Our Academic Program
Rigorous academics combined with individualized flexibility are the key components of our academic program. Small class sizes allow teachers to meet the needs of each student, and our flexibility empowers students to pursue their passions.
Core Program & Signature Courses
From exploring great books to pondering the big questions, our students acquire the background necessary to advance their knowledge in all subjects, including science, mathematics, languages, and arts. Within our Core Program, we offer an eclectic variety of courses that challenge and stimulate students.
We are also proud to offer our Signature Courses across all subject areas. These topic-driven courses emulate the experience of an advanced college seminar as we explore specialized subjects with high-level material, open-ended discussion, challenging assessments, and cumulative projects. Signature Courses are designed to show how rich and compelling deep learning can be. They reflect both the expertise of our teachers and the intellectual ambition of our student body. We believe no other secondary school in the region offers comparable courses, with the focus and rigor of college coursework. By delving into complex topics, students build a real love of inquiry, overcome their fear of uncertainty, and discover their intellectual independence.
Below are examples of some of the core and signature courses we have offered. You can also read detailed course descriptions of all our current classes in our downloadable course catalog
Core Courses:
- Pre-Algebra
- Algebra Explorations
- Algebra 1
- Geometry
- Algebra 2
- Trigonometry
- Precalculus
- Foundations in Calculus
- AP Calculus AB
- AP Calculus BC
Signature Courses:
Statistics
Students will learn how to collect, organize, and interpret data using various statistical techniques and will receive a solid foundation in the fundamentals of data analysis through a mix of lectures, discussions, and hands-on activities. This course will cover topics including probability, hypothesis testing, correlation and regression, and statistical inference. In addition to learning technical skills, students will also develop critical thinking and problem-solving abilities through real-world examples and applications of statistics in fields such as business and social sciences. By the end of the course, students should have a strong understanding of statistical concepts and be able to apply them to practical situations. The course will prepare students for future studies in fields such as economics, psychology and data science as well as provide valuable skills for personal and professional decision-making.
Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning: Proof & Logic
This course is designed to help students develop their mathematical reasoning ability and, in particular, their ability to read and write proofs. Elementary logic is introduced to familiarize students with the various forms of mathematical statements. Set theory will be explored throughout the course as it serves to illustrate many of the points of logic used in proof construction.
Discrete Math
Discrete mathematics is a very broad category that covers a larger number of topics. Examples include combinatorics (the theory of ways things combine; in particular, how to count these ways), sequences, symbolic logic, and graph theory. Simply put it is the mathematical study of objects that are countable and easily represented by models. Most computer science questions are discrete math questions.
- What is the best route from your home to your workplace?
- How do you find the most relevant web page?
- Which encryption methods are the most secure?
Linear Algebra with Applications
Linear Algebra is a foundational subject in mathematics that is rich in both applications and geometric beauty. This course uses an inquiry-based approach. To paraphrase our main text, the course is structured to provide opportunities to be creative and practice ways of thinking conducive to creativity. The "application" portion of the course is designed collaboratively with students based on their background and interests.
Core Courses:
- Earth and the Environment
- Ecology and Evolution
- Physical Science
- Biology
- Chemistry
- AP Physics 1
- AP Physics C
- AP Biology
Signature Courses:
Topics in Astronomy:
This course serves as an introduction to the known objects in the night sky and their physical properties. The central question of the course is, “How do we know what we know?” The observations, experiments, and the people behind them will serve as guides for the creation of new scientific truth and models. Astronomy, as one of the oldest natural sciences, has a long and complex history. Depending on current events and student interest we will focus on different time periods or events. Examples in past years include:
- The beginnings of Astrophysics at the end of the 19th century due in large part to the women at the Harvard Observatory.” Glass Universe” – Dava Sobel
- The discovery of planet-like objects in our solar system that lead to a change in our classification system. “How I Killed Pluto” – Mike Brown
- The first image of a black hole captured by the Event Horizon Telescope team. Press releases and academic papers from the team.
Optional spring semester course focuses on topics in Cosmology.
Topics in the History and Philosophy of Science
This class takes a deep look into the philosophical and historical aspects of a specific topic in Science. A past course looked at how people thought about Time with emphasis on progress made due to the industrial revolution and the invention of special relativity. One of the major questions concerns Time’s Arrow or why Time has a distinct difference between past and present. Topics are chosen based on current events and student interest.
Engineering: Design and Impact
Engineers work in a wide range of different fields. The common goal is to identify problems and design solutions. This course will introduce students to various career opportunities (e.g., Mechanical, Chemical, Materials, Civil, and Systems Engineering). An emphasis will be placed on applying students' prior science background, especially in Physics. Engineers increasingly have to consider the impact of their design choices outside their immediate goals. Students will investigate how the world around us, from the cars we drive to food we eat, is engineered and evaluate those design choices.
Neuroscience
Students will learn neuroscience by doing experiments. They will learn to operate simple neuroscience equipment and then design and conduct an experiment of their own. Students will keep detailed lab notebooks and write lab reports on their experiments.
Anatomy & Physiology
This class will investigate the major organ systems of the human body. This will include the immune, reproductive, digestive, endocrine, nervous, cardiovascular, and excretory system. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the relationship between form and function. We will also compare the anatomy and physiology of humans and other organisms and see how differences and similarities in anatomy and physiology can be explained through evolution. Students will read “Your Inner Fish” by Dr. Shubin. Students should expect to participate in several dissections throughout the year.
Scientific Reading, Writing, and Research
How do scientists share their results and find new questions to explore? Students will identify an area of scientific interest, read articles to understand the relevant background material as well as current research in that area, and finally, develop a novel hypothesis. The final project will be a 5-10 page background paper that summarizes the current state of understanding of the topic and outlines the rationale for the new hypothesis.
- English 6: Identity and Independence
- English 7: Community and Connection
- English 8: Courage and Conviction
- English 9: Myth Epic & Drama/Odysseys
- AP Literature and Composition
- AP Language and Composition
Signature Courses:
The Jazz Age: Modernism in America
This course will focus on American art and literature during the transformative years after World War I. During this time, cities grew and modernized, traditional values met with rising skepticism, and artists looked for ways to “Make It New,” in the words of Ezra Pound. We will read stories about characters who set out to transform themselves told by writers who set out to write a new kind of literature. Readings will include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Anita Loos’s satirical novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Crime and Detective Fiction
Detective fiction has become a ubiquitous part of popular culture, ranging from novels to television series to podcasts, and it is now a part of our mental equipment for thinking through problems of psychology, sociology, and even truth itself. With their preternatural powers of perception and deduction, fictional sleuths challenge us to think about how we know what we know. And the bizarre cases they solve often test the limits of rationalism. In this course, students will examine the evolution of mystery and crime fiction, along with the genre’s relationship to the ideal of a rational public sphere. In addition to classic mystery stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers, we will look at how the puzzle-like construction of detective fiction shows up in other genres, from allegory to horror writing to psychoanalytic case-studies.
Post-Apocalypse in the Contemporary Novel
From video games to trendy YA novels, contemporary culture is obsessed with the end of the world. Our collective imagination is teeming with zombies, ruled by sentient machines, afflicted with paranoia, and running out of toilet paper. In this course, we will explore how literary writers have used the post-apocalypse to reflect on the world as we know it. We will also ask large-scale questions about the popularity of world-ending fantasies: Why are we drawn to these stories? How has the rising threat of climate change altered the way that we think about the future? How has the pandemic changed our relationship to this popular genre? Readings will include Station Eleven, Zone One, and Parable of the Sower.
Family Stories in the Graphic Novel
In this course, students will read prose fiction alongside a series of graphic novels that explore family dynamics. In Persepolis, for example, Marjane Satrapi recounts her childhood in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Students will analyze narrative structure, compare verbal and visual storytelling, and make comics of their own. This course will double as a coming-of-age story for the medium of comics, which began as disposable entertainment for children before evolving into a part of mainstream literary culture. The readings will range between personal memoirs and works of fiction with fantastical elements. We will read works by a diverse group of artists, including Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Marjane Satrapi, Mariko Tamaki, Sloane Leong, and others.
The Literature of the Civil War
This course will explore the depiction of the Civil War in poetry, fiction, art, and photography. During the war, even Americans far removed from the front lines experienced the conflict through mass media, in the form of newspaper reports and the young medium of photography. As a generation of young men marched into battle, they left an unprecedented number of portraits behind them, many taken in army camps and mailed to loved ones at home. For the first time, photographers like Alexander Gardner documented the aftermath of battle. Meanwhile, poets reflected on the war in verse, filling newspapers and magazines with their compositions. This class will look at two kinds of art and literature: texts drawn from the time of the war and texts written with a sense of historical distance. Featured authors will include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Frederick Douglass, and Louisa May Alcott.
American Literature: Freedom and Slavery
This course focuses on American literature in the ante-bellum period. As the debate over slavery intensified, American writers struggled to capture (or invent) the voice of a nation grappling with its principles and its cultural identity. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” For Emerson and many others, American life was caught between the excitement of a fresh beginning and the lingering influence of old customs and compromises. The promise of unprecedented freedom was haunted in their works by the horror of slavery and the vestiges of old-world tyranny. We will read texts by Phyllis Wheatley, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, P.T. Barnum, and others. The readings will address the limits and the meaning of American freedom through the eyes of writers and artists who lived through a generation of rapid change and struggled to create a distinctly American culture.
Modern Drama
In this course, students will read plays from the 20th and 21st century that focus on ordinary Americans struggling for their dignity and independence. This course will center on the influential dramatists of the 1950s, who responded to the paranoia and repressive conformity of their era with experimental staging and characters at odds with their circumstances. Students will write regular responses to the reading, compose a critical essay, stage short scenes, write their own dramatic monologues, and (time allowing) adapt a short story into a short play. Readings will include The Crucible, A Raisin in the Sun, and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Moby-Dick
The narrator of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick declares, “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.” And that same itch drives Melville’s hefty novel to the ends of the earth, the bottom of the sea, and the dark recesses of the human mind. In that spirit, this course will be a deep-dive into the great American novel, with an instructor who has published scholarship on Herman Melville. During the semester, students will read Melville’s imposing tome in its entirety, study its historical context, and explore artwork inspired by the text, ranging from paintings to poetry to heavy metal to pop-up books.
Living (and Dying) in the Anthropocene
Living in the Anthropocene—the name given by scientists and artists to describe an era marked by humans’ impact on the planet—is tricky business. With wars raging, an increase in toxic spillage, and rampant consumerism across the globe, it can feel like we are living in the last days. Indeed, this apocalyptic thinking is mirrored in much of the content we consume. This course will focus on two central questions: First, how do we live meaningful and optimistic lives in the Anthropocene. Second, how do we identify and understand the structural and long-term effects of what American writer Rob Nixon calls “slow violence”. We will watch movies, and read reports, novels, poetry, and essays that inspire us to think more critically, more globally, and more slowly. From Rachel Carson we will learn how to care for our suffering planet and avoid extinction while, simultaneously and paradoxically, learning how to die like a samurai, thanks to Yamamoto Tsunemoto’s Hagakure (the Samurai’s warrior code handbook). We will take a global perspective, reading and viewing content from Latin America, The United States, Japan, France, Korea, Brazil, and more places.
Core Courses:
- Civics
- Current Events & Historical Contexts
- World History
- US History
- US Government: Current Events & Predictions
Signature Courses:
Narratives of the American Experiment
In this course, students will read a variety of age-appropriate books that reflect pivotal moments in US History. Students will engage in thematic analysis of the story of the United States based on historical narratives including (but not limited to) Never Caught: The Story of Ona Judge, Tillie Pierce: Teenage Eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg, Hiroshima, and Moonshot. Student engagement and participation are expected, and students will need to have a composition book for journal reflections. Field trip opportunities will augment classroom experiences.
Narratives of Inequality
Rooted in the graphic novel series March by the late Congressman John Lewis, this course will explore stories of the constant struggle for freedom in the United States, particularly for BIPOC. This class will be about courage, strength, hope, and healing. Students will learn about the music that led the movement for freedom in the United States, and we will watch related documentary and commercial films, such as Ghosts of Mississippi and In The Heat of the Night among others. A field trip to the National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of American Art will highlight artistic aspects of the freedom movement as inspired works of art. This course will also prepare students for the middle-school spring trip to Civil Rights sites in the South.
Geostrategy
We will follow and analyze current events in International Relations. We will attempt to identify the Grand Strategy (if any) of the Great Powers. Our primary source will be articles in The Economist magazine. (Middle school students may take this course with instructor permission)
Civil War and Reconstruction
In this course, students will examine the American Civil War and the ongoing debate surrounding it. They will explore the war’s historical background and discuss various interpretations of its causes. Students will also study the political, social, and military aspects of the war. Reconstruction will also be examined with an eye towards a more contemporary view of the era as opposed to interpretations that have been used to justify social, political, and economic inequity.
Philosophy Wars: Enlightenment Rationality vs its Enemies
Through reading, writing, and seminar discussion, students will participate in a centuries-old conversation about the most enduring epistemological (how do we come to know something?), metaphysical (what is the nature of our World?), and ethical (what should we do?) questions in the Western philosophical tradition. Students will learn argumentation and reasoning skills as they attempt to clearly articulate their position, orally and in writing, about complex ideas and college-level texts.
World War I
WW I is arguably the worst disaster in Western History, a war almost no one wanted. Nationalism, mass mobilization, industrial production, and aristocratic leadership combined to kill more soldiers than any other war in human history. The course will focus on two aspects: the diplomatic events leading up to the unwanted war, and the actual conduct of the war itself. We will examine the complex international maneuvering as well as the internal struggles within each of the major powers (plus Serbia). The course will also cover the tactics and technologies used to wage the war. The war, often characterized as a static four-year bloody stalemate, actually saw constant innovation on both sides. By the end of the war, WWII-like air-supported armored breakthrough attacks were being staged.
World War II
This course will explore how the complex interactions between politics, technology, and strategy shaped the course of World War II. We will learn about the escalating diplomatic crises of the 1930s. We will examine the great military innovations of the war itself: blitzkrieg, airborne troops, u-boats, amphibious invasion, aircraft carrier warfare, and strategic bombing. We will analyze both the large-scale strategic decisions and the urgent tactical choices made during major battles. Finally, we will evaluate the Grand Strategies of each of the major combatants. (Middle school students may take this course with instructor permission)
Political Leadership
In Political Leadership, students will investigate James McGregor Burns’s theory of transformative leadership: that is, the ability of leaders to create other leaders who serve the common good. A particular focus will include the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Additionally, students will examine the role of grassroots political leadership as demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement, studying the life and work of Fannie Lou Hammer.
(Middle school students may take this course with instructor permission)
America’s Longest War: Afghanistan
We will be covering U.S. involvement in the wars of Afghanistan. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, often kept secret, is entwined with the end of the Cold War (Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan), the U.S. as lone superpower (the 1st Gulf War), the U.S. War on Terrorism (911, Invasion of Afghanistan), and U.S. interventions in the Middle East (Invasion of Iraq). Afghanistan is America’s longest war, and yet, few people (including myself) know a lot about what is going on, let alone what happened in the past or how we got ourselves into this mess. We will seek to understand the impact short-term
Foreign Policy thinking has had on medium-term and long-term outcomes. We will also attempt to learn some lessons which we hope will improve policy decisions in the future.
How Civilizations Form
Using The Dawn of Everything as an anchor text, this course will explore recent archaeological evidence on the nature of early human civilizations and, in so doing, question the conventional wisdom about how civilizations formed and what early civilizations might teach us about human freedom in organized societies. This will be an advanced course with considerable reading and writing. We will begin with The Dawn of Everything and possibly add sources cited therein to evaluate the authors’ theory challenging the established view of the role of agriculture and the centralization of power in the rise of civilizations, and the associated assumption that humans must abandon their fundamental freedoms when organizing into societies. Students will have a chance to examine multiple civilizations across the globe spanning thousands of years of human history, including explorations of important archaeological sites that have received scholarly attention only recently. This course is designed to help students better understand the choices that underlie their current civilization.
Social Justice in America
Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, students will study the place of social justice movements in the United States. Particular attention will be paid to the Civil Rights Movement and the LGBT Movement, the Women’s Movement as well as the American Indian Movement and the fight for social justice for Latinos and Hispanics
Modern Spiritual Masters
In this course students will explore the diverse voices of people in the contemporary world through a variety of religious/spiritual traditions. Writers to be discussed include Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Joan Chittester, Thich Nacht Hahn, Abraham Heschel, Howard Turman, and Henri Nouwen. Students will visit a series of faith-based locations and discuss the parameters of that place within the context of the Spiritual Master who is most associated with it.
Spiritual Journeys: Comparative Religion
In this course, students will study various world religions through the lens of pilgrimage. The focus on pilgrimage will reveal crucial differences in religious belief, but it will also highlight the shared experiences and aspirations that unite pilgrims, regardless of their creed. We will examine a variety of pilgrimages, including travels to Lourdes, France and Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
Great Lives: Prophets of Positive Progress
In this course, students will study the intellectual underpinnings of biography as a genre, particularly how the writing process differs from the kind of chronological history featured in textbooks. Prior to reading specific biographies, students will read Biography: A Short Handbook by Hermonie Lee.
Lee’s work will provide the theoretical framework as students read a range of recent biographies. For example, in 2023-2024 students will read the new biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by bestselling biographer Jonathan Eig.
We are also proud to offer Signature Courses as electives for students. Some of the Elective Signature Courses we have offered include:
- Advanced Computer Science Projects
- Adulting 101: Financial Planning & Literacy
- Animation
- Dynamic Design
- Electronic Music Lab
- Game Theory & Probability
- Japanese Film
- Power & Film
- Rock Through the Ages
- The Visual Journals
- Uke-box
- The Full Self: The Philosophy & Psychology of Well-Being
We offer a range of Advanced Placement courses so that colleges can benchmark our students against the national student population in subjects like Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and Literature, during the admissions process. In some cases, students can earn college credit with high AP test scores. However, LSAS is not AP-driven, and many of our signature courses offer students a comparable or higher level of academic rigor.
AP Courses offered at LSAS have included:
- Calculus AB
- Calculus BC
- Biology
- Chemistry
- Physics 1
- Physics C: Mechanics
- Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism
- English Literature and Composition
- English Language and Composition
- French
- Spanish
- US History
- 2D Art & Design
- Drawing
- Computer Science Principles
Students who attended Loudoun School for Advanced Studies prior to August 2025, send all transcript requests to: [email protected]
All other transcript requests, please submit to: [email protected]