Study of the cultural, political, geopolitical, economic, and religious factors involved in global events from the Age of Exploration and Conquest to the present day. Mastery of basic historical content, the ability to analyze and interpret both primary and secondary source materials, note-taking and research skills will be developed. Writing skills for the Social Sciences, including the development of a formal thesis, the defense of that thesis through in-class writing and a formal research paper, and identifying historical significance are a major focus. Students will also be able to trace the roots of global inequality and consider the major world events of the 20th century that continue to form our modern world.
This course meets Monday-Thursday for 50 minutes (8:00 am – 8:50 am). Students who will have morning practice or another morning commitment for the whole year that would prevent them from coming to class at 8:00 am should not take this class, as regular attendance is required.
This class is offered outside of the 9:00 am – 2:45 pm school day. Zero period Modern World History classes will be of average size. Courses offered during the 9:00 am – 2:45 pm school day will be double the average class size, team-taught by two teachers.
Chemistry in the Community (Physical Science) is an alternative chemistry curriculum that presents chemistry as a powerful way of thinking, rather than a static body of knowledge. In Chemistry in the Community, students engage with four important issues of 21st century science: energy, sources, environmental challenges, life and medicine, and material design. The focus is to use core concepts and ideas in chemistry as tools to understand these issues and the current efforts to solve them. Students build understanding of chemical ideas and phenomena in interactive activities with relevant topics, laboratory investigations, design challenges, analysis skills, and cost-benefit evaluations.
Chemistry in the Community does not satisfy the prerequisites for future honors or AP classes. Students who successfully complete this course can appeal for admission to honors or AP.
UC/CSU Subject D Approval (pending)
Spanish for Heritage Speakers 1 Honors will develop the language and literacy skills of heritage speakers. Students in this course come from Spanish-speaking family backgrounds. They speak and understand Spanish in the home, and they demonstrate some skills in reading and writing Spanish.
The course will build upon the deep knowledge that heritage speakers of Spanish bring to the language classroom. With a focus on the formal registers of Spanish, this course will advance a student’s proficiency in Spanish for multiple contexts–academic, professional, and personal. Special attention will be given to building vocabulary for specific contexts, using advanced grammar, strengthening formal composition skills, and deepening academic reading ability. In this course, students will increase their knowledge of a variety of topics including but not limited to topics such as identity, communities, world challenges, and literature from the Spanish-speaking world.
Taught exclusively in Spanish, this course is designed for heritage speakers only.
Upon successful completion of this course and the course final exam, students are recommended to enroll in further Spanish courses, such as Spanish for Heritage Speakers 2 – Honors.
*Class receives honors weighting in SI weighted GPA and UC/CSU GPA calculations
AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) is equivalent to an introductory college-level computing course that introduces students to the breadth of the field of computer science. Students learn to design and evaluate solutions and to apply computer science to solve problems through the development of algorithms and programs. They incorporate abstraction into programs and use data to discover new knowledge. Students also explore how computing innovations and computing systems work (including the Internet), explore their potential impacts, and contribute to a computing culture that is collaborative and ethical. Roughly half the course is focused on learning to program in either the Python or Javascript programming languages, but the selection of a programming language is at the teacher’s discretion while the other half of the course covers non-programming topics of computer science.
*Class receives honors weighting in SI weighted GPA and UC/CSU GPA calculations
**This class will be offered pending adequate enrollment.
***Students are required to take the AP Computer Science Principles exam in May.
English 303H fulfills all the goals of English 300 but requires the students to read several more books and to write longer and more (approximately 20) papers. These papers require a good understanding of the forms of literature in order that the students will be able to formulate and support accurate, interpretative theses about the literature under study. At the end of 303H, students usually take the AP English Language and Composition examination.
Class receives honors weighting in SI weighted GPA and UC/CSU GPA calculations.
English 300 covers the literature of the United States from the Puritan Era to the present. All the forms of literature which have been studied specifically in themselves during the first two years are now studied as they emerge historically through the imaginative lives of major U.S. authors. This course complements the study of American History, which is also taken during the junior year. The students’ writing aims at greater and greater control over the expository essay and specifically at developing analytical theses on literature. Students will write at least twelve papers during the year in various rhetorical modes including the personal narrative (at least 1), the expository essay (5-7), the synthesis essay, the timed quick-write, and the creative composition. After consulting with their teachers, students taking this course may opt to take the AP Language and Composition examination. Both this course and the honors course prepare students to pass the Junior Writing Exam taken in the second semester. Students who do not pass this exam with an acceptable score must take Literature and Composition: Non-fiction during the senior year.
The major difference between this honors course and the regular sophomore course is in the number of books that are read and their inherent difficulty, in the mode of instruction in the classroom, in the student initiative required, and in the number of writing assignments (generally 2-3 additional essays per year) along with their increasing and various difficulty.
Class receives honors weighting in SI weighted GPA
English 200 continues the course of study begun in the freshman year. Skills learned the previous year are refined, expanded, and enhanced. Basic grammar is reviewed and new material introduced throughout the year. The lower division writing sequence continues with a review of paragraph writing, which leads into the year’s emphasis on descriptive, narrative, and expository essay writing. Students will write approximately 10-12 papers in a variety of rhetorical modes. The writing becomes not only more formal, but increased in length as well with students writing multi-paragraph expository essays by the end of the first quarter. The reading of literature includes all the major genres: novel, drama, poetry, short story, and essay; however, the study of literature shifts from an organization by form to an organization by themes that reveal an insight into the human condition.
The major difference between English 100 and English 103H is in the number of books that are read and their inherent difficulty, in the mode of instruction in the classroom, in the student initiative required, and in the number of writing assignments and their increasing and various difficulty.
Class receives honors weighting in SI weighted GPA
The purpose of freshman English is three-fold: 1) to master certain grammatical material that will aid in the discussion of composition, 2) to begin a systematic approach to writing, and 3) to identify certain literary concepts in a variety of literary genres. To achieve these goals, English 100 presents the incoming students with a course of study that exposes them to the forms of literature: the short story, non-fiction essay, poem, drama, and novel. Freshman English also presents the students with various writing assignments that will start them on the process of building a personal writing style. The subjects for these assignments move from the students’ own experiences to topics related to their reading, and the movement during the course of the year is from narrative and descriptive writing to writing that is more expository in nature. Writing assignments generally will progress from one-page papers at the beginning of the year to longer essays at the end of the year. By the end of the course, the student will have written approximately 10-12 papers in a variety of rhetorical modes including creative, descriptive, narrative, expository, and literary analysis writing. The student will also have completed at least one multi-paragraph expository essay.
