This was the first week back from winter break, but that didn't stop us from moving forward in the class. Before break, we started the Shakespeare project. We had gotten through watching Macbeth and writing our proposals on it. We came back from break and started working immediately on the next step: a presentation. My group finished the majority of the presentation, and that is probably because we used what we learned from the last presentation to do it. We made a basic outline for the presentation, filled it in with short bullet points, and added plenty of visuals. We felt very prepared for this. The next step in the project would be to write the paper, which scares me a little. The paper is the longest paper we've had to write in this class, and it's also the one will the least amount of guidelines. This makes sense, as the papers should get more advanced as the year goes on. I feel like we will definitely need to use the skills from the previous papers we've written to complete this one. We also started two new poems for Poem(s) of the Week. It felt like the poems this week were harder than normal. This is probably because one of the poems was very negative towards spring. It really threw me, since spring is supposed to be the symbol for rebirth and hope. I feel as though it was a good poem to analyze though, as it was a good reminder to not take everything the poem says at face value. It was also nice to have two poems that had opposite tones. The last two poems we studied (Ozymandias and Sonnet 146) had similar ideas of fading into time. This week’s poems thought very differently of spring though. It was definitely a good learning experience.
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This week could be considered to be a very easy and fun one. The main activity was watching our Shakespearian movie, Macbeth in my case. This means that the day was pretty open and shut. Show up, read/write for 20 some minutes, then watch the movie. At first glance, this would suggest that we didn't learn anything this week, but watching the movie was supprisingly tasking. Since the movie used the exact diolage from Shakespear, it was very hard to understand what was happening. I personally used Sparknotes whenever I felt unsure of what was going on (aka most of the movie). It also wasn't just a simple viewing of the play, as we had to focus on our critical theory. My group chose to do psychological, so I tried to really pay attention to why characters would to choose to do what they would do. Since I wasn't too sure what the characters were saying half the time though, it was a very difficult task. While I definetly didn't get all the usuable information, I feel as though I did good enough of a job to be able to start working on the next part this unit. I also feel prepared, since there's more than just Macbeth to anaylze psychologically. Lady Macbeth is a character who functions very differently than Macbeth, so her actions can also be noted. This will definetly help with writing the essay. This week started out with going back to an old activity of Poem of the Week. I was definitely excited to start doing these again, as I felt like I needed more practice on these. I wasn’t the best at them earlier, so now is a good opportunity to get better. There is a difference from other Poem of the Weeks we’ve done, as we were given two poems this week. It was concerning to hear that we were going to ramp up the difficulty after such a long break, but it’s been easier than I thought. Once we got going, I found a lot of the previous information returning to me. It also fun to have two poems, as you can start to see similarities of both. I think I’m in a good position for analyzing poems, as I was able to understand both without too much outside help. I’m a little nervous to write the timed writing, as it’s the first time we’ve written on two poems, but I think I can do it. We also started our Shakespearian Unit this week. So far, this has consisted of writing about our chosen critical theory. I thought this was a little weird at first, as we hadn’t even read the play yet. However, it made more sense as we studied our critical theory in depth. It’s not a surface level idea, but one that you have to really dig into in order to understand. The theory is well explained at this website. By preparing first, we can know what to look for when we actually watch the play. I’m looking forward to actually put the information we gathered to work. This week was the start of a new trimester. As in most classes, this meant that we changed that standard flow a little bit. Instead of reading any literature book, we're going to read two books with a similar theme over the whole trimester. This sounds very exciting to me, as it allows us to get a closer examination of ideas of different authors. By finding out what's the same, we can better understand what is universally true about that theme. We also have to do a presentation over the books. It will be a PechaKucha presentation, which will definitely be a change of pace. Because of the time limit on the slides, we will have to know our presentation well and be very concise with our speech. This scares me a little bit, as I normally don't like to follow a script when I present. The difference in style will force me to think and prepare in new ways though, so I think it will be a good experience for me. The other thing we did this week was to take a practice AP test. The test went well for me, and (more importantly) it gave me insight into what the actual test will be like. I want to say that I now know where the holes are in my English knowledge, but it’s not that simple. Out of the questions that I got wrong, many were due to simple misinterpretation. This scares me, as I don’t know how to stop that if I take the actual test. Hopefully doing more Poems of the Week will help to increase my interpretation skills. I did find a few knowledge holes that I can fill. There were a few different words that appeared multiple times on the test, most being figerative language terms. I looked up the definition of these words, and found this website. Having learned this, I should be a little more prepared for the next test. This week, we continued the tragedy unit. Having defined and explored the idea of what a tragedy is, it only seemed natural that we transitioned into look at examples to prove the point. The first example we explored was modern society. We watched a TED Talk about how our society indirectly tells those who don't achieve the success that it was their own fault. The "American Dream" of hard work overcomes all obstacles means that their is no reason for besides yourself. I felt a direct connection to "Tragedy and the Common Man" while watching this talk, since they were both about not achieving your preferred image in the world. This video also helped me to understand the scope of tragedy, since it was very relatable. It helped me to understand how tragedy different to every person, since everyone has different goals in life. We also looked at the performance version of tragedy. For a summary of the play, watch this. The story of Oedipus Rex is almost as close to the definition of tragedy from Arthur Miller as possible. It was very easy to see Oedipus’s descent into losing his self-image, and the result was very extreme. Analyzing the tragedy of this piece of literature felt very satisfying, as it directly related to the theory of tragedy. Most of what we read involving the ideas of tragedy would talking about the play version, so to actually read a tragic play really helped my understanding. I think I have a pretty good grip on tragedy now, so I am ready to continue this unit while feeling confident. Having finally finished the Elements of Fiction unit, we moved on to a new one: Tragedy. The goal of this week was to really discover what “tragedy” really meant. We used two ways to start discovering this. The first was by looking at Wikipedia’s page on Tragedy. I enjoyed this activity, as it allowed me to explore around the page at my own pace. It was also a good way to see the many interpretations of what a tragedy is throughout time. The second activity we did was reading “Tragedy and the Common Man” by Arthur Miller. Having seen this piece on the Wikipedia page, I was interested about what the author would say. It had many great insights into what tragedy is, mostly focused around the idea that tragedy can happen to anyone. Having done both of these activities, I’ve takes bits and pieces of each idea and forged them into how I think of tragedy. Tragedy isn’t the only subject that we’ve talked about this week. We analyzed some writing by looking for three ideas: illustrating, authorizing, and expanding. These three ideas form the point of every sentence in an essay. Illustrating describes sentences that contain the main ideas that the writer wants to cover. Authorizing describes sentences that pull proof from the original piece, often times through quotes. Expanding describes sentences that explain the writer’s thoughts and ideas. Expanding should be the most common type of sentence. I thought that covering all of this was very help to myself as a writer. I instantly started drawing connections to my previous essays. I noticed that the essays when I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing mostly didn’t have these types of sentences, while my good essays only had these types of sentences. I definitely feel like I will use this information as a writer. 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. 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. |
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April 2017
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