Grades 7-12

General Standards

Intellectual Sandards

Writing Stnadards

Dispotitional Standards

Analyze literature that reflects the transmission of a Catholic culture and worldview. 

Analyze works of fiction and non-fiction to uncover authentic Truth. 

Analyze carefully chosen selections to uncover the proper nature of man, his problems, and his experiences in trying to know and perfect both himself and the world. 

Share how literature can contribute to strengthening one’s moral character. 

Identify how literature interprets the human condition, human behaviors, and human actions in its redeemed and unredeemed state. 

Describe how the rich spiritual knowledge communicated through fairy tales, fables, myths, parables, and other stories is a reflection on the truth and development of a moral imagination and the mystery, danger, and wonder of human experience. 

Describe the importance of thinking with images informed by classic Christian and Western symbols and archetypes, including their important role in understanding the battle between good and evil and their role in making visible realities that are complex, invisible, and spiritual. 

Explain from a Catholic perspective how literature addresses critical questions related to man, such as: How ought men live in community with each other? What are an individual’s rights, duties, freedoms, and restraints? What are a society’s? What is the relationship between man and God? Between man and the physical world? What is the nature of human dignity and the human spirit? What is love? What is the good life?  

Describe how poets and writers use language to convey truths that are universal and transcendent. 

Analyze critical values presented in literature and the degree to which they are in accord or discord with Catholic norms. 

Use imagination to create dialogue between the reader and fictional characters by entering into the lives of the characters and uncovering deeper meanings, inferences, and relationships between the characters, nature, and God. 

Explain how literature assists in transcending the limited horizon of human reality. 

Evaluate complex literary selections for all that is implied in the concept of “person”3 as defined from a Catholic perspective. 

Analyze how literature helps identify, interpret, and assimilate the cultural patrimony handed down from previous generations. 

Summarize how literature can reflect the historical and sociological culture of the time period in which it was written and help better understand ourselves and other cultures and times. 

Demonstrate cultural literacy and familiarity with the great works and authors of the world and in particular the Western canon.

Explain how the powerful role of poetic knowledge, the moral imagination, connotative language, and artistic creativity explore difficult and unwieldy elements of the human condition, which is not always explainable with technical linguistic analysis or scientific rationalism. 

Analyze the author’s reasoning and discover the author’s intent. 

Describe how the gratuitousness of literary and artistic creation reflects the divine prerogative. Explain the role of man as “maker”—as artist, poet, and creator—and how the use of language to create is reflective of our being made in the image and likeness of God. 

Explain how language can be used as a bridge for communion with others for the betterment of all involved. 

Write in various ways to naturally order thoughts to the truth with an accurate expression of intent, knowledge, and feelings. 

Use grammar as a means of signifying concepts and the relationship to reason. 

Demonstrate the use of effective rhetorical skills in the service and pursuit of truth. 

Share how literature fosters both prudence and sound judgment in the human person. 

Develop empathy, care, and compassion for a character’s crisis or choice in order to transcend oneself, build virtue, and better understand one’s own disposition and humanity. 

Display the virtues and values evident within stories that involve an ideal and take a stand for love, faith, courage, fidelity, truth, beauty, goodness, and all virtues. 

Identify with beautifully told and well-crafted works, especially those with elements of unity, harmony, and radiance of form.  

Share how literature ignites the creative imagination by presenting in rich context amazing lives and situations told by humanity’s best storytellers and most alive intellects. 

Display a sense of the “good” by examining the degree in which characters significantly possess or lack the perfections proper to a) their nature as human persons, b) their proper role in society as understood in their own culture or the world of the text, c) the terms of contemporary culture, and d) the terms of Catholic tradition and moral norms.  

Delight and wonder through the reading of creative, sound, and healthy stories, plays and poems.