The freshman and sophomore year English curriculum doesn’t prepare students pursuing the IB HL Literature courses. The workload, expectations of writing level, and literature becomes significantly more difficult between the jump from sophomore to junior year.
The expectations of reading and writing level from the first half of Marshall’s English curriculum are not nearly high enough to lay the groundwork for the workload of their final years in English. Skills such as picking out style choices are useful things to know for HL Literature, but aren’t emphasized in the lower level classes due to the curriculum. The rubrics used in IB have a higher level of expectations than just the general education and honors English classes offered to underclassmen.
At the end of sophomore year, the English classes have a film unit, where students watch movies for a few weeks. The students take notes on the camera angles, visuals and characterization displayed in the films. At the end of note taking, there was the option to use the film in a presentation that compared two works we studied in that class over the course of the year. This unit lacks value and doesn’t correlate to any of the units in HL Literature.
On top of having to analyze texts with higher density, the change in workload from year to year is drastic, which poses a challenge for many students as they have to budget their time more efficiently. Classroom discussions dive deeper into content than before and force students to have an advanced understanding of the dense literature with little allotted time to read for homework. Most of the books read beforehand are middle school level or graphic novels. The novel “Scythe,” read in English 9 Honors, is recommended for children 12 and up which proves the curriculum lacks a high level of reading. The written work is very simple and not very thought-provoking. Fast forward to IB English HL, students read high level literature every night while analyzing subtle details within the text. The change from year to year may not have a large effect on some, however it doesn’t level the playing field. Implementing a harder curriculum earlier on and conditioning the students to a high workload with dense reading material will better prepare them for their four years of English.
In English 10 Honors students also studied graphic novels such as “American Born Chinese.” Graphic novels don’t teach students the same skills to draw deeper meanings from authors such as Chekov and Shelley that are studied at the HL level. The cultural symbols of “American Born Chinese” are meaningful, but it is laid out directly for the reader to see amongst the comic strips. In the book “Frankenstein,” there aren’t visuals that direct readers to symbols and motifs in the same way, so helping students gain greater comprehension of these texts will allow them to develop more structured comments in classroom discussions.
Out of all the units from English 10 Honors, the “Homegoing” unit proved to be most useful as the novel has deeper meaning and themes to pick out. In HL Literature, students have studied global issues within texts and done a presentation analyzing author’s style choices. As “Homegoing” was more of a challenging read compared to the other texts we studied earlier on, it failed to prepare us for the multiple books and texts we look at each quarter in HL Literature and still isn’t comparable to books written in the early 19th century which use more sophisticated language.
The rolling gradebook specifically allows for improvement in HL Lit, but it would have been less stressful to have past experience using the critical and creative thinking skills necessary to excel. The rigor of IB courses is known to prepare students for college, but the foundation for these courses established by freshman and sophomore year English is lacking.