English 9 offers a process-oriented approach to developing the fundamental reading, writing, and critical thinking skills that are essential for success in high school, college, and beyond. A variety of American literary texts by twentieth century writers – from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin – are read in the context of the critical moments in history that produced them, such as the Harlem Renaissance, American modernism, and the Civil Rights Movement. The Ninth Grade Fall Trip to Monterey and summer reading of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, as well as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, offer jumping off points to consider essential questions for the year: What ecosystems are you a part of? Who are you, and what is your place in a larger community? And how do class, race, and gender shape identities, perspectives, and experiences of vulnerability?

Emphasizing sentence structure through the study of grammar, style, and vocabulary in context, students are asked to pay attention to craft—their own and others’— and to develop an awareness of their own voice. In the fall, students write and revise thesis-driven literary analysis essays based on close reading and annotation. Students grow to understand the value of an argumentative thesis while immersing themselves in the process of crafting unified, coherent and well-developed paragraphs and essays.

Critical to English 9 is our Urban Studies unit, which allows students to draw on the paradigms of “close reading” and passage analysis to “read” the city of downtown Santa Barbara on a Farmers Market Tuesday. Students prepare for our interdisciplinary, collaborative ethnography walk from Alameda Park to the Funk Zone by studying complex issues related to gentrification, homelessness, class divides, the pandemic, and public health.