American high school junior class curriculum?

Weeellll ... that was *mumbletygrumble* years ago for me, but ...

In AP English we read Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Jane Eyre, The Glass Menagerie, Hamlet, and Macbeth, among other things. It was a composition-heavy class to prepare us for the AP tests. We had one in-class and one out-of-class essay every week. The teacher graded like a fiend on all points: grammar and compositional quality as well as quality of literary analysis.

There were three levels of math courses. Two-years-accelerated was taking Discrete Mathematics (which included precalculus--dunno why they called it that, everything in my college derivational calculus was a repeat), one-year-accelerated was taking Algebra 3/4, also called "Functions, Statistics, and Trigonometry", not-accelerated was taking Algebra 1/2.

Social studies was over. There was only a two-year requirement there.

Most people were in their second year of foreign language, at that point.

Science courses were mixed up. There was biology, chemistry, and physics, and you chose one of those to take two years of, and took only one year of each of the others. Most people took biology early and physics late.

The information that you want s probably somewhere on this site.


http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/cwp/view.asp?a=2618&q=322592

My daughter in in the 11th grade in North Carolina, so I can offer up some ideas.

- She's in AP English. They just got done reading IN COLD BLOOD, by Truman Capote. The read Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH and Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER. THE GREAT GATSBY was their summer reading and her friend's class also has tackled MOBY DICK.

- Pre-Cal is common, as is something called Discrete Math (which I have no idea what that is.) Students ahead in their scheduling might take AP Statistics or Calculus in their junior year.

- My daughter is taking AP US History this year. Non-AP students would probably be in American History II in their junior year.

- As it happens, she's also taking Spanish. She's in her second year, but high school students at this age could be in any level 1, 2, 3, 4. They haven't watched any film or television in Spanish, but they do have a letter writing exchange with some students in Nicaragua.

ETA - If you have any specific questions, I'm happy to ask her for you.