Westerberg, English 1-2

FRESHMAN SYLLABUS

Back to School Night, 9/17/15

Freshmen Parents:

Welcome to Room 19 and English 1-2 CP. I appreciate your willingness to give up your Thursday night to learn a bit about your child’s teachers, curriculum, and classroom environment. I hope that this is the beginning of our steady communication throughout the academic year.

Please note that I regularly update my PowerSchool so that you may monitor your child’s grade at any time. As it is early in the semester, grades are subject to drastic fluctuation; please be neither discouraged nor overly confident regarding your child’s performance.

So far this year we have:

·  Completed our first interpretive essay, an assessment of student summer reading

·  Completed our classroom and library orientation. Your child now knows my expectations, how we together manage our classroom, and how to research on-line documents and print documents in the library.

·  Nearly completed our first unit, a study of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men wherein I have regularly quizzed students for reading comprehension; introduced them to and assessed them on difficult vocabulary; discussed and analyzed the thematic content of the novel; and applied the novel’s concepts of friendship, sacrifice, and goal setting to our personal lives.

·  Embarked on our first quarter Outside Reading Project.

For the remainder of this semester, we will complete:

·  A unit on Interpretive Writing

·  A study of Greek Mythology and its applications

·  A thematic unit based on Sophocles’ Oedipus

·  A thematic unit based on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Our second semester studies include:

·  Further studies in different modalities of writing

·  A thematic unit based on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

·  A thematic unit based on J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

·  A unit of classical and contemporary poetry.

Feel free to e-mail me through the district website at or call me at 310/318-7337. You may also check my website for posted agendas, assignments, and due dates by accessing Mira Costa’s websites and locating me through the English Department.

Thank you for attending. I look forward to a great year.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Westerberg

Mira Costa High School