Response to Course Material

So I feel like we’ve done quite a bit since our last response to course material post. We’ve finally finished with Ceremony! I think we actually didn’t spend so much time on this one, at least not in class because we had read all the plays together aloud and since this one was a novel we completed it independently. Then we didn’t actually annotate the whole thing and I think we also spent fewer days discussing it. We did do a lot of background information on the novel, like reading those articles and viewing the presentation that Ms. Holmes made for us. Overall, I thought it was a really good book, but it’s a bit confusing and I think for the actual AP lit exam I’ll chose a different work to write about.

Aside from Ceremony, we’ve also started (and almost finished) reading our last novel, Fifth Business. So far I think this is also a really good book and I think it’s a lot easier to read/understand than Ceremony and even some of the plays that we’ve read. I appreciate that this is the work that we’re ending on because it’s been such a quick read.

And other than just the works that we’ve read, we’ve also been doing quite a bit of AP exam practice. We’ve written a couple of in-class essays, done some multiple choice, and even reviewed the whole 2013 AP exam during class, each of us completing allotted multiple choice sections. With all the practice that we’ve done, I feel pretty confident for the exam (and good thing, but we’ll be taking it in just over a week!).

Finally, the last big thing that we’ve done was a research paper project. We had to work in groups with people from other classes and write a paper on some aspect of one of the works we read in class. I guess I shouldn’t really say much about this project because I was selected as one of the editors for the class and didn’t actually have to write any papers. Instead, I collected links to scholarly articles about the works that we’ve read and posted them onto a class website.

Personally, I didn’t really like the project/the idea of it (since I didn’t actually do it). In general, writing a research paper in high school is a good idea to help prepare us for papers we’ll have to write in college. However, being that our AP lit exam is so close, I think it would have been better to do more AP review or something like that instead of spending a week on this project. I also don’t like the idea of having to work with students from other hours because that makes collaboration on the paper a bit harder; everything has to be typed and you can’t discuss your ideas with your partner unless you do so outside of class. Also, even though it was nice not having to do much for the project, I don’t think that it’s really fair to give two students from each hour the job of “editing,” because this essentially meant exemption from the project. As editor, I felt that I really didn’t have much to do at all during class time and instead worked on our peer review assignment and on blog posts. I had to do a lot less work than most of my peers and it was a 40 point project. I think it would be better to have people who want extra credit to do the “editing” job, that way everyone has the same basic assignment but some can do extra if they need the grade. Or, if everyone in a class happened to have an A, then whoever was assigned editor could be exempt from a blog post, or something of that sort. Overall, if this assignment is kept for next year, I think it should be revised and maybe scheduled for earlier in the year (maybe end of third quarter).