The Infant

After looking over the writing portion of the final, this prompt challenged the analyst and writer to look beyond the quick idea of motherhood and infancy (as in the two poems are polar opposites, which they don't happen to be) and move into the analysis of point of view and persona and its underlying suppositions regarding one speaker's realism and ambivalence and the other speaker's cynicism and eventual resignation. 

If you stuck with the surface read and kept to imagery (which really limited you at a certain point), you probably were in the lower or middling scoring. If you could see these subtle attitudes and incorporated more than just imagery (structure, similes, metaphors, enjambment, caesura, sound elements), you probably ended up with a high score on this prompt. (And kudos to seventh hour, who had the greatest challenge with both parts of the final in one time period and had the most 7-9 scores of the bunch. For all the whining, maybe time pressure really does work!) 

I'm off to spend some quality time with the AP Lang side of my life, so we shall meet again on Monday for some quality MC analysis, prompt work, and a return to vocabulary for a few weeks. Don't forget that The Cherry Orchard reading and its book card is due the second class period back, so try not to procrastinate too much longer!