English 12: free lessons and course outline

Twelfth grade covers a thousand years of British literature, which sounds impossible until you notice that coverage is not the point. The point is that a student finishing high school should be able to open an unfamiliar English poem, identify what tradition it belongs to, name what it is doing formally, and say why that matters. Six units, each anchored to a period and to the techniques that period invented: the alliterative line, the sonnet and the soliloquy, the heroic couplet and the Romantic lyric, the dramatic monologue and the serialized novel, modernist fragmentation, and then a documented comparative capstone. The year is built on the California CCSS ELA standards for the grades 11 to 12 band, which are recurring skills rather than topics, so they are taught where the texts call for them rather than one per lesson. Fifty-two lessons, 580 practice questions with full model answers, and six timed essay prompts in literary analysis, comparison and argument. Every text is public domain, so there is no reading list to buy.

The 36-week reading schedule. Weeks 1 to 2: the Old English alliterative line, and Beowulf lines 1 to 1250 in Gummere's 1910 verse translation. Week 3: Beowulf, the Grendel and Grendel's mother episodes. Week 4: Beowulf, the dragon and the funeral. Week 5: The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Weeks 6 to 7: Chaucer's General Prologue in Middle English with glosses, then the Pardoner's and Wife of Bath's prologues. Week 8: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Weeks 9 to 10: the sonnet, Petrarchan and English, in Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Week 11: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the opening and closing scenes. Weeks 12 to 13: Hamlet, read whole. Week 14: Macbeth, acts 1 and 2 and the sleepwalking scene. Week 15: Donne's Songs and Sonnets and the Holy Sonnets. Week 16: Paradise Lost, book 1. Weeks 17 to 18: Pope, An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. Week 19: Johnson and Gray. Weeks 20 to 21: the Lyrical Ballads preface, Tintern Abbey, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Week 22: Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Week 23: Keats's odes. Week 24: Shelley and Byron. Weeks 25 to 26: Tennyson and Browning. Week 27: Arnold and Hardy. Weeks 28 to 29: Dickens, Hard Times, read whole. Week 30: Jane Eyre, the Thornfield and Moor House chapters. Weeks 31 to 32: Yeats and Eliot's Prufrock. Week 33: Heart of Darkness. Week 34: Mrs Dalloway and Dubliners. Week 35: the war poets. Week 36: the capstone essay, drafted and revised.