I'm teaching 9th grade honors English for the first time next year, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what I need to do differently for honors classes. We do poetry, Romeo and Juliet, and The Odyssey. When I had regular, we read ALL of R&J and The Odyssey in class. Basically, does anyone have any suggestions? What is a typical homework assignment like? How much homework should I assign?
When I was in English H and English AP, I remember having to read a lot on my own outside of class, like a few chapters per night. We used class time for seminar/Paedeia type discussions and presentations.
Basically, it's more outside of class reading, more literary criticism, and more discussions. The honors/AP kids are ready for a higher level. The regular and remedial classes will need more help just reading the material and understanding the main ideas.
Oh, and plan on having your kids do a lot of writing. We wrote and wrote and wrote--everything from 5-paragraph essays to 20-page papers. We did a lot of timed writing, too, where we'd go to the computer lab and compose a 5-paragraph paper on the spot. It really helped me learn to write academically.
My son is in honors English and they read the unabridged version of the Odysey while CP reads the abridged.
When I was in honors we were a year ahead, so I did 10th grade work as a 9th grader. We also read harder books than the rgular classes. When we got to 12th grade we automatically took AP English, since we did 12th grade English as 11th graders.
In my honors class I had them read higher level novels and went faster, require more writing, etc. For example, my regular kids read Forged by Fire while my Honors kids were reading LIfe of Pi, my regular kids read The Outsiders and Speak while my honors kids read North and South. When we did Romeo and Juliet my regular students read both the Shakespearian language and modern language and my Honors kids only got the original format. As far as assignments they both may have had the same assignment, however, my regular kids were graded differently than my Honors kids.
