Why hello there old friend, it's been quite awhile. Welcome back to the weekly ramblings that I like to call my blog posts. For the last 3 weeks, our class has been delving into the depths and meanings of tragedy. I’m going to be honest here, I was dreading this unit. I’ve never thought deeply about tragedy before and quite frankly, I was convinced that this unit would be extremely dull. From what I remember in freshman year, I thought Romeo and Juliet was a giant bore, and I figured that would bleed over into this unit. But surprisingly, that wasn't true at all! I am thoroughly enjoying this unit so far and am rather excited for the rest of it! I’m not sure if I enjoy it so much because I’m actually interested in the topic, or if it’s because we’ve been kept busy throughout this unit. Regardless, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about tragedy through the last couple weeks. Another thing that we have been working on over the last couple weeks has been our creative writing. Now, I don’t feel like I'm an outrageously creative person when it comes to writing, so much like last marking period, I am struggling to write the 750 words required. I’m never motivated during our creative writing time, and I’m not applying to anymore colleges and haven’t started scholarship essays yet, so I basically just reread what I wrote previously. Overall, I feel like I have learned a lot these past couple weeks, and I actually missed writing this things!
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(This image was me trying to help write these papers. I am sensing a theme....) The majority of this week was spent working and finishing up our What is Literature? Projects. Due to the fact that it is the first week of a new marking period, we weren’t deep in any other assignments, so I found it easier to focus on the work at hand. Which turned out to be a really good thing, because I had a low-key emotional breakdown in the middle of the week, and it would’ve been worse if I had an abundance of homework. At first, my group was lagging behind on our projects, but I feel like we have a good grip on our essays. We chose Humor and Fantasy as our elements of literature, and I’m pretty confident that we are analyzing our short stories correctly. The only thing I’m worried about is how our essays actually turn out and if they read well. I know that everyone has different writing styles, and I love my friends that are in my group, but I am too much of a control freak to let it go. I never thought of myself as a perfectionist (that was always my sister), but after completing this project, I definitely think I am. I guess I’m lucky that my friends think it’s funny, and let me do what I need to do in order to make myself feel better because otherwise this project would be very messy. Overall, this project really tested me in more ways than one, and as much fun as it was, I’m excited to get back to our normal weeks. (This image was me trying to figure out to what to write for the rest of my creative writing. No joke.) We did a lot of different things this week. We focused on our poem of the week (and I somehow missed writing the essay...again), our creative writing assignment and started working on the brunt of our What is Literature? projects. As important as our Literature projects are, I was more concerned with my creative writing assignment that was due at the end of the week. I don’t think of myself as an extremely creative person when it comes to writing, so this assignment cause me quite a bit of anxiety. I knew right off the bat that I wanted to include my I Remember piece that I had written. Most of that editing and revision consisted of me trying my best to turn giant chunk of text I started with into a decent poem. It went pretty well, and I’m happy with the result. My struggle came about when I couldn’t figure out what to write or use for the remaining 650 words I needed. I didn’t get any kind of inspiration from any of my various “writings” (i.e. rants and complaints) from this marking period. I literally bothered every single person in my life to give me a creative writing prompt to give me some kind of direction. And when that didn’t work, I turned to Google, looking for various prompts that might give me an inkling of inspiration. Finally on Friday, after school and swim practice, I was going through my creative writing document and saw a sentence about something weird my dog had done and had the idea to expand on it! Somehow, that turned into me writing a letter to my dog, and I have already read it to him and he doesn't seem to care that much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Overall this week, I stressed a hell of a lot with the creative writing assignment, but I am very happy with what I ended up with and cannot wait to spend my time on something different. I’m not quite sure what to write about. My life has been so crazy this week with the homecoming events, work, and swim meets/practices, and quite frankly, AP Lit took a back seat this week. I can’t really think of anything that stood out to me as super important and I’m pretty sure that this blog is going to be very boring. I really like the poems that we listened to this week, even if they were about feet and having sex with ants. I think I liked them so much because the poet, Ross Gay, was actually reading them to us, so we heard how the poems were intended to sound like. I really like the tone in his poems, it seems like his poetry matches his personality well! We also started our What Is Literature project, and I’m super excited for the short stories that my group chose. We picked Rape Fantasies, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and The Most Dangerous Game. All of the short stories seem super interesting and I am excited to read them. However, I believe that we read The Most Dangerous Game in freshman English, but I think it’ll be interesting reading it with a different perspective. I’m sorry for this blog; it was basically just a run-down for the week. Hopefully next week’s blog will be better ㋡ This week in class we focused mainly on the poem (read: excerpt) of the week, Elegy in X Parts by Matt Rasmussen. Through the course of the week, we had multiple discussions on different aspects of the poem and filled out the TPCASTT form. This week’s poem was based on the suicide and aftermath of Rasmussen’s brother, and as sad as it was, I enjoyed analyzing it! I feel like I learned so much this week about what the meaning of a poem could be based on different aspects of the poem itself. For example, who would’ve guessed that the structure of a poem may have symbolism ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not me), but this week we discussed the idea that the couplets may resemble the relationship between Rasmussen and his brother and then in the last line Rasmussen is alone, and his brother is gone. I also learned that you can read a poem aloud in multiple different ways, you don’t always have to pay attention to the spacing and punctuation the author uses. Overall, I felt like I learned some useful techniques that would help me analyze poetry in the future! I’m not sure if it was because we spent more time on it in class, or if I participated and paid more attention in class, but I feel like this poem was much easier to analyze that The Eagle by Lord Alfred Tennyson. I honestly feel like I could tell you the possible meanings in this poem in my sleep! Although I missed Friday, I feel like I could’ve written a bomb essay for this poem! Overall, I am very happy with the progress I made this week and I am super excited to work with more poetry soon! (After finishing and re-reading my blog, I realize that it focused more on the articles I read outside of class, than what we actually did in class...oops!) Something that really stood out to me this week was the difference between general fiction (a story) and a piece of Literature. Now this may not have been the main idea in class this week, but it's something that interested me and I decided to look into it, and quite frankly I couldn’t figure out how to write 250 words about how we connected our summer reading books to How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Up until recently, I always thought there was a big difference between general fiction and literature, but I’m not so sure anymore. In one of the article I read this week, the differences between literature and general fiction was that literature is generally more controversial, complex, and has an overall lesson to it. Frankly, I think this is a giant load of malarkey; general fiction can be just as complex and controversial as Literature. Take 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher for example. The book is about a girl revealing why she had committed suicide and contains a lot of sexual content (including a rape scene). How can you get any more controversial that that?! As for the overall lesson, I believe that everyone can learn something from any book, simply based on how you think about it. The only difference that I have found between Literature and general fiction is the fact that Literature tends to be older. Think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. When this book was first published, it was a piece of general fiction! It was an adventure book for boys! And my grandpa’s favorite book! But now the only reason it is considered Literature, is because it was controversial for its time and is old. Authors don’t write books planning on them to become timeless literary classics; they write what they think people of the time would enjoy (just like commercial fiction). Time is the only difference between 13 Reasons Why and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I don’t want this to seem as if I was attacking Literature, I am confused as to why everyone seems to classify them in different categories. In reality, general fiction and Literature are more similar than people think. (Although I missed a couple days of school this week, I think I got the general gist of this week's lesson) This week we focused on the poem, “The Eagle” by Lord Alfred Tennyson, but more specifically, we honed in on learning how to analyze the poem. Through the course of the week, we completed multiple activities to help the class get different perspectives and break down the poem. We discussed our ideas as a class, discussed what specific phrases in the poem may mean, and filled out the TPCASTT form. I’m going to be honest, I’ve never liked poetry and I’m not very good at trying to decipher the meaning behind it. I think it’s because I’m a very literal person. The first time I read “The Eagle”, I legitimately thought it was about an eagle. I’m dead serious I thought it was about an eagle that climbed a cliff, stood there, and fell and died. I was so out of tune with this poem that I thought the eagle died! And as embarrassing as it is, I didn’t realize there could’ve been a different interpretation until we discussed the poem in class. Once, we started our class conversation it dawned on me that there is so much going on in the poem, and that maybe the eagle wasn’t meant to be interpreted as an actual eagle ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ who would’ve thought). I did find TPCASTT a bit confusing, and I think it was because my brain couldn’t comprehend that there could be so much meaning in such a short poem, as well as the fact that some of the boxes purposes’ seemed to overlap a bit, but breaking down the poem little by little really helped me focus and figure out what was happening. Another source that really helped was this article, which broke down most of the key elements in a poem and really helped me properly analyze “The Eagle”. I may have struggled with this week’s poem, but I actually really excited to analyze more poetry, and I’m glad that we get to do it every week! On Tuesday afternoon, I walked into Room 202, dreading what I thought this class was going to be. I expected a boring class that wouldn't truly challenge me, with a boring first day of ice breakers and syllabus run-downs, much like every other class that day. I was pleasantly surprised, when by the end of the first day; we were already working on our first assignment, You as a Reader/Writer. The main ideas for the first week of class, were reading and writing (surprise, surprise, this is an ENGLISH class), but not in the way I thought it would be. I've never had to think of myself based solely on my reading and writing, and I probably struggled more than I should’ve, but I learned something from it. I’ve learned that reading is a lot more about the process of actually reading then it is about the storyline. Before this summer, reading to me was simply trying to finish the story, while still understanding what was happening, but after finishing, How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster, I realize that books have layers of symbolism, meaning, and references, and there is no “right” or “wrong” way to interpret it! Our whole class can read the exact same book, and come up with twenty-something different interpretations, and that is so crazy cool to me! I feel as if I have already learned so much for this AP class, and am beyond exited to explore reading more with my new insights! |
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