The Library In the Margin
Opens September 2026

The fall term begins with poetry and ends in prose pared to the bone — fifteen weeks of learning to notice a single line, a turn, a held breath, and to give a great book the slow attention that lets it answer back.

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Part of The Art of Attention — the high-school literature year.
A full feast
Literature · Language Arts · Nature Study · Art, Music & Poetry
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The Shape of the Term
Fifteen weeks, one habit
Six weeks of poetry
The first half of the term. Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Hopkins, and others — learning to notice a single line, reciting a poem from memory, and writing one of your own in imitation.
Six weeks in Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, where the same attention meets prose stripped to the bone.
Three culminating weeks
A Great Conversation seminar, an in-class composition, and the first 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 poem from memoryOne poem recited from memory, not just read from the page.
  • 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 fisherman, 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 poem each week — a second Hopkins or Dickinson to read on your own and bring back.
  • ✦ An independent close reading of a single passage from The Old Man and the Sea.
  • ✦ An extended composition that sets a third voice beside the novel — a poem, or a thinker on endurance.

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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