Oh My God! We're almost done. AHHH!
So since the last blog post I feel like there hasn't been too much we've done, at least in variety.
We finished Ceremony. Overall I didn't think it was a bad novel and I liked it as a whole but looking closer at it was not fun for me. I got frustrated because I wasn't picking up the little nuances that Ms. Holmes wanted us to be picking up and I just didn't have much to say about the novel in general, which was not good for discussion. This has been the piece of literature that I've struggled with the most this year. I think the last time I struggled so much with a piece of literature was Of Mice and Men back in English 10, but for different reasons.
We've done some odds and ends things. There was the Woman Hollering Creek forum post, that wasn't too bad. It was definitely an interesting thing to read and then looking for symbols was sort of fun since they didn't scream symbolism, they were more subtle so you really had to read into the piece to find them. I wasn't there the day we did the poetry stuff so I don't really have anything to say about that. The different criticisms of Ceremony were fun to read. My criticism examined the deer, mountain lion, yellow woman, and bear in the text. As cool as it was to read at times it was a bit weird, like when Tayo was compared to the Sun God who is sometimes the lover of the Yellow Woman and sometimes the brother or son (I don't remember which it was, sorry). That sort of incest idea reminded me of Hamlet and scared me for the next few paragraphs. I think the class discussion of those articles was a little strained, for my class it was sort of a "just summarize the main points of your criticism and sit back and listen to what everyone else has to say about their own article", there wasn't a lot of discussion involved. Oddly, it reminded me of classes where the teacher gives a lecture and no one is really paying attention or when people give presentations and really you're only thinking about the one you have to give. We also have done some more multiple choice and prompt practice, which I've found helpful, I only wish we had more time to practice before the test.
Last week we spent a lot of time working on the Weebly site essay. While I liked the idea I feel that in practice it may not have been the most practical way of getting us to work across classes. I understand that in college we will have to work with people outside of our class completely in an online situation, but I think for what this assignment was it made it very difficult. Or maybe I was just stressed about the amount of work that needed to be done in the time period we were given, I don't know. In the end I liked the finished product my group created. My group did an analysis of Ophelia's role in Hamlet and how her relationships with Polonius, Laertes, and Hamlet drove the play to its tragic end. Doing this essay reminded me of the huge research essay we did in Brit Lit with Patnoude, where we had to use a literary criticism to examine a book from book circles and write an essay about it.
So we have like 2 weeks until the AP test? While I'm excited for the wait to be over and the test to be done with I'm nervous for the test. I feel like I'm only really starting to understand how to write the essays to get high scores and with the multiple choice I just never know. Hopefully these problems resolve themselves before the test.
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