Ms. Lauren Mellander, an English teacher at IHS, has crafted and taught one of the most highly demanded and richly interdisciplinary classes offered at IHS. Next year, she’s teaching a new class geared towards sophomores who have a passion for history and literature: English Honors Humanities 10. Utilizing class projects, Greek Olympic Day, the Palio, Victorian Tea, and historical field trips, the class studies connections between works of literature and their historical contexts in greater depth than the other 10th-grade English classes offered at IHS.
Although it’s technically a new course offering, English Honors Humanities 10 is an evolved form of what has been the Combined Global 10 and English class, which had been taught for decades at IHS until it received a fatal blow last school year.
“The choice of making an AP European History class put a nail in the coffin,” said Ms. Mellander, who taught Combined and will teach the humanities class next year. When former principal Jarrett Powers introduced the AP course to the social-studies department for the 2015–16 school year, the English class had to be adjusted to a new curriculum that was different from the traditional Global 10 curriculum.
Due to the onslaught of the AP class, which has turned into a currency of college admissions and school reputation, the innovative, meaningful, and interdisciplinary course of Combined is no longer.
The alignment between the two classes has been dismantled. “The AP class is on World War I now; we’re still finishing The Tale of Two Cities,” Ms. Mellander said. In addition, ancient history is not covered in AP European History at all, which has forced Ms. Mellander to drop Beowulf and Antigone from the English curriculum. She added that the new Global 10 curriculum has also changed such that the traditional Combined class would no longer work.
On top of the problems with curriculum alignment, Ms. Mellander has also seen a shift in the types of students who enroll. Previously, the Combined class was targeted towards students with a genuine interest in the marriage between the humanities and global studies. Now, the AP has pulled a different group of interested students who are taking the AP side for credit but may not necessarily want what is offered in the English component. The AP exam has also created pressure for the Global component, diverting focus away from the English side, especially at the end of the year when several major projects are due.
Ms. Mellander and Mr. Peter Kelly, the AP European History teacher, don’t have a common period to prepare together, which complicates things even more.
Ms. Mellander’s new class aims to bring back some of the lost elements of the Combined class and continue the core projects. Overall, the new course will be similar to what English was like for a Combined student, Ms. Mellander said.
Although the class will not be as well-aligned with the social studies curriculum, students interested in studying literature from a historical context will be able to take her class while taking AP European History, since the two are now separate classes. Another positive change will be more focus on primary sources, which the new Common Core English standards call for.
“I’m sad that the Combined course is done,” Ms. Mellander said. “But the humanities pairing is what lots of students want access to and I’m very excited about the potential for this new course. We lost Antigone and Beowulf, but it also opens the door to newer texts. It’s always fun to do something new.”