Innocence & Experience

"When I passed forty I dropped pretense, 'cause mean like women who got some sense,'" or so the Maya Angelou quote goes. Well, I hope I do have some "sense" at this point in the game since the idea of 40 and the actuality of it are quite different than it would have been for Angelou or previous generations. I'm not going to lie: numbers have quite a meaning and each tick of the clock, each page of the calendar, each passing of a year starts to add up and lead to reflection of what is left to do. I feel my list if fairly unchecked and incomplete, so I have a lot to do to become the person I want to be in this next decade.

In class today, we continued forward with Blake's poetry - especially those showcasing the conflicting personas of innocence and experience. We will wrap up Blake's works on Monday, and you will need to have your 3 word tone chart ready to go as well.

Blake

After finalizing our Wordsworth studies with identification of tone words covering 5 of his poems, we moved onto the biography, art, and poetry of William Blake.

From online or packet or poetry book, these are all the poems needing close reading for Friday's class. Do remember that some of these poems come from the "Innocence" side and other from the "Experience" side, so your analysis may look at the differing personas and tones.

And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time
The French Revolution (approximately lines 80-121)
London
The Lamb
The Tyger
The Chimney Sweeper (innocence)
The Chimney Sweeper (experience)
The Little Boy Lost
The Little Boy Found
The Little Girl Lost
The Little Girl Found
Why Was Cupid a Boy

More Wordsworthian Study

Our whole hour was dedicated to Wordsworth in which we finished "Tintern Abbey" and began the analysis of "Expostulation" and "Lucy." Alas, we ran out of time before finishing the remaining sections of "Lucy" and "To a Skylark," so that will be on the docket for the block day. In the meanwhile, you have a tone handout to work on (don't worry if you were absent, notebook paper works just as well). For Wordsworth, you will select 3 tone words to describe his poems as a whole. For each tone word, you will then take quotes from multiple poems that show the given tone. (No analysis on this one.) Bring your tones with you as we finish up with Wordsworth and move onto Blake.

Words on Tintern Abbey

In order to reimmerse ourselves in the world of poetry, we will be looking at a few Romantic poets (sigh) and their themes, poetic elements, and tone (hello, tone handout). First up, the wonderful walker Wordsworth (Tim, that alliteration is for you) and his version of "London 1802" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45528/london-1802 and "Tintern Abbey" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798. In both cases, we divided the poems up to look at poetic devices (caesura, enjambment, rhyme or blank verse), structure (sonnet), sound (alliteration), juxtaposition of nature and industrialization, and figurative language (simile, personification, imagery, and a few others creating the themes of the poems). For those absent, you will be up first to talk about Tintern Abbey and then we will resume our current participation schedule. For homework, overanalyze the Wordsworth poetry packet - you will be taking over and noting everything possible for these poems and then -- tone!

And, don't forget to do your shoe voting every day leading up to the AP exam. While this one is not on the list or in my size for that matter, I thought you would enjoy this whimsical pair: https://www.irregularchoice.com/us/hop-to-it-a.html.

The Storytelling Path

To start the hour, we continued our sharing of free response thesis statements, examples, characters, lit elements, lens terms, and other related ideas. Once that was completed, we returned to our poetry prompt, Walcott's meandering journey to the storyteller and her influential role in continuing the storytelling tradition. In pairs, you attacked this poem to find the meaning, the lit elements, the high-end poetry techniques that make your essay scintillate like a new pair of Charlotte Olympia shoes (speaking of, did you vote for your favorite shoes today?). Then, you had your poetry prompt back and the overall score you achieved on this practice exam. We had a wide range of testing results from 1 - 5. Lots of highs and lots of lows, which means each of you needs to revise small errors, further attach the multiple choice passages, and take our review of poetry (the Romantics) and prose (Wuthering Heights) very seriously in order to bolster your overall score for the next practice exam and the actual exam on May 9.

The Deceitful

Today's review centered on the free response portion of the AP exam, which means you have your deceitful character free response in possession and you had one or two or three (depending on the hour) thesis statement and brainstorm practices for various free response prompts. We will start class with your free response practice assigned for homework and then talk poetry prompts!

The Lydgates

Today's class focused on how to break down a prose prompt and move beyond surface analysis. From a quick glance at the time, setting, and circumstance, one would be tempted to analyze the typical gender roles of husband and wife. However, through Rosamond's jejune nature and Lydgate's cerebral mentality, the two often portray atypical roles as they delineate how their money woes will be solved. As with all prose prompts, you will want to bring in character types, utilize specific adjectives to label the characters, include literary devices (hello, dialogue, similes, tone shifts, diction shifts, juxtaposition, and even a few syntactical favs like anaphora, telegraphic sentences, interrogative queries, and exclamatory phrasing).

Before class tomorrow, take a look at the free response prompts from 1970-2013 and star your favorites for practice exercises tomorrow.

Shoe voting is ready to go. Remember, you have 2 votes per day and you must vote for 2 different pairs each day. Spread the wealth - you never know which shoes will be in stock in 5 weeks.