Alright so this week was packed full with writing for our group essay. We spent most of our class time working on them, Haley and I have made a lot of progress and finished up what I would call a pretty coherent rough draft. The two of us had a lot of meaningful discussion on what examples from the story best represented the literary elements that we have been looking for as suggested by our "How to Read Literature like a Professor" book.
After everyone finished up writing their group essays on Thursday, Mr. Schoenborn paired each essay group up with another group who read different books to help get another perspective on our writing. Haley and I are working with David Klack and Ryan Pashenee. Their summer reading books were "The Book Thief" and "Obasan" which both were written as a response to World War II and explains to it's reader how words can have such a large role on the world that we live in. I thought their rough draft was a great starting point. The two writers did a very good job at showing how the two books were similar in the first few lines. However towards the end of their second paragraph they used language that made it seem like they were offering an idea instead of supporting it. Another thing that I liked about their writing was the use of descriptive words near the end. Specifically "The house is aged and weak, there's a library of objects" (a reference to Obasan's home) which when I read it painted an image in my head of a decrepit home that is filled to the brim with objects. Each one possessing its own story that could be explained in a thousand words. Overall I think the week went by pretty quickly with everyone getting ready for homecoming. Nonetheless we still got a ton done in class and spent our nights working on our homecoming festivities! I can't really think of anything to add on as a link that relates too much to what we did in class, but the Morning Sun posted some pretty gnarly pictures from this years homecoming parade!
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At the beginning of the week we started out with the poem "The Eagle" written by Lord Tennyson. We read it aloud as a class on Monday and worked on it at our tables throughout the week. It was really cool to see how the class' perception of the poem changed as the week went on. Our first interpretations were mostly looking at the poem literally, but as the week progressed each group developed their own ideas spanning from a narrator that holds their self on a pedestal to a crooked king. Overall I think it was a great learning experience that helped everyone in the class think about we should look at poems.
Another thing that we did this week was work on our summer reading projects. Haley and I are partners for the comparative essay and so far we have made an outline to start the essay. We found some common themes from both Caramelo and The Waves and are working to flesh out all of our ideas and get the ball rolling on the paper. How to Read Literature like a Professor has been extremely helpful in finding things that are common between the two texts. We have tentatively decided to go with chapters two, twelve, and twenty-four as our links. I am excited to see how this essay turns out and getting feed back on it from our peers in the class. Lastly, on Friday we did something a little different. We independently wrote down our thoughts about "The Eagle" on a google doc for about forty minutes and at first I thought Schoenborn is insane. How was I supposed to write for forty minutes about a six line poem! Then after forty minutes of almost non-stop typing, I was only maybe half way through explaining my thoughts on the poem. After the forty minutes I realized how much of a story a poet can tell in six lines, whether or not they know it. Also to expand my view of "The Eagle" I found a neat website called Shmoop that had their own analysis of the poem and they took it more literally. AP Lit has been an experience starting from the first day. Our teacher Andy, immediately took the whole class outside and had us do an activity to shake the cobwebs off of our brains. He had us as individuals think of three things that we wanted to remember for the rest of our lives. Then out of the three pick one to share with the rest of the class. This activity was really thought provoking and most people took it pretty lighthearted but others shared some notably personal information. Which is so cool that they felt comfortable enough to share that with the class. The reason I say this is because one of the first things I wanted to say was "remember to eat" which at first glance might seem straight forward and silly to most people, but this is extremely important for me. The reason for that is I have an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa, which basically means that I do not have an appetite. In the past I have struggled with remembering to eat a healthy amount and it has almost cost me my life on a few occasions. So seeing someone be that vulnerable on the first day of class was really cool. Also on the note of eating disorders everyone is affected differently I just have a tendency to not eat without being conscious of the decision. I am not motivated by trying to look thinner in appearance or anything along those lines. On another note I think that AP Lit will be a class that I'll enjoy. So far all of my peers and the teacher seem to be ready to have discussions and get down to business. I am excited to see what the future has in store for senior year. In case you are interested in learning more about anorexia nervosa their is a really good article about it over on the National Eating Disorder Association's website. |
AuthorHey! This is my top bunk, I do all of my sleeping here so chances are if you see me here I am about to go to hit the hay. Archives
March 2017
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