Katie Barnhart is the newest member of the English department here at Catholic Central. She is also the cheerleading coach as well as the newspaper and yearbook advisors. Katie loves being apart of the welcoming and enthusiastic Catholic Central family!
Katie is originally from New England and earned her B.A. degree in English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Most recently, she taught Freshman Writing at Marquette University while taking graduate classes in English.
This semester, Katie is teaching journalism (a first semester elective), English II (the English requirement for sophomores) and World Literature (the English requirement for seniors not in AP). Students expect to work together and balance laughing and having fun while working productively and producing high quality work at the same time.
In journalism, you see students conducting interviews, creating podcasts, and making their own TV broadcasts. In her English II and World Literature classes, you will find students writing skits and stories to demonstrate higher level understanding of vocabulary and literary devices, adopting the personas of fictional characters to work on characterization, and creating presentations to teach concepts alongside her in the classroom.
In English II and World Literature, students are consistently challenged to take their writing to the next level. Katie has students working on fiction and nonfiction writing and assigns papers where students are responsible for choosing their topic and completing their own research. Through peer review and writing workshops, the students work together as a class to improve their ability to construct a classical argument.
Katie takes a two-fold approach to the study of literature. Students work within the text itself to identify classical literary devices while examining how the work informs and is informed by history and culture. Through this approach, students are able to tease out the universal themes from works of literature . Students in English II just finished reading Fahrenheit 451 where they studied the influence of censorship, communism, and the Red Scare on the content of the novel while examining the relationship to the present day. Seniors in World Literature studied the influence of kinship, military prowess, and heroism on works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wanderer, and Beowulf.
As the sophomores begin to read Othello and the seniors begin to read Macbeth, they will learn how to see the volatility of religion and the increased secularization of society during the Renaissance through the actions and descriptions of the characters while seeing the universal human emotions of rejection, revenge, greed, and ambition.
Katie will continue this combined style of literary study as her students progress through the year. The sophomores will travel the perilous Pacific Ocean with Pondicherry in the Life of Pie and feel the pain of unrequited love with Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. The seniors will experience Amir’s guilt from lack of action and the redemption that comes from doing the right thing in the face of danger in The Kite Runner. The seniors will then continue their examination of the evolving definitions and manifestations of heroism as they engage with modern and contemporary literature and culture.
Katie has truly enjoyed getting to know the students, teachers, staff, and parents that make Catholic Central the unique and remarkable place that it is. She hopes to make Catholic Central her home for a long time!
As her cheerleaders would say, We are CCHS, Go Toppers Go!
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