Course Syllabus

Bridge to College English Language Arts: Syllabus

The course curriculum emphasizes focused reading, writing, speaking & listening, and research work based on Washington State’s K-12 Learning Standards for English language arts (the Common Core State Standards, CCSS-ELA). This course will develop students’ college and career readiness by building skills in critical reading, academic writing, speaking and listening, research and inquiry, and language use as defined by the CCSS-ELA for high school. Students will engage with rigorous texts and activities that support the standards’ additional goals of developing the capacities of literacy, including deepening appreciation of other cultures, valuing evidence and responding to varying tasks across content areas, and navigating technology to support their work. Students will learn to evaluate the credibility of information, critique others’ opinions, and construct their own opinions based on evidence. By the end of the course, students will be able to use strategies for critical reading, argumentative writing, and independent thinking while reading unfamiliar texts and responding to them in discussion and writing.

The course will also develop students’ essential habits of mind necessary to be successful in college. Literacy activities will engage students in building skills in navigating complex texts in multiple content areas and communication skills that transfer to different tasks and demands. Students completing this course will be equipped to engage in college-level work in English.

Classroom Expectations:
• Students are expected to challenge themselves academically, to take pride in their work, abilities, and accomplishments, to respect the abilities of others, and the concept of an open forum protecting the academic ideas and opinions of others. All students are accountable for their own progress, empathy, and civility.
• All students are expected to challenge themselves academically, to take pride in their accomplishments, to respect the abilities and rights of others to be who they are and to express their opinions in an open forum. Students are encouraged to write for a variety of purposes, to do their best possible work on each assignment, and to strive for improvement at all times.
• All students are expected to bring pencil, composition book, paper, novels, and any additional and required materials to class each day. A signed copy of the class syllabus and expectations is to be stapled to the inside cover of the composition book at all times. Students should wait to purchase school related supplies until an appropriate list is generated and sent home.

Student Behavior:
• Any student infringing upon the safety or rights of another student will be expected to make amends in order to avoid a more punitive consequence. An annual, classroom social contract will be designed with student input.
• Students need all necessary materials in class each day and be ready when class begins
• Students must RESPECT the rights and property of others
• Each student is expected to complete his/her own assignments unless group work is assigned
• Any student caught cheating will receive no credit for that assignment; a second offense will require a conference with parents
• The bell does not dismiss students –the teacher does upon completion of the class lesson or activity
• Students are allowed to bring water bottles or securable beverage bottles into the classroom only. Any food consumed discreetly by students in the classroom must be out of the sight of other students and the teacher.

Essays:
• All compositions are required. If a student fails to complete and submit a composition, that student’s overall grade will drop up to 50 percent for that assignment. All formal writing in final draft form must be word-processed to earn final draft credit. Students will become familiar with the MLA style model for writing compositions. Acceptable scores on all summative assessments are required to pass the course and receive credit.
• Essay and research writing are both integral aspects of the class and required for passing scores. Formal written papers must follow college preparatory entry guidelines for accuracy and quality.

Films:
Films used throughout the school year will be curriculum appropriate and/or short clips available on Youtube.com for creating content connections to social issues.

Homework:
• All homework, or assigned daily work, is due the following class period unless otherwise posted.
• Each student is expected to keep a notebook containing all rough draft materials, daily written assignments, notes, and vocabulary work.
• No student is allowed to dispose of written, graded work without the permission of the teacher.
• Notebooks will be submitted for grading periodically throughout each quarter.

Course Models: Course Outline
Bridge to College English requires that students complete six of the thirteen modules from the list below. Two of the six modules selected must include book length texts, including one novel (Ubik, 1984, and/or Brave New World) and one nonfiction text (Into the Wild or The Shallows). Books must be read in their entirety. Teachers may select modules using any of the three structures below. First, a semester model is provided that allows teachers to divide the year into two equal parts with one book length text in each part. Second, an annual model is provided for teachers who want to select and sequence models in a year-long structure. Finally, three thematic models are provided that meet the module requirements and organize texts based on topics and content. As long as six modules are selected and two of the modules include a novel and a book length nonfiction text, teachers may select any modules and sequence them any way they see fit.

Module 1: Rhetoric of the Op-Ed Page
This assignment sequence uses five texts. “Three Ways to Persuade” presents the Aristotelian concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos in an accessible way so your students can understand and use these concepts in their own writing and rhetorical analysis. This text is used to prepare your students to analyze “A Change of Heart About Animals,” which presents summaries of a number of scientific studies of animal behavior and argues that science is showing us that animals are far more like humans than we used to think. Victoria Braithwaite’s “Hooked on a Myth: Do Fish Feel Pain?” presents scientific evidence and arguments that fish in fact have the same kinds of pain receptors as humans, but that we treat them differently from other animals because we are less able to empathize with them. Finally, “Of Primates and Personhood: Will According Rights and ‘Dignity’ to Nonhuman Organisms Halt Research?” an online article by Ed Yong, explores some of the possible consequences of granting rights to great apes and some of the divisions in the animal rights community.
Letter to the editor: There are two writing genres and three possible writing assignments in this module. One assignment is to write a letter to the editor in response to either the Rifkin article or the Braithwaite article (if you assigned it). The second is to write an essay taking a stance toward a proposed Animal Bill of Rights. For this essay, students can draw on both the Rifkin and Braithwaite articles and any other materials they have researched for this discussion
Argumentative essay: From their reading and research, students are asked to craft an argumentative essay that explains and supports their position, acknowledges the perspectives and positions of others, and uses evidence gleaned through close reading and analysis to support their claims.

Module 2: The Value of Life
This module provides students with extended practice analyzing and synthesizing a diverse set of texts on a shared question: How should human life be valued? This module is intended as a first-semester unit for seniors who already have some experience with rhetorical reading and writing. Several activities are assigned as homework in this module.
Reflective Essay or Passage-based Argument Essay: The module provides two choices for the summative assessment, offering students the opportunity for making a decision based on their perspectives upon completion of the unit. The key skills for the module are making connections among the various texts, notice of the rhetorical conventions used by specific genres to explore similar questions, and the use of rhetorical devices while writing an essay about their own perceptions of how life should be valued.

Module 3: Building Evidence-Based Arguments
This module proposes learning and practicing the skills and habits of mind associated with argumentation -how to conceive and communicate “arguments to support claims using valid reasoning and sufficient evidence” [CCSS W1] as well as how to “delineate and evaluate the argument[s]” and “the validity of the reasoning and relevance and sufficiency of the evidence” presented by others [CCSS R8] -which is central to students civic and academic lives. Students will learn and think about complex societal issues for which there are many explanations, perspectives, and opinions, not simply two sides to an argument.
Evidence-Based Argument Essay: the summative assessment for the module focuses on the ability of students to use legitimate, reasoned evidence in support of rational thinking about complex societal issues.

Module 4: Juvenile Justice
The juvenile justice module tackles issues surrounding the mandatory sentencing of juveniles to life imprisonment for serious crimes against society and as such is an engaging topic for students who represent this age group. The module was designed to explore a serious legal issue and the way in which scientific evidence and personal observation as well as experience contribute to different strongly held points of view on the topic. Students practice analyzing different genres of text from a rhetorical perspective.
Analytical Response Essay: students respond to a Supreme Court ruling involving the fundamental questions raised in the readings for the unit.

Module 5: 1984
This module explores George Orwell’s dark, complex, and controversial novel 1984. The novel is full of big ideas and themes: totalitarian rule, surveillance technology, mind control, propaganda, the role of the individual versus the collective, the relation of language to thought, and even the nature of reality and perception. The novel is often read as a tragic story of an individual, Winston Smith, who tries to stand up to the totalitarian government and fails. This module is designed to help students go beyond the simple plotline and engage with some of the larger philosophical ideas and themes, in part by carefully reading sections of the novel that are often omitted: the chapters from the fictitious book by Emmanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, and the appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” In effect, the novel integrates a literary narrative with fictional expository texts, which makes it ideal for use in an ERWC module. The culminating writing assignment offers a choice of four prompts, each of which explores one of the themes of the novel. Students are asked to use material from their notes and annotations of the novel to support their position on the issue of the prompt.
Literary Argument: The module provides four possible writing tasks. The first three are based exclusively on the novel. The fourth is based on the novel plus the two additional articles. In most cases, students will be making two kinds of arguments: 1) arguments about what happens in the novel and what it means and 2) arguments about what happens in real life in our own world.

Module 6: Brave New World
This is a twelfth grade module designed for middle to late in the second semester. It could be used in place of the 1984 module, before it, or after it. This module explores Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World. It opens with some quotations from Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that while our society seems to have avoided the ominous authoritarian state of Orwell’s 1984, we are actually more in danger from succumbing to the hedonistic but mindless pleasures of Brave New World. While the 1984 module incorporates several additional texts, this module sticks to the novel itself, making it slightly less complex and time-consuming. The culminating writing assignment offers a choice of four prompts, each of which explores one of the themes of the novel. Students are asked to use material from their notes and annotations of the novel to support their position on the issue of the prompt.

Module 7: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
The first unit involves students in reading Nicholas Carr’s informational text, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains as well as a number of related supplemental texts. Students will examine the central text for its argument structure and will evaluate the sources and evidence used to support its argument. Students will learn to write in the genre of rhetorical précis, which involves summarization and an understanding of tone, audience and author purpose. Students will study content-rich vocabulary pulled from the central text and will learn important word learning strategies, including deciphering meaning from context, prefix/suffix/root word study, and figurative, denotative and connotative meanings. The conclusion of the unit will involve students in collecting evidence for a stance-based synthesis essay on a topic/quote drawn from the central text, and using the central text, supplemental texts, and other sources found through library research to support their synthesis writing.
Synthesis essay: Students write a synthesis essay in which they develop and support a thesis based on a key idea represented in Carr’s The Shallows.