Many freshmen coming into one of Nashville’s top public high schools are competent and fluent readers, but have a hard time reading deeply, making ninth grade a challenging year.
In general, English teacher Emily Moore said, nearly all of the freshmen she teaches at Hume-Fogg Academic High School — a magnet school in downtown Nashville a few blocks from Music City’s famed honky-tonks — have no experience in text analysis.
“They’re all great readers,” she said, noting that nearly 90 percent are reading at grade level. “But I have a hard time getting them to engage with the text, read for understanding and deeper meaning. I have a hard time getting them to read and think and write critically about fiction and nonfiction alike.”
Because of the advanced academics at Hume-Fogg, Moore and the team of English teachers have created standards that go above and beyond end-of-course exams and Common Core standards, and instead prepare them to take AP English in their junior and senior years.
Their English standards are broken down into categories: analysis of fiction; analysis of nonfiction; writing and essay writing in general, covering almost exclusively analytical writing (a big shift from middle school); vocabulary acquisition (a schoolwide program); and universal concepts in reading composition, using major texts of the English canon.
