This week in AP Literature we spent a lot of our class time working on building the body paragraphs for our essays over unit 1. My partner was Tim and we had the topics of humor and characterization. In the unit we were required to write one essay about each of the topics that we chose. I wrote the essay on characterization and Tim wrote the essay on humor. For each essay there were one or two stories that we read and then we had to take information from the story to make your essay. I had a story called "The Destructors" by Graham Greene. A boy in the gang named T. becomes fascinated with an old house that has somehow survived the bombings of WWII. When T. gains entry to the house, he convinces the members of his ragtag gang of boys to help him destroy the house one night. Before I started writing my essay I came up with a guiding question which was How do the decisions and actions of a character reveal their personality? This guiding question helped me come up with my claim which was "the decisions and actions of a character in a story reveal what kind of character they represent." I then took all the information that I gathered from the story and made my body paragraphs with them. After I had my body paragraphs, I typed out the introduction and the conclusion and then I had myself an essay.
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This week in AP Literature we talked a lot about writing a good Poem of the Week essay and we revised our essays from last week. We also talked about the Unit 1 project which is over the topic of "What is Literature?" The poem of the week in which we talked and wrote about was "Elegy in X Parts" by Matt Rasmussen. Although we somewhat talked about the topic of writing the essay before we wrote, my essay was still not very good. After reading through it this week, I realized that I have a lot to work on with the structure of the essay about poems. My essay structure was really broken up and did not make much sense. I also need to work on adding more detail to my writing. In my writing I don't add very much detail and that is not a very good trait to have. I need to practice adding more detail to my writing to make it more interesting and to make it better overall. So, what I have learned from this week is that I need to add more detail to my writing and work on the structure of my writing. This week in AP Literature, we talked a lot about the idea of art as a window into literature. We watched a TED Talk called Finding the Story Inside the Painting by Tracy Chevalier. Tracy Chevalier is a person who makes short stories from just looking at paintings. We then talked about ideas that pictures could give for literature. We took time in class to choose form three pictures and then while we were in groups we described what we saw in each picture and the deeper meaning of each picture. My group chose a photo that had a girl who was sitting on a hillside and she was looking up towards a house. All around her was dead grass and the colors of the picture were really dark which symbolized sadness and gloomy feelings. Throughout the week we also talked about the poem "Elegy in X Parts" by Matt Rasmussen. The poem was about a person who was remembering things about their friend who committed suicide. We also wrote an essay about the poetic elements that the poem used. The third week of AP literature was heavily centered around our summer reading books and taking information from the books to make visual metaphors to represent the books. Our visual metaphor was a bridge and the base of the bridge (the strongest part of the bridge that keeps it standing) was the main theme of the visual metaphor. On the bridge, there was a man walking across and he represented the wise old man archetype from the book that we had read over the summer and it represents archetypes for other books as well. On the cables that connect the bridge to the suspensions, there are other archetypes from other books so that the bridge represents all archetypes. Under the bridge there is a boat with the name of a book on it because it falls under the idea of archetypes and it adds to the visual metaphor. Another thing we talked about this week is a story vs. literature. A piece of literature is written with an intention in mind with a timeless message that is able to be conveyed through the piece. Stories are written with a finish in mind. A complete endpoint. The difference between stories and literature would be the impact the author has in mind and its future influence. Some pieces may be both. Only really great stories can become pieces of literature. This week was our first full week of school and this week had more learning involved than the first week of school. During the first week of school you don’t learn a whole lot because it usually takes a couple days to go over the syllabus and the things you will be learning in that class. Also, it sometimes will take a couple days to get used to class routines and formalities. By the second week of school students and teachers are back into the routine of getting up early for school and during the second week normal class procedures begin to take place. In AP Lit this week, we learned about analyzing poems and to make your writing your own. This week we learned about a system for analyzing poems called TP-CASTT. This is a system where you go through the poem step by step analyzing different pieces of the poem and it helps you look at the poem in different ways. The poem we looked at is titled The Eagle. The system of analyzing the poem helped me look at the poem in different ways than I usually would. Instead of taking the poem very literal, I looked deeper and thought of the poem as an analogy. It helped me get more out of the poem and see it differently. Another thing I learned was to make your writing your own. Most people have probably heard this idea before, and I have as well, but the way it was explained made it stick with me. Our teacher told us to make your writing your own instead of writing what you think your teacher will want to hear. This makes more sense now that I have heard it explained in this way. If everyone in the class wrote what they thought the teacher wanted to hear, all the writings would be the same. This week some of the things I learned are how to find my reading rate, speed doesn't matter, and the process of doing something is important. Reading rates are very helpful in the way of being able to estimate how long it will take you to read a book and you can also estimate how many books you can read in a given time period. You can calculate your own reading rate by reading a book for ten minutes and at the end of that ten minutes, you count how many pages you read. So, on average you would read that many pages in ten minutes. Then, you multiply that number by 12 and that is how many pages you could read in two hours. This helps me determine how many pages I could read in a week and it helps me see how long it will take me to read a certain book. When you start out reading a new book, start the process over again and find your new reading rate. Another thing I learned this week is speed does not matter. It seems like it would be something that I already knew and I did already know it, but hearing it again really helped me read books differently and become more focused. Before I was reminded of this, I would read books fast and as quick as possible just to be done with them. Now, I slow down my reading and pay more attention to detail which helps me get more out of the book and understand it better. The third thing I learned this week was the process of doing things is important. If you had to write a 5 page paper and you weren't given a topic, you wouldn't just start writing and hope something came to you. Before you even opened up a word document or picked up a pencil, it would help if you went through a process of figuring out what you were going to write and how you were going to structure your paper. All 3 of these things that I learned this week really helped me look at reading and writing in a different way and they will definitely help me out at the next level.
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