This week, we finally got around to presenting our elements of fiction project. Since we had been preparing these presentations for multiple weeks, I was very nervous to actually show our ideas. It did go very well though. Neither I nor my partner made any major mistakes, and we remembered to say the majority of what we wanted to share. Not only did the presentation go well, but I felt that I quite a bit about how to correctly present. The first thing that I noticed was about myself. I tend to pause a fair bit when I talk. It’s important for me to know that I will stop if I don’t know exactly what to say, so I should try to think a step or two in advance. I also learned by watching others present. I made sure to pay attention to how I felt (as part of the audience) about the presenters’ tactics. For example, I noticed that I really did not like when the presenters gave little to no background information about their stories. I had a hard time understanding how their story in general, let alone how it relates to elements of fiction. Some presenters did explain their stories well though, and I found their presentations easier to follow. I feel that I have a better idea of how much context to give now. The same process of learning about presentations happened with other concepts. I payed attention to the amount of writing that was on the slides, so now I think I know what works. Even watching the presenters’ body language taught me about what I could do to better my own presentations. It also lead me to look more in depth about this idea, and I feel like I learned a bit from this website. While we didn’t close read poetry specifically this week, we certainly had plenty to analyze.
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We have spent this week working on our Themes of Literature project. The first step my partner and I took was reading the two point of view short stories. Having done that, we started working on the presentation. It turned out to be a much more intensive task than I originally thought. I assumed that it would take about fifteen minutes to simply write everything down, but we’ve probably put in an hour or two. I have discovered just how much having to present a subject forces you to fully understand that subject. Take our first point of view story. Reading through it the first time, I felt that I knew the point of view, why it was important, and where it was best shown in the story. However, I went to write it on a presentation slide, but couldn’t form the words to properly explain it. The parts of the stories that I thought I would use were more hidden than I realized. I, more or less, had to re-read the story to find them. I also discovered that determining what to put on the slide versus what to say is difficult. My first instinct was to put almost everything on the slide, but that would cause what I was saying to be pointless. My partner and I worked out a good system of putting the basic essentials and the quotes used as examples on the slides, while saying the explanation of why what we are talking about is important. Speaking of talking, this link has some very good tips when it comes to actually speaking that I intend to use. I feel like this project has not only taught me about the elements of fiction, but how to present in a way that the audience will find interesting. I didn’t think that AP Lit would be the class that taught me how to present the best, but I’m certainly happy that it did. This week was the end of the marking period. This means that we did a few extra projects. The first was editing and finishing creative writing. This was nice, as it was a different type of writing than we had been doing previously. Most days we had just wrote quickly, without regard to cohesiveness. In editing, we were able to shift gears and focus on writing to make the story make sense. The other project we are doing is a essay about the book we read this marking period. We had to pick from many previous AP test prompts that were all about analyzing the story. I’m excited to be able to write about Catch-22, as I really enjoyed the novel. I think I have a good idea of the author’s thinking, so this essay shouldn’t be too hard (I hope). We also continued to work on the Characteristics of Literature project. My partner and I finished reading about what theme was, so we moved on to reading Hunters in the Snow. Since our job was to discover the theme through the three characters, we used three different colored highlighters for each of the three characters. After we finished, we looked for what was the same throughout all three colors, and we came up with a theme. This article is a good summary of the process of finding theme. I enjoyed finding the theme. It was very interesting to see what else you pick up on when you purposely look into the writing. For example, the setting in this story is in the middle of winter, which reflects the attitude of the three main characters. The first time I read the story, I didn’t think anything of it. It’s all very fun. Overall, it’s been a good marking period, and there’s know only five more to go! This week was another week cut short. We had a fog delay on Tuesday and a fog closing on Thursday. We powered through it though, as we managed to analyze this week’s poem and start a new project. The poem this week was “Bright Star” by John Keats. I did not like this poem. Not in that I didn’t like the poem itself, but I knew from the beginning that this poem was different from the rest. It is very direct compared to the other poems we read. This scared me all week as it meant we analyzed it differently than the previous poems. We talked more about how the poem feels, and less about what it means. I felt like all of the training from the last two poems was useless, so I felt very helpless this week. This is definitely an area that I will need to work on before the AP test. The project we started was a look into the elements of fiction. The specific elements my partner and I chose were Point of View and Theme. Point of View has been especially informative, as I learned a few different things from it. The first is that there are 4 (not 3) points of view. I did not know that the Objective point of view existed. The second is that Point of View can give a lot of insight into how the author wanted the story to be seen. Before reading about this, I would have just guess that the author just chose whatever viewpoint was the most comfortable to write in. This reminds me of reading How to Read Literature Like a Professor in that it taught me about something that I didn’t realize I didn’t know. Coming into the last week of the marking period, I feel pretty good about this class. We started this week off with getting back to Poems of the Week. This week’s poem was “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” by Dickinson. I was very excited to get back to analyzing poetry because I felt much more prepared to inspect a poem and write about it. We spent the most time analyzing the imagery of this poem. Before we started, I thought of imagery as a single topic. However, we learned that there is much more to it than that. One important part of imagery is that there are seven different types: each of the five senses, movement, and feeling (as in emotional, not touch). There is a very good summary of every type of imagery here. We then took it a step farther by not only looking at what types were in the poem, but what types were missing. We determined that there was a distinct lack of visual imagery, so we explored further. We started to ask why Dickinson would leave out imagery for the sense we use the most, while putting in plenty of hearing and emotional imagery. This added a whole new layer of depth to the poem. It led to new ideas about the real meaning of this poem. The concept of looking at what isn’t there is a genius idea that I would not have thought of on my own. Armed with both this idea of missing imagery and getting to see a good essay written for the AP test, I felt very ready to write this Friday’s poem analysis. |
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April 2017
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