DEPARTMENT PHILOSOPHY:

In the Roslyn High School English department, our philosophy is based on the idea of breaking down walls. Specifically...

• the wall between literature and skills development. Our approach is twofold. On the one hand, we try to instill and develop a passion for literature in our students in an effort to make them into lifelong readers. Literature is a source of beauty and imagination, and is a mirror to help us understand who we are and our place in the world. At the same time, we focus intensely on the skills, such as writing, literacy and multimedia literacy, that are essential for success in the 21st century.

• the wall between English and other disciplines. With the arrival of FroHum, we now have a complete Humanities track in partnership with the Social Studies department. But walk into an English classroom, and you will find our teachers using art, music, film and other disciplines to shed light on the literature and to promote the kind of critical thinking and connections that denote true intelligence. Simply put, literature does not happen in a vacuum.

• the wall between the classroom and the outside world. Reading for its own sake is the noblest endeavor, a way to take you to new and unknown places and to stimulate the imagination. However, we strive to enable our students to make the connections between what we read and what goes on within their own lives and in the world at large. Great literature is great because it has something to teach everyone in every time and place.

• the wall between the old and the new. We will cover material ranging from Gilgamesh to post-9/11 novels and stories, and we will do so with tools ranging from pencil on paper to iPads.

Long Island's own Walt Whitman once wrote:

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself."

In other words, we're not going to tell you what the books mean. We're going to give you the tools so that you will always be able to figure it out for yourself.

Sincerely,

Mr. Joshua Cabat
English Department Chairperson