Current Courses

Honors English 10

This course's main purpose is to analyze literature and expository texts in greater depth and produce more complex writing assignments. This year-long course utilizes a variety of literary forms, genres, and voices to help students advance their reading, writing, listening, speaking, and analytical skills to develop language arts skills to fully prepare  student for an honors, AP, or college-level course in their junior year. As an honors course, students may be expected to read a greater quantity of texts which may be longer, more complex, or more mature.

Honors American Literature / Contemporary Composition

In this 11th grade honors course, differentiation strategies of acceleration/pacing, depth, complexity, and novelty are used. Writing instruction and carefully designed prompts should aim at enabling students to express complex and interrelated ideas with clarity and a mature, sophisticated style. The course will be demonstrably more challenging than regular college preparatory sections, requiring more extensive and challenging reading assignments; more

frequent, complex, sustained writing assignments; and written examinations, including a comprehensive written final examination.

Journalism 1 / 2

In this class, students will compose news articles fit for online publication on the Taft Tribune website, will have the opportunity to choose the topics they write about, will be exposed to a variety of types of journalistic writing (like writing for news, sports, and opinion etc...), and will have the opportunity take on leadership roles such as editors and section leads. They will revise articles to highlight the individual voice, improve variety and style in ways that are consistent with the purpose, audience, and genre (school news v. world news). Students will also have opportunities to develop experience with online newspaper design and layout, revision and editing, and publishing using digital tools and media for our online-only newspaper.