Do we need to follow my school's reading list, or is there a set curriculum?

Either. Sessions can follow your syllabus text by text — Beowulf, Canterbury Tales prologue, Macbeth, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Mrs Dalloway, whatever your teacher assigned — or work through a chronological survey of the periods if you are preparing independently or self-studying for an exam.

My child reads well in modern English but freezes on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Can this be fixed?

It is usually a decoding problem rather than a comprehension problem, and it responds to reading aloud with someone correcting the pronunciation and untangling inverted word order in real time. Sessions spend early time on that mechanical layer before moving to interpretation.

How is this different from a general literary analysis or critical analysis course?

The analytical moves overlap, but this track is anchored in the British canon and its history: period-specific forms like the heroic couplet and the dramatic monologue, and contexts like the Reformation, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads preface, serialised Victorian publication, and the literature of empire and decolonisation.

Can sessions help with essays graded on a rubric?

Yes. Bring the rubric and the prompt. Work covers thesis construction, selecting and embedding quotations, MLA-style citation for verse and drama, and revising a draft you have already written — though the writing itself stays yours.

British Literature

High School (11-12) · English Language Arts

A one-on-one voice tutoring track through the British canon as it is usually sequenced in Grade 11-12 English courses: Anglo-Saxon epic and elegy, Chaucer and Middle English, the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, metaphysical and Cavalier poetry, Milton, Restoration and eighteenth-century satire, the Romantics, the Victorian novel, and Modernist and postwar/postcolonial writing. Sessions work on reading older English on the page, hearing metre aloud, and connecting a text to the specific historical pressures it was written under — the Reformation, the Civil War and regicide, enclosure and industrialisation, empire and its unravelling. Speaking the verse aloud with a tutor who can stop you mid-line is the point; scansion and Middle English pronunciation are hard to learn silently.

Start a session on British Literature

What this covers

Reading Middle English and Early Modern English directly: Chaucer's vowels and final -e, Shakespeare's thou/you distinction, inverted syntax, and when to trust a gloss versus work it out from context
Scansion and verse form — iambic pentameter and its substitutions, the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet, Miltonic blank verse and enjambment, the heroic couplet in Pope and Dryden, Anglo-Saxon alliterative half-lines and kennings
Close reading of the metaphysical conceit, Romantic ode structure, dramatic monologue (Browning, Tennyson), and Modernist fragmentation and stream of consciousness
Placing a text in its period: Reformation religious controversy behind Donne and Milton, serial publication shaping Dickens's plotting, empire and its aftermath in Conrad, Forster, Rhys, Achebe's reply, and Zadie Smith
Building a literary argument on a British text — thesis, embedded quotation with line or act.scene.line citation, and analysis of diction and form rather than plot retelling
Timed essay work on unseen passages and comparative prompts across periods (e.g. a Romantic and a Victorian treatment of the same subject)

Where learners get stuck

Reading 'thou' as formal or reverent and 'you' as casual: Modern ears associate archaic language with elevated register, and the King James Bible reinforces the idea that 'thou' addresses God respectfully. In Shakespeare the reverse holds: 'thou' is intimate, familiar, or contemptuous, and 'you' is the polite or distant form. Students who miss the switch lose the whole social manoeuvre in scenes like Viola and Olivia's or Lear's outbursts.
Treating iambic pentameter as a rule that lines obey, so any irregular line is 'a mistake' or simply ignored: Students are taught the da-DUM pattern as a definition rather than as a background expectation. The meaning usually lives in the departures — a trochaic first foot, a feminine ending, a mid-line caesura. Once they hear the norm, they can be taught to ask why a particular line breaks it.
Reading Romantic nature poetry as description of pretty scenery, and Wordsworth's speaker as the poet on a nice walk: The vocabulary looks descriptive, so the philosophical claim underneath is easy to miss: the Romantics are arguing about how the mind and the external world make meaning together, often against Enlightenment rationalism and against industrial change. Without that frame, 'Tintern Abbey' and the Immortality Ode flatten into landscape writing.

What a session looks like

Sessions run on voice. A typical hour starts with a short passage read aloud — you read, the tutor stops you where the syntax or the metre has gone wrong, and you re-read it. Then paraphrase: say in your own words what the sentence actually claims, which surfaces misreadings fast in Donne or Milton. From there the tutor asks pointed questions about form and diction, and you build an argument out loud before writing it. If you bring an assignment — a sonnet analysis, a Hamlet essay, a comparison of two Victorian narrators — the session works on your thesis and your use of evidence. Homework is usually a paragraph or a passage to prepare aloud for next time.

Helpful to know first

Comfort writing a multi-paragraph literary analysis essay with a thesis and quoted evidence
Prior exposure to at least one Shakespeare play, typically from Grade 9 or 10
Familiarity with basic literary terms — metaphor, irony, tone, speaker, narrator, symbol
Willingness to read poetry and drama aloud during the session

Questions

Do we need to follow my school's reading list, or is there a set curriculum?: Either. Sessions can follow your syllabus text by text — Beowulf, Canterbury Tales prologue, Macbeth, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Mrs Dalloway, whatever your teacher assigned — or work through a chronological survey of the periods if you are preparing independently or self-studying for an exam.
My child reads well in modern English but freezes on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Can this be fixed?: It is usually a decoding problem rather than a comprehension problem, and it responds to reading aloud with someone correcting the pronunciation and untangling inverted word order in real time. Sessions spend early time on that mechanical layer before moving to interpretation.
How is this different from a general literary analysis or critical analysis course?: The analytical moves overlap, but this track is anchored in the British canon and its history: period-specific forms like the heroic couplet and the dramatic monologue, and contexts like the Reformation, the 1798 Lyrical Ballads preface, serialised Victorian publication, and the literature of empire and decolonisation.
Can sessions help with essays graded on a rubric?: Yes. Bring the rubric and the prompt. Work covers thesis construction, selecting and embedding quotations, MLA-style citation for verse and drama, and revising a draft you have already written — though the writing itself stays yours.