The Lick-Wilmerding English Department’s selection of assigned books changes slightly each year, undergoing the department’s analysis and assessment of the book’s ability to spark discussion, expand student horizons, and challenge student growth. Some years, there is little change in the roster of readings in a given course; some years several new texts are introduced.
Grade level teams establish consistent goals for the classwork in each grade. As Linnea Ogden, chair of Lick-Wilmerding’s English department, explains, grade level teams make decisions based upon a “feedback loop between a text, the year’s theme, and its guiding questions.” While freshman teachers stay in almost exact step with each other, classes begin to diverge from each other in subsequent years. Sophomore and Junior year teachers continue to teach the same books, with each section’s slight variation reflective of their varied interests.
Freshman year, the department strives to introduce all students to the same skill level of writing – a difficult task when teaching students from over 60 middle schools. As each student comes in with distinct and disparate experiences, the year’s goal is to provide all students with an equitable base of skills on which they can build. The English department summarizes the ninth grade mission: to “bring students in from…different middle schools and explicitly give them a common set of classroom, reading and writing skills that they will build on in future English classes at Lick.”
Sophomore year, students read and write about books from across the world. The reading in English is loosely aligned with the history department’s sophomore World History class. Led by guiding questions centered around systems of power and community relationships, students read a broad array of texts detailing stories set across India, Nigeria, Haiti, and Greece.
Junior year, students delve into American literature, reading American classics such as Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – as well as works by Octavia Butler, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Through discussions as well as critical and narrative writing, they examine their relationships to their communities, their own personal story, and their voice.
Senior year, students can choose from an array of semester-long English seminars. With choices varying each year, students have the oppurtunity to take two seminars – one each semester. Courses offered span a diverse range – from Gender and Sexuality in Literature to Race and Mixed Race in United States Literature to a seminar on the Literature of Protest: Coates and Shakespeare. One seminar is devoted to reading and writing short stories.
In 2015, Dr. Catherine Fung, a Lick-Wilmerding English teacher, spearheaded the effort to diversify assigned books for ninth through eleventh grade classes. At the time “two-thirds of books were white male focused” and “one-half of assigned books were British Literature.” In 2017, J.D. Saliger’s Catcher in the Rye was swapped out for Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – a novel by Benjamin Sáenz featuring two queer characters of color. That same year, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, Bich Minh Nguyen’s Asian-American novel, replaced Spanish-Canadian Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as the freshman year summer reading.
Beyond diversifying its reading lists, the English department has introduced another major change in recent years: trigger warnings. In 2016 Dr. Nikkia Willow-Mintz – Lick-Wilmerding’s guidance counselor — offered herself as a resource for students reading difficult or disturbing texts. As such, students now receive brief introductions to potentially triggering scenes and are offered Dr. Willow-Mintz’s guidance in advance. The English department has since embraced the practice, and students now receive a visit from Dr. Willow-Mintz before reading books such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which includes an instance of sexual assualt.
Finally, while the English department does not explicitly consider students’ attitudes towards a particular novel, “liking” a book is an issue the student body* impresses deeply upon the department. Potiki by Patricia Grace is one example of a book that has, as Ogden describes, “become a joke among many students.” Ogden noted that sometimes disdain stems from unfamiliarity. “Potiki is written by a woman of color in a way that is not particularly western,” she stressed, identifying the connection between the book’s position in the literary canon and students’ attitudes towards the novel. Students interviewed, however, emphasized that their disliking of Potiki did not stem from the culture in which it is set but is rather a matter of personal taste. Many cited the well-recieved The God of Small Things as an example of a non-western book written by a woman of color that is both taken seriously and enjoyed by Lick-Wilmerding students.
All in all, the English department stressed the importance of student learning and exposure to a wide array of texts over student enjoyment. As Dr. Fung summarized: sometimes the book that will be “the most valuable will not necessarily be the book out of which you get the most pleasure.”
