Opens January 2027
The spring term carries the year’s question into a forest where nothing is what it seems — fifteen weeks among lovers and fairies, asking what the night knows about love, illusion, and waking.
Enter the courseEnrolled students sign in there and enter their class code.
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The Shape of the Term
Fifteen weeks in the wood
The play, act by act
We read A Midsummer Night’s Dream slowly, dive deep
into its great speeches, memorize and record a soliloquy, and watch it performed.
A home novel alongside
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Till We Have
Faces — asking the same things about love, illusion, and waking.
Three culminating weeks
A Great Conversation seminar, an in-class composition, and the
spring squares of the Quilt.
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The Threads We Keep
Practices that run all term
- NarrationTelling back what we’ve read, faithfully, before we analyze it.
- Commonplace Journalthe Book of Attentions — the lines a student stops to notice and chooses to keep.
- Copywork & The Lively Art of WritingDeveloping real writing skill — the hand and the ear, trained together.
- A recorded soliloquyOne speech memorized and spoken aloud.
- The Relation StudiesThe “riches” — where the thread a student is following becomes tangible. They might even find a craft they love.
- The weekly Habit of AttentionA quotation to sit with and one small practice for the week.
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The Capstone
Follow the Thread
Follow one thread all the way through.
Each student follows a single thread across the term — a character
who won’t let go, perhaps a fairy queen, or a question they can’t put down —
and carries it through five pieces. The last, a painted square, joins the others on the
Great Conversation Quilt: a quilt of a season’s attention.
A Relation Study
A letter — a character or great thinker’s voice
A thesis
An imitation passage
A watercolor square · the Quilt
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The Honors Path
An honors strand runs through every week, marked in the term’s color — an invitation, not a requirement. A few of the ways it might look this term:
- ✦ An extra passage each week — a speech from another Shakespeare play set beside this one.
- ✦ An independent close reading of one of the play’s great soliloquies.
- ✦ An extended composition bringing a third text into the argument — the play, the home novel, and one more voice on love and illusion.
And it all gathers into a portfolio at the end — a record of the work a student can carry into college applications.
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