Alexander T. K. Elnabli
This curriculum unit is designed for the high school English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, especially for 9th grade. It takes as its subject matter myths and spiritual texts insofar as their elements, morals, and themes recur as allusions in literary and philosophical traditions we call the “humanities.” By concentrating on developing students’ abilities to identify and interpret allusion to culturally and literarily significant myths in more contemporary texts, this unit affirms that high school-level literacy that prepares a student for continuing higher education benefits from substantive content knowledge that enables one to participate in the humanities as a tradition rather than as a disparate set of texts. The texts proposed in this unit are in no way exhaustive, but their merit rests in the fact that they are highly alluded to and, thus, provide valuable knowledge that will enable students to make sense of other high school and college literature that references them.
The unit is planned to take up approximately one academic quarter composed of 15, 90-minute class sessions which meet every other school day. Depending on the skill level of your students, you may find this unit appropriate to start the year or to come sometime later. As written, the unit includes explicit instruction in reading, writing, and discourse habits that will be expected of students throughout the entire school year. You may cut some of the explicit instruction if you teach this unit later in the year when students have already been trained in these habits. The backward design philosophy informing this unit is grounded in McTighe and Wiggins’s Understanding by Design.
