<p>My niece is a teacher and she was telling me about one of her classes a joint American History/American Literature class. It is a double period class taught by both English and History teachers. It sounded very interesting. Our town high school does not seem to make these kind of innovations. Is something like this common in your towns?</p>
<p>At one point, our high school had one program that did just that. The school was re-structured so that program was eliminated. I sat in on one class once. The double period was too long for some of the students (this was not labeled an Honors class) but I thought the idea was great. The curricula for APUSH and AP-Lit are closely coordinated and the teachers work together closely.</p>
<p>marite- this class would be labeled an Honors class. I was told the students do phenomenal work. It is a junior year class. The teachers have to work to get a teaching pattern down. They want to co-teach not have one teach for 45 minutes and than the other teach the next 45 minutes. My niece tells me she had to learn a lot of history since she is the English teacher. It seemed to excite the teachers and the students which is never a bad thing.</p>
<p>Our school uses a similar system with all English classes (exception-APs) taught in conjunction with another class. They range from Cultural Foundations, Amer Lit/Amer Studies, World Lit/World Studies to senior seminars of Ethics, Conservation Bio, Creative Mind, Sustainability and Film in Society, which all combine English with another discipline. Classes are 2 periods long with 2 teachers, sometimes combined and sometimes separated (classrooms have retractable walls).</p>
<p>I like the idea, especially for Honors. As I said, the class I observed was not designated Honors (that particular program did not have an Honors track) and for the less advanced students, it seemed overlong. But it certainly worked well for some and the teachers were really impressive.</p>
<p>The public high school I went to for two years had this class. It was an honors class and for sophomores. It was a really great class, popular, and had two really good teachers. I really enjoyed it.</p>
<p>It’s not a new idea.</p>
<p>More than 30 years ago, I was in a high school class like that. It was intended for honors-level 11th graders, and it was very interesting. Rather than having a general survey course in U.S. history, we studied several specific periods and themes in U.S. history intensively. At the same time, in the English component of the course, we read novels and nonfiction books related to the same periods or themes.</p>
<p>The main difficulty was scheduling. Students in this course had to have that two-period block available, and it was hard to arrange that, given all the variations in the other courses they might be taking.</p>
<p>Marian- that is exactly how the class is structured. Last year they were able to have 2 sections of the class but this year only 1.</p>
<p>As a high school student (not a parent), I feel implored to comment that in many schools, this style of class is not an innovation. At my high school, we have two English/History combo classes. They are both just excuses to teach 50 person classes instead of 25 person classes.</p>
<p>As a student I’m not sure if I would not appreciate classes of different disciplines (regardless of common themes) were combined. Often, especially during stressful days, I feel as though I’m escaping the stresses of one class by jumping into a different one. I like my boundaries - they give me a chance to take a breath and start over.</p>
<p>The school from which S1 graduated in June has this - it’s an honors level class for 11th graders. It’s popular, year after year, and very challenging.</p>
<p>belle92, you have a point.</p>
<p>In the school I attended, a good student who didn’t like the combined course (or whose schedule made it impossible to enroll) had the problem of having to take the “regular” classes, which were the usual disciplinary zoo. So we were kind of forced into the program. </p>
<p>Another thing that needs to be done is to coordinate this program with the rest of the English curriculum. To make it work, the students need to read exclusively American literature (or works by non-Americans that are relevant to the American experience) during the year when they take the special class. Therefore, they don’t read the other books that usually would come up that year – such as their annual dose of Shakespeare. Those other books need to be incorporated into the curricula for the other three high school years, and at least some of the American literature usually taught in the other years should be eliminated to make room for them.</p>
<p>Despite all of the above, it was still a good program. It was very interesting, for example, to read stories of immigrant experiences at the same time that we were studying immigration in the history component of the course, and to read Civil War stories and diaries when the history part of the course focused on the Civil War.</p>
<p>A course like this was what my DOD junior high offered by way of gifted education in the 1970s. History and English were combined in 8th grade and each quarter, in addition to a fairly writing-intensive program, we had to do four projects. I learned to embroider and created a colonial-style sampler, which I still have. Turns out this was the basis for some of my major creative work!</p>
<p>S2’s middle school humanities program also had a combined curriculum – he loved it.</p>
<p>As sophomores, our students are offered a joint AP World History/honors English class. Students may take the AP World exam in May.</p>
<p>As juniors, students are offered a joint AP US History/honors English class; again, many students take the AP US History exam in May.</p>
<p>In both cases, the classes are also offered separately, for those who do not wish to take the “block class”. Especially as juniors, many students opt to take AP US history and AP Lang separately, instead.</p>
<p>It works well when the teachers are talented and are committed to working together. It works only OK if one of the teachers is weaker than the other. In the case of my younger child, the English teacher in the 10th grade block class took a back seat, and the writing instruction was not what it should have been.</p>
<p>The idea is fine, but the teachers have to work together well and a lot of planning and coordination is required to really carry it off.</p>
<p>At our HS there has been a year-long senior honors class called “Humanities” for quite a while. It was developed and taught by the heads of the English and History departments, and involved art history, history, philosophy, and literature. Each student was also required to develop a “masterwork,” which could be pretty much anything: a body of work in an art or craft medium, a project of some kind, learning to play a new instrument, a graphic novel, a movie score, a magazine, an expedition, building a canoe… The masterworks were presented at the end of the year, and I think that the experience of creating and presenting them was extremely valuable for many kids.</p>
<p>Not even close to an AP class but in the same vein…a friend’s soph. S is taking an elective class at our local charter high sch. called Long Distance Running Apprecitation. It’s not a PE class.
The kids (no athletic experience req.) are required to read four teacher selected books, both fiction and non-fiction, related to long distance running. They have to discuss and write papers about each book. Twice a week, the class goes out and runs together(at school) with their teacher, an English teacher who’s also a dedicated runner.</p>
<p>I think interdisciplinary learning tends to be more immediate, exciting, and inspiring, (it’s more like life!) and I’m involved with a charter middle school that does that in so many ways. My daughter had American history/literature in 8th grade and loved it. Now it’s back to the big public school. Some wonderful teachers, but any innovation is difficult-- and getting more difficult by the minute as standardized tests become ever more central. Makes me sad.</p>
<p>I had a class like this back when I was in high school - we still met separately most of the time, but the teachers coordinated. It was the entire freshman class and there were mulitple sections - we still never had more than 15 in the classroom at the same time - except for the rare occasions when the history teacher for example gave a slide show lecture about Greek art. </p>
<p>My son’s high school has all juniors take US History and all juniors read American Lit. They try to read things at about the same time chronologically though it doesn’t always line up perfectly.</p>
<p>It’s easier to integrate social studies and English in middle school as it is often the same teacher who is in charge of both. This integration was actually at the core of the curriculum in our k-8 school and produced excellent results. For one unit, the students not only learned history and geography, wrote many papers including some that required outside research, but also produced poems and short stories and mounted a play.
But beside having the same teacher for different fields, the students also have the same schedule. This is rather harder to achieve in high school.</p>
<p>One of the schools my kids attended had a 10th grade course that combined Latin III with Roman History, taught by one history teacher and one Latin teacher. The centerpiece of the fall was writing a paper, based on original source materials in Latin, taking a position on whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon before or after the Senate took some action that was hostile to him. The only problem was that, if a student was relatively weaker in either Latin or history, his grade tended to migrate to the lowest common denominator. Also, it took about 50% more work than any other two courses combined. But it was sensational.</p>
<p>In 9th grade, my son had integrated, double-period English and Social Studies, but to be honest I never knew exactly what they were covering with it. He worshiped the teacher, though.</p>