Each high school English course shares the following goals: to achieve grammatical proficiency, to build a wide-ranging vocabulary, to develop critical reading skills, and to become skilled writers in a variety of contexts.

American Literature & Composition:
The main goal of American Literature & Composition is to encourage students to read, write and discuss literary works critically and with energy and imagination. Through the close reading of short stories, novels, epics, plays, and poems, students consider a work's structure, style, and themes as well as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone. Further, students will learn how to respond to, interpret, and evaluate great works of literature. Readings include works of fiction, poetry and drama in American literature by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Stephen Vincent Benet, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, John Cheever, Ernst Hemingway, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickenson, Willa Cather, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy and Flannery O' Connor, among others.

A.P. English Language & Literature:
The main goal of A.P. English Language & Literature is to encourage students to read, write and discuss literary works critically and with energy and imagination. Through the close reading of short stories, novels, epics, plays, and poems, students consider a work's structure, style, and themes as well as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone. Further, students will learn how to respond to, interpret, and evaluate great works of literature. Readings include works of fiction, poetry and drama in British literature by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Thomas de Malory, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Joseph Conrad, G.K. Chesterton, H.H. Munro (Saki), P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde, and Graham Greene, among others.

World Literature & Composition
The main goal of World Literature & Composition is to encourage students to read, write and discuss literary works critically and with energy and imagination. Through the close reading of short stories, novels, epics, plays, and poems, students consider a work's structure, style, and themes as well as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone. Further, students will learn how to respond to, interpret, and evaluate great works of literature. Readings include works of fiction, poetry and drama in World literature in translation by: Euripides, Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Miguel Cervantes, Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekov, and Honore de Balzac, among others.

A.P. English Language & Composition
A practical study of the art of effective and persuasive writing. By introducing students to the classical rhetorical tradition, the course enables the student to achieve greater proficiency in exposition, argumentation, and persuasion. readings of nonfiction works and speeches include works by Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Johnson, Orestes Brownson, John Henry Newman, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, Tom Wolfe, George Orwell, Mark Twain, E.B. White, Hilaire Belloc, and G.K. Chesterton among others.