English

English Department Chair:  Joseph Billeter

Welcome to the College Park High School English department! Here we will provide information about the English teachers, classes, programs, and organizations. The English department strives to engage all students in active and participatory learning with the hopes of creating lifelong readers and writers.

English Courses Offered:

9th grade:  English I

10th grade: English II, English II Accelerated, or English Perspectives

11th grade:  English III, English III/American Threads, or AP English Language & Composition

12th grade:  English IV, ERWC, or AP English Literature & Composition

Literary Magazine

The Literature Magazine, YouthInk Literary Magazine, is a collection of student work that is displayed in a single volume at the end of the year. It is also a club with regular meetings. All genres of work ranging from photographs to poems, to short stories or artwork may be submitted. YouthInk Literary Magazine provides a chance for students to both be proud of their work as well as critique that of others. 

Portfolio Projects

Parents in our effort to increase communication and expanding our new Website, we are bringing to your attention various descriptions of projects and signature practices that students participate in, and are embedded in everyday instruction here at College Park. Portfolio Projects have been in existence the past seven years and a brief summary of this practice follows:

Each year in English classes, students are asked to collect, label, and include their “most successful” pieces in their school-wide portfolio. We define “most successful” as pieces of work of which a student is most proud. These pieces do not have to have a perfect score or be error free. Simply put, the student’s feeling of success or a resulting epiphany, as a result of this assignment, is the sole motivation for selection. The pieces, one from each academic class, are compiled during English class time at the end of the third quarter or the very beginning of the fourth quarter; rationales are written; content standards and ESLRs are discussed as there is a place on the rationale for each of these. Additionally, ninth grade students are asked to write a “Letter to the Reader” both as a reflective piece about their portfolio and practice of the letter format. Tenth and eleventh grade students are asked to write a reflective essay in which they use a piece in their portfolio as a metaphor for the school year that they have had.

English teachers read portfolios for completion and grade in English classes. At the beginning of every school year, English teachers organize the past year’s portfolios, make them available for the student’s new teacher, and create folders for new students to our school. Seniors are asked, in some classes, to write a letter to themselves at the beginning of the school year. Seniors in other classes write a reflection on their entire portfolio at the end of the school year. In all senior English classes, students are given back their portfolios on the last instructional day of their high school career.