AP Literature and Composition (12th grade) (Period 6)

"Writing well means thinking well. If you can't learn to express what you are thinking, someone will do your thinking for you." -George Orwell

Course:  Advanced Placement Literature and Composition

Instructor: Angela Blewit, MA

E-mail: [email protected]

Prep Period/Office Hours: Per. 5, 8, or by appt. (before school, lunch, or after school)

Class meeting time: Per. 6

Location: Bldg 100, Room 107

AP® English Literature and Composition is designed to be a college/university-level course, thus the “AP” designation on a transcript rather than “H” (Honors) or “CP” (College Prep). This course will provide you with the intellectual challenges and workload consistent with a typical undergraduate university English literature/Humanities course. As a culmination of the course, you will take the AP English Literature and Composition Exam given in May (required). A grade of 4 or 5 on this exam is considered equivalent to a 3.3–4.0 for comparable courses at the college or university level. A student who earns a grade of 3 or above on the exam will be granted college credit at most colleges and universities throughout the United States.

• To carefully read and critically analyze imaginative literature.

• To understand the way writers use language to provide meaning and pleasure.

• To consider a work’s structure, style, and themes as well as such smaller scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.

• To study representative works from various genres and periods (from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) but to know a few works extremely well.

• To understand a work’s complexity, to absorb richness of meaning, and to analyze how meaning is embodied in literary form.

• To consider the social and historical values a work reflects and embodies.

• To write focusing on critical analysis of literature including expository, analytical, and argumentative as well as creative writing to sharpen understanding of writers’ accomplishments and deepen appreciation of literary artistry.

• To become aware of, through speaking, listening, reading, and chiefly writing, the resources of language: connotation, metaphor, irony, syntax, and tone.

AP English Literature and Composition gives students a learning experience equivalent to a typical undergrad introduction to literature class. Through close reading of literary texts, students come to understand how writers use language to provide meaning and to answer essential questions about life and the world around them. We will "measure" literature against the history of philosophy to understand how literature fits into its own time as well as in all time. We will ask, "What is art?" and try to determine the qualities of great literature. Our literary analysis will look through the lenses of style and structure, rhetorical strategies, diction, figurative language, imagery, selection of detail, language and syntax. Vocabulary study is important. Students will also master literary terms. Writing well about literature is a key component of the class. In addition to writing a variety of essays, students will keep a writing log over the course of the year to document their progress and to engage themselves in thinking about their writing.

Course reading and writing activities should help students gain textual power, making them more alert to an author’s purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of the subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone. By early May of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in close reading and purposeful writing. The critical skills that students learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of fiction texts can serve them in their own writing as they grow increasingly aware of these skills and their pertinent uses. During the course, a wide variety of texts (prose and image based) and writing tasks provide the focus for an energetic study of literature. As this is a college-level course, performance expectations are appropriately high, and the workload is challenging. Students are expected to commit to a minimum of five hours of course work per week outside of class. Often, this work involves long-term writing and reading assignments, so effective time management is important. Because of the demanding curriculum, students must bring to the course sufficient command of mechanical conventions and an ability to read and discuss prose.

Areas of Focus:

Close reading analysis of poetry, novel, and non-fiction

Timed writings

Literary Analysis Essays

Sentence styling and grammar reviews

Literary terms

MLA format

• Timed essays based on past AP prompts

• Essay questions as required of college-level writers

• Reading/responding to/analyzing novels, drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry

• Imaginative writing including but not limited to: poetry, imitative structures

• Literary analysis papers—expository and persuasive

• Personal essay

• Graphic organizers, double-entry journals, paragraph responses, questions

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Thomas Arp and Greg Johnson. Eighth edition, 2002.

Selected poetry and short stories

Voice Lessons (diction, detail, imagery, syntax, tone), Nancy Dean. Maupin House, 2000.

Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, Thomas Arp and Greg Johnson. Eighth edition, 2002.

Selected poetry and short stories

Voice Lessons (diction, detail, imagery, syntax, tone), Nancy Dean. Maupin House, 2000.

The most important requirement for this course is that students read every assignment—read it with care and on time. Students unused to literature courses will need to plan time in their schedule for more reading than most courses require. Poetry, though usually not long, is dense and complicated and should always be read at least twice. Novels in particular require planning. Be aware. Plan. Students are responsible for independent reading outside of class time. You will read one novel per month from the AP list of recommended novels. To insure reading is done, students will be given assignments and or quizzes. Your homework every night is to read your books you have chosen. This means at least a 1-hour of reading every night Monday through Sunday. Homework will also include other assignments we are working on for the week. Homework that is late will be given half credit.

The Dialectic Journal is the first written response that the students will make to the texts we read together. They are expected to keep a journal for each major text studied. The journal will include commentary on literary attributes of the text based on a list of criteria I will hand out. Students choose from a selection of choices that include diction, theme, figurative language, etc. Although I will collect portions of the journal for assessment purposes, students should view the journal as their tool to help them work through the texts and as a reference for in class assignments. As such, they are encouraged to use it in such a way that helps them process the reading and allows them to reach higher levels of understanding.

Some suggestions are offered to students for how to approach the journal, but I inform them that I look for these four elements:

1) insight and level of engagement with the text

2) variety in the types of entries made

3) evidence of questioning the text

4) quantity of responses (more is not necessarily better, but I should see enough entries to convince me that the reading is completed)

Students will be asked to free-write their responses to the reading on a regular basis. Students should bring a free-writing notebook to each class so they are prepared for this informal writing exercise, which is designed to explore what they learn as they read. [C5]

In-class writings will primarily be AP-based examinations, though there will also be quick-response, in-class writings as a basis for discussion.

I will not announce quizzes ahead of time, and we will have a number of them, both straightforward reading ones and ones that ask you to engage an idea. Reading quizzes will always be given the first five minutes of class; if you come in late, you may not take the quiz. Questions on reading quizzes will be straightforward and simple as long as you’ve done the required reading.

This Advanced Placement Literature and Writing course is designed to teach beginning-college writing through the fundamentals of rhetorical theory, and follows the curricular requirements described in the AP English Course Description. We will talk essentially every day about some vital aspect of writing, including: invention and the artistic proofs (ethos, pathos, logos), disposition or structure, and style (diction, syntax, figurative language, mechanics). [C12] But I want you to think of this class as a workshop, not a rhetoric manual—a place where you will test certain kinds of writing and attempt to recover your own recollections as part of larger cultural experiences that eventually become a people’s “history,” i.e., a people’s collective account of itself through its literature. The kinds of writings in this course are varied, but include writing to understand, writing to explain, and writing to evaluate. All critical writing asks that you to evaluate the effectiveness of a literary piece, but to be an effective evaluator, one must understand and explain. The essence of scholarship is the combination of these three approaches to writing. [C7] In order for this class to function as a true workshop, therefore, you will write a good deal, and you will revise certain pieces of your writing into polished final drafts. You will also produce a final writing portfolio—a kind of individual writing archive. In the process of these workshops, you will be exposed to your conscious choice of diction and the appropriate use of words, [C8] your ability to create varied and effective syntactic structures, [C9] your capacity for coherence and logical organization, [C10] your ability to balance generalizations with specific and illustrative details, [C11] and, overall, your ability to combine rhetorical processes into an effective whole. [C12] What I expect most of all from our class is hard work on the part of the individual writer, careful reading and discussion on the part of the class.

Student performance in connection with important course components contributes each student’s final grade for the course in the following manner:

Essays 30% Most essays are first written as in-class essays and graded as rough drafts. Rough drafts are self-edited and peer-edited before students type the final copies. [C2] Final copies make up 30 percent of the six weeks’ grade. Rough drafts and editing assignments are part of the daily work, which is 20 percent of the six weeks’ grade. Students must submit all drafts with final copies. Graded final copies are kept in a portfolio that counts as part of the final exam grade for the semester.

Tests 25% Most tests consist of multiple-choice questions based on rhetorical devices and their function in given passages. Some passages are from texts read and studied, but some passages are from new material that students analyze for the first time.

Quizzes 25% Quizzes are used primarily to check for reading and basic understanding of a text. Each unit has at least one quiz on vocabulary from the readings. Also, each unit has at least one quiz on grammatical and mechanical concepts reviewed in daily tasks as well as from the discussions and/or annotations of syntax from the readings.

Daily 20% Daily assignments consist of a variety of tasks. Some of these tasks involve individual steps leading to a larger product, such as plans, research, drafts, and edits for an essay. Other daily tasks consist of grammar reviews, vocabulary exercises, [C9] annotation of texts, and fluency writing.

Most lessons begin with a warm-up or anticipatory task. These focus on a grammatical or writing concept that connects to the day’s reading assignment. (Items for these mini-lessons are from PSAT/NMSQT® Practice Tests, SAT® Preparation booklets, Style Analysis, An Allusion a Day, The Little Brown Grammar and Composition Handbook.) Students do these exercises during the first five minutes of the class period.

On average, you will be required to write at least one full, five paragraph or more essays twice a month. These essays will be graded on the 9-point rubric of the AP Exam. We will have vocabulary tests each week. Students will write a number of creative assignments in parallel with the critical writings completed per unit. Creative writing will include a sonnet, a group authored and class-presented Choreopoem, an ABC Fiction, and others. Students will also write several critical papers, including an explication of a poem and a play, and a close reading of a novel, plus a research-based novel analysis. This class will focus heavily on reading and writing.  Author Study Research Paper (MLA format, 4-5 pages).  Research Paper on Rebellion/Revolt in Topic Country of Choice (MLA format, 5-7 pages). 

Review of texts covered this year. Three or four students report on each work. Multiple-choice and essay questions practiced, essays written every night or two, returned the next day with comments but no grade (I’ve found the grade can shake their confidence). Students then rewrite the essay based on the comments. Each subsequent essay must incorporate practice in specific skills in which students have demonstrated weakness.

NO FINAL EXAM IN SPRING SEMESTER. YOU ARE EXPECTED TO TAKE THE AP ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION EXAM. THE AP LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION TEST SUBSTITUTES FOR YOUR FINAL.

1. A black or blue pen.

2. College-ruled paper in a 3-ring binder. (No spiral notebooks.)

3. Your textbook and reading material for "independent reading."

4. Your vocabulary cards.

• Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

• Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience.