Teachers:
•Leo Bickelhaupt
•Erik Peterson-Nafziger
If you are looking for classes like English 101, you won’t find
them at Open School. Our English classes are comprehensive theme-based
courses, much like you’d find on a college campus, but rarely in high
school or middle school. Some of our most popular courses include:
• Mad Men in Literature
• Evil Minds
• Urban/Suburban Mythology
• Shakespeare
• Multicultural literature
• Teen culture
• World Literature
• Poetry
• Public speaking
Together with social studies teacher Courtney Major, we teach a class for seventh and eighth graders called Thematic Journeys, which focuses on reading, writing and research skills, using such meaty themes as:
•The Turbulent Sixties
•Genghis Khan
•The Holocaust
•African Empires
The first hour is dedicated to content-area social studies, and
students process that content and exercise their creativity in a
reading and writing workshop during the second hour. For example,
students studying the 1960s might learn about the civil rights movement
during the first hour, then write a first-person narrative based on a
newspaper photo from the 1960s during the second hour.
In high school, students choose from a wide array of classes
to help them grow as readers, writers and speakers. Leo breaks his
classes down into three categories: literature, media studies, and
creative writing. Literature classes encourage students to investigate
the choices authors make and how literature relates to life. Media
studies focuses on non fiction reading and writing. Creative writing
courses, taught in the spring, give students the opportunity to
experiment with a wide variety of fiction writing techniques. All of
these courses feature rich reading selection – not your standard high
school anthology – as well as heavy emphasis on classroom discussion.
In addition, students have the opportunity to write for a monthly
publication in our newspaper class.
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