Literature is a survey course that is perfect for students who genuinely enjoy reading and talking about rewarding and memorable texts. This course is a great choice if you love the sustained, high-level discussion aspect of English class. Our reading of top-shelf challenging books will help you grow as a writer and thinker – be prepared for 45 minutes to an hour of reading after each class period, and come ready to share your perspectives with the class through various discussion modalities. Our reading spans genres, and includes novels, poetry, and drama. Students are expected to write independently and under timed conditions; we write frequent, short response papers of typically 1-2 pages in order to gain comfort with shorter-form writing and draw meaning from complex poems, plays, short stories, and novels that speak to the human condition. Honors Literature is ideal for students who love reading and enjoy robust discussion, literary analysis, and deep philosophical inquiry.

With some independent preparation, students who take this course may feel equipped to take the AP Literature exam.

This fast-paced course focuses on nonfiction writing, and students will become more proficient and comfortable both reading and producing complex pieces from a variety of fields (science, philosophy, popular culture, environmental studies, etc.) and genres (e.g. profiles, definitions, classifications, process papers). In addition to in-class timed writing, students should expect to write frequently at home, since the course intends to develop their own awareness of audience, purpose, and composition strategies. Rhetoric is also ideal for students who want to improve their reading of nonfiction texts and their ability to grapple with complex issues, both historical and contemporary.

With some independent preparation, students who take this course may feel equipped to take the AP Language exam.

In this thematic, literature-based course, students will explore the role of the rebel in society through the core textual and film selections including Ken Kesey’s counter-cultural novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestand the film The Shawshank Redemption. Via class discussion and writing, students will strive to answer the following essential questions: Why do rebels exist? What societal dynamics breed rebels? How are rebels viewed, understood, or misunderstood? Do rebels threaten the stability of society or ensure its well-being? Students will examine how societal forces at play in these works provide us with insight into the society we live in now: here at Menlo, in Silicon Valley, in America. Students will practice mining a text for meaning and significance, craft passage analysis, and practice building rhetorically effective arguments in response to the works studied. For long-term assignments, each phase of the writing process will be scaffolded in order for students to generate increasingly well-supported, complex, and concise written arguments.

In this course, we will use AI to explore how stories articulate our changing notions of children’s literature and what it means to be a child. As we incorporate AI technology into our study of classic and contemporary children’s texts, we will experiment with a range of digital tools and reflect on how technology interacts with both narrative and visual storytelling. What is the role of AI in critical analysis? And what role can, or should, AI play in authoring culturally-relevant literature that reflects and shapes our evolving conception of childhood? As we gain a deeper understanding of children’s literature, we will develop AI-focused protocols and methodologies for literary study.

Wilderness is, actually, an American invention. It’s a construct, not a fact of nature, but one with enormous consequences for the ways in which we relate to our natural world. The ideas of wilderness and the frontier are in fact so entangled in the American identity that we still cannot relinquish the dream of them, even if the U.S Census declared the frontier “closed” 133 years ago; even if less than 3% of the land in the contiguous United States is today considered “wilderness” at all. In this course, we will use literature to explore America’s relationship with its own geography—how that relationship has changed and how it hasn’t—from the biblical ideas that informed our nation’s founding to the rise of a worldview that could possibly condone something like ecoterrorism. Through an interdisciplinary lens that combines literature, art, history, science, and ethics, we will explore the reactions that wilderness has historically elicited, our options for responding to it today, and our own relationships with our uniquely Western environment.

From the genres of magical realism to cosmic horror, humans have often felt compelled to say, “but what if the things that scare us in the dark are actually real?” In this course, we will be examining some of the ways in which writers have used fantastical elements from their traditions in storytelling to both respond to colonialism and work to preserve indigenous and diasporic cultures. If colonialism can be described as the extraction and consumption of resources, how might those who have been colonized regain power through turning their teeth—metaphorical and real—on their oppressors? Texts may include authors such as Cañas, Khaw, and Roanhorse.

Over the semester, you will write analytically in order to come to better understandings of the genres while also doing quick creative pieces to experiment with how the authors create particular effects.

When it comes to the human body, scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge are seemingly at odds. The former demands dispassionate, objective observation; the latter invests our genome with the DNA of imaginative literature: symbol, image, metaphor. Yet clinical medicine cannot be practiced without a narrative patient history, and medical knowledge seems to strive for the archetypal shape of narrative: the medical crisis is a narrative “climax” of sorts that must be “resolved” by a cure. This course invites you to discover new ways of thinking about the relation between medicine and the humanities through close readings of memoir, fiction, poetry, and essays, as well as medical and scientific treatises. Units on bioethics, embodiment, pain, pathography, pandemics, and immunology will prepare you to fashion original theories of narrative and healing at the vanguard of this interdisciplinary field. This seminar is designed equally for STEM students who are interested in healthcare and for humanities students interested in themes of malady, body, and identity.

The first decades of the twentieth century represented a major inflection point in world history, as the comfortable traditions of previous centuries crumbled in the face of accelerating social and technological change. This is the period that gave birth to the literary revolution we call Modernism, which sought radically new forms of expression in order to articulate the human experience in an increasingly inhumane and unpredictable world. Today we stand at the dawn of a similarly tumultuous new age, and this course will examine the works of the Modernist poets as inspiration for our own poetic innovation. Students will analyze a wide range of Modernist poetry and experiment with various poetic techniques as they compile a portfolio of their own verse throughout the semester.

In this course, we will seek to capture and convey the wisdom found in the human condition. Our units will take on some of the major facets of life: joy, growth, loss, grief, despair, belonging, curiosity, connection, solitude, nature, and more. A wide selection of essays, poems, podcasts, short films, and art from authors, creators, activists, and leaders of different eras and backgrounds will inspire students as they work to hone in on, and articulate, their own life philosophies. Our study and our time together is designed to inspire deep reflection and the thoughtful development of a personal connection with our values and experiences. Flannery O’Connor is quoted as saying, “I write to discover what I know.” Likewise, students in On Being will write reflective weekly journals as a way to build towards crafted personal essays that express their particular wisdom with style and purpose. Our writing, like our reading and discussion, will be exploratory in the name of discovering our wisdom about living what Mary Oliver reminds us is our “one wild and precious life.”

Were you one of those kids who could never get enough Greek mythology? Or maybe Percy Jackson or The Hunger Games were more your jam. Are you an unabashed Trekkie and/or Star Wars fan? Perhaps you fancy yourself a connoisseur of more rarefied sci-fi from purists like Isaac Asimov (of Foundation and I, Robot fame) and Frank Herbert’s Dune. If any of these pique your curiosity, then this is the class for you! Many sci-fi stories we know and love today actually have their roots in ancient Greek and Roman literature. As we journey (or trek!) from antiquity to the present, we will trace the development of science fiction as a genre, uniting the ancient Greek and Roman worlds with the modern science-fiction universe. Reading assignments will be of three types: (1) primary ancient and pre-modern sources; (2) critical essays by pioneers in the field of self-conscious science-fiction writing; (3) modern science-fiction short stories, along with television shows and feature films. Most days will be occupied by Socratic-/seminar-style discussion of assigned readings and/or viewings, and the course will be capped by a research project in which students either analyze a science-fiction text not covered in class or write an original short story (screenplay, etc.) of their own that is informed by Classical texts and themes.

“Reputation, Reputation, Reputation!” Shakespeare has many reputations: the world’s greatest dramatist; lovelorn poet; deeeeeep thinker; weirdly astute businessman; sick wordsmith. You probably know him best for his tragedies (like, ahem, Othello), but he’s also one of the best comic writers in English. This year’s course will focus on the Bard’s early- and middle-period works, especially his comedies: for instance, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, or As You Like It. Reading these plays, we’ll watch how the son of a glove-maker turned himself into the playwright who could write Hamlet. We’ll end with that, his most ground-breaking work, and the recent award-winning film, Hamnet (2025). Our focus throughout the semester will be on both the ways in which Shakespeare’s work responded to his world and how others have adapted his works to respond to theirs. Assignments will include Director’s Notes, Presentations and a Final Creative Project on a play of your choice.

While literature has a long and illustrious history, it also is an exciting and evolving art form. In this course, we will investigate a survey of the best writing released in the last year, to answer the questions: what is the general state of writing today, what trends are occurring across genre and medium, and what exciting innovations are happening in the world of writing? Selections for this course will include a wide variety of award-winning short stories, novels, poems, nonfiction books, long form articles, films, and television programs across numerous genres. This reading list will be drawn from the nominees and winners of the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, O. Henry Prize, Booker Prize, Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, Emmy Award, and Academy Award.

In addition to producing literary analyses of these texts, students will also participate in contemporary writing by producing their own creative writing in a variety of forms and genres. These pieces will respond to the texts we study, while also introducing innovations of their own, adding the newest examples to the exciting and evolving world of literature!