To provide language for talking about culture, desire, and love, students began with some background reading, including Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, and some minor pieces such as an article from Harper's satirizing the micromanaged nature of pleasure cruises. The class also watched a documentary, Killing Us Softly, that shows how images in advertising affect our conceptions of gender roles and our relationships with ourselves, the opposite sex, and children.

Then the class took a look at the "marriage market" that forms the backdrop of Austen's Pride and Prejudice. "Very moral (and in other ways interesting) lives are played out against that backdrop," says Lightfoot. "Characters are either blind to the choices dictated by their culture, or they are aware -- and within its limitations making the best choices they can."

Then on to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a different kind of love story in a very different world. "Students are just now beginning to be struck by what it means to live in an era in which the values that, for instance, Austen could count on as a framework for human choice-- a coherent, commonly held value system for shaping the individual, the passions and feelings, the spirit -- have been exploded, and we're left with this very open world. We're more susceptible to advertising, to the blandishments of popular culture, when there is little else consistently in dialogue with them, debating them or arguing with them, at least not in the strong nationwide or culture-wide forms of Austen's time.

"On the other hand, one of the positive ideals which modernity and American values offer each human being is that of living an authentic, freely chosen life. Yet we can't live in this way, either, unless our choices are ones we want at a deep level, at a spiritual or moral level -- or even if only at the level of expressing our true selves.

"One of our most potent cultural influences is the marketplace, and so we're looking at advertising and popular culture to try to realize the influence of these forces on our perceptions and choices." Lightfoot says that the marketplace affects our choices not just by offering a certain array of products but by eliciting from us needs and creating desires where none may have existed before. And these "false" needs easily become substitutes for desires that might be healthier or more expressive of our real values.

"One teaching challenge was to make seniors' values an active part of the construction as well as the content of the course. Fortunately, Lakeside has a tradition of asking students to be responsible for their learning and to go further with anything 'given' in a class." To sharpen themes of responsibility and awareness of one's values, Lightfoot draws on this tradition, engaging students in shaping the content, goals, and pace of the course.

Students were given the option of altering the reading list, but they ultimately agreed to work with books already ordered. Additionally, they decided they wanted to analyze and discuss a film, visit an art museum, keep a journal to record their impressions throughout the course, and analyze the appeal of sales catalogs, magazines, and perhaps a bestseller. Students also lead class discussion, teaching and learning from their peers. "In one section, we were having trouble seeing Austen's relevance to our experience," Lightfoot says. "The students responsible for next day's discussion asked classmates to choose a passage from the book that resonated with an event from their lives, then to bring in an object or a story related to that event for sharing with the class. It made for a really rich day.

"They all decided they didn't want just to build academic interpretations; they're very familiar with the English teacher's strategy of posing questions and then using student responses to construct an interpretation the teacher decided on beforehand. They said, we want to build our interpretations."

Students are also helping to determine standards of assessment for the course. They wrote a portion of their comments and defined B and C grades, though they had trouble defining an A grade. Pondering Austen's phrase "accomplished woman," they noted the many attributes such a woman was said to possess, and agreed with Elizabeth Bennet that no such woman exists. Then they decided this mythical woman was a metaphor for "A" achievement at Lakeside -- the standards are so unrealistically high.

"In a spring elective it is easier to downplay grades anyway. Most seniors aren't trying to build the perfect transcript now, they aren't courting colleges now. Spring term gives them a chance to enjoy learning for its own sake," says Lightfoot. "And for a lot of them, it feels like a chance to make better sense of who they are."

Senior Masayo A____ was drawn by the subject and approach of the course. "It didn't sound like a class for just reading books and writing papers, but more like an opportunity to explore. The discussions and topics are interesting, and keeping a journal allows you to learn about yourself as opposed to just learning about author A or author B. I feel I have the freedom to learn how a book relates to my own life, and that's what feels different about this class."

Lightfoot says the English department decided last year that having spring electives exclusively for seniors "lets us be especially creative with senior time. Offering this course was kind of a kite that the department flew up. Students cast their votes with their course signup and it ended up getting two sections. The department sees this as a way of helping seniors to be independent and creative in their learning and to construct something personally valuable as well as academically respectable. All the current electives -- film course, writing courses, gender studies -- focus in some way on helping seniors produce something of their own that they can feel proud of."

Lightfoot says her seniors continually come up with moving insights. "The question we keep returning to is 'What does the heart really want?' And students keep saying, in different ways, this: 'We want living connections with people and with nature. We want to be creative -- to make beautiful, meaningful things. We want somehow to live so as to have meaningful effects on other people's lives.' In this kind of course, I'm constantly being instructed by the students."