Category Archives: Language Arts

Yearbook (cont’d) (Sieglinde)

In this twice weekly, yearlong Yearbook Class, students are co-editing, designing, and creating the 23-24 PSCS Yearbook. The  theme this year is Punk! which was decided by community process. We’re studying and learning the the intersectional history of punk, both as an aesthetic, as a sound, and as a movement—and applying it to a really cool archive of the year.

Our co-editors have already worked out the layout, timeline, and have gotten us started in Canva (easy to share, easy to organize, on the cheap). We hope to add 2-3 more folks interested in finalizing layout, writing copy, taking and organizing pictures, and creating pages/spreads in ways that capture this amazing community of humans.

The final result will be printed and shared with the community in June.

About the instructor: 20 years of graphic design, printing, and photography experience. Many years of experience with yearbook timelines, planning and layout (8th grade yearbook co-editor; High school yearbook staff).

  • Outside work: Occasional throughout the term
  • Minimum students: 3
  • Sessions per week: 2

Love Medicine – HS Literature (hannah)

Note: This class is open to high school students only.

I just read this book and felt immediately called to teach it. Big themes include Indigenous life, family relationships, intergenerational narratives, multiculturalism, oral tradition, and the pull of home. Those of you who took Indigenous Poetry may remember reading Louis Erdrich’s poetry. 

In this powerful novel, Louise Erdrich introduces several generations in the interrelated families living in and around a Chippewa or Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota. Spanning fifty years, from 1934 to 1984, Love Medicine is told through the voices of a series of vivid characters, mostly Chippewa men and women who are caught up in the emotional tangle of their families’ histories, but who struggle to gain some control over their lives. In her uniquely poetic style, Erdrich creates an intense vision of a world that is at once violent and tender, ugly and lyrical, realistic and gothic. The separate stories that make up the novel convey the subtle pressure upon the souls of people who are culturally mixed – of those whose lives are shaped by conflicting values, habits, and customs.

This is a more-advanced English class – all of the required reading will take place outside of class, giving us more time to dig into the book together. The class will include weekly discussions about the book, writing assignments, and other related creative projects.

  • Outside work: A moderate amount (e.g., 30-60 min) for each session
  • Mature themes:

Fearless English (Scobie)

How I Make My Hypnosis Recordings - Start to Finish | Giovanni Lordi
This is the class where each week, you write something you’re genuinely excited to read aloud to your classmates, mostly fiction, but sometimes other kinds of work.

I am nowhere near out of good, provocative prompts, and I’ll take ANY of my wonderful writers from fall term, as well as ANY new writers!

  • There is always work outside of class because we use class for reading your pieces aloud. You get your pieces written between classes!
  • This class is FIRE, people, based on the idea that you should only bother writing what you’re super-pumped to share. When you do this the way it’s meant to be done, it feels like being in the best writing class there ever was.
  • Outside work: A large amount (e.g, >60 min) for each session

Climate Optimism (hannah)

Note: This class is open to high school students only.

In this interdisciplinary class, we will learn about the current state of the global climate crisis. This class will be a mix of science, English, current events, and project-based learning. 

My objective is for students to come away from this class with more understanding about climate science; knowledge about movements and solutions happening locally and worldwide; and to gain skills and strategies that can be implemented immediately. And – to embody agency, power, and hope. 

Some examples of the type of work in this class: 

  • Reading, analyzing, discussing current articles from major publications about climate solutions
  • Initiating a “green team” at school who could, for example, create and implement a system for our compost and other waste – get a worm bin??
  • Researching local climate solutions and grassroot movements happening in Seattle 
  • Basic science lessons on how and why climate change is happening 
  • Study local Indigenous Science and consider how we might initiate those systems on small and large scales 
  • Learning from visiting speakers who are currently working in the environmental sector
  • Outside work: A small amount (e.g., <30 min) for each session

Poetry Lab (hannah)

This is a poetry-writing class! 

We will read lots of poetry, studying how this art form continues to change over time and across cultures. We will write lots of poetry, examining elements of the form and experimenting with different styles. You will be facilitated in different writing activities and methods in order to develop confidence and comfort with poetry-writing. 

This class requires courageousness to take the risk to write and share your work. Open to all.

  • Outside work: Occasional throughout the term

Global Graphic Novels – MS Literature (hannah)

Note: This class is open to middle school students only.

In this class, we will read two different graphic memoirs about global geopolitical events, Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook and Maus by Art Spiegelman. Both of these books have recently ended up on banned book lists in schools and public libraries across the country. 

Banned Book Club is a memoir about Kim Hyun Sook’s experience in college in South Korea in 1983. This was during South Korea’s Fifth Republic, a military regime that entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and the murder of protesters. In this charged political climate, Hyun Sook sought refuge in the comfort of books. Instead, she found herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. But in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence as the walls close in.

In Maus, Spiegelman blends autobiography with the story of his father’s survival of the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The all-too-real characters here have the heads of animals—the Jews are mice, the Nazis are rats, and the Poles are pigs—a stark Orwellian metaphor for dehumanized relations during WWII. Much of Spiegelman’s narrative concerns his own struggle to coax his difficult father into remembering a past he’d rather forget. What emerges in his father Vladek’s tale is a study in survival; he makes it through by luck, randomness, and cleverness. 

This class will include in-class reading and discussion; lessons about the historical contexts of both stories; comparing / contrasting the narrative and art style of both books; occasional writing assignments; and other creative projects.

  • Outside work: A small amount (e.g., <30 min) for each session
  • Mature themes: learning about military regimes, totalitarianism, and genocide