Response to Course Material #5

So, this response to course material post is really supposed to be about everything we’ve done in the past month, but class really hasn’t been in session for the past month. We had three snow days for the first three days that we were supposed to be back from break, then Thursday and Friday of last week I was sick, so in the past month I’ve only been at school for five days. I guess this post will really only cover what we did last week.

That being said, I do think that our class has done quite a bit in the past five days. First, we hammered out our Hamlet theme statement. This took up most of Monday and Tuesday, but I was pleased with the result. Our theme statement was about how self doubt and moral corruption leads to the subversion of providence. Our class had a lot of trouble with the exact wording of the statement, but we were eventually able to come up with something that worked. After we finished the theme statement, Ms. Holmes showed us an interpretive dance of Hamlet that one of her previous classes had created, and I thought it was really cool. When Ms. Holmes first told us that she was going to show us the video I thought it was going to be something really weird or obscure, but the dance actually did make sense. The students did a really good job incorporating the major parts of the play and acting them out in dance form.

Aside from Hamlet, we also did some vocab review games and worked a lot on the collaborative exam review. I have never done a collaborative exam review any of my classes before, but I think it’s a great idea. This year, most of my teachers didn’t really give an exam review. In chem we have a FERP (final exam review packet), which is pretty helpful, and in government we received an outline of what we will need to know (without any actual info on it – just general topics), but that’s pretty much it for all my classes. If I want a study guide, I have to make it myself. Making a study guide as a class is great though because then you can thoroughly cover every topic. Not only that, but people even typed notes for certain things, like how travesty, burlesque and parodies are similar and different. Then, under the lit term there are tons of examples. No one student would have been able to make such a thorough study guide for this class, but together we were able to create a study guide and a practice test at the end. I guess the only real problem is that it is really long and takes a while to read through, but since every section is labeled it’s easy to just choose a section that’s harder and study that one more than the others.    

Basically, with such an extensive collaborative review, it’ll be pretty hard to give a good excuse to not study for the Lit exam, since all the information is right there for us. Hopefully it also means that we’ll all do pretty well on the exam too.