Humanities

Freshman English introduces students to a variety of literary genres, including short stories, novels, and poetry. The class emphasizes personal writing and class discussion as strategies for exploring literature and its connections with life. The different units include relevant non-fiction for two reasons: to build needed background knowledge and to teach annotation and summary strategies. The course reviews grammar and usage, as well as sentence structure and paragraph development. It also includes practice in different types of writing, from responses relating personal experiences to fiction reading, to more academic prose and even student-authored short stories.

This course focuses on advancing Tenth Grade students’ reading and writing skills and stresses the importance of considering a text within the background of the time and place of its writer and its setting. Units include works by major American and other English-language authors, and they also teach relevant non-fiction in order to build needed background knowledge and to teach annotation and summary strategies. The course deepens understanding of grammar and usage, especially in the understanding and composition of complex sentences, and includes focus on strategies for paragraph development.

English 11 focuses on short stories, novellas, and memoirs by American authors with the aim of  teaching students about how narratives are constructed and about different techniques that authors use to engage readers and to convey their messages. Topics include the definition and nature of narrative, plot analysis, masterplots, character types, imagery, symbols, allusion, and more. Units include relevant non-fiction in order to build needed background knowledge and to reinforce annotation and summary strategies. Ongoing instruction in descriptive grammar and sentence analysis builds students’ appreciation of literary style, as well as improving their own writing. Students use this knowledge to perform written analyses of literary fiction and are asked to do frequent revisions in order to take their writing to new levels of clarity and expression. The year ends with a unit on memoir and the personal essay to prepare students for writing their college essays.

Juniors in AP Language and Composition class are challenged to engage as readers, writers, speakers, and problem solvers in their world. The AP English Language and Composition course aligns to an introductory college-level rhetoric and writing curriculum, which requires students to develop evidence-based analytic and argumentative essays that proceed through several stages or drafts. Students evaluate, synthesize, and cite research to support their arguments. Throughout the course, students develop a personal style by making appropriate grammatical choices. Additionally, students read and analyze the rhetorical elements and their effects in non-fiction texts, including graphic images as forms of text, from many disciplines and historical periods.  Over the course of the year, students uncover and polish their own powers of communication through discussion and debate, building vocabulary, and engaging in an intensive speaking, writing, and revision process.

In Senior English, students start the year by returning to the writing of memoir and personal essays, this time with a stress on giving the narratives an arc. In other words, students will learn to take episodes in their lives and turn them into stories of change and discovery. Units on a variety of topics hone reading to learn skills and give students a chance to write and respond to readings academically and creatively. Time is also devoted to the fine-tuning of grammar, mechanics, and rhetoric in preparation for college-level writing. The spring term dovetails with the Senior Evaluation sessions with its focus on “What is the good life, and how do you lead it?” Texts from Genesis to Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics help students explore this ultimate question.

World History is a year-long required survey course that explores the key events and global historical developments since 1350 A.C.E. that have shaped the world we live in today. The scope of Modern World History provides the latitude to range widely across all aspects of the human experience: economics, science, religion, philosophy, politics, and law, military conflict, literature, and the arts. The course highlights connections between our lives and those of our ancestors around the world. Students uncover patterns of behavior, identify historical trends and themes, explore historical movements and concepts, and test theories. Students refine their ability to read for comprehension and critical analysis; summarize, categorize, compare, and evaluate information; write clearly and convincingly; express facts and opinions orally; and use technology appropriately to present information.

This course introduces students to the history of the United States with an emphasis on the transformative events of cultural, economic and political significance from the colonial period to the present. Questions for student exploration throughout the year include: 

How did cultural contact challenge the identities and value systems of people from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe? Can political freedom exist without an economic foundation? Does equality in a democratic society depend upon government action? Students will explore these and other enduring questions through the period of the Revolutionary Era, the Constitutional Convention, Jacksonian Democracy, Antebellum slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The course is bookended by an examination of important events of the 20th Century from the Great Depression and New Deal to the Cold War Era and the Civil Rights Movement.

The class will address themes including but not limited to the politics of race, class, and gender, and the social upheaval of migration, economic transformations, and interrogate the idea of American exceptionalism. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to think critically about these topics, and in the process, develop important intellectual and analytical tools, including how to structure an argument, write a paper, and deliver a presentation.

This class will focus on subjects that mainstream academia has either ignored or has not been able to answer. 

Subjects the course will delve into may include: aliens, UFO's, missing people, ghosts, paranormal activity, cryptoids, questions of identity, and cases that have not been solved. We will also spend time looking into whether the timeline of history is accurate.

This course encourages students to think about history critically and to question our understanding of the past. Students consider the roles of policymakers, leaders, laborers, families, minorities, and citizens of other countries in shaping how the United States of the 21st century looks and operates. The class uses selected events and characters from the twentieth century to hone their analytical reading, writing, and research skills and to reflect on the American experience. In this course, the class will continue to work on the essential skills of the historian: summarizing, drawing conclusions, comparing and contrasting, analyzing cause and effect, hypothesizing, and making inferences.

Throughout Hyde School’s history, the study of Government as it relates to self and community is a seminal part of the Senior Year experience. As stated in Hyde:  Preparation for Life, “Government teaches us about our responsibilities to the community … [it] helps us become part of the great American experiment committed to the dignity and worth of all individuals.”  Government provides students the opportunity to explore the notion of “big citizenship” – what it means to be a part of something bigger than self.  

Using the Constitution as our guide, students critically analyze relevant theories and concepts, apply them to historic and current events, and develop connections across Hyde’s curriculum. Students study the governmental institutions provided by the Constitution (Legislative; Executive; Judicial), as well as major institutions not written in the Constitution (media; political parties; interest groups).  The goal of Senior Government is not to tell students “what” to think; instead, the goal is to teach seniors “how” to think in order to strengthen their capacity for reasoned judgment.

Students in Senior Government are assessed not only on their academic performance, but also on their contributions to the Hyde community (both inside and outside the gates) and their commitment to Hyde’s words, principles, and inner leadership deliverables.

AP U.S. History is a rigorous full year course, designed to provide students with a college-level academic experience and prepare them for the Advanced Placement examination on May 9th, 2025. In the first trimester, students will examine transformative events of cultural, economic and political significance to the development of “America” beginning with European settler colonization in the 16th century, bookended by the United States’ first experiment in bi-racial democracy during the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War in the 1860s. The course emphasizes two key skills: reading comprehension (the textbook, primary sources, and historians' interpretive essays) and analytical and interpretive essay writing. We will find ourselves reading and wrestling with a broad array of primary source testimony and secondary source historical interpretations.