11th Grade Curriculum

In the 11th grade curriculum, existential questions arise. Juniors learn to live with open–ended questions and begin the long path towards answers they might not expect. These classes offer concrete opportunities to set and accomplish challenging goals and take responsibility for important personal work.

Below are classes we’ve offered recently:

Mathematics

  • The focus of this class is helping students develop mathematical thinking. Students determine mathematical relationships between all operations and numbers, use this knowledge to model situations with mathematics, and reason about these situations abstractly and quantitatively. The concepts students apply conceptually in the realm of pure mathematics and then model and evaluate real world situations are as follows: real number system, expressions and equations, graphs, functions, linear relationships, exponents and radicals, polynomials, quadratic relationships, introduction to trigonometry, complex numbers, linear algebra, exponential functions, and transformations.

  • This class begins with a general review of pre-calculus concepts including graphing and modeling, different types of functions and their graphs, and inverse functions. Students then begin their study of Calculus. The topics covered include: finding limits graphically; evaluating limits algebraically; defining continuity; epsilon delta definition of a limit; finding the derivative; product, quotient, and chain rules; implicit differentiation; derivatives of inverse functions; Newton’s method; utilizing the derivative to describe a function; concavity and second derivative tests; optimization; differentials.

  • Through various geometric constructions first discovered by Pappus, Desargues, Pascal, and Brianchon, students explore the ways in which mathematicians for 2000 years flirted with the ideas which we now recognize as projective constructions. The effort moved forward when artists in the 15th century began to wonder how to depict scenes on flat paper which appeared to be three dimensional. Projective Geometry only began to be developed in the 19th century. Students come to appreciate a completely unfamiliar space of reality which is just as valid, and in fact more generally true, than the one with which we are more used to dealing.

Sciences

  • In this class, students work with and catalogue observations of celestial movements, recognizing and identifying patterns and rhythms that occur in the sky. They track the positions of planets, moons, and stars and make conclusions about their movements. Students use astronomical tools (a clinometer and a compass) to locate objects in the night sky. They measure celestial distances and review various methods ranging from early Greek to modern day techniques. The class also calculates the distance from the Earth to the Moon, planetary distances to the Sun, and the distances to stars. There is an evening field trip to the Dearborn Observatory.

  • This class covers the chemistry of elements: what is an element, what elements are commonly found in the human body, the important non-metals, the alkali and alkaline earth metals, the halogens, and some other metals and semi-metals. Students look at various properties of the elements: elemental masses, the valences of the elements in making compounds, and constant and multiple proportions in reactions. They study the structure of the periodic table and how its structure relates to chemical and physical properties. Experiments familiarize students with basic chemical reactions including combustion and metal replacement.

  • This class considers the concept of an organism from several perspectives. Beginning with experimental embryology and Spemann’s Nobel Prize winning experiments, the class considers cell-division and cell-differentiation as these appear “in vitro” within a healthy organism and in cancer cells. Thereafter, students focus on the development of genetics from Mendel to the recognition of the central role that DNA and RNA play in protein synthesis, as well as recent discoveries in the realm of epigenetics.

  • Today, life without electromagnetic technologies is almost inconceivable. For this reason, it is vitally important to understand the basic phenomenological observations which first led scientists to discover the conditions that give rise to electrical and magnetic effects. This class studies those effects, and carefully observes the conditions which create them. Both electricity and magnetism may be understood as forces that seek balance and students learn to understand such concepts as charge, field, voltage, current, resistance, and power within this framework. They go on to study technologies which harness the electromagnetic effect, such as series and parallel circuits (Ohm’s law), electric motors, generators, solenoids, and transformers. Finally, they consider how power is generated for the multiplicity of electric devices we use today, and the implications of these methods.

Humanities

  • The Enlightenment was a time when philosophers and scientists challenged one another. Rejecting the authority of church and king, they trusted the authority of their own reason and sought to discover the natural laws that governed the movements of bodies in the heavens and the society of humans on earth. This revolution in human thinking coincided with a time of political revolution. England's bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688 ushered in the period and France's bloody Reign of Terror in 1793 ended it. Students read Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison.

  • Juniors are ready for rigorous reading and thoughtful analysis. The class begins with a combination of literature and history by reading John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and considering its moral and social questions. Students complete individual research projects and presentations on the period. Units on Dante’s Divine Comedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet offer insight into Medieval and Renaissance eras and illuminate basic human questions. A unit on the Romantic Movement further illustrates the ideas of the Enlightenment. Students choose their senior project topics and write a five-page paper following MLA guidelines.

  • For ages, human beings have expressed and responded to their lives, ideas and beliefs through music.

    We will span centuries and touch on some ancient cultures and western and non-western musical traditions. Our focus will be on deepening our listening and increasing our ability to discern and appreciate what we hear, even if we don’t think we “like” it. The block will end with individual student presentations on the traditional music of countries around the world.

  • The Middle Ages are often defined as the millennium between the 5th-century fall of Rome and the 15th-century Age of Discovery. This class studies a European world cut adrift from its ancient moorings and slowly reinventing itself. The ideas of Constantine, St. Benedict, Mohammed, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Pope Urban, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marco Polo, Joan of Arc, and others illuminate themes of authority, freedom, orthodoxy, heresy, love, and war. The readings include selections from the Rule of St. Benedict, Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the poetry of the troubadours, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Students develop the ability to work logically and creatively with primary source material.

  • Parzival is a vast, complex tale of adventure and romance written in the early thirteenth century by Wolfram von Eschenbach, a minnesinger who claimed – perhaps facetiously – to be illiterate. It tells of Parzival’s journey from clownish ignorance, through sorrow and doubt to become a Knight of the Round Table and Lord of the Grail. The grail is not a cup in this story, but a mysterious stone that has power to nourish and to heal. In addition to the challenging reading, students keep a journal addressing themes of the class, to develop artistic responses to the story, and to write a final essay.

Languages

  • By the end of German III, students should have mastered the present and past verbs, including reflexives. They should be able to differentiate between the nominative, accusative and dative cases in terms of prepositions, articles, and pronouns, as well as know and apply with accuracy, dative verbs and relative clauses. Practically speaking, students should also know how to ask for products in a pharmacy, describe their injuries or illnesses, tell/recount a story in the present and past, look for a hostel while traveling, and read a short novel.

  • This class is an opportunity to study independently with the teacher. By the end of this course, students should have mastered the usage of the subjunctive cases (I and II), passive voice, phrases such as um…zu, je…desto, and da-wo compounds. Practically speaking, the students should know how to write a formal/informal letter and email, how to apply for a job, how to give a presentation, and how to defend his or her own opinion about a worldwide and/or local social problem.

  • The goal of this course is to provide the basic grammatical structures needed to communicate in Spanish. The students learn vocabulary for typical activities related to traveling in a foreign country and vocabulary pertaining to housework, shopping, weather, transportation, restaurants, and everyday life. Students learn more complex verb forms (such as the imperfect, future and conditional tenses). They also read short stories from different Latin American authors and work on two different projects for each semester.

  • In Spanish IV/V, students read El Esclavo by Francisco J. Angel. Students spend time discussing the book in order to deepen their fluency and write assignments in order to focus on their Spanish reading and writing. Their final test is to summarize the novel in a brief Spanish language essay.

  • As part of the extensive and growing global network of Waldorf schools, the Chicago Waldorf School offers a distinctive exchange program that places our High School students in Waldorf Schools across the world and welcomes exchange students and international students to visit and enroll in our school. Exchange students come to our school from diverse countries including Colombia, Chile, Austria, Switzerland, Korea, Brazil, Germany, Argentina, Kyrgyzstan, France, and Peru, among others.

Arts

  • In a deeply self-reflective block, juniors study the Art of the Monologue. Through three individual pieces—Shakespeare, contemporary, and an original composition— the students explore their own voice through the character of another. During a process of introspective, personal discovery, the 11th graders also engage in active support of one another as scene partners, directors, and coaches. The class culminates in a performance of one of their monologues for an invited audience.

  • This course introduces the students to the basics of bookbinding techniques from use of a bone folder to various styles of sewing signatures and cover design. Each student completes three different styles of books as well as one or two extras which they present in their senior year to their first grade partners from the Rose Ceremony.

  • After an introduction covering the history of publishing, students learn to create their own eBooks, incorporating text, images, photos, charts, and more. The course also covers principles of graphic design and typography.

  • Adding to the skills learned in ninth grade, in this class, students learn the components of etching and enameling. Students begin by learning to enamel pieces of copper using opaque enamels. They practice a variety of techniques for developing etching designs that are then enameled using transparent enamels. Once they have mastered these skills, they design and create an individual project.

  • The inspiration for this class is Michelangelo and contemporary artists and teachers who came out of that stream. Students study figure drawing while taking turns doing one, five, ten, and two twenty-minute poses in street clothes for the class. Beginning with a gesture sketch, students learn how to construct the figure in geometric shapes and then make the forms more organic, before finally rendering the drawing visually during a long pose of about forty minutes.

  • Students study the technique of outdoor painting in oils, striving for the color perception exhibited by French and American Impressionist painters. The teacher demonstrates the application of oil colors from the tube to canvas and students watch a video demonstration of a method of impressionist landscape paintings; then, they begin their own paintings. They paint at least two scenes outdoors on both a gray day and sunny day, returning at the same time each day to study the color. They stand up to paint at easels, juggling their palette knives, paper towels, and an egg carton filled with oil color.

Music

  • Students develop technique, hand coordination, and traditional rhythms in an ensemble. Additionally, students investigate the cultural and historical significance of the djembe drum, the oral history of each rhythm and song, and the geography of regions specific to the tradition of the djembe as well as Africa in general.

  • Chamber Ensemble is for those students who wish to continue the study and performance of music on classical instruments. The students study and perform standard orchestral works arranged for small ensemble and also continue playing both by rote and by improvisation. Listening – melody, harmony, accompaniment – is emphasized, as is technique.

  • Students learn basic musical concepts and skills with an emphasis on how they apply to guitar as well as to singing. Students learn to play chords, scales, and full songs and attain a basic proficiency in reading music.

  • Students who have a basic level of guitar skill play a range of parts (according to level of ability) that when combined, create a cohesive whole, as in an orchestra. Moving beyond unison chords, students will learn to play single line melodies and two or more notes simultaneously, in addition to broken or block chords. Students also sharpen their listening and collaboration skills. The class takes up different genres – classical, folk, rock, jazz – over the course of the year.

  • The Jazz Band plays many different styles of jazz including Dixieland, Bebop, Bossanova, Swing, and Standards. The students play at a high level on their instruments, study music theory, and improvise as part of the ensemble.

  • Vocal Ensemble is both a performance-driven chamber choir focused on the rehearsal and performance of choral and vocal music, and a supportive environment to try new things, experiment with improvisation, and have fun creating music together. The class places emphasis on vocal development, independence in part-singing, stylistic understanding, and performance technique. Time is spent on reinforcing and developing an understanding of musical notation and conducting patterns.

MOvement

  • Eurythmy is a performing art that engages aspects of dance, music, poetry, speech, and kinesthetic expression. A feature unique to Waldorf education, the beautiful, spiritual, and emotional art of eurythmy introduces students to the frameworks underlying speech and music through movement. The study of Eurythmy develops concentration, spatial orientation and dexterity, and engages students in the study of enhanced rhythms of speech and music as experienced and interpreted through the whole body.

  • At the Chicago Waldorf School, we believe every student is a mathematician, scientist, artist and athlete. In our gym program and extra programming we strive to offer a rich variety of athletic activities designed for students to explore physicality in all its aspects. Students learn fundamental movement skills through sport lead-up games, then participate in team and individual sports. From aerial circus arts to javelin to football to parkour, our students have ample opportunity to discover their interests and to develop mastery.