Combined Class

The-powers-that-be have decided that AP Language & Composition will be combined with English Honors III due to the low number of students enrolled in AP. Students will receive credit for the course in which they are enrolled. The good news is that same basic material is covered. Unfortunately it means that the pace of the class will be set by the English Honors III course (don’t worry too much, the class will go faster than American Literature), and we will have to increase the number of outside of class sessions. I will still keep to the two Saturday (or Sunday) sessions in the spring term (TBA) in which you will take a full-length exam. However, we will have to have weekly morning sessions (period 0) starting the second week of school. So, I need your input here. Do you prefer Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday mornings? (Yes, you can eat in my room and we will talk about a breakfast rotation) We can’t do Mondays because we will forget on the first day of the week, and Fridays are out because it is "late start" for students and "early start" for teachers (faculty meetings before school this year). Please post your response as a comment to this post so that the other students can see your responses. The morning sessions and two weekend sessions will be part of your over all grade and attendance is required.

You will have many different assignments than those of the English Honors III students and some the same. For example, the vocabulary and term paper are the same. However, how you look at a piece of literature will be the main difference. When the English Honors III class has a literature packet and notes on each chapter to complete for The Scarlet Letter, you will have a Critical Reading Response (CRR) on each chapter. You will learn how to complete CRR’s over time. This really isn’t much different to how I used to teach AP and Honors at a previous institution. BTW the students who attended all of the morning sessions this past year are also the ones that passed the exam. By starting in the fall with the morning sessions, I believe we will have the whole AP class pass the exam.

AP Reader Recall

It Will Be Fixed

There was a formatting error, and as you may have noticed, the words go off the ends of the pages. I discovered the error when I received my copy and contacted the company promptly. For those of you who purchased and received your AP Language O’Rourke Reader before July 26, 2010, ESCO will be contacting you and replacing it free-of-charge.

July 26th-August 1st, 2010 Question #5

Question #5

What is rhetorical language? What are rhetorical devices? Identify at least three different rhetorical devices in The Grapes of Wrath and why you believe Steinbeck chose them. Remember to use direct quotes from the novel.

We will be moving on to Black Elk Speaks next week; I hope you have finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Grapes of Wrath by now (notice I didn't say "finished the essays"). For those of you who have finished Huck Finn, I also hope you noticed what a little stinker/jerk/awful person Tom is compared to what the character was like in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. At least in the self-titled novel he was just a rascal.

July 19th-25th, 2010 Question #4

Question #4

SparkNotes lists and explains well known quotes from novels. Choose a quote from The Grapes of Wrath NOT examined by a “student-helps” website and explain its mean and significance to the overall work. Remember to focus on the language used and why Steinbeck utilized those specific words.

July 12th-July 18th, 2010 Question #3

Question #3

Twain writes about Jim as illiterate, ignorant, superstitious, and often deferential to the white characters in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Is this simply an accurate account of the condition of most African-Americans under slavery (during which it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write), or is it slander against all black Americans? Is the use of the offensive word “nigger” an insult aimed at blacks, or an accurate depiction of the vocabulary of the day?

I know that it is easy to go over the word count when a person gets emotionally charged by the topic; however, try to keep your response clinical and fact based.

Sample Answer to Question #3

Mark Twain grew up not only during the time of slavery, he grew up in the midst of it—the Deep South. Twain lived the early part of his life in Missouri and as a teenager worked up and down the Mississippi River. To him, slavery was part of the culture. However, he had a unique insight into the human condition and observed everything. He tries to be as objective as possible in his writings, and when he isn’t Twain directly address the reader and admits when he is putting in his own moral judgment. When writing the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other such works, Twain uses “nigger” not as a direct insult on any person of African-American decent, but rather as a way of capturing the vernacular of the place from which he originally came. By the way, the word “nigger” originally meant “ignorant and uneducated” if you go back to the 1700’s. Since it was illegal for slaves in America to be educated and most (not all—there were Native Americans, various Asian groups, Eastern Europeans, etc as well) slaves were of African American decent, overtime the word “nigger” began to transform in meaning as a derogatory term for dark-skinned people from all around the world, not just those of African decent. Think of the word “gay” meaning “happy” it too has transformed in meaning overtime.