Welcome to Open School English! 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 Susanne Hollingsworth, 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. Bridget’s talents and interests serve as a nice balance to Leo’s. Her specialties include Shakespeare, theater, public speaking, and poetry. Bridget also runs the school’s theater a program. As you might imagine from the school’s artistic director, Bridget’s classes tend to have a strong dramatic element – much to the delight of our students. Bridget has lived and worked around the world and her literature courses have an international flavor. She hand picks her curriculum to meet the range of student talents and interests.