Oh, That Wife of Bath

After completing the character introductions (Cicely has resolved to keep the Squire, and Brooke has pledged her heart to the Skipper), we dived into The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, in which we see what happens when an errant knight is given the daunting task to find out what women want. Fifth hour, you know the ending (and you will be reading The Pardoner's Tale for homework this evening); second hour, you need to read the ending for our next class.

Our Pilgrims

First up on the docket was our vocab quiz for unit 6, which was inspired by our latest reading selections. If absent, you have the mandatory 48 hour window to make up the quiz or schedule a time to do so. Following that form of fun, we returned to The Canterbury Tales with a closer look at all of our pilgrims (although, some are grouped together or barely mentioned). If absent, I will need to see your notes for your assigned character(s). Thanks, Sky, for helping me out with the Lawyer!

P.S. When The Canterbury Tales Prologue turns into an episode of the Bachelorette...

Last Chance

There are still about 50 extra allusion posters up for grabs. If you want to do one, I will need to have an e-mail by 2:40 p.m. on Monday (tomorrow). Check out the blog from January 15 for the instructions to complete the assignment - if you choose to do so. If you create an extra poster without the go-ahead, you will not receive extra credit for it. I'm looking forward to our last week of allusions and my soon-to-be new wallpaper for the rest of the semester!

Off to Canterbury We Wende

After our review for the vocab quiz on Monday, we headed off to meet Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales. Looking at the overall prologue, we met the speaker and the knight. For weekend work, you will be reading 1-2 character prologues to identify the occupation/class, characterization, physical description, and themes related to this character. Be ready to discuss those 4 categories next class. Here is a copy of the prologue - it is not the same translation as our textbook, so you are expected to use your textbook's phrasing for any in-class citations: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/CT-prolog-para.html.

Absentee Assignments:
Domonick = Plowman
Izzy = Miller
Kaylynn = Miller
Hughes = Manciple
Brooke = Reeeve

We're Going to the Underworld & Middle Earth

While we are still playing with found poems, vocab, allusion posters, and multiple choice practices, the highlight of both classes revolved around the voting for our future Canterbury Tale and pilgrimage location. Fifth hour clearly chose the Underworld, which makes me wonder about what character you are going to make me be. Second hour had a 2 rounds of vote due to an initial tie between Middle Earth, Chernobyl, and Wonka's Chocolate Factory. After much campaigning, Middle Earth become milieu of choice. Does that mean we will all be barefoot running around? More to come on your tale - after we read the source material!

Practicing the Prose

With you working on your found poem for The Metamorphosis and your third allusion poster outside of class, today's class was a chance to practice MC passages for prose works. Our high scorer was CB with 15/20. 

For the block day, make sure you have all of your creative assignments and your big green textbook with you. 

Elegy for Gregor

The metamorphosis is complete: Gregor has left this world, Grete has moved onto a life of marriage or music or some combination thereof, and the Samsas no longer need lodgers to keep up the rent. As a result, it is time for the assessment. You will be creating a found prose poem by selecting 10 significant quotes from The Metamorphosis and, in any order you find significant, creating a poem from Kafka's words. This will be due on the block day.

Tomorrow will be a little multiple choice practice to review prose comprehension, characterization, tone, and motifs.

Milk & Apples

We started today's discussion of Gregor's unfortunate metamorphosis with his new-found hatred of milk, that feminine symbol of motherhood, and ended with those knowledge-filled apples striking his back and permeating his skin with all those pressures of his father's expectations and disappointment. For Monday's class, we will be finishing up Part III, and you will be leading the discussion with topics of your choosing - whether it be character-related, plot-related, motif-related, literary element-related, or regarding if Grete's metamorphosis is as significant as her brother's buggy one.

I Still Think It Is Tuesday

After copying down our next unit of vocab, which happens to be 6, second hour finished up the analysis of Part I and commenced our second round of allusion posters while fifth hour spent the entirety on allusion posters. Second hour, you have Part II for tomorrow, and fifth hour, you shall have finished the entire Metamorphosis.

The Gilded Frame

In the gilded frame that is AP Lit, we started off today with your vocabulary quiz for unit 15 and followed up with looking at Kafka, The Metamorphosis translations, Part I analysis (at least for fifth hour). Tomorrow will be allusion posters and more with Gregor. Fifth hour, make sure to prepare Part II for discussion.

Cold Day Update

I know all of you loved having that phone call from the district this morning: announcing that there would be no school with the underlying subtext that all of you don't have to make that day up.

For AP Lit, we will have the vocab quiz and the first part of Metamorphosis on Wednesday. As a result of our timing, the allusion posters will be pushed back to Thursday.

Stay warm!

Allusion Poster Addendum

With 119 students and 571 allusion poster possibilities, the math shows a plethora of allusion posters that were not assigned to AP Lang and AP Lit. As we would like the future allusion wall to be full of all these examples, you have the opportunity to create 1 additional allusion poster for 15 points extra credit. 

How will this work? Below, you will find the numerical listing of remaining allusion topics (mostly historical). You will e-mail me with a request for one allusion poster. (You may also send a short list in case your favorite option has already been claimed by another student.) If no one has claimed the topic, I will e-mail you back with the go-ahead to create this allusion poster. The "claiming" of the allusion will be first-come, first-serve. You will then create this extra allusion poster AFTER you have completed your previous assigned allusion posters. Yes, you have to do the assigned ones first. You will then bring in this extra allusion poster with your fourth allusion poster during our last week of show and tell in order to share with the class. 

Available extra allusions to start: 95, 440, 446, 447, 448, 451, 452, 455, 456, 469, 470, 472, 473, 475, 476, 478, 479, 481, 482, 484, 485, 487, 488, 490, 491, 493, 494, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571. 

I am posting this with AP Lang momentarily, so your class has about one minute head start :)

Hello, Kafka

After reviewing vocabulary, we finished our sharing of The Cherry Orchard character posters, and you received The Metamorphosis for weekend reading. Fifth hour, you know all about its author, Kafka, and second hour will receive the same knowledge on Tuesday. However, if you want to see how Gregor and Kafka overlap, you are more than welcome to look up his biography and take a look. Text of the Metamorphosis in case you are in need: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm.

The Past Two Days

Since the last two evenings have involved emergencies and school-related events,  I am hoping for a night of peaceful grading and prepping for trivia lunches tomorrow!

On Tuesday, you were assigned the character poster for The Cherry Orchard, which would begin with your assigned character's name in the center of construction paper (color symbolism optional), a web of at least 5 adjectives describing the character around the name, and then at least 2 quoted examples for each adjective. 

For the block day, we finished up vocab experts, shared our first round of allusion posters, analyzed character speeches, and cemented the ending of the play. In fifth hour, we were in the midst of sharing our character posters and will finish those up on Friday. 

Chop, Chop

We polished off the MC portion on the final, and then spent the rest of the hour sharing ideas regarding The Cherry Orchard. Our emphasis focused a great deal of the class structure and the fall of Russian aristocracy via middle class and modern philosophical viewpoints. 

Fifth hour, you have just about everything back from last semester (minus the poetry test), and second hour, you will receive all of this back tomorrow before we resume our Cherry Orchard look-see. 

Jane Eyre

For the majority of class today, we focused on close reading multiple choice passages - in particular, Jane Eyre and the scene with her fondness for Miss Temple and Helen. After thorough engagement with the passage, we completed the multiple choice with less difficulty. Second hour also worked on "The Pulley." For homework, revise the other passages on the MC exam.

We will go over The Cherry Orchard book cards and finish up the final review on Monday.

The Creative Month of AP Lit

While we are still analyzing at an upper level, we will be moving away from formal essays this month and going into creative realms.

Today, we started off with copying down Vocab Unit 5, which we will begin tomorrow.

Then, you received your 4 assigned allusions to create your allusion posters for the next 4 weeks.

Last, we returned to the final and to the realm of Plath & Blake. Before we jumped into structure and literary elements, we looked at the poem's meaning and tones, focusing on comprehension in order to understand why the author would want to select enjambment, caesura, or rhyme scheme.

See you tomorrow to talk about the MC passages of the final and share your book card for The Cherry Orchard!

Observations on Lear, Infancy, and Multiple Choice Passages

It's 2018 and we are now looking forward to second semester with plays (The Cherry Orchard, The Importance of Being Earnest), short fictional works and frame stories (The Metamorphosis, The Canterbury Tales), essays (A Vindication on the Rights of Woman), novels (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights), and poetry (The Romantics -  the walker Wordsworth, the artist Blake, the addict Coleridge, the playboy Byron, the reviled Shelley, my lover of purplue Keats). In between all of that reading, we will have allusions, multiple choice practices, feminist critical theory, and Marxist critical theory. I know this sounds like a of work, which it does qualify as; however, there will be creative opportunities for the upcoming assessments, which will include a character chart, a found prose poem, and our own class pilgrimage to another location. In case you remember my random outfit choices last year, we ended up at Hogwarts and Jurassic Park. 

Before we can commence all the aforementioned antics, we must look back at 2017 and, more specifically, the end of semester assessments. We will spend quality time reviewing the Poetry Test, the Psycho Lear Essays, the Poetry Prompt and Multiple Choice test from the final during our opening day classes. Prior to that day - in what I am sure will be a very cold classroom - I will give you the observations from the evaluation process and the minutia of highlights and lowlights from these evaluations. 

In regards to that play about a feisty king with feisty daughters with feisty spouses hanging out with feisty foils, there were strong essays detailing the psychology of the characters with an emphasis on speech patterns, meter, and other literary elements that behoove the telling of the id, the ego, the superego, coping mechanisms, stages of development, birth order, and other delusions of grandeur from the psychoanalytical spectrum (alas, no one grasped the trauma of the real, a personal favorite that Lear finds in conjunction with the raging storm out of doors). For the 3 students scoring a 9 on this essay (if you would like to play initial matching, MH, AP, JK), they offered a clear context in the introduction of the historical realm, the psychological conflicts inherent in the character, or an analogy that connected directly with the character. To further their writing, they merged psychoanalytical terminology with literary terminology in every, or almost every, paragraph to show how Shakespeare's literary elements construct the psychology and adjustment of character throughout the play. To exhibit the information, these students brought in multiple examples of evidence per paragraph - not always stopping at two - and fully analyzed the meaning of each word, phrase, idea to its zenith. Overall, second hour averaged a 6.31 for this writing, and fifth hour averaged a 5.84. To make it interesting on my end, I evaluated the essays by character, starting with all of the Lears, moving to all the Edgars, and so on an so forth until the end with the Cordelias. 

As with all essays, including the final, you want an introduction that engages the audience and connects to the text and the prompt given, transitions from the hook to the thesis with ease, incorporates the author and the title (properly punctuated, which is still a difficulty for too many of you at this point), and ends with a thesis of mature language, specific direction, and indication of the paper's overall focus. The thesis may be heavily focused on psychoanalytical terminology (Lear) or on literary elements (poetry prompt). 

The body paragraphs rely on structure first and development of ideas second. A topic sentence commences each paragraph and will indicate the specific quality or term to be focused upon and its significance. Building from the topic sentence, students will begin to explain the element and bring in evidence from the text to exhibit a usage of caesura, a look at the id's overwhelming takeover of rational human beings, or any other focus. The evidence should be in words and phrases that flow into your writing and do not cause a distraction from your ideas. In addition, the citations should be properly placed and punctuated. Each element of evidence must be explained and connected to the topic sentence. Once all the above necessities are included, a concluding sentence ends the show.

The conclusion does not have to be a regurgitation of the whole essay, but it needs to end with something memorable for your audience, who, for instance, may be reading 37 essays about King Lear or two poems side-by-side. I recommend returning to your hook in some fashion and expanding upon it with the knowledge shared during the essay. 

To specify a bit more from the final, you had to do the above qualities regarding 2 poems. For Plath (you know her background, so you have some context to help you here) and Blake (a couple of you may know that he is a Romantic poet, artist, religious man, and realist), you had to look at how they used imagery to reveal their tones toward infancy. As a result, you, as an AP-level student should, went beyond imagery and connected it to persona, similes and metaphors, alliteration, free verse vs. formal rhyme, caesura, enjambment, tercets and quatrains. Some responses went for more of a surface read (motherhood is grand; infancy is horrible). However, there were several layers to Plath's poem of anxiety, careful concern, and natural instinct  that went beyond a simplification of happy to be a mother. (I must say I was disappointed that not one of you went after the idea of her Victorian nightgown, a reflection of a repressive era of forced gender roles!). Those of you that found all those layers and all those poetic devices were evaluated highly. Overall, there were two 9 scores (TK & CB) with second hour averaging 5.82 and fifth hour averaging 5.65.

Lastly, the MC test was all over the place and, interestingly enough, the majority of you did better with the later passages than the first passages! I did too, actually, scoring 44 out of 51, which would be the curve score for this portion of the final. Reminders for MC are fairly redundant but important too: close read the passage and understand the plot first. Rushing through the text to get to the questions may take away from your reading for necessary plot, facts, and character information. 

On each and every MC test, we will have 4 goals:

Goal 1 is 50%, which is 26 correct on this exam 

Goals 2 is 60%, which is 31

Goal 3 is 70%, which is 36

Goal 4 is scoring enough to have a 2 on the exam without writing an essay, which is 42 

And how did you do with these goals? 

Goal 1: 9 

Goal 2: 10

Goal 3: 8

Goal 4: 0 

If you do the math, there are still many of you working to reach Goal 1, and we will be working on this to help you feel more confidence and accuracy on this portion of the exam.

See all of you on Thursday - and don't forget to be reading The Cherry Orchard and working on your book card for this play!