Faculty Approve Author-Based Winter Term English Electives

Faculty approved the English department’s proposal for new winter term electives last Monday. According to the new plan, seniors who take the winter electives will focus on one author, selecting him or her from a list of 23 choices. The fall term courses will remain as genre-based electives, and the spring term electives will remain as the same thematic, topical, regional and interdisciplinary courses as before. On the other hand, several courses were removed for the 2016-2017 academic school year, including “Creative Nonfiction—The Ones that Got Away,” “William Faulkner and His Influence,” “Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” “Great Books,” “Short Stories,” “Creative Writing Winter,” and “Humor in Writing.”The 2015-16 school year was the first year the English department offered a completely elective based senior year. Previously, seniors were required to take English 410 and 420 in the fall and winter terms respectively, and only in the spring were they allowed to select their courses.Last year, the department developed the current fall term genre-based electives. The department withheld the author based winter term electives for this year and decided to offer the spring-only electives in both winter and spring.

“I love the shift to an all elective year for our seniors.”

Thus this year, the English department drafted a list of twenty three authors for students to select from. Ellen Wolff, instructor and chair of the English department, commented that the new all-elective senior year will offer students more options as they fulfill their English requirements.“We chose authors whose work is appropriately challenging for seniors, and who represent a range of periods, genres and voices,” Wolff said.The list of chosen authors features a wide variety of writing styles. The authors range from poets and novelists to playwrights—a myriad that provides options for all interests. The list allows seniors to choose from writers of classic novels, such as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Herman Melville. However, there are also relatively new writers such as Zadie Smith, a contemporary British writer. The list is also racially diverse, including Native American author Louise Erdrich, Chinese-American poet and novelist Ha Jin, African American novelist Toni Morrison and more.Some teachers have expressed concerns after their current experiences with the elective-based courses. There have been some difficulties this year with the electives as teachers have had to cut certain topics out of their curriculum to make time for meditations in winter term.Despite this minor inconvenience, English teachers are enthusiastic about the all-elective senior year. Many believe that the new courses will improve the organization of classes.“I love the shift to an all elective year for our seniors. It gives our students more flexibility to choose when they are going to fulfill their English requirements and it allows students to take more English classes,” English instructor Lundy Smith said.While the English department is confident in their new system, students are conflicted about the gains and losses of each program. Seniors who are currently writing their meditations find it difficult to switch from studying a topic of poetry or humor to settling into a long written narrative piece.“I think in relation to the meditation, the old system of senior English classes probably works better because you have more time as a class to focus on analyzing and learning how to do the meditation,” senior Keji Oladinni said.Senior Will Rau agreed with Oladinni, adding that finding time to both write his own meditation and help classmates edit theirs has been demanding on top of the normal coursework. Rau continued and said that although the new system still needs improvements, it is more interesting than the old one and allows them to focus on their passions.“The current system allows students to specialize and specify their interests—there is a course for everyone,” Rau said.The author-based course selection for winter term looks promising to several students as it retains the positive aspects of the old system while remedying some of its shortfalls and allowing students to choose courses that interests them. Uppers, who will be directly impacted by the change next year, are enthusiastic for the new change especially since it will broaden the topics they can pick from.Upper Emily Vaccaro is looking forward to the course changes. She believes that she and other students will advance their knowledge and go in greater depth with the single author-focused classes. “I think it will be interesting to see what kind of authors and genres they offer and I think it would be neat to go in depth into one author’s style of writing,” Vaccaro said.Upper Caroline Davis said that a diverse pool of authors would spark discussion outside of the classroom. “My friends and I often compare the different books our English teachers choose, but now that we get to choose our own authors and topics it will allow us to find our own passions for writing and literature,” Davis said.Contributions from Rose Horowitch