We've been pretty busy since the last Response to Course Material Blog we had to do. A lot of discussion and new ways to look at everything.
So we did some more multiple choice practice. Apparently that was the last time we will get to work in groups for multiple choice practice. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I like being able to talk through my thought process with other people on what I've thinking. On the other hand when the answer that I think is right differs with the answer the other people in my groups thinks is right I question my judgement and I'm unsure what to chose. Hopefully I will be successful on my own. Who knows, maybe I'll do better because I wont question my judgement as much.
We finished Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and finished up our discussion of the play. Personally, I loved this play and the idea that maybe there isn't a deeper meaning like we expect there to be. There are so many little things with this play and in any other class if we had a play this simple and yet so complex, the teacher would be telling us exactly what it means and what to take from it. I love that Ms. Holmes let us decide what the play means and letting us form our own opinions.
Ceremony has been our most recent piece of literature and we're still working on it. I've read little over a third of it and while I find it very interesting, it is definitely confusing. The way Tayo jumps into flashbacks and into his own head then back to reality is a bit difficult for me to follow. It reminds me a little of when Willy would switch into flashbacks in Death of a Salesman. Tayo's story is interesting to me, and what he goes to I often find myself relating back to what I've learned in history classes. When Tayo flashed back to marching through the jungle I immediately thought of the island hopping in World War II or the Vietnam War. I was close, it was WWII. I'm interested to see where else Tayo's story takes us and how it will progress.
Lately we've done a lot with looking at literature thorough different lenses. Our first day of discussion my class really went into The American Dream and the second day we really dove into Death of a Salesman. I'll admit the first day I was fairly quiet, I was still trying to wrap my head around the different lenses. My opinions on the literature were pretty set, I didn't exactly want to look at them in different ways and potentially change how I felt. Maybe if I had been more exposed to such varying lenses this would have been easier for me. Last year was really the first time I had ever been introduced to different lenses, but we didn't go very deep with them in Brit Lit. This was a good experience and by the second day I was ready to open my mind to different perspectives. Looking at Northrup Frye's way of critically analyzing a work also gave me a new perspective on the literature we've read.
I hope that there will be more discussion of the literature we've read through different lenses. This has been one of the more interesting things we've done this year and I would very much like to continue it. It was also great to hear how other people were seeing the works through the different lenses.
Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great response to course material. You went into a lot of detail into each different thing we have done in the past. I agree with a lot of what you had to say since we are in the same class. It is cool to read your thoughts on Ceremony when you had only read a 1/3 of the book compared to what you shared in class after reading the whole book. Also I liked how you really addressed yourself in terms of critical lenses. I had the same struggle of letting my previous ideas prevent me from looking at the texts in new ways. Hopefully we get to do that again because I thought it really helped our class get to new ideas and got a lot of people talking. Great job on this set of blogs!
Avery
Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteYou covered everything in class we discussed in March. I agree with you that if we had read Ros and Guil in any other class our thoughts and opinions would be drastically different. Not necessarily would the teacher have told us what to think, but perhaps would not have led us in the right direction at all. I can't think of another teacher that would have provided extension material about the class text which drastically helped me understand what Stoppard was writing. Also, in any other class my peers would not have offered up so many different ideas about the text which was constructive for my understanding as well. I know for a fact in my past English classes in a "class discussion" nothing insightful would have been said. The only tiny flaw I see with your post is maybe you could add some more outside of AP Lit connections, because most of yours are to the other texts we read in class