Wondering what’s offered for upper-level English classes? Watch this video to hear directly from Dion Mote, VSA Teacher.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

So we do have about seven English electives that are offered after Composition II and some of these courses are only offered opposing summers. For instance, this summer, we will be offering novels of Jane Austen, but that won't be offered again for two years.

So if you're interested in some of these courses and you are a diploma student, get with your Academic Advisor because they can direct you when these courses will be hosted the next time. But just as a summary, we have a fiction Writing workshop that is a Dual Enrollment class offered during the school year, and it's offered every year.

We also offer Creative Writing this summer. I don't know if it will be next summer, but we for sure will have it this summer. Novels of Jane Austen is a summer class, and that is a Dual Enrollment class, and it will not be offered in the summer of 2024 unless the teachers change their mind. But at this point, it's going to be offered again in 2025– the summer of 2025.

We are not offering science fiction this summer, but it will be on the course catalog for the summer of 2024. And then poetry is a school year class. It's Dual Enrollment. Shakespeare will be offered in the summer of 2024. It's not offered this summer. And then, finally, Fairy Tales is offered during the school year. It is not yet Dual Enrollment, but I think it's in the process of potentially becoming approved for Dual Enrollment.

So these English electives are typically classes that are taken by our 11th and 12th graders. The prerequisites for these classes as you can see, most all of them have prerequisites of Composition II or comparable course and the age of 14. There is one exception. Creative Writing is one exception. The prerequisite is Comp I, and the age of 13.

But you'll notice for almost all the others, it's recommended that the students are on the older end of high school and that they have had Composition II. All of these courses require reading along with writing. So they're reading literature alongside their writing and their critique of that literature. So those are just a few of the electives, or actually, those are the elective that we offer for English.

We have just a few minutes, maybe just 3 to 5 minutes remaining for questions, and I would welcome you to type your questions into the chat box, and I will try to answer them. And then we have a couple of our teachers that have been able to stay with us. I don't know if you know, but many of our teachers teach night classes for our students that are in different time zones. So they've moved on to teach their evening classes. So I'll do my best to answer your questions.

I see one already. Katie, Do any of the dual enrollment classes transfer as college freshman English courses or are they more like 300 level? So they all coming in around 300 level. The the typical freshman composition English course is actually Senior Thesis and that kind of falls under our logic and rhetoric and subject header. But senior thesis is that the typical freshmen composition course but these do come across as a literature like a 300 level literature.