Tutorial House students follow a year-long program in Tutorial One and Two, the ninth and tenth grades. The curriculum also includes an elective tenth grade drama course, film course and journalism course. In the eleventh and twelfth grades, Tutorial Three and Four students select from a series of semester-long literature and writing courses as well as courses in drama, film studies, journalism and independent study. UNIS offers all levels of International Baccalaureate English with programs designed for native, near-native and non-native speakers. Many students elect to take double English one or more semesters of their last two years of High School. Students may also enroll in the International Baccalaureate theatre arts course as part of the eleventh and twelfth grade IB program or the UNIS electives program. (See the K-12 English Curriculum.)
English teachers see evidence of their students' interest and skill in writing every day, and UNIS alumni/ae, when they come back to visit, tell us that their college English professors also comment on their writing ability. The language program concentrates on frequent writing of all kinds, from creative to personal to analytic. Since students learn to write, in part, by what they read, we always select challenging reading texts with literary merit. The literature includes English and translation texts and is drawn from many countries, cultures and time periods.
Intensives provide one-on-one work with a teacher for students who would like extra help with their reading or writing in English or their other subjects. Student writing and artwork are published in a literary magazine, a general interest magazine and the school newspaper, all sponsored by the English department. Each year High School students may also participate in a full-scale Shakespeare drama production in the fall and a comedy play in the spring.
Tutorial One
Tutorial One begins with an intensive writing workshop. The ten-day program that opens the school year for the ninth graders immerses them in writing, preparing them to respond personally and carefully to the literature they study. The literature ranges from Shakespeare and vignettes to modern, contemporary and classic novels, and students model a portion of their writing on these works. Tutorial One students also have the chance to be teachers for a day by teaching poems to the class as part of the poetry portfolio project.
Tutorial Two
In their second year, we ask Tutorial Two students to read more precisely, think more independently and write more formally. Texts range from classical Greek tragedy to contemporary nonfiction. Tutorial Two is alive with drama, and all tenth graders join in the annual spring Othello festival. Drama, journalism and film studies are offered as electives.
Tutorial Three and Four
Tutorial Three and Four students in the eleventh and twelfth grades may choose from six or seven different English courses each semester, depending on their interests, abilities, International Baccalaureate program choices and plans for college. All literature courses include demanding texts, oral work and writing. Special courses in drama, film studies, journalism and independent study give students the opportunity to explore an area of interest in depth. Students may study IB English A1, a literature course for native and native-fluent speakers; IB English A2, a literature and language course for near-native speakers studying another A1 language; or IB English B, a language course for foreign language learners.
Some of the Tutorial Three and Four courses taught in recent years include: The Art of the Novel, American Myths and Heroes, Beyond Colonialism and Segregation, The Individual and Society, Latin American Literature, Short Prose Writing Workshop, Literature and Film Noir, African Poetry and Prose, Science and Literature, The Mythic World, An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Literature, Points of View, A Study of Genres, Views of Women, The Comic Spirit, Memoir, Classic Horror Fiction and Film, Plays and Playwrights, The Anti-Hero and Experimental Modern Fiction.
Among the many writers studied in Tutorial Three and Four in recent years, listed here in no particular order, are: Morrison, Findley, Boll, Atwood, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Hurston, E. Bronte, Yoshimoto, Flaubert, Huong Duong, Austen, Kundera, Blake, Patchett, Steinbeck, Ionesco, Kawabata, O’Brien, Greene, Chekhov, Camus, Kingsolver, Rodriguez, Thomas, Sacks, Hwang, Keats, Murray, Faulkner, Plath, Dickens, Frame, Chaucer, Twain, Vonnegut, Dickinson, Kingston, Aristophanes, Yeats, Galeano, Wilde, Wharton, Orwell, L. Hughes, Euripides, Allende, Mahfouz, Vargas Llosa, Huston, Akutagawa, Bulgakov, Thomas, Woolf, O’Connor, Fuentes, Hopkins, Tolstoy, Dillard, Soyinka, Brecht, Frayn, Armah, Kaufman, Esquivel, Rushdie, Hardy, Schulz, Rhys, Hemingway, Saramago, Albee, Makine, Hawthorne, Alexie, Neruda, Malcolm X, Beckett, Chraibi, Allison, Williams, Michaels, McCullers and, of course, Shakespeare.
The English area overlooks an international sculpture garden. The classrooms surround a common open study space, which can be converted into an assembly space for student performers and guest artists.